The Murman Coast

Saints are not normally trendsetters. But when Tryphon set out from Novgorod in the fifteenth century to convert the “heathen” Sami of the Murman coast and Pasvik Valley, he established a trend that would last for half a millennium. Over that period, in parallel with Russia’s colonization of the East (Siberia), the Russian experience was profoundly shaped by its imperative to tame the North.

Yet the mission of “civilizing” one small fragment of the Russian North was not just a Russian enterprise. It relied on a cosmopolitan mix of players from different nations: Pomors, Kvens, Karels, Finns and Norwegians, along with the native Sami (or Lapps), all played a part in shaping life, culture and communities in the lands that abut the Barents Sea coast.

Tryphon was not the first to spread the holiness of Rus to the North. By the start of the fifteenth century, the first monastic settlements had been established on islands in Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega – both at about 61°N. Later in the same century, St. German endured many years of frigid isolation on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea (at 65°N).

Yet these early forays to northern regions were essentially anchoritic retreats from the world. Tryphon’s approach to the North was different. He went to evangelize. Saint Tryphon is still remembered as the “Enlightener of the Lapps,” and the monastic settlement he founded at Pechenga is today undergoing a major program of renewal and expansion.

 

The Barents Sea region includes the northernmost reach of the mainland of European Russia. This area is part of the Murmansk Oblast; it lies between 69°N and 70°N – a broadly similar latitude to Alaska’s North Slope – and is bounded on the north by the Barents Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean. Norway, which shares a short common border with Russia, lies to the west and there the mainland extends well north of the 70th parallel. Finland lies to the southwest. Russian influence was rarely constrained by those borders, however. In fact, Finland was part of the Russian Empire during the late-tsarist period. And prior to the border between Norway and Russia being agreed upon in 1826, the entire Varanger Fjord area (now in Norway) was part of the fellesdistrikt, a formidably barren region administered jointly by Russia and Norway.

In the southern part of the area, from Lake Inari in the west to the Kola Valley[1] in the east, there are mixed forest landscapes. But at these high latitudes the forests are never dense. There are Scots pine, willows, aspen, rowan and birch. Siberian spruce and red cotton grass bring a touch of the East, a reminder that the taiga forests stretch east to the Urals and beyond. Moving north towards the coast, the dwarf trees and shrubs dwindle, shading slowly into mossy tundra. At the most exposed locations on the coast, there is almost no vegetation – merely great slabs of bare rock.

The religious landscape is less barren. The imprint of the Orthodox world does not stop at the Russian border, but reaches beyond the frontier into neighboring areas of Norway and Finland. There is a beautiful small church at Neiden (just west of Kirkenes in Norway) and a number of Orthodox churches around Lake Inari in northeast Finland, mainly serving Sami communities in that area. Throughout the region, including in Russia, there are reminders that Lutherans settled along the inhospitable Barents coast. The religious diversity is further enhanced by the homegrown Laestadian tradition that blossomed from the mid-nineteenth century. This revivalist Christian movement became a powerful force in Sami communities across the entire North.

The area of Russia shaded in darker green was Finnish territory from 1920 to 1944. This strip of land was known as the Petsamo Corridor

The View from the Border

There is just a single point on the 121-mile border where civilians can cross between Russia and Norway. The local brown bears couldn’t care less about such formalities and reportedly tussle with barbed wire to move back and forth across the borderlands. Bears notwithstanding, in 2014 Russia started a major program to strengthen border infrastructure. This includes construction of a second set of border fences and the introduction of new electronic surveillance techniques. The local Sami population, once free to wander at will with their reindeer, can no longer roam unhindered across their traditional homeland.

The sole highway crossing point between the two countries is on the E105, a ribbon of tarmac that traces a line across Europe from Kirkenes in northern Norway through St. Petersburg and Moscow to Yalta on the Black Sea coast of Crimea. The road is a teaser, inviting us to speculate what we might encounter if we were to follow its 3500km route all the way to the Black Sea.

At seven each morning, Nor-wegian and Russian border guards walk up to the barrier that marks the precise line of the border. They salute with military formality and then courteously exchange a warm handshake over the barrier, which is then raised for another day’s business on the E105. Even in this northern wilderness, the men and women of the border patrol make time for a touch of diplomatic ceremony at the frontier that is known on the Russian side as Borisoglebsky (Борисоглебский) and in Norway as Storskog.

