Residents of Norilsk long felt isolated from their country’s turbulence. Then a mining company strung a fiber-optic cable across 600 miles of tundra.
NORILSK, Russia — On a screen, the California sun beams through the palm fronds and the Walk of Fame gleams underfoot. This island of mines and smokestacks in the tundra has high-speed internet now, so Andrei Kurchukov watches videos about America.
Videos by one of his favorite YouTube personalities, Marina Mogilko, feature interviews with fellow Russian expatriates in the United States. “Los Angeles,” she tells her one million followers, is “where Russian dreams come true.” “I watch her and think, alas,” Mr. Kurchukov said. “So what we’re showing about the rotting West is false.”
Closed to foreigners, unreachable by road and shrouded in darkness for 45 days a year, Norilsk, an Arctic nickel-mining hub of 180,000, is Russia’s most isolated major city. Lacking reliable digital communication with the rest of the country — “the continent,” they call it — residents used to fly home with external hard drives full of downloaded books and movies after their trips out.
Then, two years ago, the city’s mining giant, Norilsk Nickel, strung a fiber-optic cable across 600 miles of tundra and under the vast, icy Yenisey River. Amid fireworks and a concert in the central square, cheaper, faster internet suddenly replaced a slow and shaky satellite link as the city’s main data connection to the rest of the planet.
That turned Norilsk into a petri dish for a slow-motion but radical change pushing ever deeper into Russia’s hinterlands. The relatively uncensored internet is replacing Kremlin-controlled TV as the public’s main window onto the world. And as it does so, the carefully crafted image of a resurgent Russia and a decadent, devious West is becoming more difficult for Moscow’s spin doctors to maintain.
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