The 20<sup>th</sup> Century History of the Russian Arctic and Northern Sea Route Development in the Russian and Foreign (English-Language) Historiography: Key Research Problems
The article gives an overview of the most significant Russian and Foreign (English-Language) works on the history of Russian Arctic development in the 20th centuries; determines key problems analyzed by the researchers. It is concluded that Russian and foreign specialists using theories of “colonization”, “modernization”, “frontier” covered a wide range of issues related to the history of Arctic exploration, reorganization of administrative system, demographic and socioeconomic development especially during the Soviet period. Special attention was paid by historians to the history of transport communications, first of all, the development of the Northern Sea Route (V.Yu. Vize, M.I. Belov, D.M. Pinkhelson, L.B. Krasavtsev, K.I. Zubkov, V.P. Karpov et al.). Researchers emphasized the strategic importance of the northern sea communications during the war period. However, problems of economic life in the Arctic during the Great Patriotic War remain understudied. Unlike the Soviet historiography, many foreign researchers (T.A. Taracouzio, K.J. Webster, K. Krypton et al.) gave the tsarist policy in the Arctic a better score; noted the negative effects of the aboriginal policies and natural environment damage, while showing increased interest in the issues of international cooperation, geopolitics and military strategy in the Arctic. A key feature of the contemporary historiography is its attempt to put the history of the Russian Arctic into the global context considering it as a part of a single Arctic region.