Northern Limits

Summer is short in the Russian Arctic, especially in the 191 islands that make up Franz Josef Land, the huge archipelago devoid of any permanent human settlement that lies midway between Svalbard and the Severnaya Islands. Only very exceptionally in Franz Josef Land does the temperature ever rise above 50˚F (10˚C).

There are deeply glaciated mountains and barren territories where polar foxes roam in search of food. The islands and their surrounding seas are home to polar bears, walruses and belugas. Since 2009, parts of the archipelago have enjoyed protection within Russia’s newest national park (called Russkaya Arktika).

Actually, over the past few years Russia has sought to extend its protection and dominion over the Arctic (most notably with the planting of a Russian flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole). Yet such ambitions have roots at least a century deep. In fact, this summer will mark three important Russian Arctic anniversaries.

First, it was in August 1912 that the Brusilov expedition set off from Alexandrovsk,[1] and, within a couple of weeks, became stuck in pack ice in the Kara Sea. The only good thing to come out of that ill-fated venture was Valerian Albanov’s epic tale of survival, In the Land of the White Death, which recalls how Albanov and one other member of the expedition survived by walking over the polar ice to Franz Josef Land.

Also in August 1912, Georgy Sedov set off from Arkhangelsk in the Sv. Foka[2] on an expedition bound for the North Pole. Sedov, who had had an illustrious career charting Russia’s northern coastline, died of scurvy and the expedition was abandoned. In one of the most remarkable chance meetings in Russian history, the Sv. Foka was returning south through the Franz Josef archipelago in July 1914 when her crew sighted Valerian Albanov and the only other survivor of the Brusilov expedition. The two men were stranded on Cape Flora at the very south of the Franz Josef islands and the Sv. Foka ferried them back to the Russian mainland.

The Voyage of the Knipovich

The third anniversary expedition was the voyage of the MV Knipovich. Eighty years ago this summer, Nikolai Zubov sailed north from Murmansk on the MV Knipovich – an expedition that was to be altogether more successful than that of Brusilov’s or Sedov’s. By 1932, Zubov had established a reputation as the most distinguished oceano­grapher in the Soviet Union and a man with an unrivalled understanding of the physics and geography of Arctic sea ice.[3] Zubov predicted the geopolitical potential of Russia’s Arctic territories and northern waters, even speculating on the possibility of establishing trade routes linking Europe with the Far East via the Russian Arctic.

But Zubov’s 1932 expedition had more modest goals. We should remember this was a time when atlases and nautical charts of northern Eurasia and the Arctic still had some blank spots. For example, although the Russian imperial icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach had noted the broad position of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago in 1913, it was not until the early 1930s that Georgy Ushakov mapped the Severnaya Islands. The 1932 voyage of the Knipovich was thus, at least in part, a journey into terra incognita. And Zubov completed as planned a complete circumnavigation of Franz Josef Land.

Franz Josef Land had been discovered by accident in 1873 by an Austro-Hungarian expedition that had the misfortune to find their ship locked in pack ice for two entire winters and the intervening summer. While thus marooned, their ship fortuitously drifted past the islands, thus allowing the expedition leaders to claim some credit for a polar misadventure that generally failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. Franz Josef I was a man of many titles, among them Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary, but with the serendipitous discovery of Franz Josef Land he now had a huge chunk of Arctic territory inscribed with his name. He thus naturally welcomed his Empire’s polar explorers back to Vienna as heroes. And with so many unnamed islands urgently needing appellations, Franz Josef’s imperial cartographers rewarded expedition members, their patrons, and many members of the Emperor’s family with an island named after them.

Contested Islands

The dissolution of Austria-Hungary after World War I left the empire’s landlocked successor states ill-placed to protect legacy interests in the Arctic. So it was no surprise that during the 1920s the Soviet Union increasingly staked a claim to the Franz Josef archipelago. The only other nation with significant interests in the region was Norway. Yet while the Svalbard Treaty of 1925 gave Oslo jurisdiction over the Svalbard archipelago (albeit with some limitations) it also implicitly defined the easternmost limit of Norwegian interests in the European Arctic. Franz Josef Land, with its glorious legacy of place names from a lost empire, became part of the Soviet Union. And, oddly, the great majority of those royal place names have survived.

Zubov’s 1932 expedition was part of the process of the Soviet Union consolidating control over its northern waters. Conducted under the guise of science – and Nikolai Zubov was indeed a most distinguished scientist – the Knipovich voyage was also a deeply political affair. It was an attempt by Moscow to make its mark on the fluid and contested polar geographies of the inter-war period.

Zubov narrowly missed discovering an uncharted island in the seas east of Franz Josef Land. That privilege was to fall to Ushakov three years later, after whom is thus named the last fragment of land to be discovered in the Soviet Arctic – and one of the remotest, for Ushakov Island is 90 miles from the next closest island.

