BARENTSBURG
this coal-mining town owned by Russia goes back to a dutch enterprize in the 1920s and was acquired by the sowjet union in 1932. mining is still done, yet only on a small scale. in its heyday, 1100 russian and also ukrainian citizens inhabitated barentsburg; today about 300 are left and live there.
beside its industrial facilities, the town has/had an art center, schools, history museum, a lenin statue and of course several pubs.
barentsburg is on its way, slowly, to become a tourism place. visitors mostly come by boats from longyearbuen.
there are even paintings of barentsburg in the past... when walking through this half-dead russian town one experiences a strange mixture of alive and abandoned buildings.
