I. Introduction After decades of isolation, Northerners communicate again The Northern News Service was a child of glasnost', born in Soviet Russia amidst the emergent freedoms engendered by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. Beginning as an untested news-sharing cooperative of 15 Soviet and 11 Western newspapers, it grew to become a multinational news service offering more than a million Russian readers an unprecedented, uncensored view of the northern world through the eyes of foreign journalists. In return, Northerners across the circumpolar Arctic received their first contemporary accounts of Russian communities formerly known only as grim islands in the Gulag Archipelago and shadowy outposts of Soviet military might. Establishment of the news service precipitated the opening of many doors. Foremost was the Soviet willingness to engage in generally open, multi-national exchange of material with foreign journalists, an exercise previously unknown at such scale in the USSR (Baranikas: 1993c: 1; Kudrya, 1993a: 2). The enterprise also opened territorial doors, allowing Western journalists to visit places like the closed Saami village of Lovozero and former Gulag camp at Noril'sk in what has been called the "secret empire" of the Soviet North. (Horensma, 1991: 1). It brought provincial Soviet journalists to Alaska for conferences in Anchorage and inspections of North Slope oilfields at Prudhoe Bay. Beyond that, the exercise provided the West a fresh view of the Russian North in radically changing circumstances, offering stories written by Russian journalists on formerly taboo topics like the troubled conditions of indigenous people, protests over nuclear waste disposal in the Arctic and the despoliation of the Russian environment. The news service also was unique in focusing on the affairs of the Arctic. Conceived directly as a result of General Secretary Gorbachev's 1987 Murmansk speech opening the door for circumpolar cooperation, its origins reflected his call for polar relations in a climate "determined by the warm Gulf Stream ... not the polar breath of accumulated suspicions and prejudices" (Gorbachev, 1987a: 19). The news cooperative was comprised of Northerners and aimed its reporting exclusively at the North, and in this, too, it was unique. Eschewing traditional East-West paradigms of international relations, the Northern News Service focused on a circumpolar perspective, and included at various times representatives and articles from Greenland, Iceland, Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Canada and Alaska. It is not surprising that an unprecedented venture focused on an unusual region would develop an "atypical vocabulary." The articles generated over the four years covered by this study demonstrate just that. Any news service will discuss government, politics and economics; of greater significance here is the fact that this news service added generous coverage of more peculiarly "northern" topics like indigenous people, wildlife and the natural environment. Later sections in this thesis employ a content analysis of the stories to draw distinctions between how subjects were handled based on national origin, and to illustrate a marked congruence between forces shaping the broader changes in the USSR and the concerns reflected in NNS articles. Computer-assisted classification techniques that allow simultaneous examination of multiple variables in the stories yield a rich variety of data for subsequent qualitative analysis. The research that follows is more about the process of communication than about the product of it--about the structure of the news service, how it fit into the changing society it served, what themes and patterns emerged from the openings it forged. The articles exchanged between countries serve as the measure of that communication, and this analysis seeks to understand them and their context. In the end, however, this thesis is more concerned with the fact of communication than with the specifics of what can be deduced from an analysis of 242 journalistic articles. This is a thesis about communication where there was no widespread communication before. It is an examination of how people across the northern edge of the world came to exchange news and opinions about their lives after decades of enforced isolation. This thesis searches for insights by combining an understanding of the history and context of the Northern News Service with the results of a detailed content analysis. Charting that context reveals the story of Soviet glasnost' writ small but with surprising precision on the history of the NNS, with the themes that dominated four extraordinary years of change in Russia echoed by the experiences of the news service. Finally, this thesis will indicate that although it was launched to satisfy the imperatives of statecraft and propaganda, the NNS may ultimately have evolved and grown beyond its origins, becoming an expression of emerging circumpolar consciousness that employed its "atypical vocabulary" and network of correspondents to bring a sense of place and commonality to readers throughout the North.