Russia’s northern shore runs for more than 20,000 km along six seas of the Arctic Ocean — the Barents, White, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi — and includes its largest archipelagos, its only large Arctic city and the Northern Sea Route. No account of this ocean is complete without it. Murmansk, with around 270,000 people, is the biggest city north of the Arctic Circle; Franz Josef Land is the northernmost land in Eurasia; Wrangel Island has the densest concentration of polar bear dens known anywhere.
It is also, at the time of writing, a region we cannot recommend visiting. Since February 2022 the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and most European countries have advised their citizens against travel to Russia; direct flights from those countries have stopped; foreign bank cards generally do not work; and most Western expedition companies have withdrawn. Much of the Arctic coast was in any case a restricted border zone requiring special permits. We therefore do not promote bookings in Russia. This page explains what is there, what the situation is, and where to find comparable experiences in Kirkenes and Svalbard.
Highlights
- Murmansk, the ice-free port that never freezes at 69° north
- The Lenin, the world’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker, now a museum ship
- Franz Josef Land’s ice caps and bird cliffs at 80–82° north
- Wrangel Island, a refuge of polar bears, walrus and musk oxen
- The fortress-monastery of the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea
- The same Barents coast, safely seen from the Norwegian side at Kirkenes and Vardø
Russian Arctic: planning your time
Our advice is simple: read your own government’s current travel advisory for Russia before anything else, and assume that standard travel insurance will not cover you if you go against it. If your interest is the Barents Sea, the borderland and Soviet Arctic history, you can see a great deal from Kirkenes, Grense Jakobselv and Vardø in Norway, and from the Russian-built settlements of Pyramiden and Barentsburg in Svalbard. If it is high-Arctic islands and ice, expedition cruises around Svalbard and to East Greenland cover similar ground.
