People and the land

While much has been written on post-Soviet change in Russian urban centres, we still know very little about how these changes have affected peoples’ lives in rural communities. This is nowhere more true than in the vast regions of Siberia and the North. This volume fills this gap with in-depth studies of how people with different cultural backgrounds, often living in extreme natural environments, are coping with dramatic and rapid political and economic transformations. It shows how the fate of postsocialist reforms in the Russian North depends largely on striking the right balance between exploitation of the region’s strategic natural resources and concern for environmental impacts and the survival of local people. The authors, among them many of the leading scholars of the Russian North, place their accounts within the context of wider, comparative enquiries into the nature of postsocialist societies.