Back to the Arctics
Winter is the time to go to the.. ocean. When the weather is steadily below zero and the sun never rises above the horizon it is the high time. High time to go and see the auroras in the land of no-way-getting-there-in-the-summer.
There are no auto roads that way in summer. In winter there is small chance to get there. Even if you have suv or big gas goggler jeep you still can be sure in reaching the shores of the Polar Ocean.
Why people try to reach those salty frozen waters there? Maybe taking a look on the photos can give a clue.
Russian at Northern Pole, 1950s-1960s
Russian people have tens of years of Polar explorations history. Something like fifty-sixty years ago they didn’t have the machines and planes like now but still some spent all year round on the Northern pole on the drifting ice platforms, because at the Northern Pole there is no land surface to build a stationary places like they do at Southern.
Many of those people already passed away. None of such situations are possible now - with lack of electricity, power supplies etc to stay at the Northernmost point of the Earth for 300+ days and don’t loose spirit.
These photos truly inspire.
One Northern City
In Russia there are plenty of small cities built deep far North near some kind of natural resource excavations. We had those diamond mines - it could be called the king of such settlements because we all know how much diamonds cost. But there are different other towns based around things like oil, gas, coal and some rare metals mining facilities which give jobs to majority of population.
This one is located almost at Pacific coast of Russia (yes Russia has Pacific coast too!) and was founded around enormous layers of coal back many years ago in Soviet times.
Later it was sustained by the mining, then after Soviet Union collapse the coal mining still was active so the town survived all that times.
The majority of currently living there people moved there from European parts of Russia but there are still natives living around, eating raw meats and having deer skin covered huts in which they live even at most freezing times of the year. People joke that when civilization would fall all those modern houses and facilities would crumble to dust but the natives would not notice all this modern stuff gone.
Akkani: Wild People - photos by Konstantin Lemeshev
Akkani is an old settling located in the coastal area of Chukotka, Russian far northeast. Like hudreds years ago, walrus hunting is a traditional pasttime of native people. Nowadays, families of locals come to this place every weekend to enjoy this sort of sport.
The Raw Deer
People of Russian North know that eating food raw, as it is, or better to say as it was in nature, can be very beneficial to your health.
The only problem that the only food during long polar nights available in raw state in these lands is meat and blood - the flesh of the freshly killed deers they breed. So, they eat it as it is - raw and uncooked. People say, that this is the only source of vitamins, especially vitamin C for them, and due to this habit they maintain to survive in severe Northern climates for hundreds of years.
Children participate in such bloody lunches since the early age and perceive the taste of raw flesh and blood in no other words as “Tasty! Delicious! Awesome!” or even “The best thing to eat in whole life”.
Hibini Mountains
We have mentioned some time ago the abandoned cities of Kola Peninsula, left by people and Russian army, now standing alone with only severe Northern winds inhabiting them.
This place is also on Kola Cape, but they got better fate. One of the reasons for this is because of the Hibini mountains, which got this region a travel twist. Now around some abandoned Soviet structures one can use the ski lifts and skiing trace.
Dead Towns of Kola
Kola peninsula is a cape in North-Western Russia. This region borders Norway and Finland and has direct access to the Northern Ocean. Because of it’s prevailing strategic position it was valued much by Russian army and hundreds of army bases were placed on the peninsula.
During 1990s Russian army got tremendous budget cut off and had to cut its costs. One of the way to save for the army was to give up some bases and concentrate bases from bordering locations to one. So it was done and many of the army bases were abandoned. Then the other way to reduce costs was to pay less to the personnel, so during 1990s many Russian soldiers and officers had to give up Army service cause they couldn’t sustain normal living from it. Especially at the Northern territories where it was impossible to keep natural living sources like gardens or domestic animals. People naturally fled from North. The apartments prices were falling down at just lightning speed rates, going to as low as $2000 for a 4 room flat, and then it all finished up with hundreds of residential multi-stored houses stayed abandoned with no occupancy.
Army has built a lot of small cities during the Soviet period around its military objects. Those were left first. Now tens of such towns stay all across Kola Peninsula not visited, not inhabited.
Here are just some photos from the empty streets of Kola Peninsula Ex-Army Town.
Russian Ionospheric Link
Before the satelite communication was implemented Russian military bases located at the low-populated places such as shores of Arctic Ocean or frozen Siberian forests had to communicate somehow. It was practically impossible to connect them with wire because required too much effort, and was not secure at all - just a small cut off of the line would cause days of searching for it at -40 weather.
So Russian army has implemented the network of stations that fired their messages to ionosphere then the message was reflected from it and returned to the Earth surface - right to another station. By connecting those stations in relay chain they could communicate through all 10000 mile wide Russian land instantly.
After the sat connections came into play some of the stations were discontinued some were converted to satelite link.
Below you can see the map of this system, and the basic stations. People were sent there to serve their military service for two years guided by full time military commanders. Some still remember those times with a nice nostalgic feeling, some don’t - just imagine to live in the middle of the nowhere for couple of years with the only task to service some strange looking antenna.
Deer Racing
These days is a great day for the dwellers of Northern regions of Russia. The polar night lasting many days before when the Sun didn’t come above the horizon and the land was covered with the darkness ends. People come from all the regions to celebrate.
The main fun during celebration is the deer race. People bring their best deers and race, race, race. The looser deers are being eaten then, like, they did not satisfy the expectations, giving the big meals to everyone.
Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses
Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.
But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.
So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.
Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
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