Oct. 19th, Barentsburg

If you think it is strange there is a Russian town on Spitsbergen, remember that this land is not exactly part of Norway.  It really is a kind of no-man's territory, not subject to any taxation, where historically a man could arrive from anywhere and stake a claim. The American Longyear founded Longyearbyen, the Russians had Pyramiden, now abandoned, and Barentsburg, still going strong.  Long before climate change grabbed our attention the Arctic had tremendous strategic importance, and the Germans bombed all of it in World War II.  They even had one far and remote weather station that was the final place the Nazis surrendered in September 1945.

Whereas Ny Ålesund is a curious modern science town of satellite dishes, nationalistic research buildings from nations as diverse as China, India, Germany and France, Barentsburg looks like a little slice of Siberia.  You walk up to the city up hundreds of carefully constructed wooden steps, to emerge on a plateau with crumbling concrete buildings, most built in the sixties through eighties but generally looking much older. 

The faded grandeur of the Soviet time is out in full force, monuments everywhere you look.  To the glory of the coal miner!  To the arctic socialist explorer hand in hand with a polar bear!  A concrete apartment building with a giant brick design of a Russian country maid.

Strangely, there are murals throughout the town (of perhaps six hundred Russians, with room for about a thousand more) of green and leafy summer scenes, images of a landscape so far removed from where we now stand that it is hard to understand why anyone would want to paint them here. Is this some kind of wry Arctic joke?  Or are these billboards advertising the land all the residents will sometime soon go home to?

The bartender at the one foreigners' hotel smiles when I ask her, "how long have you been here?" 

"My term is two years.  The pay is good.  But then I am getting out."

In the middle of the night after hours of vodka in the bright fluorescent bar we are laughing in the dark, running down those perilous wood steps at top speed, slipping on rail tracks in the tunnels that lead from the mine.  Around a corner we spy three coal-faced miners, returning from work.  All of a sudden life here seems no longer a party, but risky, dirty work.  We all go silent for a moment.  But soon we start laughing again and run back to our boat.