THE GEOPOLITICS OF NORTHERN TRAVELS : ENACTMENTS OF ADVENTURE AND EXPLORATION IN THE NORWEGIAN-RUSSIAN BORDERLAND Urban Wråkberg

Critical geopolitics is used in analysing discourses on a micro-social level in the performances and enactments taking place during fact-finding tours and leisure journeys in northernmost Europe. The cases of journeys focussed are those of Scandinavians travelling along, and sometimes departing from, the highway between the Norwegian village of Kirkenes and the Russian city of Murmansk. In travels undertaken for professional or leisure purposes alike a hyperreal meta-script is enacted mediated on the cosmopolitan cultural experiences held collectively by the travellers; simulacra provide the context for the enactments of fact-finding and drama taking place during border-passage. It is argued that the characteristic montage-like sequence of events of border-crossings are interwoven with a geopolitical discourse, and that it should be understood as encompassing both language and practice in order to appreciate the geopolitics at work. Three ways in which geopolitics enters travels in the northern borderland between Scandinavia and Russia are identified: scenarios of future regional scenarios of future regional developments, popularisations of research obsessed with the problems of borders, and what has been termed here the geopolitical anecdote. In considering the aesthetics of the simulations taking place in cross-border travels this study suggests focussing the meta-script of the American and the European road movie film genres. The essay argues that the cosmopolitan mind of any traveller, and its collective mediated content of cultural and political discourses, has been underestimated so far in the socio-political research regarding the borderlands of the European north.


Introduction
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the national borders of the former states of the Eastern Bloc have changed character and taken on new functions and meanings.The introduction of democracy and the transition to market economy have followed no given courses.Statements on the borders in the new Europe, and narratives from people who have travelled across them, rather than providing a balanced account of an individual journey often mirror what the narrator would like us to conclude about the present and to envision for the future.Changes in outlooks are taking place in many regions but runs in parallel with only slowly altering, deep seated practices and attitudes about the east and west of Europe stabilised by la longue durée, the momentum of human mentalities, identified by Marc Bloch in the Interwar period and studied by the French Annales school in spatially oriented economic and social history.Informal dissemination of ideas on cultural and national differences often takes place during cross-border travels The up-take in policy-making of the findings of critical geopolitics has promoted liberal institutionalism and created new symbols of shared interests and for dialogue in the new Europe.(Morozov, 2005;Sparke, 1998;O'Tuathail, 1996) In the north this includes the Arctic Council (1996) and the EU's Northern Dimension policy (1997).The Barents Euroarctic Region and its council is another example of innovative multilateral partnership launched in 1993.The northern counties of Scandinavia and the five oblasts and republics of NW Russia run it.In a regional context, based on approval and funding from the Foreign Offices and State Departments of the nations involved, the Barents Euroarctic Council has promoted local initiatives for cross-border regionalism.There has been criticism on its lack of success in the business and industrial sectors but experiments are continuing with e.g.twin town cross-border collaboration and bilateral local citizens' borderland visas.(Browning and Joenniemi, 2008;Archer and Etzold, 2008;Buursink, 2001) Nordlit 31, 2014 Northern Europe with the location of Kirkenes and Murmansk.Map by the author The coastal region and interior of north-eastern Norway and Finnish Lapland are sparsely populated and rather vast areas by European standards.Their small villages are far between and remote from any major Scandinavian cities, but State subsidized airlines are operating connections to and inside the region.(Gløersen, 2009) In adjacent NW Russia larger towns like Murmansk (pop.307000) and Arkhangelsk (pop.348000) make the Barents Region on average the most settled part of the high north in Circum-Arctic comparison.The borderland of Norway and Russia is beyond the limit of the pine forests, slightly mountainous and cowered by tundra.There was never a significant agricultural or forest sector in the local economy to provide the landscape with a network of smaller roads.There was and is however a land-use based on the indigenous Sami peoples' traditional hunting, costal fishing and reindeer herding.Fishing and mining are economic activities of international importance and tourism is growing.Local but also national optimism regarding the future of the Barents Region is based on positive official policy-statements and industrial scenarios indicating the likelihood of future expansion in off-shore oil and gas extraction on the Exclusive Economic Zones of Norway and Russia in the Barents Sea.