Thomas Nilsen, of the local Barents Observer, has watched comings and goings at this border for years. The Barents Observer has a cross-border brief, monitoring political, economic and cultural developments throughout the Barents region.[2] Nilsen is a man who knows about borders. “Looking at frontiers across the world,” Nilsen says, “there are very few which mark such striking discontinuities in attitudes, culture and life experiences as we see here dividing Russia and Norway. Perhaps the Rio Grande between Mexico and the US, and the difficult frontier between Gaza and Israel.”

Nilsen is quick to point out that, while the border is a fixed and definitive line between two nations with very different perspectives on global affairs, the entire Barents region is a border zone where the interests of Russia and Norway intertwine. “We can take the pulse of Russo-Norwegian relations here at the frontier.”

Here is one example. In early 2014, more than 40 percent of fish imported into Russia came from Norway. With the EU’s imposition of trade sanctions in the wake of events in Ukraine, Norwegian salmon supplies to Russia were interrupted.[3] Russians from the Murman coast region poured over the border, stocking up on salmon in Kirkenes supermarkets, often also buying electronic goods and other products (locals living in the border region are able to cross the frontier without a visa).

Abandoned settlements in Lappland.

But the boom in cross-border shopping was short lived. As the ruble plunged in value at the end of 2014, the appeal of Kirkenes shopping sprees slumped. The streets of Kirkenes, where many signs in Cyrillic are a reminder of Russia’s proximity, have been unusually quiet in recent weeks.

Nilsen admits that Kirkenes is a barometer, recording recent atmospheric changes in the Russian economy, but he takes a longer term view of the Barents region. “This part of Europe has long been a melting pot. There is a very long history of free movement through the North, and that’s not wiped away by the current tensions between Moscow and the West. The interests of many different ethnic groups – Norwegians, Finns, Sami, Russians and more – have shaped this region, and cross-border cooperation in cultural affairs is still very important.”

Colonizing the Coast

Vardø is a small town at the very end of Norway’s Varanger Peninsula. Located on an island just off the mainland coast, Vardø relies on a subsea tunnel for its road link to the rest of the world.

“Cod is great,” proclaims a sign on the quayside – a reminder that Vardø is primarily a place of the sea. Eerie white radomes, looking like giant golf balls, loom on a hill above the town, recalling the days when the US monitored Soviet airspace from this easternmost outpost of Norway.

For a generation of explorers, Vardø was the jumping-off point for major Arctic adventures. Fridtjof Nansen set out from Vardø in 1893 on the voyage that was to take him closer to the North Pole than any previous expedition.

But Vardø was also the port of departure for more modest expeditions that broke no records – it was from here that settlers set off in the second half of the nineteenth century to settle the Murman coast. Pomor traders had long conducted business across the Barents Sea, and Russian vessels regularly pulled into the port of Vardø. The trade was never one-way. Norwegians from Vardø sailed east along the Murman coast to Kola Bay and beyond. So too did others who lived on the Varanger Peninsula, such as the Kvens – settlers of Finnish extraction.

The entire Varanger region experienced massive population increases in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with many fishermen from the Lofoten Islands and other areas of Norway seeking to cash in on the excellent trade in cod around Vardø. Yet in a region with such harsh terrain and climate, there was little opportunity for newcomers to engage in the mixed business of farming and fishing, an occupational duo that made natural partners in lower latitudes. Varanger fishermen were critically dependent on fishing alone, and even a slight dip in catch had immediate repercussions on family fortunes and the well-being of entire communities.

In the years after the Crimea War (1853-56), the tsarist empire encouraged migration to the Murman coast, creating a number of incentives to ease the lot of those who elected to create new lives in this remote region. A steady stream of vessels sailed east from Vardø.

The bells of Pechenga monastery.

The first migrants from Vardø to Russia settled on the Rybachy Peninsula,[4] a fragment of territory linked to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. Vaidaguba, at the northwest corner of Rybachy, developed into an outpost of Norway in Russia. Later, the Norwegians moved to Tsypnavolok, where they had their own school, health clinic and Lutheran church. They were in time replaced at Vaidaguba by Finnish settlers, who favored a Finnish rendering of the village name: Vaitolahti.

