Vladimir Rusanov Ocean via the Northern Sea Route. Their ship "Gerkules" was too small for the kind of expedition Rusanov had in mind. The last to be heard of Rusanov's expedition was a telegram left at Matochkin Shar on Novaya Zemlya, which reached St. Petersburg on 27 September 1912. In it, Rusanov indicated that he intended rounding the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya, and heading east across the Kara Sea but nothing was heard from the "Gerkules" thereafter. He and his 11-man team, including Alexander Kuchin, disappeared without trace a year later in the Kara Sea, off the northern coast of Siberia.
Novaya Zemlya numbering 298, was removed to the mainland in 1957 before nuclear testing began. In 1943, during World War II, Novaya Zemlya briefly served as a secret seaplane base for Nazi Germany's "Kriegsmarine", to provide German surveillance of Allied shipping en route to Siberia. The seaplane base was established by U-255 and U-711, which were operating along the Northern coast of Soviet Russia as part of "13th U-boat Flotilla". Seaplane sorties were flown in August and September 1943. In the months following Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain organized convoys of merchant ships