This study will consider the Norwegian-Russian borderland in the subarctic part of Europe, and focus the "border passage" from the Norwegian border village of Kirkenes (pop.9000) along the 250 km main road to Murmansk in Russia.During journeys along this road political discourses on northernmost Europe combine with other cultural predispositions to create social and individual experiences of crossborder travels between Kirkenes and Murmansk (on tourism experiences of this route see Viken, 2007).This includes micro-social communication on interpreting observations and enacting typical events of the journey.One basic idea in the analysis to be undertaken in this article is that many of the cultural expectations and Nordlit 31, 2014 scopic regimes at work among the travellers are cosmopolitan in origin.While not denying national, professional and other identities that separate travellers from each other the contemporary access/exposure to global media makes it crucial to consider the mediated level of representations or simulacra, and how these become the basis for various simulations during journeys that are often possible to generalise on a collective level as e.g.styles of travels.(Baudrillard, 2001, 169-187;Lukinbeal, 2004, 248;Amin, 2004. Cf. Wood, 2010) The emphasis here will not be so much on the border as on the desire of whatever is beyond it as a driver of the passage; thus the interest for the road between Kirkenes and Murmansk.Concepts like "home," "foreign" and "individual identity" will be treated as contingent assemblages of ideas, as will all goals and motives for cross-border study-travels and tourism.Meanings of landscapes are dependent on the traveller and the style of the journey.(Wråkberg, 2007) During guided tours and political fact-finding trips first-hand experiences and acts of see-foryourself tend to be staged events that need scrutiny on behalf of the spectator and critical judgement of anyone taking part in the resulting journey narrative.Crossborder travels will be discussed based on a set of recurring events recognised by participant observation by the present author during some thirty trips of different character between Kirkenes and Murmansk undertaken for various purposes, and in the company of different constellations of travellers in the period 2006-2011.

Geopolitical Discourses in the Borderland
The way geopolitical ideas and outlooks enter conversations and happenings during cross-border travels depend on the composition of the travelling party.A template of different constellations is presented below, applied to road travels between the village of Kirkenes and the city of Murmansk.The participation of an active guide, or any casual commentator, makes a difference in most travels.If this person is e.g. a Russian professional colleague to you, or a Russia or Norwegian tourist operator makes certain differences, as does of course the identity, composition and political level of the majority of the accompanying travellers.If you ride as the author has done on occasions together with only Russian passengers and/or a Russian driver of a rented car this means that conversations are likely to touch upon certain visions of the borderland and e.g. its business or recreational opportunities.As we will discuss further in the following, travelling in a Russian registered car means that an accompanying Nordic citizen might more easily depart from the high way and perhaps access roads and visit sites that are allowed for entry only to Russian citizens and foreigners with special permits.

Nordlit 31, 2014
Comments and directions on what to notice, as well as conversations between travellers, give ample scope for political and other lay or expert reasoning.To stop the car or bus and embark on joint enactment of observations makes it easier to arrive at a consensus on what conclusions to draw.Of course the amount of critical individual reflection that goes into such processes varies, but in the borderland a lot of this is based upon micro-social manifestations of new and old geopolitical ideas.I am following Martin Müller's suggestion about conceptualising discourse not only as language but as language and practice in order to deal with the discursive constitution of geopolitical identities.