At the western extremity of Franz Josef Land, Zubov scored a considerable success in clarifying the Soviet position over Victoria Island. Throughout the late 1920s, Norway had expansionist aspirations. Jan Mayen (between Svalbard and Greenland) was annexed in 1929 and two years later Norway embarked on its most extraordinary Arctic adventure when it attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to wrest a chunk of eastern Greenland from Denmark.

The case of Victoria Island tested the resolve of both the Oslo and Moscow governments. Norwegian seal hunters had chanced on the island in 1898, although the territory remained anonymous until 1919, when the Norwegian crew of the English-owned steam yacht Victoria sighted the island and proposed to the authorities that it be named in honor of their boat (which itself had been named by the boat’s English owner in memory of his country’s late queen). This insignificant speck on the map, midway between Franz Josef Land and Svalbard, lay beyond the purview of the Svalbard Treaty. A Norwegian party landed on Victoriaøya (as it was rendered on charts published in Oslo) in August 1930, and stayed just four hours on the island. That was long enough to raise the Norwegian flag, build a cairn and leave a message in a bottle under that cairn. The message declared that Victoriaøya was being claimed for Norway.

Nikolai Zubov was an accomplished scientist, seaman and diplomat. But he was certainly not used to conducting diplomacy through messages left in bottles. When the Knipovich reached Victoria Island in August 1932, the crew raised the Soviet flag and, as soon as the news filtered through to Murmansk and Moscow, Soviet authorities proclaimed the barren island to be part of Franz Josef Land. Norway protested only lightly over the annexation of its easternmost Arctic outpost, possibly worried that an overreaction might prompt Russia to clamp down on Norwegian hunters who regularly exploited the sealing grounds of the White Sea – an area that was well and truly Russian.[4]

Nikolai Zubov, 1945.

Thus did the offshore Soviet territory of Franz Josef Land acquire its 191st island – though not the first named after an English monarch. As Norwegian Victoriaøya morphed into Russian Ostrov Viktoria, George V was on the throne of the United Kingdom. The second largest of the Franz Josef islands had very much earlier been named after the monarch-to-be. It is still known today as Zemlya Georga.

Soviet ideological adjustment of Franz Josef Land place names was very light touch, and limited mainly to the excision of regal titles. By contrast, Norway imposed a very thorough Scandinavian imprint on the place names of the Arctic territories of Svalbard and Jan Mayen, which it acquired in the 1920s. The Moscow authorities did however give a name to the hitherto unnamed cape at the northern end of Ostrov Viktoria. It became Mys Knipovicha (Cape Knipovich), thus recalling for posterity the name of the vessel that successfully sealed the Russian claim on the island.

In the eighty years since the voyage of the Knipovich, the Moscow government has never established any permanent settlement on any of the Franz Josef Land islands. There are research and military outposts, including a small airfield at Nagorskoye on Alexandra Island which, after many years of total neglect, has over the last five years been renovated. New buildings have been constructed and a small Orthodox chapel erected. Vladimir Putin’s visit to Nagorskoye in 2010 was widely seen by many analysts as indicative of the Russian Federation’s determination to maintain a strong presence in the strategic circumpolar region.

The Svalbard Story

On the next archipelago to the west, Svalbard, there has been more continuous Russian settlement than anywhere in Franz Josef Land. And though the Svalbard Treaty was in many respects a Norwegian success story, it did not quite extinguish Russian life in Spitsbergen and the other islands that make up the Svalbard group. Throughout the eighteenth century, Pomor hunters from northwest Russia were very active throughout the islands.[5] True, there were also Dutch, British and Norwegian interests in Svalbard, but the only travelers equipped to deal with the formidable northern winter were Pomors and other migrants from northern Russia. These visitors over-wintered on Svalbard year after year, the toughest notching up two dozen or more winters in Svalbard. When a Russian monk named Starostin died in Spitsbergen in 1826, he was said to have spent just short of four decades on the island.

With growing opportunities for hunters and trappers in Siberia from the 1820s, many of the Russian and Pomor stalwarts on Spitsbergen turned their attentions east, but the flame of Russian life still burnt on the islands. A coal boom in the opening years of the last century attracted Russian mining companies, and when the international community drew up the Svalbard Treaty in the 1920s, care was taken to protect the interests of Russian and other non-Norwegian settlers and investors in the islands. After the treaty came into effect in 1925, the Norwegian flag graced the office of the Svalbard governor in the capital Longyearbyen, but only conditionally.

Russian Settlements

The Svalbard village of Barentsburg is just 25 miles southwest of Longyearbyen. But it is another world. Longyearbyen is much closer to the North Pole than the northernmost point in Alaska. Yet, for a community of just 2000 souls and a place with such impeccable polar credentials, Longyearbyen is surprisingly cosmopolitan. There is a pizza restaurant run by two Iranian brothers and the most northerly Thai restaurant in the world – the latter reflecting the remarkable oddity that Thais constitute a sizeable ethnic minority in Svalbard just as they do in Greenland. Longyearbyen’s new mayor, elected last year after moving here from mainland Norway just two years ago, is fond of reminding visitors that you can buy anything in Longyearbyen.

