Kola Peninsula

The Kola Peninsula (Russian: Ко́льский полуо́стров, romanized: Kolsky poluostrov; Kildin Sami: Куэлнэгк нёа̄ррк) is a peninsula in the extreme northwest of Russia, and one of the largest peninsulas of Europe. Constituting the bulk of the territory of Murmansk Oblast, it lies almost completely inside the Arctic Circle and is bordered by the Barents Sea to the north and by the White Sea to the east and southeast. The city of Murmansk, the most populous settlement on the peninsula, has a population of roughly 270,000 residents. While humans had already settled in the north of the peninsula in the 7th–5th millennium BC, the rest of its territory remained uninhabited until the 3rd millennium BC, when various peoples started to arrive from the south. By the 1st millennium CE only the Sámi people remained. This changed in the 12th century, when Russian Pomors discovered the peninsula's rich resources of game and fish. Soon after, the Pomors were followed by the tribute collectors from the Novgorod Republic, and the peninsula gradually became a part of the Novgorodian lands. However, the Novgorodians established no permanent settlements until the 15th century, and Russian migration continued in the following centuries. The Soviet period (1917–1991) saw a rapid population increase, although most of the new arrivals remained confined to urbanized territories along the sea coast and the railroads. The Sámi people were subjected to forced collectivization, including forced relocation to Lovozero and other centralized settlements, and overall the peninsula became heavily industrialized and militarized, largely due to its strategic position (as the pre-eminent Soviet ice-free Atlantic coast) and to the discovery of the vast apatite deposits in the 1920s. As a result, the peninsula suffered major ecological damage. After the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economy went into decline. Its population fell from 1,150,000 in...