(Müller, 2008) Border discourses on threats or opportunities in the Euroarctic, generalised from contemporary mainly Norwegian visions across the borderland with Russia, can be grouped under eight partly conflicting headings: 1. Big time oil and gas scenarios 2. East-west industrial clustering 3. Environmental catastrophe 4. Opening the Northern Sea-Route between the Atlantic and the Pacific 5. Expanding cross-border tourism 6. Facing Russia's north-western military flank 7. Building professional alliances/consensus 8. People-to-people collaboration and understanding These geopolitical and geo-economic discourses are based on perceived opportunities for economic and social developments in the borderland, but also on fears of environmental catastrophe e.g. at some deteriorating nuclear installation, or a "bad turn" in the good political relations between Norway and Russia.On the whole this subarctic border region is peaceful, and the Norwegian border-guards have registered very few deliberate attempts to cross the national border illegally in recent years.But this was not always the case.Before 1826 there was no border at all only Skolt and other Eastern Sami nomads on the tundra, traced seasonally by competing tax collectors from southern state capitals.During the Second World War German troops were fighting the Red Army along the road between Kirkenes and Murmansk, and in the Cold War the border was almost completely closed as one of the few instances of a NATO member state (Norway) bordering directly on the Soviet Union.(Jackson and Nielsen, 2005;Gebhardt, 1990) There are at least three ways that geopolitics and geo-economic ideas may enter the mind of the northern borderland traveller.Business scenarios forecasting grand developments in the region have already been mentioned (on the origin of scenario research see Aligica, 2004).In recent years the vision of a future boom in off-shore oil and gas extraction on the continental shelf adjacent to the Euroarctic coast has been the source of much regional optimism.Such scenarios are typically communicated in presentations at industry conferences and in newspapers in e.g.Kirkenes and Murmansk.After the Norwegian-Russian settlement in 2010 of a borderline at sea between the Exclusive Economic Zones of these countries on the Arctic continental shelf, followed by several new finds of hydrocarbon deposits made by international off-shore industry on the Norwegian side of the shelf, such Nordlit 31, 2014 outlooks have begun to materialise.This has created a feeling of being in the initial days of collaborative industrial expansion between the Norwegian and Russian petroindustry.(cf.Brunstad, 2004) In this some see new job opportunities and regional economic growth, while others see security risks, environmental threats and loss of traditional ways of living.
The second route by which geopolitics may enter the minds of northern borderland travellers connects more directly to the world of science and scholarship.It operates by the regular output of various research communities of articles in professional journals, and by popularisation of its findings made by journalists and the researchers themselves.In much western academic research on the Euroarctic Russia is still mainly seen as a source and exporter of "problems".A problemobsessed paradigm can be detected in many publications from social as well as natural science research projects.Funding seems to have been more easily found for biased and alarmist investigations, nevertheless the initial post-Cold War indignation over environmental hazards and water-and airborne pollutions crossing the borders from Russia, along with trafficking, organised crime and prostitution, has calmed down in recent years.
A third way of communicating geopolitical ideas during cross-border travels is by a narrative device that I will call the geopolitical anecdote.It is common in the narratives of guides, and in conversations in travelling parties consisting of local experts and guests to the region.The geopolitical anecdote is often entertaining by the surprise it creates; or by relating apparently insignificant or puzzling objects along the road to unexpected political contexts; or by scalar jumping in historical time and geographical space to a global frame of casual explanations (on the political uses of social re-constructions of geographical scales normally regarded as ontologically pre-determined see Sidorov, 2010, 552 and passim).
The geopolitical anecdote tries implicitly to establish a consensus with the listener on the geopolitical ideas of the narrator by projecting a biased worldview or moral idea of the anecdote, often by appealing to prejudices that the listener may have and thus find pleasing to have confirmed.A geopolitical anecdote can be invented by anyone but the most influential ones are those told by professional guides and frequent local travellers.The propagation and popularity of a geopolitical anecdote is based on attaining a consensus between teller and listener, and a shared fascination in it.But often the geopolitical point of the border anecdote is blurred by rather obvious anomalies or contradictions; the main reason why this doesn't seem to hamper their recurrence is that they are in line with widely held geopolitical ideas.
