09 Feb World’s Northernmost Bar

The bar at the northern end of the world is in Pyramiden, a failed Soviet model city on Spitzbergen Island in the Arctic Ocean. It’s situated at almost 80 degrees North, which puts it closer to the North Pole than to the Arctic Circle. According to the young Russian caretaker who showed us around, Pyramiden had been a very desirable place to be, Soviet-Unionwise.

  The Workers’ Paradise Soviet citizens fought to be assigned to

Like Longyearbyen, a Norwegian town fifty miles east and a couple of dozen to the south, Pyramiden had been a coal mining town. Unlike Longyearbyen, people waited years to get assigned there. We boated over one day to check it out.

                                  Arriving at Pyramiden

Before everybody moved away, Pyramiden had been the northernmost civilian place in the world. Among other attractions it had featured the world’s northernmost grade school, the world’s northernmost swimming pool and the world’s northernmost bust of Vladimir Lenin. The school shut down when the kids left, and the idea of swimming held no charms. But we did see the bust of Lenin, snow-blown in front of the Sports Palace.

                       The northernmost bust of Lenin

The Sports Palace isn’t what came to mind when we thought, “Palace.” From the outside it looks like a heavy-equipment shed in a boarded-up factory. Inside is a tawdry little music room and an even tawdrier niche fitted with shelves that some wag once designated as a library. There’s a gloomy movie theater that reminded me of the sort of place that, before the internet, catered to lonely men drinking from paper bags. Along with the theater is a storeroom that boasts more than a thousand Soviet films preserved by the cold. Nobody, as far as I could tell, ever cared to thaw any of them out.

The sports part of the Sports Palace resembles a rundown middle school gym in a community that experienced a property-tax revolt. Where middle school gyms in America might use pictures of caped superheroes to inspire kids to stay in shape, this one came plastered with posters of heroic Red Army soldiers from the Great Patriotic War.

A caped superhero with a grownup reason to stay in shape

Across from the Sports Palace is a sinister sounding building called the Tulip Hotel, which, since we weren’t Soviet royalty off on a junket, we weren’t allowed inside of. “Everything here was free,” beamed the Russian who showed us around. He was too young to know better.

Free included a bleak apartment in the men’s building, if you were a guy. In the ladies,’ if you weren’t. The metal boxes that protruded from apartment windows would have been air-conditioning units if they’d been in cheap hotels in America, but made no sense 600 miles from the North Pole. Or, at least they made no sense until we discovered they were cold-storage boxes where apartment dwellers could stash food without anybody having to supply free refrigerators.

There were rumors of a secret tunnel connecting the buildings, but the idea was hard to credit since both buildings were constructed several feet off the ground on account of permafrost. Still, if you could manage to hook up with a coal miner of the opposite sex you hit the jackpot because married people got upgraded to a couple’s apartment. There must have been a limited number of those apartments, though, or people would have been allowed to meet out in the open rather than having to sneak around in nonexistent tunnels.

Free also included the labor those miners put in. And the food they ate. Evidence of what kind of food you can get for free lurks in the abandoned institutional kitchen. Mostly it seemed to have been peas dumped from five-gallon cans into huge electric-powered tubs that reminded me of the first-generation washing machines you see in photographs from the Depression. Free industrial peas at the end of working all day in the mines — no wonder the vodka had to be free. It’s not any more, of course, but one taste, and you realize why it hasn’t migrated to a more competitive locale. And why free was the right price.

               Vodka that Norwegian coal miners would have rioted over

Important people. Doctors. Lawyers. Folks with political pull pulled strings to get sent to a place farther north than Siberia so they could work in mines and eat cafeteria peas and hook up in tunnels like horny junior-high kids and shoot down vodka that would have etched the chrome off the fancy ZiL limousines their betters were chauffeured around in back home. In Longyearbyen a few miles to the south, Norwegian miners rioted because they didn’t like their accommodations, but these poor schnooks thought they were living in paradise.