Our dear friend, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, told us about her time stationed in Iceland, when they were occasionally on alert for Russian military planes flying out of Murmansk, Russia. The largest city north of the Arctic Circle, this port remains ice free year-round due to the warm North Atlantic drift ocean current and is valuable, not only as a fishing and shipping port, but as a strategic extreme north-western base for the Russian Navy.
Founded in 1916, the city was built as a western terminus for the railway line, designed to open the North Atlantic supply route to Russia in support of the Eastern Front during the First World War, and serving as a link to the western world in WWII. Murmansk is now home port to Atomflot, the world’s only fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers, used to ship cargo into the Arctic Circle through the Northern Passage.
We docked across from the sturdy and rugged, first nuclear-powered 1957-built Icebreaker “Lenin” in the very industrial Murmansk port, filled with heaping mounds of black coal with a damp mineral odor, and multi-storied cranes for transporting shipping containers. Rather than spend the several hundred dollars and time to obtain a Russian visa required for us to visit the country, we enlisted in port excursions offered by the ship, which provided for free entry as long as we did not deviate from our supervised tours. Russian immigration met us brusquely at our gangway, where we were issued the proper documents with specific instructions not to lose them, and sent on to our designated tour buses. Welcome to Russia.
Murmansk still resonates a Soviet influence. Apartment buildings, lined up in rows and terraced on the hillsides, are all nearly identical 9-story cement-block structures built in the Khrushchev regime, to provide the people with quick and cheap housing. Today, though still actively inhabited, they are in disrepair with broken windows, unpainted and chipped surfaces, and unmown grass, overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, that makes them seem almost abandoned. The same is true for their public buildings, institutions, and parks.
The weather was weirdly and unseasonably warm…almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and our buses were hot, since there is typically no need for air-conditioning in this Arctic town. Our native guide, Lena, expressed having never experienced such warm weather in all of her 34 years. We were whisked away to the Oceanarium, a small white-domed building, where we were entertained by trained seals, adopted due to injuries or abandonment, and rehabilitated and studied at the complex. We walked by the imposing yellow local administrative building and through the adjacent city park, the so-called “Central Park” of Murmansk, where many people were enjoying the Polar Days, which occur from the end of May to the end of July, when the sun never sets.
Above the city and the harbor sits the Alyosha Statue, gateway to Murmansk, a 100-foot-tall statue of a lone soldier and monument to the defenders of the Soviet Arctic. The panoramic views from this site make it a popular place for picnics, weddings, tourists and, as we found out, flies and mosquitoes.
On the way back to the ship, we stopped at the gold-domed, blue-roofed Russian Orthodox Church of the Savior-on-Waters, built in 1840 and named after the patron saint of sailors, where a service was in progress with the mystical, muted strains of a sacred choir in the background.
Winding our way back to port, through the “blocks”, as the apartments are called, we left behind a city that seems to be lost in time, somewhere between the past and the present.
Looks lost in time…. Timetravelish