This video was made possible by me!
That’s right, I’m advertising for myself.
It’s like a pyramid scheme where every block in the pyramid
is me.
This whole episode is a sneaky promo for my podcast Extremities—available at
ExtremitiesPodcast.com.
You’ll see what I mean at the end.
This is Barentsburg—a Russian town.
It has Russian stores, Russian schools, Russian money, and Russian people who speak… you
guessed it…
Spanish.
No, Russian.
I want to be clear—the town doesn’t just have a lot
of Russians in it, it isn’t like a Russian equivalent of
Chinatown.
It is an entirely Russian town entirely owned by the Russian Government.
It’s as Russian as Vladimir Putin drinking vodka out
of a Matroishka doll.
So why then, you have to wonder, is this Russian town…in Norway.
This is Norway—home to, um…
Norwegians?
Now that cool, electric guitar shaped area down there is probably what you normally think
of when you think of Norway—and you might be wondering, what’s up with that weird
jagged island up at the top that you also highlighted?
Is that also part of Norway?
Did you make a mistake?
Of course not—as I’m sure you know, every part of every HAI video ever is totally 100%
accurate always, no exceptions.
That area up there is also part of Norway.
It’s called Svalbard and that’s where Barentsburg is—right here.
When Svalbard was discovered in the late 16th century, lots of different countries had lots
of different opinions about who should own it, and in the end, the conflict was solved
the same way many great conflicts are solved—by never
addressing the problem and pretending like everything is fine until it isn’t, kinda
like climate change.
Functionally, that meant Svalbard was open to everyone, under the old maritime principle
of “mare liberum” which is Latin for “free seas,” or it might be Latin for “horse
library.”
I don’t really know.
My Latin isn’t great.
For the next few hundred years, several countries would whale, and, later, mine in
Svalbard, but over time, the question of who owned Svalbard kept coming up.
That question was finally answered after World War I, when the
countries at the Paris Peace Conference all came
together, and in between answering questions like “should we call it the League of Nations
or the Justice League” and “how can we best set
things up for another, worse world war 19 years from
now,” they asked, “who should get Svalbard?”
To which Norway said, “us!”
To which the other countries said, “um…yeah, sure, I don’t
care, why not.”
This deal, though, came with quite a lot of conditions.
Norway would be allowed to own Svalbard and enforce Norwegian laws, but any
country that was party to the treaty was allowed to set up shop and use Svalbard’s natural
resources.
Also, any citizen of any country party to the treaty had to be allowed to come to
Svalbard anytime they wanted, and stay as long as they wanted, no visa required.
Later, Norway expanded this privilege to everyone, even
if you weren’t from a country that signed the treaty—
making Svalbard the only place in the world apart from Mastercard's HQ that’s completely
visafree.
Which brings us to how a Russian town ended up in Svalbard, a Norwegian island.
Well, technically archipelago.
See, Russians had been in Svalbard as long as anyone, starting sometime
between 1425 and the later 1600s—I know, that’s a long gap but hey, archaeology is
hard, okay.
Anyway, starting somewhere in that time, a group of Russian hunter trappers called the
Pomory had been traversing between northern Russia
and Svalbard to do what hunter trappers do best—
play Pictionary.
Ah no sorry I misread that—they hunted and trapped.
Those were the first Russians on Svalbard, but they certainly weren’t the last.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union decided to take advantage
of that, “anyone can use our resources,” clause of the Svalbard Treaty, and they bought
a mining town called Barentsburg from the Dutch
—which is, of course, the town you’ll remember from the beginning of the video.
You’re paying attention, right?
Of course you are—when has anybody ever not paid close attention to a
YouTube video?
Because they were party to the Svalbard Treaty, the Soviet Union was allowed to have a
mining settlement in Svalbard and because Svalbard was visa-free, their Russian citizens
could live on Svalbard as long as they wanted which
is how we got a fully-fledged Russian town right
smack in the middle of Norwegian territory.
The Soviet Union knew that because Svalbard was
visa-free, anyone might come and see their town, and so they purposefully engineered
it to be an example of communism’s supposed success.
It had a massive cultural center with an enormous heated pool, a museum, and, to make it fun
for the kids, a massive, imposing bust of Vladimir
Lenin.
At its peak, over 1,500 people lived in Barentsburg.
But as the people at MoviePass can tell you, success doesn’t always last.
Most of the funding for Barentsburg had to come from the
Soviet mainland, because despite the fact that
Russians have been doing it for over 90 years, mining in Barentsburg has never once been
profitable.
Once the Soviet Union fell, there was less need for a Soviet utopia in Norway, so
funding decreased and the town began to struggle to stay afloat.
Since then, the Russian government has been giving it just enough
money to survive—not because they need coal, but
because Barentsburg sits in the middle of key sea routes that connect Russia to Western
Europe and North America—but it’s still only
scraping by—now, with only about 400 people left,
Barentsburg has attempted to pivot to tourism, but with little success.
There have, though, been some tourists in past year—including someone
named me when I visited in order to make the second season of my podcast Extremities.
Extremities season two is out and is available at ExtremitiesPodcast.com and on all of
these podcast clients.
It’s a show about how and why people live in the most remote and extreme
settlements on Earth, and season two is all about Svalbard.
The episode we released today talks about Barentsburg, and the Russian occupation
of Svalbard, in much more depth and detail.
Plus, in the other episodes of the podcast, I talk
about a ton of fascinating things I didn’t even get to
mention in this video—polar bear attacks, bank heists, the northernmost hospital in
the world, a massive seed vault that some consider the
most important building on Earth, a secret WWII
operation to keep Svalbard out of Nazi hands, and so much more.
To get the whole story, make sure to start at episode one which, once again,
is available at ExtremitiesPodcast.com.
Now, get out of here and listen to my podcast, damnit!