Field Report
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In Witness Onstage, Molly Flynn addresses the cataclysmic cultural changes that were created by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991:
“As the fault lines of Eastern European cultural memory continue to lead to violence and conflict in Russia and other former Soviet countries it has become increasingly vital for artists and academics to do the difficult work of reprocessing the Socialist past in the present. The significance of Soviet history remains of crucial consequence throughout the region [and the rest of the world]” (Flynn, 2020:51)
As the memories of communism recede, the differences in perception of this period have reshaped national boundaries and given energy to longstanding historical rivalries between Russia and the West. A point of both tension and cooperation is Svalbard, the international treaty territory of Norway, where Russia has staked centuries of interest. The Russian Arctic story reached its high-water mark in Svalbard; there the Soviet Union established three settlements to provide coal for its northern cities and to provide an economic outpost in a NATO member state. My field research documents the abandoned town of Pyramiden, once home to over a thousand residents, now uninhabited except for seasonal guides who have turned the settlement into a time-capsule tourist experience.
This research project began by travelling to Pyramiden to conduct a phenomenological investigation of the settlement. The phenomenology would arise from this lived experience in the settlement, communicating details which cannot be documented in photographs, or articulated through text (Neubauer et al, 2019:91). Writing this play would require a developed understanding of Pyramiden and and this would require me to look beyond text-based sources. To understand the physical layout of the settlement in which the play would be set I would need a more substantial insight than disconnected photographs of landscapes and interiors offered by the photojournal Persistent Memories (Andreassen et al, 2010). To write believable characters in this setting, I needed to appreciate the difficulty of Arctic life; a hostile climate, the nature of settlements built in permafrost, and the ongoing effects of climate change that threaten the region, and I felt that by visiting the archipelago myself I could begin to understand these complex issues. Finally, if I was to create characters with rich personal histories then I felt it was vital to meet Svalbard residents to gather anecdotes and personal stories, to try and build a more complete image of life in these remote settlements – and of the sort of individual who thrives in this environment. A phenomenological approach to research was essential; not only to settle technical issues around authentic setting and character, but to incorporate the spontaneous encounters of my journey into the text itself.
My first impression of this town was the landscape it presented; settled in the shallow valley of Billefjorden, the settlment looked insignificant next to the peaks either side of it and the stark point of Mount Pyramiden from where the town received its name. The flag of the Russian Federation flew from the dockyard crane; beyond was a ramshackle pipeline trailing away in the direction of my destination. The waterways across Svalbard are frozen during winter, rendering the settlement inaccessible for several months of the year - reached only by overland travel or helicopter. Before widespread adoption of the latter, Pyramiden was essentially an island in the polar night, cut off from regular support from the mainland or its neighbouring settlements. For this reason, there is evidence of a self-sustaining society embedded in the ruin I visited; the indoor collective farm which produced much of the settlement’s food, the cafeteria which operated on cashless distribution of meals and the wealth of cultural buildings for residents. Andreasson quotes a Trust Arktikugol company representative of Pyramiden:
“Most of the [organic refuse of the settlement] does not end up [in landfill] here. This is not refuse - it is a resource… In fact our food remains a large part of what we feed to the animals. We also have a deposit for animal manure… we use [it] in our greenhouse… Why should we throw away [industrial chemicals]? We hardly have enough paint for maintaining our buildings. We certainly don’t throw away paint… Accumulators [and batteries]. They are very expensive - and contain valuable components. We ship those back to the mainland for recirculation.” (Andreassen et al, 2010: 86)
Pyramiden was not only a settlement designed to function in polar isolation, it was a community of practical people who did not waste resources. In this space, there was not only a rejection of capitalism, but of a rejection the fast consumer culture which was celebrated during and after the time of Perestroika.
Figure iv. Approach to helipad.
The towering sign in front of the settlement invokes a rising pyramid, topped with a four-pointed star reaching skywards. The Arctic shares that same place in the Russian imagination as space; a place of heroes, of struggle against a hostile environment and a source of national pride (Emmerson, 2010:3-4). The Arctic explorers of the early Soviet era would become celebrated national icons, mirroring the same celebration of Soviet cosmonauts decades later. The same way, the workers who lived here were engaged in breaking down the final frontiers of nature, attempting to create a sustainable settlement which operated on communist principles. Reimagining Pyramiden as a project to build socialism in a place hostile to human habitation reminded me of these Soviet cosmonauts. Each pioneers, at work in a hostile place, serving the Soviet Union in highly technical skilled labour. Svalbard proved a dress rehearsal for the Soviet Union’s aspirations for space, using science to achieve long term ambitions which could be realised without having to consider preexisting civilisations (Pearlman, 2019:85). Both these settings offered frontiers for socialist expansion. The ideological symbolism of the settlement might be an interesting draw to tourists, and cater to a romantic image of the Arctic (Lafferty, 2019), but Pyramiden was more than just a set of empty buildings, it became a community of over a thousand people, which makes its demise a genuine tragedy.