Shift to Barentsburg and the shops are conspicuously emptier and you’ll hardly hear a Norwegian (or even a Thai) voice. The man who unlocks the door to the little museum in Barentsburg speaks only Russian, and the story told inside the building is one of how Pomor sealers and trappers were the first settlers in Svalbard. Barentsburg is a Russian mining town. True, some of the miners hail from the Ukraine, but in its entire demeanor Barentsburg is Russian. This little fragment of the post-Soviet world survives in an Arctic wilderness shown on all maps as being nominally Norwegian. The few vehicles in Barentsburg, mainly UAZ jeeps, bear Russian license tags.[6] There is a Russian hospital, a House of Culture and a little Orthodox chapel. The latter is a poignant memorial to victims of a 1996 air accident that claimed 141 lives when an inbound Tupolev aircraft from Moscow crashed into a mountainside. A statue of Lenin presides over Barentsburg, probably providing less reassurance to local residents than the cheap vodka on sale in the bar just behind the statue. The bar, rather incongruously, is called The Hilton.

But that Barentsburg statue of Lenin is not the most northerly tribute to Lenin in the world. That privilege is reserved to Piramida [Pyramiden], a now largely-abandoned Russian settlement far to the northeast. Even in mid-summer, a chill wind blows down Mimerdalen, and the doors on the old tenement blocks in Piramida blow open and shut. A dust devil sweeps in from the tundra, skirts the main square and dumps a pile of moss and waste paper on the doorstep of the old House of Culture.

The Russians pulled out of Piramida in 1998, and the entire settlement, at the very head of Isfjorden, has been mothballed ever since. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin presides over this strange scene, surveying from his plinth an unkempt mosaic of naked pipes, empty buildings and rusting mining equipment. Two decades back, Piramida was still home to several hundred miners, and the town had all the infrastructure necessary to support them, their families and visitors: a hospital, school, hotel and swimming pool.

Nikolai Zubov, veteran of the Knipovich voyage to Franz Josef Land, once famously remarked that mapping and monitoring the Arctic environments off the north coast of Russia was necessarily expensive, but cost almost nothing compared with the expense of using those areas for any economic purpose. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Piramida turned out to simply be too expensive for modern Russia – one indulgence too far, and the mine was closed. Everyone moved, leaving a huge bust of Lenin and the most northerly stray cats in the world to look after the town. It is a reminder that Russia’s engagement with the Arctic is always a matter for renegotiation. RL

Arctic Visits

There are no scheduled flights to Franz Josef Land and the only way for tourists to visit is on an expedition cruise. The cruise season lasts from late July to late September, and this year just nine voyages are scheduled for the entire season. Departures are usually from Murmansk. German cruise company Hapag Lloyd is offering a very adventurous itinerary on their ship MS Bremen, which leaves from Tromsø and will continue east beyond Franz Josef Land to include Severnaya Zemlya. Cost: €14,700 per person in a shared twin; shared suites from €30,000 per person. By contrast, cruises on Russian icebreakers (such as the Admiral Dranitsyn) start a €8000 in a shared twin, and lower on some vessels which have 4-bed cabins. The Russian authorities have never previously allowed foreign-flagged vessels to follow such routes.

Svalbard is very much easier to visit than Franz Josef Land, and, during the short summer season, day trips to both Barentsburg and Piramida can be made by boat from the capital Longyearbyen. Scheduled flights operate several times weekly from both Oslo and Tromsø direct to Longyearbyen. The regular Russian flights to Longyearbyen from Moscow and Murmansk are charter operations run under contract to the Russian company Arktikugol. They are reserved for miners and their families and others with official business in Svalbard. They cannot be booked by tourists.

NOTES:

1. Alexandrovsk is now known as Polyarny (Полярный). It is one of the two principal outer ports of Murmansk.

2. Святой мученик Фока (St. Foka the Martyr)

3. Zubov’s publications on the physics of polar sea ice remain classic reference texts. After his death in 1960, his most famous book was translated into English and published by the U.S. Navy under the title Arctic Ice.

4. Norway and the Soviet Union had signed a bilateral trade agreement in 1925 that allowed cross-border movements by sealers and trappers in the Barents Sea region. Surprisingly, such undocumented migrations across one of Europe’s most difficult frontiers continued well into the Cold War.

5. While credit is nominally given to the Dutch navigator Willem Barents for having discovered the Svalbard archipelago in 1596, the islands were almost certainly already well-known to the Pomors. The Pomors called the area Grumant. Barents introduced the name Spitsbergen (meaning “pointed mountains”). Today Norwegians favor Svalbard, although the largest island is still generally called Spitsbergen.

6. The Russian vehicle license plate suffixes APБ and APП are reserved for the two Russian communities on Svalbard: Barentsburg and Piramida. As there are no roads between communities on Svalbard, none of the vehicles on the islands clocks up much by way of miles. They must all be imported by sea.