Barentsburg

Grønfjorden, named Green Harbour by the English explorer Jonas Poole in 1610, was used by whalers from 1612 until the 1650s. Coal brought the first town. The Dutch Spitsbergen Company, founded in 1920, bought a mine at Green Harbour from its Russian owners, worked it from 1921 to 1926 and named its settlement Barentsburg after the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz. In 1932 the Dutch sold the mine and the settlement to the Soviet trust Arktikugol, which has run the town ever since. In September 1943 a German fleet bombarded Barentsburg along with Longyearbyen and Grumant.

At its height the settlement had around 1,000 people. On 29 August 1996 a Tupolev charter flight from Moscow, bringing a new shift of miners, crashed into Operafjellet near Longyearbyen on its approach to Svalbard Airport; a wooden chapel in Barentsburg remembers the victims. After the end of the Soviet Union the town declined steadily, and when Pyramiden closed in 1998 Barentsburg was left as the only working Russian settlement.

In October 2006 Norwegian inspectors found a smouldering underground fire, mining stopped, and production resumed only at the end of 2010. Before 2022 many Ukrainians lived and worked here; after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine most non-Russian residents left on their own or were asked to by the local authorities, and Ukrainians were ordered to leave unless they accepted the Russian passports they were offered. Russia announced new investment in Barentsburg and Pyramiden in 2022. In 2023 the Russian consulate general and Arktikugol held a Victory Day parade through the town on 9 May; the Governor of Svalbard was reportedly invited but declined.

Barentsburg has been called an open-air museum of the Soviet Union. A bust of Lenin still stands on the main street, and on the hillside above the houses a five-pointed star and the slogan Miru Mir, "Peace to the World", have a practical use: when the star becomes visible again after the polar night, summer is on its way. A few Soviet flags are painted on buildings, and Russian national days are marked with parades.

The town has a small cultural life of its own. The Pomor Museum presents Pomor culture, Arctic wildlife and archaeological finds from the permafrost; the Art Arctic Gallery shows whalers' belongings and folk art; and the sports hall, with its seawater pools, hosts competitions with Longyearbyen. Each summer several dozen scientists from Russia and elsewhere work in the town's research centre, and Barentsburg also has a year-round meteorological observatory and the northernmost cosmic-ray station.

Barentsburg lives under Norwegian sovereignty and Russian management at once. The Svalbard Treaty gives citizens of signatory countries equal rights to exploit natural resources, which is why Arktikugol still mines here; Russia is represented by a consulate, yet the town has a Norwegian postcode and telephone numbers, and a Norwegian mobile operator covers it. Relations with the Norwegian settlements are described as cooler now than they were during the Cold War.

About 300 people lived in Barentsburg in 2025, almost all of them Russian nationals, down from a peak of around 1,000. The main work is coal mining by Arktikugol, with the coal shipped out and usually sold to buyers in northern Europe; some 100,000 tonnes a year are exported. Tourism is being developed but does not yet earn enough to revive the town, and Russia spoke in 2021 of building a plant to process fish for export.

Life is organised around the company. The town depends on mainland Russia for food, and there have been times when too little arrived and aid was sent from Longyearbyen. Residents grow many of their own vegetables in a greenhouse and keep their own livestock barn, and they pay with special plastic cards rather than cash. The settlement has a hospital, a coal power plant, a research park, a hotel, a meeting hall and a school, which in 2014 had three teachers.

Residents live in apartment blocks, while many older buildings stand empty. The working year follows the light: the polar night shuts the sun out for months, and the summer boats bring both supplies and the day visitors who make up most of the town's contact with outsiders.

Barentsburg's food reflects its role as a Russian company town. Residents eat in a shared canteen, where the staple is shchi, the Russian-style cabbage soup; when it is made with sauerkraut instead of fresh cabbage it becomes sour shchi, and versions based on sorrel, spinach or nettle are known as green shchi. Vegetables grown in the town's own greenhouse and produce from its livestock barn supplement what is shipped in from mainland Russia.

For visitors there are only a couple of places to eat and drink. The best known is Krasniy Medved, the "Red Bear", one of only two breweries in Svalbard alongside the one in Longyearbyen. It is a restaurant, bar and party place in one, brewing its own beer and serving cod dishes, burgers, meat dishes and soups. Prices for visitors follow Norwegian levels and are paid in Norwegian kroner. The town's souvenir shop sells matryoshka dolls, Lenin pins and other Soviet-Russian keepsakes, some of them made by local residents.