MOSCOW, November 18. /TASS Correspondent Vitaly Korneyev/. Most Russians have heard at least something about Spitsbergen - a cold Arctic archipelago. The name is associated with the vast snowy expanses, polar bears, black coal, and red fish. However, not many can say anything about the people who live in towns next to Norwegians, or about what they do there.
From time to time, "Spitsbergen" appears on newswires in relation to arguments about bears, fish, coal or the endless snow-covered land. Whenever news of the kind arrives, many people wonder: how comes that Russians and Norwegians are sharing an archipelago? Which jurisdiction is applicable? Or even - who owns Spitsbergen?
Answers to these questions are shrouded in numerous myths — for example, about Scandinavian sailors or lost Wehrmacht detachments. This story is an attempt to shed light on the history of the archipelago, where the Russian Pomors lived, where Dutch expeditions were, where sea hunters were rushing after whales, and where the Norwegians fought for independence. An archipelago that was affected by two world wars and where many thousands of very different people have lived for more than five centuries.
"Gates into the Arctic"
Some 900 km from Norway's Tromso on the mainland's north, and about 1,000 km from Russia's Murmansk. Spitsbergen - or Svalbard, or Grumant - is an archipelago of three big, seven medium and endless small islands. It occupies an area equal to the Kursk and Kaluga Regions together.
Most part is taken by massive glaciers. The coastal sea waters are rich in whales, cod and char. Next to them live polar bears and other protected animals. The archipelago's coal reserves are about 10 billion tons.
Spitsbergen keeps the World Seed Repository, as well as the Arctic World Archive — in case of a global catastrophe. Plus a few scientific polar stations for specialists from all over the world.
The population on 61,000 square kilometers is 3,000 - the number is comparable with the number of people residing in a condo. Russian citizens there are not more than 400 people.
Norwegians mostly live in the town of Longyearbyen, while Russians live in the Barentsburg town.
So, whose is Spitsbergen?
Back in the early 20th century the answer would be a positive "no man's." The international law contains a notion of terra nullius - a no-man's territory, free from any power. For centuries, Spitsbergen was such a territory, Dmitry Tulupov of the St. Petersburg State University said.
In 1905, Norway developed into a young independent state, having regained the ancient crown, which had long been in the hands of Danish and Swedish monarchs. Later on, 15 years after World War I, the victorious countries secured the Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago. Since then, the answer to the question "Whose is Svalbard?" has become unambiguous - Norwegian it is.
What about Barentsburg?
The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognized the full Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago. With a number of special conditions though. First of all, all the parties to the agreement received the right to free economic activities on Spitsbergen - to extract coal, to fish, and to build necessary infrastructures. In addition, the signatories' citizens were guaranteed a free access to the archipelago - this explains why a visa is not required to visit the archipelago.
Russia, which joined the Svalbard Treaty in 1935, also recognized Norway's sovereignty and received all the rights to develop freely the archipelago's resources - primarily coal. To service the mines, Russia built three towns for workers - Grumant, Piramida and Barentsburg. Only one of them, Barentsburg, is permanently inhabited nowadays.
Realistically, it is a regular settlement with a school, a hospital, a sports complex, a hotel, residential and office buildings, says Ruzanna Chernakova, the Vestnik of Spitsbergen's latest editor-in-chief.
"Such a settlement, be it somewhere in Siberia, could well exist as an official settlement, with an administration, an elected government. But here, on the archipelago, this is the property of Russia's Arktikugol Company, which is engaged in coal mining and tourism," she said.
According to Russia's Consul General on Spitsbergen Andrey Chemerilo, only Norwegian laws apply to the settlements and the Russians living on the archipelago.
"The Russian settlements do not enjoy the right of extra-territory benefits. Only Norwegian civil and criminal legislation is in force on the entire archipelago," the diplomat said.
Noteworthy, the Norwegians were not the first to start exploring Spitsbergen.
First people
For centuries, these lands did not see either power or people. Formally, the first people there were participants in the Dutch expedition led by Willem Barents in 1596, said Ilya Rud of the Arctic and Antarctic Museum. Due to the Dutch traveler many countries name this archipelago as Svalbard.
"Barents was the first to draw up a more or less realistic map of the archipelago north of the then Danish-Norwegian kingdom," the expert said.
Before that, for centuries, about those lands people had only vague ideas based on primitive images and ancient Scandinavian sagas, which depicted the Arctic as a closed ecumene, cordoned off the mainland by the giant Greenland and many archipelagos, which sometimes were displayed as a single territory.
Spitsbergen or Svalbard or Grumant?
Was it really so that the Dutch were the first people to appear on the archipelago? There are three versions, Ilya Rud said. The first version is based on the Scandinavian sagas, which describe a land called Svalbard. Later on, a number of Norwegian scientists suggested that the legendary Svalbard is Spitsbergen, which means that the Norwegians' ancestors were there in the times of Vikings. The problem however is this version lacks archaeological evidences, the expert added.
At the same time, archaeology reveals another important layer in the archipelago's history - settlements of the Pomors - a Northern sub-ethnic group of Russians, whose culture and dialect have been lost. In the Middle Ages, people living on the Russian northwest coast, explored numerous Arctic islands in search for fish and fur-bearing animals, he continued.
Remains of those settlements were found on Spitsbergen, which the Pomors used to call Grumant. The second version says the Russian Pomors in small hunting groups started exploring the archipelago back in the middle of the 16th century — a couple of decades before Barents.
However, not all scientists agree with the timing of the Pomors' early settlements on Spitsbergen, assuming that Barents and his expedition were truly the first people to get to that part of the world.
