Alina Bykova receives predoctoral fellowship from the Clements Center for National Security
Alina Bykova is a 6th year Ph.D. candidate in Russian and East European History with a focus on Soviet environmental history, energy, and mining industry in the Arctic. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University and an M.A. in European Russian Affairs from the University of Toronto. Before starting her doctoral studies at Stanford, Alina worked as a reporter at Canada’s largest newspaper, Toronto Star. She is currently serving as a senior research associate and editor-in-chief at The Arctic Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank. In AY 2025-2026, Alina is awarded with a predoctoral fellowship from the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin.
Congratulations on your Clements Center fellowship! Please tell us about your research.
My dissertation looks at the history of resource extraction and global politics on Svalbard, a group of islands in the Norwegian Arctic where there was a significant Soviet presence throughout the 20th century. Since the islands’ discovery in 1596, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, German, British, American, and Russian actors have competed for resources and influence in the area, partaking in whaling, fishing, hunting and trapping, and later, coal mining, scientific exploration, and tourism. Previously considered terra nullius, the islands were placed under Norwegian jurisdiction with the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. While the Treaty established Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago, it granted other signatory states the right to take part in “maritime, industrial, mining and commercial operations on a footing of absolute equality.” The Svalbard Treaty now has over 40 signatories, which has turned the region into a unique zone of transnational cooperation and competition. Today islands remain a center for regional resource extraction, tourism, and science, which are the three topics that I explore in my dissertation through environmental and diplomatic lenses.
How did you get interested in this topic?
Before graduate school, I worked as a journalist interested in the environment and human rights. When I decided to pursue a masters degree at the University of Toronto, I became very interested in Russian and Soviet approaches to the environment and Soviet resource extraction projects. I eventually chose to focus on the Soviet mines on Svalbard for my masters, because I wanted to find out how Soviet citizens and towns ended up in the Norwegian Arctic, and I got so hooked on my research that I decided to continue it for my doctoral study at Stanford as well. While my masters thesis focused only on two Soviet towns on Svalbard and their broader connection to the U.S.S.R.’s Arctic city-building projects, my Ph.D, dissertation looks at how nationals from Norway, Russia/the Soviet Union, England, the United States, Germany and Sweden interacted with the natural environment and extracted resources and information by hunting, fishing, mining, conducting scientific research, and engaging in tourism during the long twentieth century. In that respect, the scope of my doctoral research is much broader, following more actors and employing environmental, diplomatic and transnational perspectives.
What are some key questions in the environmental history of Russia and East Europe?
The environmental history subfield in Russian and East European studies is very new and quite small currently. There are only a handful of people who work on these issues directly. I am very interested in studying how Russian and Soviet environmental history ties into broader Cold War environmental history, which is a very new field as well. Most of the works in environmental history studies thus far, since the field was founded in the 1970s, have dealt with American and Western European history. Some work has been done on the Cold War from the perspectives of the West, but I think the Soviet side is a pivotal part of this story. Likewise, scholars of environmental humanities have covered the Western role in the Anthropocene at length, especially with regards to the impact of capitalism on the global environment, but very little has been written on the Soviet, or even larger Communist contribution to the current climate catastrophe. Thankfully this seems to be a growing field and I’m very excited to see how it develops further!
How does the Svalbard archipelago help us understand the environmental crises today?
Svalbard is an excellent case study to look at how the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world and the impact of this warming on people who live in the North. The islands are only 700 miles away from the North Pole and they are now one of the fastest warming places on the planet. The air temperature there has risen several degrees on average since 1970. It’s estimated that in just a few decades, the biggest island on Svalbard will be split in half due to melting glaciers. There have also been reports that Svalbard lost 1 percent of its glacial ice in 2024 alone due to heat waves.
The news cycle tends to focus on visible impacts of climate change, such as glacier retreat, but permafrost thaw arguably poses a greater threat to Arctic residents by destabilizing the ground and human-built structures. Because of warming temperatures and permafrost thaw, the main town on Svalbard, Longyearbyen, has experienced increased avalanches in recent years that destroyed homes and killed many residents. The thawing ground broke buildings and forced the city to relocate its historic graveyard. Moreover, valleys and mountains around Longyearbyen and several other towns on Svalbard are dotted with coal mines, most of which are shut down but not yet cleaned up or sealed properly. So melting water ends up flowing in the mines and then leeching a toxic cocktail of metals, called acid mine drainage, into the surrounding environment, waterways, and drinking water reservoirs. Some scholars have called Arctic mines “zombie mines” for this reason: even though the coal extraction stopped years or decades ago, the mines continue to have an adverse impact on the environment.
("Acid mine drainage", the orange residue in the ditch is the heavy metals runoff.)
Tell us about your sources.