One example from the road between Kirkenes and Murmansk -we will return to the geopolitical border anecdote in the following -is occasionally stated on the bridge across the Pasvikelva, or the Paz River as the border river between Russia and Norway is sometimes called in English (despite identical names not easily confused with the border river between Guatemala and El Salvador).Step one in this anecdote is to note, what few have thought about before, that this bridge could be regarded Norway's "gate to the east", as it is its only road connection with Russia at the border station some kilometres further down the road.It's also where Norway is "at its Nordlit 31, 2014 slimmest" since the bridge is the only link to a Norwegian enclave of land on the eastern side of the Pasvikelva. 1 The Pasvik River bridge at Elvenes.Photo: Vidar Andreassen, Wikimedia Commons On this already rather unusual bridge, according to this parable styled borderland anecdote, nothing less than the northern outposts of the civilisations of the ancient empires of Rome and Byzantium are symbolically standing face-to-face fossilised by age, frozen by the climate, after long marches over the centuries from their respective points of origin in Rome and Constantinople.I first heard this anecdote from a senior advisor of the foreign ministry of one of the Nordic countries during a trip with a chartered bus from Kirkenes to Nikel. 2 Most travellers find this idea very odd, particularly at first.Part of its mindboggling effect is based on its monumental transferal of geographical and temporal scale.Maybe it is just fascination with early modern history of Christianity, or maybe some people like to estrange themselvesand others -from Russia and its European identity?Russian Orthodoxy does have a geopolitical dimension and fictional history and fantasy novels with imperialistic messages have reached large readerships in Russia in recent years, so dreams of empire and wandering and clashing civilisations are still viable.(Sidorov, 2006;von Hagen, 2004, 450;Marsh, 2011) The spiritual importance to religious people in Russia of the surroundings of this bridge is also mirrored in the increasing number of orthodox pilgrims who are seeking permissions from the Russian border-guards, and assistance by Norwegian tourist operators, to visit the nearby orthodox church of Boris and Gleb and the "crevasse of Saint Triphon", a site in one of the mountain cliffs sloping into the border river where the holy monk Triphon of Pechenga 1 In Norwegian: "porten til Norge" stated e.g. in a local daily news article (Kristiansen, 2011).Norway at its slimmest: "Norge på sitt smaleste" e.g. on the tourist map (Turkart 1:100 000 Sør-Varanger: Grense Jakobselv, Kirkenes og Bugøynes, 2007). 2 Specifics details on the cross-border journeys and names of persons who have made statements during these which the author has noticed as participant observer are supressed in this article.
Nordlit 31, 2014 experienced a revelation during his missionary work among the Skolt Sami in the beginning of the 16th century.(Wisur Olsen, 2013)

Cross-border Simulations
The individual and collective experience of travels are today formed by a hyperreality of signs, images, narratives and standardised events developed or reproduced by the media industry but also in the general knowledge production of society.Baudrillard's dismissal of any direct or stable relationship between "basic reality" and the sign or image that pretends to represent it seems congruent with a cultural relativistic view on knowledge formation the explanatory force of which has been demonstrated in much research over the last several decades.(for an overview of some of this see Law, 2009;Bauchspies, Croissant and Restivo, 2006) Baudrillard in his critique moves from the epistemological stance of the image as a reflection of basic reality, to that of a mask or perversion of it, into a representation hiding the fact that there is no reality behind it; finally to suggest that in contemporary society, after a historical/cultural shift along this route, signs and images should be understood as floating in a Western hyperreal system of simulacra that lacks any definite connection to basic reality or whatever is out there, but which instead creates its meanings by references and associations within the same system of simulacra.(Baudrillard, 2001, 173-174) Applying this to the travellers on the road between Kirkenes and Murmansk means that most of those that are in the tourist or investigators typical mode of heightened senses and awareness, while floating in this culture will understand old and especially new observations and happenings by relating them not only to actively held pieces of knowledge believed to be correct but also to less conscious tropes and bits and pieces of fiction, adventure or exploration.They may be helped by tour operators (or not) to develop their trips into a simulation of something cultural, a stylised journey that follows a meta-script.The mind-switch into sorting observations, making comments and enacting standard events from a simulacrum is triggered in the individual, I will argue, either at moments of the journey that exhibits striking similarity with elements in a collectively held hyperreal meta-script, or by a more gradual process leading to such an association by the montage-like experience of filmic storytelling that the passenger may experience when the vehicle moves through the physical landscape.Journeys are turned into simulations of meta-scripts of cultural fiction and of pre-conceived ideas, rather than fact finding field excursions simplistically inspired by the call "the truth is out there". 3 The simulation will guide and filter the observations and interpretations made and thus in practice create experienced reality.
