There is an archipelago of nine icy islands in the Arctic Ocean where the terrain is somewhat alien. For most of the year, the landscape of Svalbard’s administrative capital, Longyearbyen, is barren — the earth either black or snow-white — because the deep-frozen ground prevents anything from growing. And so it would have remained, like the two-toned Arctic of the early settlements that sprung up in the stark valleys and mountainous tundra, except that, since airplanes started to land in the 1970s and souvenirs filled the shelves of the local supermarket, new species of flowers and grass have been growing in the meadows in the summer months under the lukewarm midnight sun. Spores riding the wind from overseas have produced lush dandelions and red fescue grass, colonizing the Norwegian Arctic.
The seed invasions are symbolic of other anomalies in Longyearbyen where today more than a quarter of all residents are non-Norwegian. The city was established on the romanticized notion that Longyearbyen could be everything Norway was not. But soon this premise became literal, and the islands turned into a region where income taxes are so low that there is no social security, where the Norwegian Welfare Act does not apply and where the old, ill and disabled have no access to Norway’s famously strong social safety net.
It isn’t uncommon to hear stories from people living in Longyearbyen who started out, and will most likely end up, somewhere else. New settlers come from afar, often by word of mouth, arriving in Longyearbyen to find a new job as a waiter or chef, or to reunite with their families who came before them. One can have lunch at a restaurant in the town center prepared by a young chef from Belarus, return to one’s hotel room after it is cleaned by Filipinos and then pop into the local supermarket to buy bread baked by a Uruguayan.
Longyearbyen, home to about 2,500 inhabitants, is located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It straddles the same latitudinal lines as the top of Greenland in an Arctic region that has become a geopolitical and economic hot spot, as relations grow frostier between the West and Russia and polar ice caps melt due to the worsening climate crisis. When something strange happens here, it is usually a consequence of something important unfolding elsewhere. An unusual legal framework means foreign people can live in the region and foreign entities can gain a foothold there. The Norwegian administration, which once welcomed the foreigners, now feels the city’s destiny is slipping out of its hands. A conflict is raging between what the community has turned into and what those who administer it expect.
As far as the Norwegians in charge are concerned, the international residents are called “foreigners,” but this name can be irksome. “I deliberately use the word non-Norwegian instead of foreigner,” says Elizabeth Bourne, a painter and photographer originally from Seattle, Washington. “Every person who comes to Svalbard and has a job has a right to be here. As far as I’m concerned, there are no foreigners in Svalbard,” she tells me one dark afternoon as we sip instant coffee in an exhibition space converted from a miners’ shop.
All flights to Svalbard come from the Norwegian Arctic city of Tromso. Norwegian is the language of the bureaucrats, the low-cost menus written in chalk on restaurant blackboards and the local newspaper. Yet while the Svalbard archipelago is officially part of Norway, the truth is that Longyearbyen couldn’t be further from Oslo.
On the weekends, there are tourists from around the world taking a guided tour of the abandoned coal mine or having a coffee downtown while petting a cafe’s old huskies, now retired after a lifetime of pulling sleds.
There is something felt on certain afternoons, when darkness is so heavy it clings to you and the wind whistles through the city’s corridors, pricking your face. In this world of others, you can find Slovenian trainers at dog sled farms filling the northern Bolterdalen valley with howls and Russian and Ukrainian waiters floating in the downtown restaurants, barely smiling when a Norwegian customer stops them to ask, “Haven’t you learned Norwegian yet?”
Longyearbyen was founded in 1926 by the Michigan timber and mining developer John Munro Longyear, who came to Svalbard two decades earlier to set up the Arctic Coal Company. The Norwegians only took control of the archipelago in 1925, establishing sovereignty over it after the 1920 Svalbard Treaty in the aftermath of World War I. That was also when Norway gave it the name Svalbard, meaning “land with cold coasts” in Old Norse, replacing the previous name of Spitsbergen, Danish for “jagged mountains.” The treaty granted the islands visa-free status, meaning anyone in the world could work and live there. Signatories to the treaty, who include the United States, Japan, India and dozens more, are given equal rights to conduct business on the archipelago and exploit its mineral resources. As of 2024, only Norway and Russia have taken full advantage of the privilege, owning and operating large-scale coal businesses.
But there were centuries when Svalbard — more than half of which is covered in glaciers — was orbited by explorers, whalers and hunters, who described the shapes of the fjords in their travel accounts. Their notebooks detail grand tales, in which the biting winter kills and the bears are white and ferocious.
Such magic lasted until the coal mining expeditions started at the turn of the 20th century, bringing with them the first boat of settlers. They docked at Adventfjorden, the bay whose southwestern shore would soon become home to Longyearbyen. With no indigenous population to conquer, the first settlers struggled to survive on polar bear territory as the cold gnawed at their toes.
