Murmansk is Russia's gateway to the Arctic. Built at the country's far northwestern edge, on the Kola Peninsula and well above the Arctic Circle, it is the largest city in the world at such extreme latitudes: a city of almost 270,000 people where the sun doesn't rise for weeks in the depths of winter and doesn't set for weeks in summer. Its great paradox is that, despite the cold and lying further north than much of Greenland, its port on the Kola Bay never freezes, thanks to a branch of the warm North Atlantic Current. That geographical detail has shaped its entire history.
It's a young, tough city, founded in 1916 as a military port and grown at the pace of the Soviet 20th century, with its colourful apartment blocks planted on the bare hills around the fjord. It's not a city of ancient monuments but of atmosphere: port cranes, huge ships, the giant concrete soldier of the Alyosha monument watching over the bay, and the world's first nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Lenin, moored as a museum. Murmansk played a key role in the Second World War as the destination of the Allied Arctic convoys, and for its resistance it holds the title of Hero City.
But most travellers come today for the sky. Murmansk is one of the best bases in the world for chasing the northern lights: between autumn and spring, when the very long polar night falls, you only need to get away from the city lights to have a chance of seeing the sky light up in green and violet curtains. From here you can head out to the coastal village of Teriberka, looking out over the Barents Sea, and to the wide-open spaces of the Kola tundra. As with the rest of Russia today, it's worth reading up on the situation before you travel: there are no direct flights from the West and foreign cards don't work, so you need to plan ahead and carry cash.
Murmansk is a young city: it was founded on 4 October 1916, in the middle of the First World War, under the name Romanov-on-Murman, to give the Russian Empire an Arctic port free of ice all year round through which to receive Allied supplies. It was the last city founded by the Russian Empire; shortly afterwards, with the Revolution, it was renamed Murmansk. Its defining moment came in the Second World War: as a key Arctic port for the Allied convoys bringing supplies to the USSR, it was a top target for Nazi Germany, which tried to take it in 1941 without success and bombed it until it was almost flattened, though it never fell. For that resistance it received the title of Hero City, and in 1974 the colossal Alyosha monument to the defenders of the Soviet Arctic was raised. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Peter the Great's window on Europe and the Russian north-west: from the medieval cradle of Novgorod to the old Prussia of Kaliningrad and the Arctic of Murmansk.
Read the history of Saint Petersburg and the north-west →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Almost every city in this guide has roots that go back to the Middle Ages or to Antiquity. Murmansk, by contrast, is so young that its founding has an exact date and even named protagonists: on 4 October 1916, in the middle of the First World War, the first stone was laid for a new city on Russia's Arctic edge, and it was christened Romanov-na-Murmane ('Romanov on the Murman'), in honour of the ruling dynasty. It was the last city founded by the Russian Empire: just a few months later, the Revolution swept the Romanovs away, and the city came to be called simply Murmansk.
Why build a city in such an inhospitable place, above the Arctic Circle, where the ground is bare tundra and winter lasts half the year? For one decisive strategic reason: its port never freezes. A branch of the warm North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream, tempers the waters of the Kola Bay and keeps it navigable all year round, which is exceptional at these latitudes. Russia, caught up in the Great War and with its other ports blockaded or frozen, desperately needed a window onto the Atlantic through which to receive supplies from its allies.
So, in record time, the Murmansk railway was laid to link the port with Petrograd (today's St Petersburg), and a workers' settlement grew up around it. Murmansk was born, quite literally, as a wartime port and a railway station at the end of the world. Its history would be marked forever by that double calling: the sea that never freezes, and war.
The city being young does not mean the land was empty. The Kola Peninsula, that great Arctic appendage between the Barents Sea and the White Sea, had been inhabited for thousands of years by the Sami (formerly called Lapps), an Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and Russia, traditionally nomadic reindeer herders, fishers and hunters, with their own language, their own beliefs and a close relationship with the tundra and its extreme seasons. The Kola Sami are still a living community today, and visiting their villages and camps is one of the experiences the region has to offer.
From the Middle Ages onwards, these coasts were also reached by the Pomors, Russian settlers from around the White Sea — many of them descendants of old Novgorod — who specialised in fishing, hunting seals and whales, and trading by sea across the Arctic, developing a remarkable culture of northern seafarers. Orthodox monasteries such as Pechenga, or the great Solovki in the White Sea, Christianised and colonised the region over the centuries.
For a long time, however, Kola was an extremely remote periphery of the Russian state, with a handful of fishing villages and the old outpost of Kola — which gives the peninsula its name — as its administrative centre. The real transformation of this Arctic land into a populated, strategic place would only come in the 20th century, with the railway, the port of Murmansk and, later, Soviet industrialisation.
