Russian Journalists on Svalbard in the 1930s

The article aims to reconstruct aspects of community life in mining settlements on Svalbard in the mid-1930s, with Barentsburg as a centrepiece. Little known multilingual press and archive material has been used to do so, with microhistorical research as a guiding principle, formulated by Carlo Ginzburg (1993: 33): “Any social structure is the result of interaction and of numerous individual strategies, a fabric that can only be reconstituted from close observation”. None of the closely observed sources used in this research have been taken for granted.