Nikolay Erofeev. Facilitating settler-colonialism: Soviet housing production in the Far North 

Nikolay Erofeev, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Kassel with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, specializes in the history of socialist architecture and urban planning and explores Soviet housing production in the Arctic as a key instrument of settler colonialism. In his talk, Erofeev examines how the Soviet Union used prefabricated housing to colonize the extreme conditions of the Far North, such as in Vorkuta. This housing, adapted for permafrost and built using mobile factories and unskilled labor, enabled the rapid expansion and settlement of these remote areas, facilitating resource exploitation and creating a permanent population of "northerners."