Murmansk's finest hour, the one that forged its identity, came with the Second World War. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Murmansk's Arctic port, reliably free of ice, became a vital piece: it was the way in for the supplies that Britain and the United States were sending to the USSR. This gave rise to the Arctic convoys, the famous 'Murmansk Run': fleets of merchant ships which, escorted by warships, crossed the frozen northern seas from Iceland and Scotland, dodging the German submarines, aircraft and battleships based in occupied Norway.
It was one of the deadliest voyages of the entire war. In an icy sea where a shipwrecked sailor died within minutes, amid storms, icebergs and constant attacks, dozens of ships and thousands of seamen were lost. But the convoys got through: over the course of the war, more than forty of them unloaded tanks, aircraft, lorries and equipment at Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, helping to sustain the Soviet war effort. The city was the lung through which the West helped the resistance against Hitler on the Eastern Front.
For exactly that reason, Murmansk became a priority target for the Germans, and its defence was heroic. In 1941 the Wehrmacht launched Operation Silberfuchs ('Silver Fox') to take the city from Finland and Norway, but the Red Army and the Soviet Northern Fleet halted the advance at the Litsa River and saved the port and the railway. With the ground assault thwarted, the German air force turned its fury on the city from the air.
Unable to take it by land, the Luftwaffe tried to destroy Murmansk from the sky. The city, built largely of wood, suffered relentless bombing: there were days with fifteen or eighteen air raids, and over the course of the war tens of thousands of bombs fell on it — figures of around 185,000 incendiary and explosive devices have been cited. By the end of 1945, barely a fifth of its buildings were still standing. In proportion to the damage it took, Murmansk was one of the hardest-hit cities in the Soviet Union, often compared with Stalingrad.
And yet it never surrendered or stopped working. Among the ruins, the dockers kept unloading the convoys, the railway workers kept the line open and the Northern Fleet defended the waters. That combination of suffering and stubborn resistance is what the city commemorates, and what earned it, in 1985, the honorary title of 'Hero City' (Gorod-Geroy), the highest Soviet distinction for cities that heroically held out during the war, which it shares with Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Sevastopol and a few others.
The symbol of that memory is the monument to the Defenders of the Soviet Arctic, the gigantic 35.5-metre concrete soldier that locals call 'Alyosha', unveiled in 1974 on a hill overlooking the bay. With the eternal flame at its feet and its gaze fixed on the fjord, it sums up in a single image what the war meant for this city: the price of keeping Russia's Arctic gateway open against all odds. In the post-war reconstruction, Murmansk rose again in little more than a decade, this time in stone and concrete.
After the war, the Soviet Union turned Murmansk into the great centre of its Arctic and naval power. The city grew to nearly half a million inhabitants in the 1980s — a huge figure for the Arctic — on the back of deep-sea fishing (one of the largest fishing fleets in the country), maritime trade and, above all, the navy. The Kola Peninsula and its surroundings filled up with Northern Fleet bases, including nuclear submarine bases in places such as Severomorsk, making the region one of the most militarised and strategic areas of the USSR, on the front line facing NATO during the Cold War.
Murmansk was also the capital of the Soviet conquest of the Arctic. Polar expeditions set out from its port and, above all, so did the icebreaker fleet that kept open the Northern Sea Route, the passage across the Arctic Ocean that links the Atlantic with the Pacific along the coast of Siberia. In 1959 the Lenin was launched, the world's first nuclear-powered surface ship, able to break ice for months without refuelling; today, retired and turned into a museum in the port of Murmansk, it is the city's great technological pride and the emblem of that Arctic epic.
With the end of the USSR in 1991, the city went through hard times: economic crisis, the decline of the fishing fleet and heavy emigration shrank its population. These waters were also the scene of one of the great tragedies of post-Soviet Russia: the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in 2000, with its 118 crew members, remembered by a monument on the waterfront that includes a fragment of the submarine itself.
Today Murmansk remains the undisputed capital of the Russian Arctic: the largest port in the north, home of the Northern Fleet and base of the nuclear icebreaker fleet that keeps the Northern Sea Route open, a route growing ever more important as climate change opens up the Arctic ice. It is a city of work, sea and cold, its colourful apartment blocks climbing the bare hills around the fjord; not very monumental, but full of character.
In recent decades it has also discovered a new calling: tourism. Its position, right beneath the auroral oval, has made it one of the world's great destinations for seeing the aurora borealis, and every winter it draws travellers from all over Russia and abroad who head out into the tundra to chase the northern lights, visit Sami villages, try dog sledding and look out over the Arctic Ocean at Teriberka. The midnight sun in summer and the extreme landscapes of the Kola Peninsula round out the appeal.
Like the rest of the country, Murmansk is visited today in a complicated context: since 2022, the war in Ukraine, sanctions and the end of direct flights from the West have made the trip harder, and its role as a major naval base in a border region makes it especially sensitive; it is worth getting well informed before you go and carrying cash, since foreign cards do not work. But for those who reach this corner of the Arctic, Murmansk offers something unique: the largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle, a port that defies the ice and a sky that, on winter nights, lights up in curtains of light.
