“Barentsburg welcomes you” read the white letters in Russian above the dock. From the moment visitors step off the boat, there is little doubt who is at least symbolically in charge of this small town of a few hundred in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Russian flags fly from buildings. The local pub, the Red Bear, charges punters in roubles. A bust of Lenin looks out across the fjord, behind it a monument declaring: “Our goal is communism!”
Yet this is not Russia, but Norway. The mining town may have been owned by the Soviet Union (and subsequently, Russia) since 1932, but it is located on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, which is resolutely Norwegian. Under a treaty drawn up in 1920, the Norwegian government has “full and absolute sovereignty” of Svalbard in return for equal rights of abode to citizens of signatory countries, including Russia.
