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Alex Eremenko sparked off discussion recently about Soviet icebreaker
passages recently, which raised some interest.

I've had my eyes open for a book on the topic and have now found, and read,
"Arktika", by Oliver Walston (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994).

Walston, though an English farmer, is something of a nut about the Arctic,
and managed to get himself invited to a voyage on the nuclear icebreaker
Arktika from Murmansk through the Northeast Passage. He doesn't give the
year, but it was the time of Yeltsin's election, whenever that was, and
things were opening up.

There's quite a lot of interesting stuff in it, but rather more than I
needed about his socialisings with the crew. It seems that Russian Arctic
navigation is largely fuelled by vodka.

It was early in the season, and the ice was still thick. He tells of an
interesting episode in which a merchant vessel, heading for Dudinka, is
having its path cleared by a non-nuclear icebreaker, the Captain Sorokin.
However, Sorokin herself was stuck in thick ice, and Arktica had to dig
them both out, and clear the way for both over several days. Walston muses
about the economics of using two icebreakers, one nuclear, to escort a
single merchant vessel, and wonders how the system will survive in the
forthcoming era of capitalism. I wonder, too, how it has fared so far.

Just short of the Bering Straits, and clear of solid ice, Walston
transferrred to a tanker at Pevek, which took him to Nakhoda, to fly back
from Vladivostok.

There was a lot I didn't know about the Northeast Passage, and this book
has filled in some of the gaps, but left a number of unanswered questions.

George.

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