For a long time, the inhabitants’ lives were governed by the rhythm of mine shifts, until coal ceased to be profitable in the 2000s. By then, tourists and researchers had begun arriving and Longyearbyen had discovered another way to exist.
Already, in the 1990s, Longyearbyen had started to become a new promised land for foreign arrivals. In the early part of the decade, the old provisions store was replaced by a flashy new department store, called Svalbardbutikken. The University Center in Svalbard (UNIS), offering English-language degrees in Arctic disciplines, was founded, and tourist infrastructure spread.
By 2016, when the state-owned mining company Store Norske lost profits as Norway moved away from subsidized coal amid global discussions of decarbonization, Longyearbyen’s transition from a Norwegian company town to an international outpost was in full swing. Hundreds of Norwegian workers were laid off and a new era for Svalbard was ushered in.
Carlos Gerez, a 58-year-old from Uruguay with gel-tamed graying hair and a face that’s quick to smile, arrived in Longyearbyen through a series of coincidences. In 2006, while waiting for six months in Trondheim in central Norway for a work visa that never came, someone told him about an island where, he recalls, “one can work without needing a work permit.”
Once he applied online for a job as a chef and was ready to move to the Norwegian Arctic, his new employer, as is customary in Longyearbyen, provided him with a flight ticket and organized his accommodation.
This was a time when new job postings in the service and tourism industry were on the rise in Longyearbyen, forever changing the demographics of the islands. Seasonal and short-term contracts that did not appeal to Norwegians attracted new nationalities to this visa-free icy realm where freedom began taking different forms. The surge in new jobs in private companies stemmed from the administration’s realization that the town could not rely solely on coal mining indefinitely. At that point, not only did new private tourist companies come to town but there were also many international researchers living on Svalbard to track the melting glaciers or study farming systems to potentially feed people once humans colonize Mars.
The year 2006 was one of celebration in Longyearbyen, marking the centenary of the settlers’ first winter. A year after Gerez landed, his Chilean wife Emilia Sazo and their three children, then young adolescents, followed. Gerez now works in two different bakeries in town, while Sazo spends her days sitting at the cash register at the Svalbardbutikken, scanning expensive imported products.
“My first feelings were of amazement and wonder. I was overcome by the beauty of nature and at the same time had renewed hope that it was possible to move my family here,” Gerez says.
On a cold evening with a winter storm raging outside, he sits down to tell me the story of how he and Sazo came here. We are in his overly heated house, in one of Longyearbyen’s new complexes of terraced residences. We take off the first layers of heavy clothes, padded and insulating jackets, still slippery from the rain. To give the story justice, he must start “from the beginning,” before he met Sazo.
He recalls sitting in the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay, where an officer detailed a long list of documents required to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. He was in his early 20s and somewhat naive, and soon realized that going to America was a quixotic dream. But later that day, an ad in a newspaper caught his eye. When he read the words, “Do you want to go to the USA?” he knew this was his chance. He responded to the ad, paid for a trove of documentation and left for Mexico.
Gerez begins to laugh at the memory. He was in Tijuana, near the border with the U.S., surrounded by hazy dusty air, when he realized that the documents were fake and there was no way to legally cross. He decided to go anyway, covertly crossing the stretch of desert connecting Tijuana with San Diego in California, a shrubland or matorral of low scrub. The black night was thick with the cackling of coyotes and the howling of border police dogs chasing him.
But he made it, eventually reaching New York. In the South Bronx, in 1991, he was repeatedly stabbed in the stomach one night by two men who left him for dead, bleeding in the seat of an aluminum truck he used to transport loaves of bread across the city.
A week before the attack, he had met Sazo, 10 years his senior. It was by chance. Gerez had called her home number, hoping to get hold of her roommate, whom he was interested in seeing. But only Sazo was home that day and the two started talking. For a while, the couple lived in South America, calling the Chilean village of Quilacoya home, living there in a small house among the mountains. But as their children — Daniela, Gabriel and Helena — grew, an unaffordable future loomed and became a reason to move the family. The Scandinavian countries, known for excellent and inexpensive education, were high on their list.
By the time the Norwegian administration realized that Longyearbyen’s demographics were rapidly changing, the non-Norwegian population already made up more than one-quarter of all registered residents, according to a 2016 tally.
Longyearbyen’s non-Norwegian residents feel they woke up one day and realized that the land on which the sun had risen did not actually belong to them. Someone was coming to reclaim it. This wasn’t due to the physical changes they noticed — whether the reindeer dying of hunger because the melting and refreezing of the snow had left the moss they ate encased under ice, or the foundations of their homes, which were beginning to sink. Strange things started happening that were unconnected to climate change and there is not much in Svalbard that can be considered a coincidence.
