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The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870–1950

AT THE BERING STRAIT, less than sixty miles of ocean separates Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula and the northwest coast of Alaska. Each winter, these narrows are bridged by ice. The Bering Sea appears to go still beneath its lid of frozen water. But the bergs and slush shelter colonies of hardy algae, and with spring, melt frees their photosynthetic potential, just as newly liquid water churns nutrient-heavy currents to the surface. The resulting bloom of phytoplankton nourishes creatures from minuscule crustaceans to giant crabs, fish from salmon and sole to cod and herring. By summer, the Pacific Flyway brings birds by the millions to feed where whale dives froth krill to the surface. Among this riot of life are over 100,000 Odobenus rosmarus divergens, the Pacific walrus.1 Even in summer, enough ice remains to provide refuge for the walrus herds, floating them close to the seafloor mollusks that bulk their bodies to a ton or more. A walrus can live as long as forty years. Thus a pup born in the 1870s came of age in a Bering Strait newly divided between the United States and Imperial Russia, and gave birth to her last pups in the years before Lenin came out of exile. Both generations bore half-submerged witness to human revolutions onshore. The United States and Imperial Russia began patrolling the Bering Strait, the First World War came and went, a new Soviet state arrived in Russia, a second world war began and then dwindled to its frigid aftermath. But the walrus were more than witnesses. In Beringia, the herds became the literal fuel of revolutions. As the thin line of sea between Russia and the United States became a hard line separating economic and ideological projects, walrus were ensnared in capitalist and communist attempts to make their visions of the future into present reality. The walrus’s involvement was a result of Beringian ecology meeting the material