Spring for the North only begins at the end of May and beginning of June, with the drifting of ice. In fact, only the calendar proves that other seasons exist aside from the nine month long winter. Yet at the end of April the sun is already so bright that going out without sunglasses is not recommended. Little by little the unsetting sun and the spring wind begin to gnaw the snow-drifts, sharpening its ice plates to the slimmest in the open areas, sharp enough as they already are, especially on the vast white smooth, mirror-like surface of the frozen northern rivers, like the Yenisei, where the author has lived nearly a quarter of the century.
      In one such day at the end of April, more than twenty years ago, I happened to admire the frozen Yenisei from the captain's bridge on the Captain Sorokin icebreaker, which led a convoy of two ships (of the first Arctic winter expedition) from Murmansk to Dudinka. The ice in the Yenisei Bay of the Kara Sea and on the river itself was unmeasurably thick. The icebreaker was followed by a stream of clear water slightly smoking in the frost, a dark band cut from the ice along a ruler, blackening the endless whiteness that surrounded them. Two big ships and a beautiful icebreaker sailed along slowly. More than two months after this historic event came the long expected ice drifts on the Yenisei, beginning the usual "open water" navigation season.
      Northerners wait for the ice drifting and prepare for it. The docks at the unique Dudinka seaport, the only one of its kind, are fully cleared from cargo and the huge cranes are lifted onto higher banks to protect them from high waters.

A. Brechalov
Advisor to the
State Duma Committee
for the North and Far East