Putin

As Britain’s leading expert on the Russian Arctic, Terence Armstrong, says in The Russians in the Arctic: “This sort of thing was not a rare occurrence.” He points out that through their “boldly conceived expeditions, the Russians have made themselves the undisputed experts on the whole central Arctic region…,” adding that almost “everything that is known about the circulation of water in the Arctic Ocean … was discovered by Russian work.”

Not only did the Russians explore the High North, they exploited it, which also means investing in it. Twenty percent of Russia’s landmass, the Arctic Circle, accounts for something like 20 percent of the country’s GDP and exports. None of the other five Arctic Ocean powers have any cities of notable size in the Arctic Circle. Nome, Alaska, the United States’ largest Arctic city, usually has a population of just under 4,000. Russia, on the other hand, has eight of the ten largest cities in the Arctic Circle, Norway having the other two. Murmansk, the largest, had a population of 500,000 in Soviet times, though it has fallen almost by half in the years since.

The last city founded by the tsars, in 1916, Murmansk was a principal target of the 1918 U.S. invasion to keep Russia war materiel from falling into German hands. American soldiers are buried there. During World War II the “Murmansk run” became legendary as British, Canadian, and American ships kept an embattled Soviet Union supplied with food. German U-boats torpedoed eighty-five merchant ships and sixteen Royal Navy warships. Churchill called this “the worst journey in the world.”

For Russians the Arctic is associated with the heroic and the hellish—sometimes the two have even been combined. Daring rescues of explorers and scientists trapped by ice provided patriotic fodder for Soviet newspapers and newsreels. In 1937, due to exceptionally severe conditions, twenty-six Soviet ships were forced to winter at sea, frozen in place. This might have been good luck in disguise because 1937 was the very apex of Stalin’s Terror, and it was safer to be trapped in Arctic ice than home in your bed.

The Arctic was not only an arena of heroic exploits but a scene of ecological crimes. There were 138 nuclear tests—land-based, underground, underwater—in the Arctic between 1955 and 1990. Fourteen nuclear reactors were simply dumped into Arctic waters along with nineteen vessels containing radioactive waste. The K-27 nuclear submarine was scuttled in 1981 in thirty meters of water whereas international convention requires three thousand. In some places, like Andreeva Bay, nuclear waste leakages from a site containing thirty-two tons have rendered the waters “completely devoid of life.”

But that may not be the gravest danger: “A Russian Academy of Sciences study indicates decades’ worth of nuclear reactor and radioactive waste dumping in the Kara Sea by the Russian Navy—as well as fallout from Soviet-era nuclear tests—could cause heightened levels of radioactive contamination when major Arctic oil drilling projects ramp up…. Studies show that when the drill bit hits the ocean floor, there is a danger of disinterring a vast portion of the Soviet Union’s irresponsible nuclear legacy … which threatens to contaminate at least a quarter of the world’s Arctic coastlines.”

But drilling presents other dangers—as well as some intriguing possibilities—apart from the release of radioactive wastes. Russian scientists, attempting to foresee and forestall some of the effects of climate change and drilling, have been working on the melting permafrost and have recently discovered more than twenty previously unknown and possibly dangerous viruses. One of them, termed a “giant” virus because, at a length of 0.6 microns, it can be seen under a normal optical microscope, is known as Mollivirus sibericum and has been frozen in ice for thirty thousand years.

Not all the viruses are potentially harmful. In fact, one of them, officially known as Bacillus F and more informally as “the elixir of life,” shows mind-boggling promise. First, scientists noticed that Bacillus F “didn’t show signs of aging,” said Dr. Anatoly Brushkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University. “My colleagues and I cultivated the bacteria and started studying them more closely…. We started injecting mice with a solution containing Bacillus F and their lifespan increased by up to 30 percent.” As the lab head, Vladimir Repin, put it: “Imagine an old mouse living the last of its average 600 days. We injected it with the solution, and suddenly it started behaving like it was much younger. All the vital signs returned to normal.” Another of the lab’s scientists said, “Experiments have already resulted in mice restoring their fertility and beginning to reproduce again.”

The true treasures of the North may not be the obvious ones of gas, oil, and gold.

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