Meanwhile Norway, like Russia, realized that the security of their common frontier was enhanced by having people living in the territory immediately along the border. So, at this same time, Norway was also encouraging new settlers from its southern regions to settle in the Pasvik Valley. Homesteaders moved to the area that spans from Kirkenes south to Svanvik and Nyrud.

Elsewhere along the Murman coast and in its hinterland, there developed communities of Finns and Karelians – whose very presence hemmed in the reindeer-herding Sami who had, prior to the arrival of these settlers, treated the entire region as their own.

The new settlers to Russia were exempt from the requirements for military service that prevailed in the Russian Empire and they enjoyed a reduction in normal taxes for the first eight years after arrival in Russia. Their imports were generally exempt from duty, a privilege that was later curtailed when the local revenue inspectors discovered that supply boats arriving from Vardø were weighed down by large quantities of rum. The Murman colonists also enjoyed extensive hunting and fishing rights. And they were entitled to conduct all correspondence with the Russian authorities in their mother tongue. The ties of language and church gave dual incentives to remain within a settlement that consisted largely of one’s own national group.[5]

Vardø, where Cod is Great and listening posts (above) keep an ear to Russia.

The Finnish Connection

For half a century, the Murman colonists survived war and revolution, creating a viable lifestyle in an unforgiving climate. They pragmatically shifted their allegiances from the tsar to the Bolsheviks – yet the Soviet authorities did not secure full control of the Murman coast until early 1920.

Then, in a surprise decision negotiated as part of the Treaty of Tartu, the Soviet Union ceded to Finland a slice of territory abutting the Norwegian border. This strip of territory, known as the Petsamo [Finnish for Pechenga] Corridor, gave Finland prized access to ice-free northern waters. (It was ceded back to the Soviet Union in late 1944, restoring the common border between Russia and Norway.)

This post-Tartu arrangement for the Petsamo / Pechenga area was no mere act of magnanimity on Moscow’s part. It was the result of Finland agreeing to withdraw from the East Karelian provinces of Repola and Porajärvi, which it had annexed in 1918 and 1919, respectively. So it was that, suddenly and unexpectedly, colonists in the Pechenga area found themselves living under Finnish jurisdiction. The demarcation line marking the western boundary of the Soviet Union cut through the Rybachy Peninsula and barbed wire fences divided the village of Vaitolahti into Finnish and Soviet sectors.

For the monks at the Pechenga Monastery founded by St. Tryphon, the change in political landscape barely registered. Finland’s affection for Orthodox spirituality[6] allowed the community to meld into the new order. They recited the psalms and sung troparia through good times and bad. When the monastery at Pechenga was destroyed in the Second World War by the German army, the monks fled to New Valamo, an Orthodox monastery in Finnish Karelia.

During the Cold War, it was the sound of Soviet fighter aircraft rather than the honeyed chanting of psalms that echoed over the tundra here. A major airbase developed at Korzunovo, on a bluff just above the monastery site. Some of the most elite Soviet aviators were based in Korzunovo. Among their number was Yuri Gagarin, who lived there from 1957 to 1959.

Now, in a strange reversal of fortunes, the airmen have left and a new generation of Russian monks are redeveloping the Pechenga Monastery. Korzunovo has become a ghost town.

During the early years after securing the Petsamo Corridor, the Finns very industriously connected that remote corner of Finland to the rest of the country. The Great Arctic Highway was built, running southwest from the estuary near Pechenga and skirting the east side of Lake Inari to reach settled areas of northern Finland. A small port was constructed on the west side of the estuary, along with a cod liver oil factory and a tourist hotel. During the 1930s, the more adventurous among the first generation of Finnish automobile owners would drive the entire length of the Great Arctic Highway to vacation by the sea.

The acquisition of this region brought another unexpected result. As Finnish surveyors and geologists mapped the Petsamo Corridor, they discovered important mineral deposits near the Norwegian border, on the east side of the Pasvik Valley. Valuable nickel and copper ores were crucial to the creation of an important industrial base in the region.

The tradition of nickel mining, established by the Finns in the 1920s and taken over by the Soviets after WWII, is still going strong. So well, in fact, that the main town is called Nikel (Никель).

Nickel from Nikel

Nikel is one of those places where life is laid bare. Mikhail Smirnov, a lifelong resident of Nikel, likes it that way. “Nikel people are friendly folk,” he says. “What you see is what you get.” Behind Smirnov, three huge chimneys pump plumes of smoke into slate-gray northern skies.

