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USSR's first drifting polar station: When Soviets set their sights on the Arctic

The four members of the North Pole 1 expedition – Ivan Papanin, Ernest Krenkel, Yevgeny Fyodorov and Pyotr Shirshov – spent nine months on a drifting ice-floe and were evacuated on February 19, 1938

On February 19, 1938, the Soviet ice breakers Taimyr and Murman took four people and their equipment off the ice floe. Soviet explorer Ivan Papanin and three other members of the North Pole 1 expedition (Ernest Krenkel, Yevgeny Fyodorov and Pyotr Shirshov) spent nine months on a drifting ice floe. North Pole-1 became the first Soviet manned drifting station in the Arctic Ocean.