Authors

Discussion

Svalbard is an Arctic archipelago under the Norwegian jurisdiction, also regulated by the international Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which allows its signatories to exercise scientific and economic activity on the islands. Russia has been such a signatory since 1935 while claiming that Pomors (an ethnonym for those who had historically inhabited the White Sea shores) discovered Svalbard long before Willem Barents in 1596. While this particular claim has been contested by a number of historians and archeologists, it is true that Russian (sporadic) presence on Svalbard goes back at least to the Petrine era. 

One of the better documented instances of Russians visiting Svalbard is the Russo-Swedish expedition of 1898-1902, arranged to measure the meridian arc from Vesle Tavleøya in the north to the Sørkapp Land in the south. A major achievement for its time, it has recently become the subject of a Russian documentary (2017) and a feature film (2021), both of which deviate to various degrees from real events to overemphasize Russia’s role in the expedition, as well as the country’s earlier ties to the archipelago. Part of the underexposed “Svalbard nash” trend, which received a notable boost since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the films seem to be a grassroot initiative, rather than a commission from on high. Serving as an example of the current, heavily mythologized Russian memory politics, they are analysed in the context of post-truth and alternative history phenomena, and briefly contrasted to Quentin Tarantino’s blockbusters Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), which take significant liberties with well-established and widely known historical facts.