The Indigenous Citizens of Igarka: Colonial Discourse and Socialist Modernity in the Arctic Soviet Cityin the 1930s¹.

The article examines the colonial discourse and socialist modernity narratives surrounding the Soviet Arctic city of Igarka in the 1930s, focusing on the collectivization and sedentarization of Indigenous peoples under Stalinist policies. Initially, Igarka's city managers used Indigenous agitators educated at the Soviet Party School to promote collectivization, while technocrats from the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (Glavsevmorput) later emphasized urban industrial modernity as a model for Indigenous transformation. The Soviet state framed Igarka as a symbol of socialist progress, using urban life and industrial development as propaganda tools to integrate Indigenous communities into a new socialist order, despite tensions between rhetoric and on-the-ground realities. This discourse served primarily to facilitate governance and control over diverse Indigenous populations by Soviet institutions, while Indigenous individuals sometimes became active agents within this system.