Information AboutMurmansk |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MURMANSK | |
| coastal cities | |
| hero cities of the soviet union | |
| settlements established in 1916 | |
| port cities and towns in russia | |
| barents sea | |
| russian and soviet navy bases | |
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, Archangelsk , Dikson , Tiksi , on the Arctic Ocean ]] Murmansk () is a city in the extreme northwest of est.); 336,137 ( 2002 Census ). The city is an important Navy Base . Geographical coordinates: . Murmansk is the administrative centre of Murmansk Oblast . The port remains Ice -free year round due to the warm North Atlantic Drift Ocean Current . It is the largest city in the Arctic . HISTORY The city, known initially as Romanov-on-Murman, was founded on September 21 , 1916 , when the Railroad line to Kola was built, and named after the Russian royal dynasty of the Romanov s. Murman is the old Russian name for the Barents Sea and for Norwegians, derived from the ethnonym '' Normans ''. Another theory holds it that Murman derives from Saami for land and sea. The city was renamed to Murmansk after the October Revolution in 1917 . From 1918 to 1920 , the city was Occupied by the Western powers who had been Allied in the First World War and "White" forces during the Civil War in Russia. During . German forces launched an offensive against the city in , depicting a Russian soldier of World War Two, was erected overlooking the city harbour. During the Cold War it was a centre of Soviet Submarine activity, and since the breakup of the USSR, it remains the headquarters of the Russian Northern Fleet as well as its Nuclear Powered Icebreaker fleet. The weather is similar to Alaska. It is very close to the northern parts of Norway and Finland. There is near perpetual daylight in June and darkness in December. TRIVIA The city is also known to be one of the main settings in the novel, , by Eoin Colfer . It is the place where Artemis's shipwrecked father is believed to have died after capture by Russians. In the novels '' HMS Ulysses '' (1946) by the Scottish writer Alistair MacLean and '' The Captain '' (1967) by Dutch author Jan De Hartog , the protagonists are sailors in the Second World War Murmansk-bound convoys who ran the gauntlet of German U-Boats and war planes. In their minds, Murmansk assumes the status of almost a "Promised Land" which lucky survivors will reach. The physical city itself does not appear in either book. In de Hartog's book the protagonists, with their ship sunk, get in a lifeboat which is picked up at sea and get to Iceland instead; in the MacLean book, the survivors of the decimated convoy who arrive at the port of Murmansk are not allowed to set foot ashore, and remain cooped on board until the materiel is unloaded and the moment comes to set out back to Britiain. EXTERNAL LINK |
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