Russian Empire Bolsheviks followed in 1918. The administrative boundaries of European Russia, apart from Finland and its portion of Poland, coincided approximately with the natural limits of the East-European plains. In the North it met the Arctic Ocean. Novaya Zemlya and the Kolguyev and Vaygach Islands also belonged to it, but the Kara Sea was referred to Siberia. To the East it had the Asiatic territories of the Empire, Siberia and the Kyrgyz steppes, from both of which it was separated by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River and the Caspian Sea — the administrative boundary, however, partly extending into Asia on
Novaya Zemlya lost more than three-fourths of the merchant ships committed to the convoy — more than one fourth of the losses to American shipping in all convoys to northern Russia. The destruction of PQ-17 significantly affected the people dependent on supplies carried by the ill-fated merchant ships. Karlo Stajner, a Gulag prisoner in Norilsk in 1942, wrote “the German cruiser’s attack on Novaya Zemlya and the sinking of the food transports had catastrophic consequences…the population was left without provisions…supplies in the warehouses of Norilsk [were] distributed among the NKVD, the guards, and the few free civilians that lived in the town.”