The simulations investigated in this article entail associations based on aesthetic effects, and they also seek aesthetic qualities as goals for the travel experience and the narratives told about it in social interactions, either during the journey or after the journey has been completed.Recognising that journeys, particularly in regions Nordlit 31, 2014 unfamiliar to the traveller, are prone to be influenced by a certain kind of cultural meta-script facilitates seeing and recognising the enactments taking place en route of the script's typical events of for example geopolitically laden observations and cosmopolitan fiction.This also motivates discussing styles of travels.In adventure tourism and in journeys styled in such a format the re-enactment drama is inspired by the desire to succeed in the sublime act of handling danger.Enacted travel dramas are important topics in the adventure-narratives that may be told to impress others afterwards; this may also entail propagating geopolitical anecdotes.
Simulations, following two particular travel meta-scripts, are suggested here for application on journeys in the Norwegian-Russian borderland.One has the colonial scientific expedition as a model; the other is based on the film genre of the road movie.The colonial expedition has been identified as an important but nonacknowledge model in ecotourism.(Gilbert, 2002) This style of travelling can often be detected in study-trips in the northern borderland.The "big time oil and gas crossborder scenario" mentioned previously in the list of active borderland simulacra represents a reterritorialization of capital and economic development by expansion into the European north.(on reterritorialization see Massumi 1987) It has been simulated in cross-border business development trips with participants active in the industrial sector; during these old colonial concepts like "frontiers" of raw material extraction and the "opening of transport routes", are often used.
There are two sides to the identification of the Kirkenes-Murmansk borderland crossing with the road movie genre.It is useful to draw upon the scholarship of film genre analysis as an interpretative resource, (Everett, 2009;Atkinson, 1994;Denzin, 1991) but also because the road movie genre provides a meta-script which may cause factual travels to include re-enacted elements from it.A road movie simulation may determine the experiences, narratives, and knowledge of the travel; it is a Nordlit 31, 2014 hyperreality with an aesthetic logic that can be artfully enacted.In the following the re-enactment of the elements of the road movie genre will be traced in individual and group travels along the highway between Kirkenes and Murmansk.It is most likely to influence the minds and practices of travellers in small groups, taking part in nonofficial journeys, the constellations marked bright green in table no. 1.
Driving by the industrial plant at Nikel in Russia, on the road between Kirkenes and Murmansk.Photo: the author

Re-enactments en route
The American and to a lesser extent the European road movie are parts of a cosmopolitan media experience; reminiscences and associations to its standard events, emotions and problems can be invoked in many individuals.The recurring inspections at the border station and checkpoints in the security zones of the Norwegian-Russian borderland create an uneasy feeling in most people of being on the run from the law.This is among the trigger elements which may establish the mind set of "being inside" a (road) movie, this opens a stream of associations to the typical plot of the films of this genre and cause those entering the simulation to enact its meta-script and make it reality.This means activating certain expectations with the traveller and not others.Another trigger of this association is the odd similarity between the classic barren landscapes of many American road movies, e.g.those filmed in Pennington County, South Dakota, and the man-made "Badlands" around the Russian industrial town concisely named Nikel on the Kirkenes-Murmansk highway.The deforested tundra and industrial wasteland at Nikel is caused by the massive sulphur dioxide emissions from its polluting metallurgical plant and its heavy-metal leaking slag heaps.(Boyd et al., 2009;Kalabin and Moiseenko, 2011) In this desert land close to the border the highway exhibits strait strips which vanish Nordlit 31, 2014 into the horizon, this in itself being a classic road movie vista.In that genre the freeway crossing through the desolate badland serves as a metaphor of passage, a passage that may challenges the protagonists with various transformative experiences.Terrence Malik's road movie "Badlands" is an exquisite example of the genre which is instructive to consider in this analytical context among other because this film presents, along with the strong feeling of doom looming over it outlaw adolescent main characters (as such constitutive of the genre) a striking visual poetry in its slow, reflective movement manifest in the time that it takes for the protagonists and their vehicle to transfer through some barren but monumental landscapes of the US Midwest.This evokes the viewer into a tempo and mood resembling real-life road travels more than what is the case in most earlier and later road-movies in which action scenes make up a larger portion of the drama.
