Filin P. Why Did All the Children in the 1930s Want to Become Polar Explorers? The Experience of the All-Union Game “Along the Northern Sea Route”

Pavel Filin
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the RAS
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0002-3965-6694
E-mail: pfi lin@yandex.ru

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ABSTRACT. In March 1937, the newspaper “Pionerskaya Pravdaˮ announced a competition game “Along the Northern Sea Routeˮ. Readers had to come up with an icebreaker, give it a name and description, and then imagine a trip along the Northern Sea Route, arranging it in the form of a logbook and a route map. More than 7,000 people took part in the game, the authors of the best works were awarded prizes. The article reconstructs the details of the game, its rules, stages and outcomes, analyzes the historical and cultural context and the social effect. The game took place over the course of six months against the backdrop of key Soviet Arctic events — the expedition of the drifting station “North Poleˮ of Papanin, the transpolar flights of Chkalov, Gromov and Levanevsky, which caused a public outcry. The game allowed pupils to immerse themselves in the activities of polar explorers, reproducing the real aspects of Arctic work — filling out a logbook, creating a map, studying literature. This formed a sense of belonging to the country’s achievements in the Arctic, being an example of a large-scale educational process and the formation of creative patriotism. The article focuses on the preserved logbook of the icebreaker “Сonstitution of the USSR”, prepared by one of the participants in the game, Mark Belotserkovsky. During the analysis of the sources, it turned out that this participant was the outstanding Soviet writer and playwright V. Bill-Belotserkovsky, and this is his unknown and unpublished work.

KEYWORDS: Northern Sea Route, Arctic, North Pole, polar explorers, “Pionerskaya Pravdaˮ

FORCITATION: Filin P. Why Did All the Children in the 1930s Want to Become Polar Explorers? The Experience of the All-Union Game “Along the Northern Sea Route”. Kunstkamera. 2025. 2 (28): 102–119. (In Russian). DOI: 10.31250/2618-8619-2025-2(28)-102-119

* The article was prepared within the framework of the Russian Science Foundation project no. 25-18-68050 “Northness of Russia and ethno-cultural potential of the Arcticˮ (A. V. Golovnev).

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2025-2(28)-102-119
UDC 374.3:913(985)

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