I have worked with documents in six languages (i.e., English, Russian, Norwegian, German, French, Swedish) collected from more than 15 archives located in Norway, Britain, the United States and Russia. I learned Norwegian and German to carry out this work, and thankfully Swedish is similar enough to Norwegian that I can understand it at an intermediate reading level. Some of my most interesting archival findings have come from the C.I.A’s declassified online reading room, the NATO digital archive, and the Hoover Archives at Stanford, as well as from the Norwegian State Archive in Tromsø, and the Russian Foreign Policy Archive, which is partially accessible online. I have also worked in three newspaper archives, one of which can be found in Arctic Norway at the Norwegian Polar Institute, and two which are online (one is Norwegian and the other is Russian). Having access to so many sources, in both digital and physical archives, is both a blessing and a curse, because while I’ve learned a great deal from these resources, I also have over 400 GB of documents saved on my poor overworked computer and obviously not enough time to read every single one of them in detail. On the bright side, there is a lot of material left over for future projects!
Have you encountered any challenges during your fieldwork?
One of the greatest challenges was the impact of Russia’s 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine. After that it became apparent that going to Russia for fieldwork would be impossible, but the Russian side of the Svalbard story is critical to my research. To get around that, Stanford History colleagues connected me with SRAS, an organization that matches research assistants in Russia with scholars elsewhere for archival research. I had a very good experience working with the SRAS staff who got me hundreds of documents that are vital to several of my dissertation chapters. Additionally, the Stanford Library was able to help me get access to a digital archive of the Soviet newspaper on Svalbard, Poliarnaia Kochegarka, which has been massively informative to fill in the gaps where the official Soviet government papers are not enough.
Do you have a favorite archive?
I don’t have a favorite archive because I think they’re all excellent and have all been useful for my project. Yet, my favorite archive trip was when I went to Norway for nearly six weeks in winter 2024. I spent a week working in the Svalbard Museum Archives in Longyearbyen during the polar night, meaning that I didn’t see the sun at all for six weeks! During that time, I also worked in the Norwegian Polar Institute Newspaper Archive in Tromsø , the Tromsø State Archive, and the Norwegian National Archive in Oslo. Norway was very snowy and cozy during the winter and I had a chance to go on hiking trips in the mountains and also to ski with a friend. Northern Norway is especially beautiful, and I hadn’t experienced the polar night before so it was a very unique and jarring experience.
("Flying over Svalbard" shows the general terrain of the islands and you can see the sun very small on the horizon because it's polar night!)
Being on Svalbard in the winter also helped me understand what it might have been like for people who lived there for years doing coal mining and hunting in the 20th century. The Svalbard airport was built in 1975. Before then Svalbard was inaccessible between November and May due to sea ice, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to be stranded there in the dark for half a year, especially without modern amenities available today. The entire trip was an eye-opening and informative experience. I also found some interesting telegram correspondence in the Tromsø state archive between the Norwegians and Soviets in the 1960s where they discuss very random issues such as lost dogs and ski competitions.
(The archive note is correspondence between the Norwegian governor's office on Svalbard and the Soviet consul in 1958.)
You are also an active contributor to a policy-focused interdisciplinary think tank. How does your history training help juggling policy and scholarly analysis?
I really value my work both in “traditional” academia through the Ph.D. and in the think tank space. The academic skills I’ve learned as a graduate student at Stanford have made me a better thinker and writer, and the connections and policy insights I’ve gained at The Arctic Institute (TAI) have also been invaluable Working simultaneously in both spaces helped me sharpen my own research, connect with bright scholars from all over the world, and promote critical, grounded, public knowledge about pressing security and environmental issues.
I think that policy and scholarship are two fields that should speak more to each other. I always look for ways to bridge that gap, especially in a field like Arctic studies where devastating environmental changes have been happening for years now and will only grow worse. Many people in the South don’t know much about the Arctic, but it affects the rest of the world with its vital role in global meteorological data, satellite connectivity, and greenhouse gas emissions. Public facing history is vitally important now more than ever, especially in an era where we’re seeing funding cuts and sweeping restrictions on access to knowledge. I’ve been working at TAI as editor-in-chief for six years now, and I oversee the publication of more than sixty articles per year. Many of them very effectively bridge the gap between dense scholarship and policy and public-focused informative writing, which I think is a huge plus for the field of Arctic studies and security studies as a whole.
While a lot of the news and policy discourse about the Arctic these days is about military security and economics, I think the scholarship on the human experience of living in the North adds an important contour to the debate: The Arctic is not just an abstract region that can be claimed for resource extraction; it is also home to four million people who are on the front lines of the climate emergency. We need policy analysts and scholars to connect more so that they can better connect the people and ideas to understand the environmental problems facing all of us on the planet.