Russia maintains ghost town in Norway: visit to pyramids

Pyramiden mining settlement

Russia’s ghost town on NATO territory

Hundreds of miners once dug for coal in the Soviet settlement Pyramiden. Moscow is now using the settlement in Spitsbergen, Norway, in a different way – giving it up is out of the question.

Tobias Schibilla reports from Spitsbergen

The Nordenskiöld glacier towers majestically behind pyramids. It is quiet in the former mining settlement, which was first operated by the Soviet Union and has been managed by the Russian state-owned company Arktikugol since its collapse. Only a few seagulls that have settled in the broken windows of the former family home are screaming incessantly.

“We call it the madhouse,” explains tourist guide Anastasia. In the past, the children of the families who lived here would have played in the wide hallways and screamed loudly. “Today the seagulls are screaming.”

Pyramiden is located on the banks of the Billefjord in Svalbard, one of the largest Norway belonging to a group of islands in the Arctic. No road leads into the town; the nearest settlement, Longyearbyen, is around 50 kilometers away as the crow flies. In the summer months, around 50 to 80 people still live here permanently, explains Anastasia.

Svalbard is part of Norwegian territory. But the land on which Pyramiden stands belongs to the Russian state-owned company Trust Arktikugol.

The company gave up mining in Pyramiden in 1998, but it still continues to subsidize the site, which has since become a tourist attraction. Arktikugol has converted pyramids into an open-air museum showcasing the settlement’s Russian-Soviet history. The nostalgia is intended to attract Russian tourists, and the general interest in the ghost town is intended to attract international visitors.

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But Pyramids is much more than just a tourist attraction. For Russia it is an outpost on Norwegian territory of high symbolic value – internally and externally.

The bust of Lenin, which stands on a pedestal in front of the former Pyramiden cultural center and looks over the Billefjord to the Nordenskiöld glacier, also bears witness to this. However, Pyramids was not founded by Russians, but by Sweden. An expedition Stockholm staked out the first coal fields here in 1910 and gave the settlement its name based on the pyramid-shaped mountain that towers above it.

In 1926, Sweden sold the mining rights to a Soviet company, which in turn passed them on to the newly founded Arktikugol trust in 1931. The Second World War Pyramids survived unscathed, unlike the second Russian settlement of Barentsburg and the Norwegian Longyearbyen, the two other large towns on the archipelago in the Arctic.