Part 5: The Russian mining town of Barentsburg

Our time in Barentsburg started at the local hotel, where a nice meal was served consisting out of mushroom soup, various small Russian-style appetisers and a hotpot with potatoes and meat. As drinks, we could take coffee, tea, water and kompot (homemade Russian-style fruit juice). It took quite some time to get out of our snowmobile suits before we could enter the dining room, but it was well worth it



After the meal we were accompanied by a second guide, this time a Russian native from Barentsburg (a girl in her mid 20s) who would give us the very interesting city tour. Barentsburg is not that big and you can basically walk from one end of town to the other end in 15 to 20 minutes.



The town has all kind of facilities which a community needs to sustain itself. Supplies are sent in a few times a year by ship from Russia and Germany, while the town itself basically has all services which you might need. There is a kindergarten and school, a shop, hotel, accommodation units for workers, doctor. The relationship between the two communities on the island seemed to be very warm and friendly, with our snowmobile guide from Longyearbyen and our city tour guide from Barentsburg sharing stories and trading barbs about a yearly sports tournament which is held between the two Svalbard towns.

Of course, Barentsburg still being an active coal mining town, there is also a dock in the fjord to where the coal is brought via underground mine galleries before being shipped away once every few months.



And the good news: the town even has its own brewery pub! Yay! Although the bad news is that it was closed and I would not have been able to sample some beers anyway as I still had to drive back to Longyearbyen. Booh! The aptly name of the brewery pub is by the way 'krasniy medved', which means 'red bear' in Russian.



The town also has its own hostel, the Pomor Hostel, located in an older wooden building.



The Arktikugol headquarters (Arktikugol literally means 'Arctic Coal') was located in a more modern building. This is the state-owned mining operation which basically owns the entire place. It was founded in communist times (1931) and has an awesome logo with a polar bear, which also features in the Barentsburg town logo.



The town has its own school building too, which seems a bit large considering the population and the fact that there are only three teachers.



Next to the school is the post office, which is run by the Norwegian Post with all post going via Longyearbyen and the Norwegian mainland. It is a nice building as there are is a small exhibit with old postal artefacts. It also doubles as a souvenir shop, and even though I'm normally not a souvenir-buying person (at least not when it comes to tourist kitsch) I couldn't resist buying a red t-shirt with the awesome polar bear logo of the town with the name Barentsburg written in Cyrillic letters. For those who might be wondering, despite it being a fully Russian town basically run by the Russian government, prices are still in Norwegian Crowns (NOK). It being Norway, even at this outpost of the world you can still pay with card.







Of course, most buildings in town are basically the flats to house the workers and their families. There are both older wooden buildings as well as more modern structures.







That statue you see on the last picture above in front of the flat? Take a guess! Yes, it's our old comrade Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. It's the second most northerly Lenin statue in the world, with the most northerly being located in the abandoned mining town of Pyramiden a bit further to the north on Svalbard.



It would make a nice travel quest to visit all weird Lenin statues in the world, I was thinking at that exact moment. The most northerly Lenin statue, the largest Lenin head in the world (in Ulan Ude)... although when I see where the most southerly Lenin statue in the world is located, I don't think I could ever complete such a quest... would be an epic challenge though!

Even though Barentsburg just missed out on the northernmost Lenin statue, it does have the northernmost diplomatic mission in the world as Russia has a consulate here (the modern building on the left on the picture below – if I remember correctly the older building in front was the old consulate building).



There is even a gym and swimming pool in a modern building for the locals to stay fit and have some R&R in the long, cold winter weather.



I forgot what the purpose was of the old wooden building below, but it looked spooky and had some cool murals. One has a Russian poem written next to a bearded sailor with lipstick – or at least that is how the man looks like. Nobody in town actually knows who the portrayed man is!









Barentsburg also has a small church. In a bit of airline history: it was built as a memorial to those 130 passengers (plus 11 crew members) of Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801 which crashed in 1996 into a Svalbard mountain on its final approach from Moscow Vnukovo to Longyearbyen due to pilot error and loss of situation awareness. As the passengers were all on their way to the Barentsburg and Pyramiden mining towns, it had a huge impact on the Russian community. It is to day still the biggest air disaster in the history of Norway.



After the city tour we had some 20 to 30 minutes to walk a bit around on our own, buy souvenirs, or to warm up with a drink in the hotel. I snapped a last few pictures of the town before going back to the hotel to put on my snowmobile suit for the ride back to Longyearbyen.





Next up: More snowmobile fun!