The less well-known European road movie genre exerts influence in the minds of a smaller number of people but is interesting in this context as several of its films problematize the idea and reality of home, and of borders, and ethnic or national identity in historical contexts.(Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2006) This also applies in the Norwegian-Russian borderland.In 1920-1944, as a result of the Peace of Tartu a corridor of Finnish national territory crossed right through it and connected Finland in the southwest with the coast of the Barents Sea.Its Finnish immigrants and indigenous Sami population were forced to re-settle in Finland after WWII when the original 1826 border between Norway and Russia was re-established.(Siida Sami Museum, 2011) Where the passage of the American road movie brings the travellers social challenges in meeting unexpected others in a supposedly "domesticated" national territory the European landscape brings anxiety by its age-old divisions of ethnicity, nations and people.In the Euroarctic borderland this is evoked by many visible surveillance installations in use or abandoned by today's border guards.
The exposure to the agents of law enforcement in the road movie, with its often dramatic and destructive ending, should be expected to characterise any simulations made of it.When travelling from west to east an uneasy feeling is established quite soon after crossing the Pasvik River, by the lengthy passport and custom clearance in the national stations at the border from Norway to Russia.Another site driven through half an hour later seems conceived in a movie script to establish initial gloom and ominous feelings of things to come.It is the large cemetery on both sides of the road leading into the metallurgical town of Nikel.The present writer has heard many persons, including a Russian diplomat, expressing concern over the size of these graveyards in relation to that of the town.The speculations on the causes have included deficient local health care, some hushed up major calamity of the Soviet past, or that it is the sum result of the post-war era of Stalinism and work hazards in the mines and smelters in and around the town.But perhaps the impression is due to the fact that the cemeteries are highly visible from the road because, for convenience of access, they have been located on both sides of the southern entrance of the main road passing the town -the highway to Murmansk.But the basic issue of the geopolitical anecdote, and even less so the dramatic or mood setting event in the road movie simulation, is not establishing solid or neutral facts.This happens to be hard in this case because regional statistics are misleading as many residents of Nikel leave it for good at some point, especially on retiring.But observations made during cross-Nordlit 31, 2014 border journeys tend to be part of some culturally determined simulation the enactment of which is given meaning by an aesthetic meta-play of emotions and knowledge in the participant.In this mind-set driving by the cemeteries of Nikel mainly adds an ambiguous aura of doom.
Photo-stop on the hill overlooking Nikel on the Kirkenes-Murmansk main road.This is the standard site for anyone in a hurry to re-enact an environmental inspection of this metallurgical combine and its surrounding wasteland.Photo: the author The photo-stop on the road at the ridge overlooking Nikel is a standard event on most tours with new guests to the region, including anyone from plain tourists to factfinding professionals and official delegations including in recent years one where both the foreign ministers of Norway and Sweden participated.This event fits a recurring simulation of ecotourism in its pretention to provide authentic individual observations of the real facts based on lay re-enactment of the scientific field expedition.Leaving the size, severity and political-historical contingency of the related environmental issues aside (Aanesen, 2006), the lay scientist's tourist gaze from the hill overlooking Nikel is often accompanied by comments of official guides or self-appointed experts telling you what should be learnt from the obviously damaged vegetation of the surroundings, including hints on the best ways to do photography on the site.(cf.Jenks, 1995; Urry, 1992, 181-184) Further east on the road to Murmansk, still within the Russian so-called outer security borderzone, there are heightened restrictions on photography at a place called "19 Kilometre".It consists of the military camp of an infantry regiment of the Federal Russian Army.Like the cemeteries of Nikel it is located ostentatiously on both sides of the highway, but following military logic it is not marked on public maps of the area, which also explains its secretive name.Geopolitical anecdotes are often spoken here regarding the units standard of armoury and amount of new equipment possible to glimpse in passing by some of its camp and by comparing Nordlit 31, 2014 observations from previous drive-troughs -provided some commentator is thus experienced and holding real or imagined expertise in relevant military details.