To recognise Pyramiden as a ruin of community is to give it a new meaning; where I had once expected to find an austere, heavily policed culture and the physical ruins of a state security apparatus, I instead found myself looking over pictures of families and gatherings in settings familiar to my own home. Several celebrations are displayed; so-called “cultural exchanges” that took place between Norwegians in Longyearbyen and Pyramiden, competing in sports, exchanging industrial expertise and celebrating their shared Arctic culture:
Figure v. Inside the Cultural Palace.
“the healthy relation between Soviets and Norwegians on Svalbard [were] ‘free and unforced’… and [featured] cultural exchange” (Andreassen et al, 2010:180)
Amidst the trophies and photographs of the cultural palace, it became difficult to distinguish relics of authentic community expressions from stage-managed social theatre. I believe that the two are often hard to distinguish, especially now that the living memory of Pyramiden begins to fade. As for the authenticity of the present, there is no question that the space has been turned into a tourist attraction, its remains have been commodified like so many communist spaces after the fall of the USSR (Creed in Todorova and Gille, 2010:30). I buy a t-shirt from the gift shop, I pay by debit card, a Russian cover of Bohemian Rhapsody plays through the shop speakers. In a place that was once connected to the outside world by one telephone to Barentsburg, I receive 4G mobile coverage and Snapchat my friends from the cultural palace, amidst the works of Marx and Lenin. Instead of feeling awestruck, or unnerved by the emptiness of Pyramiden, I feel disassociated, far away from its values, as if we existed on a different planet from the society that created Pyramiden.
The duality presented by the commodification of an anti-capitalist space produced a complex and useful range of feelings to develop the text from; I felt amusement at the absurd meeting point of Marxist-Leninism and late-capitalism, the unachieved meeting the unsustainable. Marxist-Leninism as practiced within the Soviet Union would ultimately prove a failure, and neoliberal ideology is ill equipped to deal with existential threats; economic disparity, pandemics, and the coming ecological cascade of climate-related systems collapse. Both of these realities are presented by the landscape of Pyramiden, a monument to Soviet hubris and the ongoing decay of the Russian Federation.
Yet the strongest feeling was of neglect that stemmed from the loss of a whole way of life, the ongoing fascination for the community that had existed here, and a melancholic for an alternative to capitalist society. A Russian word that could describe this longing is toska - which linguist Anna Weirzbiecka defines as:
“Elements of something similar to melancholy, something similar to boredom, and something similar to yearning are blended together and are all present at the same time, even though different contexts may highlight different components of this complex but unitary concept.” (1992:171)
It is not just nostalgia, it is a desire to return to a place you have never been to, a place that maybe never was to begin with. The dream of the Soviet Arctic lies in the imaginary, and now exists only in memory, real or imagined. Pyramiden is a physical expression of toska, a manifestation of the optimism and ideals of the Soviet Union after the terror of Stalin. This overwhelming feeling of toska led directly to the character of Sasha; unable to reconcile with the end of his world, representative of post-communist nostalgia as a “rupture between past and present” (Creed in Todorova and Gille, 2010:37). As for the present, my guide, a Russian woman born after the dissolution of the USSR, spoke objectively about the Soviet relics, devoid of any romanticism, as if they were as alien to her as well as to the western visitors. This alienation from a shared past formed the basis of the character of Slava, embodying the opposing view to Sasha. Suddenly, a play that seemed to be based only in the text-based history of an Arctic mining town became a living dialogue on the Soviet experience and a drama about the transformation that Russia endured in the 1990s.
Figure vii. Discarded photographs in the Yuri Gagarin Sports Complex
To summarise, this field research changed my perception of Pyramiden and its potential as an ideologically charged space. The visit drastically altered my plan for the stage play; from a history play set in the final months before the settlement’s closure, with no fixed central characters, to a drama about two opposing characters locked in a conflict rooted in their shared motherland. Nightlands became less fixated on the ruin and its history instead became a discussion about what their country was to become. The play now tackles global themes such as national identity in the globalised twenty-first century, the changing shape of the Arctic and the crossroads of Russian society prior to the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Yet, it also engages in interpersonal themes that attempt to speak to all audiences; the effects of austerity culture, the effect of collective nostalgia - and how these issues are often interlinked. In looking to Pyramiden, I expected to find a ghostly image of the past, but in its place, I saw an opaque mirror of my own country, and our own developing existential crises. Pyramiden serves as a case study for how societies evolve and decline, its existence reflects the societal collapse and political change that sweeps people from the earth and leaves only ruins.
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POST-SCRIPT - August 14th, 2022
NIGHTLANDS has just finished its run at Summerhall. After the company was denied arts council funding to tour the piece it is likely that these 12 performances will be the only time it is seen and heard by the public.
Fortunately, it was time well-spent. It is only the start of my career, it’s a debut and not the end point of my work.
While it may be the last we see of Nightlands as a production, the meaning and living history of Pyramiden endures in arctic permanence, frozen in time, affixed with a tyrant’s gift shop. We may wish to leave the past behind us, to imagine only the future, but the past has a will of its own. I know that I will return to this place at some point, its story is not yet finished.
-Jack