Whale rush
It was the whales that became the main incentive for Spitsbergen's exploration by people from various European countries, who came there after Barents' discovery, Ilya Rud said. The reason, obviously, is not tourism — tons of blubber were extracted from whales. It was the main fuel for street lights before the era of kerosene. The British, Dutch and Danes organized big companies that equipped large whale-hunting vessels, and that hunting was ongoing.
On Spitsbergen, other hunters, though on a much smaller scale, were the Russian Pomors. They did not have large up-to-date ships, and they chose to hunt walruses and fur-bearing animals.
According to Ilya Rud, all people on the archipelago, who came from different parts of the world - from the Basque Country to northern Russia, anyway constantly interacted, sometimes rescuing each other amid the harsh Arctic.
Change of guard
By the 19th century, most whales off the coast of Spitsbergen were exterminated, and Western Europeans for a certain time lost interest in the archipelago. At about that very time, the Russian Pomors began to move from Grumant to other places, more rich in animals, he said.
The places left by the English, Dutch and Pomors with time were occupied by people coming from Norway, which at that time was still under the rule of the Swedish crown.
In addition to Norwegian fishermen and hunters, only Arctic researchers of that time retained interest in Spitsbergen. It was the scientific discoveries that brought international competition to the archipelago in the early 20th century.
Arctic coal
The era of kerosene and coal replaced the era of blubber and firewood. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, businesses from across the globe realized that fuel can be extracted in the Arctic as well, Ilya Rud continued.
Quite soon on Spitsbergen emerged coal enterprises from the US, the Netherlands, Denmark, Great Britain and also from Norway, which by then had got freedom from the Swedish king.
At that time, Russians began to return gradually to Spitsbergen. According to the expert, the famous expedition of Vladimir Rusanov got to the archipelago in 1912. The expedition participants were doing geological exploration, and on the sites of future coal mining they installed Russian application signs.
Very soon Europeans faced a question - who will be able to manage Spitsbergen to guarantee to coal miners from all over the world their rights and interests are observed, Dmitry Tulupov said.
Why Norwegians?
After World War I, Spitsbergen faced territorial problems that had remained in Europe since before the war. At that time the Norwegians showed the greatest interest in control over the archipelago, explaining they were economically active there, stressing the neutral status and the fact the kingdom was maximum close to that land.
"In the early 20th century, Russia failed to gain a foothold on the archipelago. After the World War, and later on, after the Civil War, the country was too weak to claim the archipelago. The Norwegians managed to prove their claims well and offered favorable conditions to other countries. This, of course, can be called a victory of the Norwegian diplomacy," Dmitry Tulupov said.
A separate paragraph in the Svalbard Treaty (initially - the Spitsbergen Treaty) contained an invitation for Russia to join the active development of Spitsbergen whenever the country obtained a single government.
Russia's comeback
Already in the 1920s, recognized Soviet Russia got re-engaged in the archipelago's development. At that time, many coal plots on Spitsbergen were in the hands of Russian emigrants and Western Europeans, Ruzanna Chernakova said. For example, the village of Barentsburg belonged to the Dutch for a long time.
After a number of successful deals, the Soviet state obtained vast territories, and in 1931 it established the Arktikugol Company to manage them.
For more than 90, Arktikugol was Russia's main acting force, which has largely determined the archipelago's modern positions, said the company's Acting Director General Ildar Neverov.
Lost players
Coal mining in the complicated Arctic region is a very costly process that requires great resources, which do not always pay off, the company's top manager said.
Thus, in the 1930s, most coal companies left Spitsbergen, having sold their assets to Russia's Arktikugol and Norway's Store Norske: only state-owned companies have survived the Arctic competition, as for them the presence on the archipelago was of both economic and political values.
Norwegians and Russians were establishing partner relations, without which it is simply impossible to survive in the Arctic, said Ildar Neverov. The relations of good neighborhood, laid in those years, were the foundation for Spitsbergen's further development.
Hot and Cold Wars
In the 1940s, German troops ruined the good neighborhood, Dmitry Tulupov continued.
"In 1943, German ships destroyed Soviet and Norwegian settlements on Spitsbergen, and in September, 1945, Wehrmacht's last soldiers in Europe surrendered. They had lost contact with the command a few months earlier," he said.
The Cold War was known for the tensions around Spitsbergen related to the possible militarization of that conveniently located archipelago. All parties to the Svalbard Treaty pledged not to use the archipelago for military purposes.
"In the late 1940s, the Soviet government a few times offered Norway to have a Soviet military base on Spitsbergen. Noteworthy, to a big extent, those offers have pushed Norway to join NATO in 1949," Dmitry Tulupov added.
Anyway, military bases on Spitsbergen have not appeared in the end. And the archipelago, in compliance with the 1920 treaty, has remained a land free from conflicts between nations.
Peace archipelago
The unique status and a specific location in the Arctic have turned the archipelago into a special zone of international cooperation in various fields - from science to polar tourism.
According to Ruzanna Chernakova, even during the Cold War the archipelago did not have fences or walls to protect some people from others - Russians and Norwegians have been visiting each other freely.
"Over the decades of, at first, industrial, and then tourist work of Arktikugol, about 65,000 citizens of the USSR and Russia have visited Spitsbergen, which really makes the archipelago a special place for many our people," Chernakova said.
The archipelago is known for a unique atmosphere of ongoing cultural and sports exchanges, joint commemorative events and daily human contacts, Russia's Consul General Andrey Chemerilo said.
For the most part of its history, Spitsbergen, even under most complicated international conditions, has remained a safe haven, free from political confrontation and open to creative work of people from all over the globe. With this long-term experience in mind, we may hope the archipelago will remain as such in the future.