Towards the end of the WWII, on the 25th October 1944, the 99th Rifle Corps of the 14th Army of the Red Army was the first unit to break through the defence lines outside Kirkenes given up by the retreating 6th Mountain Division.Thus the northeastern corner of Norway became the first piece of its territory to liberated from the Nazi occupation.For this (and its voluntary redeployment to Russia soon thereafter) the 99th Rifle Corps and its soldiers have been honoured ever year in Kirkenes at an official annual celebration.This combat group and other Russian wartime units were reorganised into the infantry regiment which today has its training camp at 19 Kilometre.Whether its present location on the highway to Kirkenes should be understood as a promise to save the neighbour yet again from any external enemy, domestic turmoil -or himself -is not politically correct to speculate upon by official Norwegian guides; they would rather remind you that photography is not allowed and that you should at least remember to turn off the flash if you intend to violate regulations.Maybe the location of the infantry camp on the highway simply indicates that a tank column with motorised infantry would still today run into difficulties if it tries to depart far from the main road into the blocky terrain of the subarctic tundra with its many small lakes and treacherous bogs.(Jacobsen, 2006;Gebhardt, 1990) Going off-road Reminiscences of the road movie are invoked again by the odd motel in Titovka, another standard stop now at the midway point on the Kirkenes-Murmansk highway.
Here you can have a coffee or a beer and a small Russian pirog pie.The place seems to be a nice example of new Russian small business and has had its share of difficulties with regional authorities such as accusations of violating food management regulations.The motel runs on electricity from a diesel driven power generator of its own that is persistently humming or roaring in the not so distant background.No deal has been possible to strike on tapping the power line passing right through the site which supplies nearby military barracks.The Titovka road inn is "always open", except when there is a power-outage, and is built from makeshift parts, mainly once mobile cabins of Norwegian origin.It was initially a place to rest and sleep out for personnel engaged in clearing the road from snow in the winter.Apart from serving the travellers on the highway, local military residents are often its guests.In the 1990s it used to be the scene, some say, of prostitution, while today the foreign visitors that stay the night are anglers.Some of the fishing business around Titovka is run in Norwegian-Russian collaboration.Regarding it environmental and geopolitical anecdotes have been spoken, and published on the Internet, implying that it is a shame (with moral overtones) that these operators let their customers run their small all-terrain vehicles (ATV) four wheelers, to reach the good fishing spots at the brooks and streams on the difficult to walk surrounding tundra.Such actions are supposed to inflict injury to the sensitive ground vegetation that will take for ever to "heal."This anecdote implies the superiority of Scandinavian environmental legislation and its enforcement and proposes a consensus on this.But there are anomalies in this Nordlit 31, 2014 projected understanding already on the regional level.In the County of Finnmark on the Norwegian side of the border there is a locally very well-known debate raging since long between legislators in the southern capital of Oslo, the police of the county and its majority of snow scooter owners and off-road vehicle enthusiasts who dislikes the Norwegian regulations and are longing for, and envying, the freedom of neighbouring Russia.Norwegian guides on official trips in the borderland tend to present simplistic scientific reasoning and seldom mention local Finnmark opinions when they happen to depart from the homogenised national policy.(on the public understanding of scientific "facts" see for example Law, 2004) The Titovka road inn under early spring snow-slush conditions.Photo: the author Driving off road in the border security zones in a foreign registered vehicle is a crime against Russian law which may cost the traveller a day or two in police custody, and result in fines and a moratorium on any new visa to the country.Travelling with Russian friends and colleagues in a car registered in Russia could thus open unique adventurous avenues to self-insight in the road movie simulation by off-main road detours.Unlike the message of the one-dimensional geopolitical anecdote some such experiences may come in the shape of enduring enigmas with the potential of opening the mind of the traveller to the relativity of knowledge, the multiplicity of worldviews, and the contested meanings of sites.
One relevant example is a small house in Luostari where the first man in space the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin once lived with his family.It is presently a museum occasioned by the fact that it was at the nearby, now closed, airbase where Gagarin got his basic training as a pilot.It stands out among the surrounding houses, obviously built at the same time for the same group of air force personnel, which are today in poor condition.The house in Luostari, it turns out, is just one of several still Nordlit 31, 2014 preserved in Russia in which Gagarin and his family once lived.The power vertical to the federal capital is manifest by the landmark monolithic stainless steel statue of Gagarin standing tall in the Moscow square named after him.It is kept in perfect shape while the monument over USSR heroes of aviation close to Gagarin's house in Luostari is falling apart.The phenomenology and aesthetics of ruins have profound significance in European culture.(Patrik, 1986;Roth, 1997) The meaning and emotions of ruins are further intensified when they include neglected memorials.As these were always erected to celebrate and to fix attention on certain values their degree of decay becomes a meter of the strength of that which it is made to signify in posterity.The monuments at Luostari of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, illustrate the role of ruins in the stream of time.