Non-Norwegians had always been allowed to drive in Svalbard, but this was suddenly questioned in 2022. There was the case of the American guests of a resident who were told they couldn’t drive a snowmobile, and the foreign friend of the American painter Bourne who was told she was no longer allowed to drive buses.
In November of that year, the Svalbardposten, Longyearbyen’s local, Norwegian-language newspaper, reported that a man from Thailand, Nattapol “Bang” Chuphu, was no longer allowed to drive around Svalbard using his Thai license. Chuphu had lived in Svalbard for 15 years, one of 20 Thai employees at one of the main tourism companies, Hurtigruten Svalbard. He — along with a hundred other Thai residents — had used his Thai license without issue throughout his time on the archipelago. Then, one unusually rainy November day, the governor told him it was temporarily invalid. “[I was told] that I had to spread this message to the Thais on the island,” Chuphu told the Svalbardposten.
A few days before Chuphu’s license was rejected, one of his Thai colleagues was stopped by police on a routine road check. They told him his license was also invalid and that he would be better off walking on foot.
The incidents shocked the community and angered residents, both Norwegian and non-Norwegian alike. They all agreed that such a situation was not good for business. Gustav Halsvik, the general director of ISS Facility Services, a local provider of cleaning, property and security services, added to the furor, telling the Svalbardposten that 20 of its 60 employees had been prohibited from driving. “I don’t understand how the governor has the legal authority to do this. If this is read and approved as Norwegian law, ISS will have to shut down parts of its operations,” he was quoted as saying. The Svalbard government said it reviewed the matter and no changes had been made to the traffic law. Instead, “It turned out that there had been, for some time, exemptions made,” Eva Therese Jenssen, the communication adviser to the governor of Svalbard, wrote to me in an email. She added that a correction was made after careful review by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration at the governor’s own request. But the license issue was one instance in a series of oddities that non-Norwegians in Longyearbyen believe began long before. In 2020, the only branch of SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge closed, meaning residents would need to fly out of Svalbard to the mainland — requiring a Norwegian visa for some — to access banking services. In 2022, restrictions were placed on the right of non-Norwegian residents to vote in local elections (those who hadn’t lived on the mainland for at least three years were no longer eligible). In the fall of that year, some protested by covering their mouths with black tape at the opening of an exhibition at the Svalbard Museum celebrating 20 years of local democracy in Longyearbyen.
A series of theories circulate among the residents about the origins and nature of the problem. Although the stories vary depending on who is talking, the general consensus is that the Norwegian administration is increasingly fearful of geopolitical pressures. Russia, which already has a presence of sorts on the archipelago, could use Svalbard for military purposes, while China claims that it is a “near-Arctic” state. Such fears are not unfounded: The Norwegian state hastened to buy up plots of land at auction and now owns 99.5% of the archipelago, with a further 0.4% belonging to Trust Arktikugol, the Russian state-owned mining company in Svalbard, and 0.1% owned by Norwegian firm AS Kulspids, according to the Norwegian government. The sale of this last piece of privately owned land, the remote Sore Fagerfjord property in the southwest — 23 square miles of mountains, valleys, a glacier and coastline with no infrastructure — attracted the interest of Chinese buyers, leading the Norwegian government to call off the $330-million sale in the summer of 2024, citing national security concerns. According to Norway’s policy and strategic documents of the last decade, the priority is — and has always been — to sustain the “Norwegian communities in the Archipelago,” to quote a Norwegian government white paper from 2015-16. These official papers reinforce the belief, much felt by the residents of Longyearbyen, that Norway’s sovereignty is best “asserted” by a “permanent presence of Norwegian citizens,” which is in turn represented, to quote another policy document on Svalbard, by the “family-based community of Longyearbyen.” So it’s not difficult to understand why, when the job openings in Longyearbyen started to appeal more to foreigners than Norwegians, the administration became displeased.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it did not take long for Ukrainians to arrive in Longyearbyen. Soon, both young Russians and Ukrainians appeared in shops and restaurants downtown. They arrived via the Russian mining settlement of Barentsburg, a three-hour boat ride west of Longyearbyen. While Svalbard’s second-largest settlement is also officially under the sovereignty of Norway, almost everyone who lives there is Russian-speaking. Many things make Barentsburg different from Longyearbyen: The supermarkets get fresh vegetables only once a month and the local tourism office works directly with the Kremlin. The Soviets, and later the Russians, have owned its coal mines since 1932, leveraging the Svalbard Treaty’s right to extract coal. Cyrillic script graces most of the buildings and, each May 9, the town comes together to celebrate Victory Day, a Soviet-era holiday that President Vladimir Putin has repurposed to project Russian nationalism and show off Moscow’s might.
