Rosneft Establishes an Outpost in Russia's Northern "City of Angels"

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In Arkhangelsk every year from mid-May to late June a sunset glow morphs into a flush of dawn, making it easy for the city residents to walk all night long at a picturesque embankment of the “Russian North’s capital”.

Founded in 1584 “after the design” approved by Ivan the Terrible, Arkhangelsk is still one of the biggest sea-ports in the Russian North.

Cape Pur-Navolok remembers the days of the rule of Peter the Great, when the Russian navy was born. It was here that the tricolor – the tsar’s invention – first went up: when the first Russian merchant ship “St. Paul” was sent off on a voyage, the stripes on the Dutch banner were transposed. Later, after the victory over a Swedish fleet, Peter nominated the “sea-gate” of Russia’s administrative center of the territory and approved a coat-of-arms for the city. Against a golden background, armed with a sword and a shield, an archangel on the fly stabs a vanquished devil – and this initial design of the coat-of-arms was restored in the late 1980s.

The seas of the Arctic have long been an enticement for the valiant residents of this coastal region, who headed north to hunt for marine animals and fish and discovered the islands of Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, Vaigach. And a few centuries later, scientific expeditions headed by Chichagov and Rusanov, Sibiryakov and Sedov, Pakhtusov and Litke used the city as a point of departure for their Arctic journeys. Here the research ship “Perseus” was built for the Kara Sea expeditions. In 1932, an ice-breaker “Sibiryakov” set sail from here – the first ship to sail all the way along the Northern Sea Route from the White Sea to the Bering Sea in one summer without wintering en route.  The city history’s memorable events are linked with the birth of Arctic aviation and pioneering ice patrol flights.

Five centuries ago, foreign merchants who sold their wares at the city’s main department store, Gostiny Dvor, which was famous all over Russia, would leave the port loaded with hemp, lard, wax and ship timber, heading for the estuary of the Northern Dvina. Today the mainstay of local exports is oil and oil products – they make about 70 percent of the cargo turnover of Arkhangelsk port, according to Yuri Serdyuk who heads local administration of the Primorsky District municipality in Arkhangelsk Region. “Today RN (Rosneft)-Arkhangelsknefteprodukt is the key taxpayer in the Primorsky District accounting for the bulk of the municipal taxes. Perhaps, their only rival is the Severalmaz (Northern Diamond) company,” believes Serdyuk. In the early 1980s a first kimberlite pipe, later called Pomorskaya (“Coastal”) pipe, was found, heralding the discovery of Europe’s largest primary deposit of diamonds. Severalmaz was created for the mining of diamonds, and two years ago the company started to mine diamonds in the White Sea region on an industrial scale.

Yuri Serdyuk names the Laiski ship repairing plant as one of the most dynamically developing companies of the region. But unlike the youngest enterprise in the Russian mining industry, which was founded in 1992, the Laiski plant is a veteran that will reach the age of 100 by the end of May. The enterprise survived bankruptcy, but later rebuilt its footing, and today it has plans to become a ship builder, in addition to ship repairs. 

And of course RN-Arkhangelsknefteprodukt is considered the uncontested leader and driving force of the local economy. Jobs at the company are coveted by many. According to the Primorsky District administration, the lowest wage of a specialist at RN-Arkhangelsknefteprodukt – 9,000 roubles – is equal to the average wage in the region. Meanwhile, this year the average wage at RN-Arkhangelsnefteprodukt has been 17,000 roubles.

The presence of Rosneft in the region galvanized the port, while contributions of the oil corporation’s “daughter company” to the social programs have in no small degree furthered the progress in the region. It is not only due to writing off debts to local enterprises in charge of infrastructure facilities and social support facilities, granted several years ago when the company only started to secure a foothold in the region; and not only due to the company’s assistance to local schools, in-patient clinics, and support to culture and sports. In 2004, RN-Arkhangelsknefteprodukt contributed about 10 million roubles for construction of an out-of-town ski stadium, and in 2004-2005 it contributed about 33 million roubles for road construction (to build a road from Arkhangelsk to Severodvinsk). Besides, it participated in the construction of new facilities at a local airport. The good condition of the local roads is a source of special pride for the general director of Rosneft’s subsidiary, whose fuel stations proliferate all over the region like mushrooms in the local forests. Contributing targeted funds, Yuri Anisimov wants to secure for the company the right to control the process and quality of the construction work, up to the asphalt laydown thickness. “This is important, considering our climate, the temperature fluctuations, and the fact that in spring the roads get shut down for 45 days and big trucks cannot use them,” Anisimov says.

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What do we know about the Arkhangelsk Region?

Mid-summer is the time when an anniversary of Plesetsk, the first and largest cosmodrome located in Russia is celebrated – it is the world’s northernmost space port and the only one in Europe. Exactly half a century ago here, in the Arkhangelsk Region, 900 km north-west from Moscow, construction of a unique site began – the launch site for R-7, first long-range ballistic missiles, developed at the OKB-1 design bureau under the guidance of the legendary engineer Sergei Korolev.

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In the 15th-16th centuries the Solovki (Solovetsky) monastery, founded in the western sector of one of the Solovki islands, on the shore of the Blagopoluchiya (Prosperity) Bay, was known as  an abode of strong-spirited monks. “God’s people” not only devoted themselves to prayer, but also valiantly fought off the attacks of their belligerent Northern neighbors. The boulder fortress, built under the direction of an architect and monk Trifon Kologrivov, withstood an incursion of Swedes during the war with Livonia and held out under cannonballs during the Crimean war.

Political dissidents were banished to the Solovki. Having survived a split caused by the church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century, the monastery became an area where opponents of the political regime and the official Russian Orthodox Church were banished. In the Soviet period the ill fame of the “Solovki (Solovetsky) Special Purpose Camp (later prison)” (SSPC) for political prisoners tarnished the heroic image of the medieval monastery. Whereas for the whole period since the inception of the monastery until the Bolshevik revolution the compound received slightly more than 300 prisoners, during slightly less than 20 years that the camp was in existence hundreds of thousands perished there.

Today the Solovki monastery is again a holding of the Russian Orthodox church.

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Early in the 1960s Novaya Zemlya became a site for a new round of the tug-of-war between the two superpowers – Russia and the USA.
In response to the US testing a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on the Marshall Islands, Russian scientists tested a nuclear weapon of their make. A 50-megaton superbomb created by a team of nuclear scientists under the guidance of Andrei Sakharov was detonated at Novaya Zemlya on October 30, 1961.

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