ABSTRACT
Winter navigation caused a significant increase in turnover on the western section of the Northern Sea Route. This underlined its historical position of being the most important part of the route, as it had been almost continuously since Joseph Wiggins’s first commercial operations in the last century. Other activities on the Northern Sea Route have always been much more limited. Transit voyages, which one would believe to be the most important activity, are relatively few, although some are made each year, especially since the first ULA freighters arrived in 1954. Less sturdy ships have been known to make the transit journey as well though, for instance the Neptun-class Vitya Sitnitsa did so in eight days in 1971. (Chubakov 1982: 92–102). The commissioning of a new ULA class, the SA-15, has allowed a number of double voyages from the West to Vancouver and Japan, and vice versa. In 1984 four SA-15 bound for Pevek and Tiksi continued to Vancouver and returned to Murmansk by the Northern Sea Route (Ponomarev 1985a). These transit voyages were all cases in which shipping was preferred over other means of transport, for instance to get grain from Vancouver, and gas pipes from Japan for the Urengoy–Uzhgorod pipeline. Another of these few profitable cases was the transfer of barges and fishing boats, built in Europe and needed in the Far East. Once a year all ships of that type were gathered in one convoy and sent through the Northern Sea Route (Armstrong 1980: 113). But on the whole it would seem that transit passages are not very important, although exact indications of how many goods are shipped in transit voyages are not available. This leaves about 30 to 35 per cent of the Northern Sea Route’s turnover for the eastern section, a small amount for a large area.
