In customary understanding about the Second World War, at least in Britain, the northernmost part of Scandinavia does not feature much, if at all. In my own family history we do have some recognition of it – an uncle of mine served on the merchant navy vessels making up the convoys supplying the Soviet forces via Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and was, I believe, torpedoed and rescued from the sea. Those convoys had some of the highest mortality rates for any personnel involved in the war anywhere.
I have just been in Kirkenes, one of the most north-easterly towns of Norway. Kirkenes suffered the second worst bombardment of any place in Europe, after Malta. By the end of the war only 13 houses were left intact. And around Kirkenes, in all the other towns of Finnmark, there were similar levels of destruction – through the initial Nazi occupation in 1941, through shelling and bombing as those occupying forces defended themselves against Allied attacks (from both the Western and the Soviet allies), and as a result of the scorched earth policy whereby as the Nazi occupiers retreated they destroyed all property in sight. Earlier the sea inlets of this area had been crucial to the Nazis as hiding places for their naval vessels tasked with attacking the Allied convoys – they had sheltered the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst battleships, for example. And airfields had been of similar use to the Luftwaffe. The details of the Lapland War and the Petsamo-Kirkenes Offensive which drove the Nazi forces out of northern Finland and northern Norway are complex, but the liberation of Kirkenes by Soviet forces finally took place in October 1944 after three years of what must have been a local hell. This morning I visited the Soviet War memorial, in a residential neighbourhood of the town, and found it festooned with large wreaths, presumably placed there on the anniversary last month.
The Soviet War Memorial
But Kirkenes seems to me a fascinating place for more reasons than its wartime history. I have visited as part of a Hurtigruten coastal voyage – on board the daily ferry that travels up from Bergen and back calling at innumerable small ports on the way. I talked to a French fellow passenger in the town centre who commented on the ‘atmosphère spéciale’ of the town, and I agree with him.
It has been an overcast morning with solid ice on all of the pavements and on most of the side roads, but grit had been spread on many surfaces to improve walkers’ and vehicles’ grip. I met an older woman pushing what appeared to be a zimmer frame, with attached basket, in front of her but as she passed I realised that it was actually mounted on skis. Every occupied house had lights shining in every window, so that whole residential areas twinkled brightly in the gloom of an early November day. The annual 50 or so days with no sun will start later in the month.
Norwegian-registered cars slowed to a crawl as they passed pedestrians making their way along the edge of the main road, but some cars carried on at their normal speed and I quickly noticed that these were Russian vehicles that have come through the only land border between Norway and Russia which lies only 15 kilometres or so away to the east. It is curious to reflect that although Kirkenes was liberated by Soviet forces in 1944, throughout the Cold War it stood as a front-line town where NATO (of which Norway was a founding member) confronted the USSR: if at any time Soviet forces had wished to invade a NATO power the quickest way to have symbolically done so would have been through Kirkenes. Today, in the post-Cold War era, 10 per cent of the town’s population are Russians.
I went into a busy café where Elvis Presley's In The Ghetto was playing on the radio. The young woman serving was happy to talk. She was born in Kirkenes and had never lived anywhere else – and nor did she want to. Many young adults who move away come back, she said. Despite the proximity of Russia – and the fact that local Norwegian identity card holders can cross the border without securing a visa first – she had never done so. A week or two ago I was in Oslo and when the receptionist in my hotel there heard I was going to Kirkenes he sighed and said how much he’d like to go back, having worked there for a year.
So why does Kirkenes have such a special draw, and a distinctive atmosphere? In part it’s because it’s the last stop in democratic, liberal and modern Norway. But there are a number of other North Norwegian towns that can similarly claim to be at the end of the road – Hammerfest claims to be the most northerly town in Europe, although vying for that distinction with Honningsvåg (much depends on the definition of a town), Vardø is the most easterly town in Norway: I have visited all these places on my trip.
But to its geographical distinction Kirkenes adds the special Norwegian flavour of a thriving and supported settlement, despite its small size and its isolation. Serving a town population of around 4,000, and a wider local area of at most 10,000 souls, are a modern public library, sports pitches and indoor gymnasia and a sports centre, a swimming pool, schools for all levels, a hospital, a theatre and cinema. As I explored the town, public buses were strongly in evidence, traversing small back roads amongst the wooden-framed houses, all of them rebuilt since the destruction of the town during the war. The population remaining by 1946 had been largely evacuated to Harstad, much further south in the Vesterålen Islands, for two years while their town was rebuilt: ironically they were housed there in a former Nazi prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet captives.
Housing in Kirkenes
I was amazed not just at the number of shops but also at their quality – clothes shops that would grace any middle-class high street, shoe shops with a massive range of merchandise (although majoring on boots at this time of the year), a bookshop and stationers, two indoor shopping malls, motor dealers (with snowmobiles as their principal offering at the moment). There seemed to be more wool on sale than in most places (a possible occupation through the winter months?), and as throughout Northern Norwegian towns there seemed an over-provision of hairdressers that I find difficult to explain. The range of retailing (market driven) and of public facilities in Kirkenes puts to shame what is available in many other places five times its size in other parts of Europe. So, why is the town (and others like it in the area) so vibrant?
High class shopping
Since 1990 the Norwegian county of Finnmark has been given special tax status with lower rates for residents – such that a four person household might benefit to the tune of 100,000 krone per year (or about 9,000 UK pounds) over residents of other parts of the country. That clearly helps household expenditure levels, and from the estate agencies windows (most housed within savings banks) I looked at in Kirkenes, housing costs are not particularly high. But on the public sector side, Norway takes both an egalitarian and a social democratic view – that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that inequalities within the country are reduced, including inequalities between regions, and that the provision of many basic services should be determined by the state and not by the market. Two Americans on the boat were arguing with one of the crew last night when they heard about this – accusing Norway in no uncertain terms of being ‘socialist’ or even, in one heated moment, ‘Marxist’. But this has been the Scandinavian way ever since the Second World War. The aim to reduce disparities, and to do so through government intervention, is at the heart of much Scandinavian political ideology. And it is worth pointing out that Norway is one of the richest countries in Europe – 3rdafter Luxembourg and Switzerland in GDP per capita in 2017. OECD data for the same year show that Norway, along with Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland all have much lower levels of income inequality than countries with lower levels of public expenditure such as Germany, the UK or the USA – or than the other two wealthiest European states, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Norway has made very sensible use of its oil and gas income (which amount in the average year to around one-sixth of the economy) by creating a sovereign wealth fund. And this enables that egalitarian ideology to extend to accessibility – in a country made up of mountains, high plateaux, and innumerable inhabited islands. Amazing numbers of bridges, and even undersea tunnels, have been created in recent years to link even small settlements into the national communications system. I have seen major new bridges reaching out to islands with only 200 people.
So the atmosphere of Kirkenes is inflected by a number of influences, both geographical (its position near the Russian border) and through Norwegian public policies. Even isolated towns in the far north can offer a high standard of living to their inhabitants, and can retain young people who in other countries and other situations would almost certainly have headed for the bright(er) lights of a big city. It truly is a rather special place, one of the northernmost towns on this planet, with a distinct and tragic history – but with a future that looks sustainable and, as long as Norway’s social democratic ideology remains in place, well assured.
