The Soviet flag flew high as this year's first passenger voyage from Murmansk came to Svalbard

The Professor Molchanov, the first passenger ship of the season sailing from Murmansk, reached Barentsburg on 12 March. Aboard were miners, relatives of miners and scientists working in the Arctic, according to a post by Trust Arktikugol (Russia's state-owned company on Svalbard) on VKontakte. On arrival, a flag of the USSR, a state that ended 35 years ago, was hoisted on a coal-loading crane in the port.

The route runs directly from Murmansk to Svalbard. Russian citizens who use it do not have to travel through Oslo or Troms tø, so they do not need a Norwegian visa. The Professor Molchanov is scheduled to make ten voyages in 2026. Arktikugol gave no reason for choosing the Soviet flag rather than the Russian tricolour.

Kari Aga Myklebost is professor of Russian history at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT). She told the Barents Observer that she reads the flag as one element of a wider Russian effort to show presence on Svalbard through symbols and actions. In her words, Russia spends little on its Svalbard activity while testing how Norway will react.

The Barents Observer adds that the flag expresses pride in a story of a heroic past, when thousands of people from Moscow lived on the archipelago. Barentsburg now has around 300 residents. Pyramiden, an abandoned settlement, has only a handful. President Vladimir Putin has publicly described the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union as the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.

Big Soviet flags returned to Svalbard in 2024. In the same year a large hammer and sickle, the USSR emblem, was put up on a mountainside above Pyramiden. Arktikugol had used flags in a contested way before. In 2023 it displayed the banner of the Donetsk People's Republic, as that entity styles itself, at its 9 May event in Pyramiden, which resembled a parade.