Monument of Soviet aviation heroes at Luostari with one Antonov An-2, the "Annushka"; a biplane utility and school aircraft designed in 1946 and in production until the 1990s.Yuri Gagarin's bust is the second from the left.Photo: the author Other sites in the borderland from the same period are harder to reach, and controversial even to ask about, such as the sites of the Gulag camps that used to be found outside all major towns and villages on the Kola Peninsula.On the other hand the large number of comparably well-off scientists and Komsomolsk pioneers living then, and now reformed partly still so, in the privileged defence towns and in the research resort of the Kola Science Centre at Apatity (also a metallurgical town), are important parts of any historical picture with some real explanatory power.(Josephson, 2007;Luzin, Pretes and Vasiliev, 1994) The USSR simulacrum is corroding into fragments and dust all over the Russian borderland.It has become akin to an unviable 1x1 full-scale utopia the size of the landscape into which it is Nordlit 31, 2014 withering.Looking back at the decaying manifestations of the old empire as a Russian you would be compelled to compare its works with the achievements of the present in terms of infrastructure, constructions, public works, but also your own living standard, job opportunities, culture, education, freedom to travel, etc.
To surpass the achievements, state organisation, affluence, science and technology of the ancient Roman Empire, as manifest by the ruins of the public buildings in its capital, the West needed roughly a thousand years.(Woodward, 2001) Modern Russia is moving at a speed of an entire different magnitude, thus living entirely among the ruins of the Soviet past as many once did among those of Rome is unusual.In what resembles the unexpected turn in the plot of a road movie you may depart from the highway between Kirkenes-Murmansk to follow a small southern road into the tundra and reach the inhabited Soviet ghost town of Prirechny.This former mining community and its resident pensioners were featured in 2007 in a Norwegian film by Tone Grøttjord, "Prirechny -Byen som ikke lenger eksisterer" (Prirechny the non-existing village).Among the several striking aspects of this outstanding piece of documentary film-making are the traumatic experiences conveyed in interviews with the older generation of hard working people of the Russian economic transition of the 1990s.No doubt unexpected before the financial melt-down of 2008 this has today renewed political and moral interest, not least outside Russia, where many individuals now want to discuss the costs of societal restructuring, market based economic reform and state financial austerity trumpeted out as the ingredients believed necessary in the brew for some to swallow to save everyone else from the ailments of the stagnant economy of the Eurozone and of Western Europe.
The city of Murmansk, the eastern terminus on the Kirkenes-Murmansk road movie simulation, offers another set of mirrors to ponder as much on the minds of the self-absorbed visitor, the reactionary resident, and the reform-minded opportunist as on the character of that which is believed to have been objectified for analysis.Regarding the recent past of Murmansk it was never even fully a northern centre of the USSR Empire as its character was tainted by the role the town played as a base for the White Guard and the British, US and French interventionists during the Russian Civil War 1917-23.Despite its heroic defence and sufferings during WWII the city remained slightly suspect in the Soviet mind by its character of border outpost.Thus Mikhail Gorbachev's pivotal Murmansk declaration in 1987, during the height of the Perestroika, which opened new avenues for multilateral collaboration and provided many ideas for the innovative post-modern policymaking to come to the Circum-Arctic, was made at a ceremony focussed on the past and the act of finally bestowing the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star on the city of Murmansk.(Gorbachev, 1987;Åtland, 2008) It was entered, in the eleventh hour, into the hall of fame of Soviet patriot cities like St. Petersburg and Minsk, all named on stone tablets at the great "Alyosha" war memorial on one of the hills overlooking the city.Some still yearn for the lost superpower glory of Russia but more common is the distrust of capitalistic foreign business.This is underestimated by many Nordic cross-border business activists.They are often puzzled by, or at least always disappointed with, the recurring lack of opportunities for foreign investment and the

Table 1 .
A template of border crossings: Scandinavians travelling between Kirkenes-Murmansk