ON THE CONTINUED INVOLVEMENT OF THE STATE IN THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC VIABILITY OF THE POST-SOVIET KOLYMA, RUSSIAN FAR NORTH

In the 20th and 21st centuries the northern development project of the Russian Northeast was, and still is, a state bounded high modernist project. Clear aims of northern development and targeted use of certain tools, such as designing programmes to increase, or more recently, to reduce the population by relocating a 'surplus' population point at the social engineering character of these initiatives, then and now. Yet neither the Russian government nor the World Bank, both assisting northern residents to move out of the North, fully achieved their goal: people who were meant to relocate resisted such plans and stayed in the region using survival strategies that helped them to take advantage of the state's assistance to meet their own goals. The central argument of this paper is that life goes on, including the life of the state, that changes and develops too, despite the drastic outward appearance of the state's withdrawal and population out-migration.