Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland

Natural History, May, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland by Roger Took Westview Press, 2004; $27.50

Few places in Europe areas far off the beaten track as the Kola Peninsula, a potato-shaped carbuncle of land at the top of the Scandinavian Peninsula, east of Finland. Russian Lapland, as the Kola is also known, has one large city (Murmansk), a few subsidiary industrial centers and mining towns, and a scattering of isolated villages in the hinterlands. One passable highway runs through the province. But beyond that right-of-way, [of hundreds of kilometers in every direction, the hardy traveler encounters nothing but tundra, taiga (boreal forest), and vacant shoreline.

Roger Took is just such a hardy traveler--perhaps even a foolhardy one. When be arrived in the Russian northland in the early 1990s, the entire country was teetering on the edge of anarchy, and it was not clear which disaffected group a lone Englishman should be more afraid of: suspicious Sami tribesmen, the military attached to the remnants of the Russian Northern Fleet, or the legendary Russian Mafia. Just in case, Took offhandedly notes, he learned how to fire, strip, and reassemble a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol be[ore he left London.

We never learn whether Took ever fired the pistol, but readers can be grateful that he survived, met many fascinating characters, and kept coming back, year after year, for more than a decade. The Kola, he discovered, is a land of contrasts and contradictions, shaped by history and politics as much as by geography. Its first inhabitants were nomadic Sami, who roamed freely through northern Scandinavia. In the Middle Ages, settlers called Pomors arrived from the more populated regions of Russia, to the south. A brisk for trade with Europe developed be cause the Kola Peninsula's best harbors, warmed by the northernmost hook of the Gulf Stream, are more or less ice-free throughout the year.

Only after the Russian Revolution did the area begin to take on its current look of emptiness. In a procrustean attempt to collectivize the Sami economy, Stalin had villagers herded into hastily built urban areas and industrial farms. Much of the coastline was declared off-limits. The discovery of rich mineral resources in the Khibiny mountain range, near the center of the peninsula, only made matters worse; soon "special settlers" were being shipped from various parts of the Soviet Union to provide forced labor.

For the most part, today's inhabitants huddle in charmless concrete apartment blocks, largely ignorant of the region's rich history and remarkable resources. Took, however, has grown to love the place. Armed with little more than a backpack and a fishing rod, he boldly wandered through military reservations, floated down rivers with salmon poachers, sledged to hunting and herding excursions with descendants of the Sami, and accompanied wildlife biologists and archaeologists on expeditions to the interior. In one memorable episode he hitched a ride through the backcountry on a clanking, tanklike all-terrain vehicle (minus the gun turret), accompanying a human-rights activist who was documenting a gulag of prison barracks.

Took reports signs of a new life for Russian Lapland. Environmentalists in Russia and Scandinavia have begun to throw their weight behind efforts to clean up the damage caused by the nuclear fleet. Shops in Murmansk now display the latest fashions. And foreign sportsmen have begun to discover that some of the world's greatest salmon streams run through the Kola's remote countryside. Russian Lapland may not come off as a vacation paradise, but Took's book is a marvelous introduction to a region of rich but almost forgotten heritage.