Enemies and Partners in the North: Cold War Collaboration on Svalbard, 1945-1975

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Cold War tensions between the Soviets and theWest were high throughout the 1950s and 1960s, which did not exclude Soviet-Norwegian relations. At the macro level, suspicion, espionage, and propagandistic agendas ruled between Oslo and Moscow. However, on Svalbard, an archipelago in the Norwegian High Arctic, the Soviets and Norwegians cultivated good relations that lasted thirty years, from the mid-1940s through to the mid-1970s. In the remote Norwegian north, the Norwegian governors and Soviet consuls exchanged telegrams frequently and relied on each other for search and rescue operations, help with accidents and illnesses, and referred to each other as friends. They took part in sport and cultural exchanges that brought Norwegian skiers, chess players, gymnasts, volleyball and soccer players, and choral groups to the Soviet towns, and Soviet people to the Norwegian towns. This chapter examines high-level diplomacy between Norway, the Soviet Union and the West, the role of Svalbard in these relations, and the development of local Soviet and Norwegian cooperation on Svalbard in the postwar period. Using documents from the Norwegian and Soviet foreign ministries, as well as hundreds of telegrams between the Norwegian governor and Soviet consul on Svalbard, it aims to illustrate that while tensions and mistrust simmered at the macro-level, local relations between Norway and the Soviet Union on Svalbard were colored by collaboration, reciprocity, and friendliness.

Alina Bykova is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History. Her research interests include Arctic and Soviet environmental history with a focus on energy and industry. Alina is writing her dissertation on the history of energy and extraction on Svalbard, Norway. In 2025-2026, Alina was a predoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. She also works as a senior research associate and editor-in-chief at The Arctic Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank.