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Мурманск в 1930-е годы Альбом оригинальных фотографий Murmansk in the 1930s An album of original photographs Music: “Pastorale“ by I. Stravinsky. Played here by Alexander Grot & Paul Laul Continuing my series of photographic videos of the Soviet Union in the 1930's, I now turn travel to the far northwest part of Russia and show the great city of Murmansk, the world's largest, above the Arctic Circle... The port city is located on Kola Bay, an inlet of the Barents Sea on the northern shore of the Kola Peninsula, close to the Russia's borders with Norway and Finland and was the last city founded in the Russian Empire. In 1915, during the Great War, needs required that Russia have an ice--free port to which her allies could ship military supplies. A railway was constructed from Petrozavodsk to an ice-free location on the Murman Coast in the Russian Arctic. The terminus became known as the Murman station and soon boasted a port, a naval base, and an adjacent settlement with a population that quickly grew in size and soon surpassed the nearby towns of Alexandrovsk and Kola..... On September 21,1916, the settlemnt was grantedtown status and named Romanov-on-Murman . After the February Revolution of 1917, on April 3, 1917, the town was given its present name. By the beginning of the 1920s, Murmansk had less than two and a half thousand inhabitants and was in decline. The city landscape consisted of two or three streets of one-story houses, overcrowded workers' barracks , a disorderly accumulation of shacks and railway wagons adapted for housing... by the end of the decade, this had changed manifestly- the city began to develop rapidly, as the Soviet Union had a strategic need for the construction of a large port, transit through which would not depend on relations with neighbouring countries. Since 1933, Murmansk was one of the bases of supply and ship repair for the Northern Fleet......
