ON THE MURMAN COAST 



157 



whole. There are sawmills at Imandra, Kern, Soroka, 

 and several other points along the railroad south from 

 Murmansk. Sawed lumber was fairly abundant at Mur- 

 mansk though most of the buildings there were con- 

 structed of logs, even two or three stories in height. The 

 Russian workman is an artisan when it comes to work- 

 ing with wood, and about all he has to work with is an 

 ax (that looks as if it might have come down 

 from Peter the Great!) and a saw. One hardly 

 expects to find the Gulf Stream in Northern 

 Russia, but its influence is most marked and 

 makes that country habitable, and is responsible 

 for Murmansk being Russia's only ice-free north- 

 ern port. The winds from the north and north- 

 west are the mild ones ; the south and southeast 

 winds coming from the land are cold. The cli- 

 mate is in general therefore milder than at Petro- 

 grad, which is some 1,000 miles further south. 

 Winter lasts from the middle of November until 

 the middle of April. The snowfall is naturally 

 heavy, 15 to 20 feet, and houses in Alexandrovsk 

 near Murmansk, are said to be often entirely 

 covered over night ; there was some three feet 

 of well-packed snow on the ground at Murmansk 

 when we were there in April. The long winter 

 is followed by a rainy season, hardly to be called 

 spring, for with the coming of the rains the whole coun- 

 try seems to shed its snow and ice at once, and summer 

 comes with high temperatures and twenty-four hours of 

 sunlight, and innumerable mosquitoes. The rainfall is 

 less than one might expect. In Northern Norway it 

 reaches 69 inches, while going southeast along the Kola 



borealis, however, this long night is not as dismal as 

 it might seem. While at Murmansk we witnessed almost 

 every night the most brilliant displays of the aurora, 

 bright enough at times to read by, or almost bright 

 enough to take photographs. There is a government 

 meteorological station some 25 miles north of Murmansk 

 where records have been kept for many years. The 



A RUSSIAN TEAMSTER 



Hauling a Scotch pine log at Murmansk. The Russian ponies are small, look weak, 

 but are wonderfully tough. Combination Russian passenger and freight train in 

 background. 



Peninsula it decreases rapidly to a mean maximum of 

 14 inches, mean minimum of 1.7, with a mean average 

 of 7.17 inches based on government records covering a 

 period of eleven years. This figure does not include 

 the snowfall; as this is very heavy, the total precipitation 

 is therefore much greater than the above figures would 

 indicate. The Polar night lasts from November 26 until 

 January 22. With the frequent displays of the aurora 



WHEN HEAT WAS NEEDED 



Russian peasant women getting fuel wood from a pile of mill-ends brought to 

 Murmansk by train from the sawmills at Kem. 



mean temperatures are given as 14 F. in winter and 

 55 F. for summer, by the government records. On the 

 White Sea coast however the temperatures go down as 

 low as 35 F. The Polar ice has never been known 

 to reach the Murman Coast. Off the coast the sea never 

 freezes and steam vessels can traverse the bays and gulfs 

 at all seasons. In the inlets, back from the coast, 

 ice forms, and if the inlets are fairly narrow they 

 are apt to freeze to a depth of 8 to 10 inches. 

 Ice was floating down the Kola River all the time 

 that we were there. The severest climate of the 

 entire Murman Coast is said to be in the im- 

 mediate region of Varanger Fjord, on the ex- 

 treme western point of the Murman Coast. 



The shortness of the summer season, the lack 

 of drainage and the great depth to which the 

 soil freezes, are the determining causes of the 

 relatively scant vegetative cover of most of the 

 Kola Peninsula. As mentioned previously, how- 

 ever, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream, 

 these factors are mitigated to such an extent 

 that the climate and the consequent flora con- 

 stitute a distinct surprise, as compared to areas 

 hundreds of miles further south but unrelieved 

 by the influences of a warm ocean current. The 

 flora of the Arctic Region of Kola Peninsula is said to 

 be much more akin to that of northern Siberia and North 

 America than it is to that of Central Europe. 



Kola Peninsula covers some 57,000 square miles, or 

 is about the size of the State of Michigan. Before the 

 building of the Murman Railroad the population was 

 given as 14,300, consisting of Russians, Lapps, Finns 

 and Norwegians. The present population (1919) was 