Day-to-day life in Nikel is inflected by the season and the direction of the wind. “You’ve chosen a good day,” Smirnov says. “You’d really not like it in mid-summer. That’s when we have to cope with some pretty bad air pollution.”

Smirnov is the perfect guide to Nikel, where the only thing that has seen a recent coat of paint is the white bust of Lenin overlooking the nickel smelter.

Nikel.

“Nikel certainly isn’t pretty,” Smirnov says. “But people here make good incomes and it’s a decent place to live and work.” He goes on to commend the merits of the ski season, which lasts over half the year. Walking through the allotments that run down to the waterside on the town’s west side, Smirnov recalls an extraordinary day last summer when there were clear skies and the winds blew the sulfurous fumes from the chimneys away from town. There are times, it seems, when Nikel is the happiest place on earth.

Barents Observer editor Thomas Nilsen is a regular visitor to Nikel and acknowledges that the town is not without its merits. “It’s too easy to write off a community just because it doesn’t look nice. But we have to remember that the industrial plants in Nikel are pumping much more sulfur dioxide into the skies than all of Norway.”

The hillsides around Nikel are rough and bare, the contours of the land scarred beyond redemption by acid rain. The gentle slopes where the Sami once let their reindeer graze are sad and naked. Industrial practices that may have been quite normal in the 1920s, when the Finns developed the nickel industry in this area, have persisted into the twenty-first century.

Travelers who venture into remoter regions of the former Soviet Union are fond of referring to “post-Soviet space” – a phrase that inevitably evokes images of crumbling khrushchyovkas,[7] their prefabricated panels in tatters. There is nothing post-Soviet about Nikel. The town is a throwback to much earlier times, and all the more interesting for that. “We have buildings here, dating back to the early days of the town, when it was being built up under Finnish administration,” says Smirnov, as he points out what locals still refer to as “the Canadian houses.” “Those were the buildings used by the Finnish mine managers,” he explains. “It was Canadian funding that backed the early mining operation here,” he adds, explaining the name.

The reality is that Nikel is a survivor. Where other ex-Soviet monogorods have suffered through the demise of their core industry, Nikel is doing rather well.

Postscript

Heading east on the E105 from the Norwegian border towards Murmansk, you can’t miss the Titovka café. Sooner or later, everyone driving this stretch of the E105 stops at Titovka.

This roadside stop lies in a gentle valley that affords slight protection from the elements. Dwarf shrubs and the occasional crooked birch struggle against the Arctic elements. Willow scrub tumbles over peaty dells in this hummocky landscape. Beside the café, there is a Sami tent. It is a sad reminder of the missing element in this story: the Sami. For today they are hardly to be seen along the Murman coast or in its hinterland.

The Titovka is a beacon in the wilderness, one of those welcoming spots that every highway deserves. Amid the hustle and bustle of trade, there is a mix of voices: a group of Russian merchant seamen on their way to join a ship at the Norwegian port of Kirkenes; travelers from Norway on their way to Murmansk, among them a man who says that one day he plans to follow the E105 all the way to Yalta.

All faces turn to the highway as a sullen convoy of Russian military trucks rumbles west, towards the Norwegian border. The reverberations of international politics are never far from the tundra. No one is in any doubt who are the real masters of the Barents wilderness. RL

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Notes

[1] Kola (Кола) was long the principal city of the Kola Valley. One hundred years ago, Murmansk simply did not exist. It has however grown to become the dominant city of the entire region. Murmansk lies just a few miles downstream from historic Kola.

[2] Barents Observer publishes in English and Russian. Find out more at barentsobserver.com.

[3] Some Norwegian salmon still appears on the shelves of Russian stores. Fresh fillets from Norway are exported to Belarus, where they are lightly smoked and sent on to Russia (sometimes even branded as a Belarusian product).

[4] In Russian, the peninsula is known as полуостров Рыбачий — literally Fishermen’s Peninsula.

[5] Read more about the Murman colonists at coast-of-hope.no. This website is the legacy of an 2012 exhibition created in a three-way cooperation between partners in Norway, Russia and Finland.

[6] The Orthodox Church is one of two confessional traditions that enjoy the status of a national church in Finland. The other is the Lutheran Church.

[7] The khrushchyovka (хрущёвка in Russian) is the standard-issue apartment block, usually three to five storeys, that came to symbolize Soviet housing of the 1960s.