ABSTRACT
It is a remarkable fact that Stalin's demise did cause an important reappraisal of maritime policy, with marked consequences for the Northern Sea Route, while it had next to no influence on the development of Arctic historiography. The tone of Belov's official history did perhaps become slightly less belligerent towards the West, but its character hardly changed. There was no major change of approach, except for some suggestions in the Introduction of Volume IV as will be noted in this chapter. Instead, most Arctic studies still toiled over the problem of proving priority and continuity, without making much progress. Belov occasionally wrote articles on topics such as using the lives of saints as a source for the Pomory or the life of V. A. Nordkvist, a Russian zoologist who took part in the NordenskiOld passage of 1878-9; but most work was put into time-honoured subjects. The study of Dezhnev flourished, having obtained a new impetus from the tercentenary in 1948. Several people were working on that topic. T. D. Lavrentsova found another of the original accounts of Dezhnev's voyage (Lavrentsova, in Belov 1964). Indeed, in the early sixties a person emerged whom Raymond Fisher has described as 'the second major scholar of Dezhnev' , B. P. Polevoy, who found the last of the four documents on the basis of which Miller had concluded that Dezhnev had sailed through the Bering Strait (Fisher 1981: 22). The first major scholar was, of course, Belov, who from time to time rewrote and updated his book on Dezhnev (Belov 1955, 1973).
