The present article focuses on children from Russia, who immigrated to the northern part of Norway in the end of the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century. The Russian immigration to north Norway is particularly strong, and therefore it is an obvious choice to focus on this group if one wishes to study Russian immigration to Norway. By studying the immigrants in Sør-Varanger, will we discover some objective tendencies and peculiarities of adaption of Russian immigrants in Norway at large? Attention to children-immigrants’ life in school and outside school, their friendships, their contacts with their homeland and attitudes toward future work, allows us to understand their position, views and level of mutual understanding with those people who surround them in the new country. In the present article special attention is also paid to the parents, first and foremost the mothers, who brought the children to north Norway, and their opinions about the welfare of their children in the new country as well as their own well-being. In many ways these children and their mothers from northwest Russia make a shining example of a successful establishment of a new life style in a foreign country. One may ask, however, is it too successful?

In 1933, the steamer Chelyuskin sailed from Murmansk, east bound to attempt a transit of the Northern Sea Route to the Pacific, in order to demonstrate that such a transit could be achieved in one season. The vessel became beset in heavy ice in the Chukchi Sea, and after drifting with the ice for over two months, was crushed and sank on 13 February 1934. Apart from one fatality, her entire complement of 104 people was able to establish a camp on the sea ice. The Soviet government organised an impressive aerial evacuation, under which all were rescued. Following several unsuccessful attempts, the wreck was located on the bed of the Chukchi Sea by a Russian expedition, Chelyuskin-70, in mid-September 2006. Two small components of the ship's superstructure were recovered by divers and were sent to the ship's builders, Burmeister and Wein of Copenhagen, for identification.

Ever since the end of the Second World War men who served on ships, both naval and merchant, which were involved in the transport of war materials to north Russia between 1941 and 1945 have sought recognition for their service with an appropriate campaign medal. They have failed to achieve this through a complicated muddle of government policy, ignorance and cold-heartedness.

Can words freeze as soon as uttered, and thus become inaudible? Polar research does not confirm it, and even the layman may well suspect that there are serious scientific objections to such a notion, and to its corollary, which is that congealed words should become audible on thawing. Yet this idea, through the ages, has given rise to a series of literary anecdotes and allusions, all of them humorous or satirical in intention. It is interesting to speculate how the idea arose in the first place. Hyperbole, including deliberately facetious hyperbole, is always present in the popular imagination, which tends to seek vivid, graphic, and sometimes wildly improbable comparisons in order to make its point. The heat of hell, and the coldness of charity, are equally undemonstrable from the strictly scientific point of view, while the goodness of gold must be regarded as ethically unverifiable, however effective as alliteration. We must imagine that some early wit once said: “It's so cold in X that when you try to say something, your words freeze and fall to the ground.” As a matter of fact, something very similar was attributed by Plutarch to one Antiphanes. In a chapter of the Moralia entitled “How a man may become aware of his progress in virtue” we find this anecdote:

Antiphanes said humorously that in a certain city words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter; it was the same way, he asserted, with what was said by Plato to men still in their youth; not until long afterwards, if ever, did most of them come to perceive the meaning, when they had become old men.

Explorer Joseph Elzéar Bernier's famous 1909 sector claim on Melville Island is often described as a key moment in the evolution of Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago. Writers such as Yolande Dorion-Robitaille and Marjolaine Saint-Pierre have argued that Bernier was unfairly deprived of the credit he deserved for his sovereignty contributions. Alan MacEachern has recently stated in Polar Record that civil servants in the 1920s were to blame for this supposed unfair treatment. In particular, he sees Oswald Finnie of the Department of the Interior as a man who was determined at all costs to rewrite the historical record. This article contests MacEachern's depiction of Finnie and his colleagues, based on a range of primary source documents. It also emphasises the little-known but very significant role played by James White, who first placed the sector lines on an official map five years before Bernier's 1909 proclamation. The article thus clarifies the complicated relationship between White's 1904 map, Bernier's 1909 claim, an earlier sector claim made by Bernier in 1907, and the views on the sector theory held by influential members of the Canadian civil service at the time when an official sector claim was made by Ottawa in 1925.