In a house with no running water, surrounded by ice on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, I listen to former miner Terje Johansen and his wife Solveig Oftedal, two of the city’s oldest Norwegian residents, as they paint a picture of the Barentsburg of old. Cold War-era exchanges between the two settlements would take place, with a man taking a tally at each bus stop to ensure no Soviet citizens went missing. There were long days of chess tournaments and a love story from the 1980s involving a skier from Longyearbyen and a young woman from Barentsburg, which sadly ended when Soviet officials sent her away. “It was very strict in those days,” Oftedal recalls, adding that the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s opened things up. “All this time, we’ve had good relations with the Soviets and the Russians. And that makes it a bit difficult today.”
Those who have spent time in Barentsburg describe the settlement as a place where they could dream of a slightly freer world, a Russia that is also not Russia. “Barentsburg is a place, maybe not of freedom, but without Russian fascism,” says the red-headed Timofey Rogozhin, a former prominent member of the community, as we sit and drink a beer in a packed restaurant in downtown Longyearbyen. It is almost past dinner time and laughter and music have made the place rowdy. We need to shout to get our words out.
When Rogozhin became the tourism manager for Trust Arktikugol almost a decade ago, life in Barentsburg was different. It was “a more open society,” he recalls, a settlement enlivened by young Russian people working as staff and managers in hotels and restaurants. That changed when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbor. “People now shut up and Barentsburg is silent,” he says, barely audible over the din.
Rogozhin became outspoken about the Russian government after it illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. By 2021, when opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately arrested, Rogozhin had become even more vociferous in his criticism of Moscow. He was soon fired. Within four hours, a group of Trust Arktikugol employees walked out of their Barentsburg offices in solidarity. “When we knew that Timofey was fired, we all quit straight away,” says Sergei Chernikov, a Muscovite with tattooed hands who moved from Barentsburg to Longyearbyen. “Because we are not going to be working in a company which acts like that.”
Rogozhin moved to Longyearbyen and can often be seen taking a stroll through Nybyen, a small neighborhood on the southern outskirts of the valley, where he works in souvenir shops, folding sweatshirts emblazoned with polar bears. “I think Timofey is special,” says Ivan Krivosheev, a young man from Kazan in central Russia, who works as a waiter at Stationen, a brick and wood-paneled restaurant serving traditional Norwegian fare in Longyearbyen. “I had many friends in Barentsburg. Had. All of them are here now,” he says.
Their lives feel like a microcosm of the domestic turmoil that Russia is experiencing, where patriotism and loyalty to the state are valued above all. During my conversations with young Russians in Longyearbyen, they told me the same thing: “I never want to go back to Russia” and “I have nowhere else to go.” If you ask those closer to the Russian government, they will tell you a different story. “Barentsburg is a beautiful place,” says one of the executives of Trust Arktikugol. We are having an informal conversation; he asks that we do not name him. Inside one of the lounges in the Russkiy Dom Guest House, the Russian foothold in Longyearbyen, boxes of Russian chocolates sit on the table between us. “[Barentsburg is] much more beautiful than Longyearbyen,” he says, adding that the mountains are higher there.
Many in Longyearbyen today feel that ultimately “it’s not anymore as it was,” as Gerez reflects. If one walks away from all the rumors and stories, beyond the mysterious tales of broken subsea cables and the not-so-secret plans to conquer the Arctic, there remains a population that has to reckon with the unpredictability of its administration. “You don’t have a future here,” Gerez admits. His children with Sazo were already in middle school when they settled in Longyearbyen: Helena was 11, Gabriel 12 and Daniela 14.
But growing up here has a different flavor. It is a land discovered by hunters and conquerors of new worlds. The children of Longyearbyen grow pale from months of darkness. If non-Norwegians do not have a job by the time they turn 18, they lose their health insurance. They learn to identify the contours and texture of winter peaks and how to hunt animals in the snow-white landscapes, where shadows are few. They are quick on their feet, intimately aware of how easy it is to fall on the ice. Their bikes zoom through the few hundred yards of road that wrap around the town. Helena grew up in sunless winter days and her bones weakened each year. “She was growing up and the bones weren’t ready,” Sazo says.
From an early age, most children are stuffed with fish oil pills and other vitamins to get through the polar nights. The children of Gerez and Sazo have since built their own lives away from the archipelago and now live scattered between the mainland of Norway and Chile. In this, they are similar to the Norwegian residents, whose children often move to the mainland or further afield. Some escape sooner, some later, some are fortunate enough to have a Norwegian passport, others struggle with visas.
Many of the Longyearbyen residents we talked to had planned to stay for only a few years but remained for 10 or 15, some growing old in a city where nothing is meant to last. Once settled in, they are confronted with a certain sense of immobility — not because the fjords freeze over in winter and ships can no longer get in or out, but because, for some, leaving is more difficult than arriving, for privilege exists even in retreating.
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