"Tell my story. Tell how the proud men of the Russian navy fought against the enemy from inside and sacrificed their lives so their dear country might once again stand proud."
— Admiral Igor Yarofev, Tomb Raider: Chronicles (2000)
The Arctic Submarine Base
A narrower cousin of the frozen wasteland, this setting trades the open tundra for a specific piece of Cold War geography: the fjords and closed naval towns of Russia's far north, where the Soviet, and later Russian, submarine fleet has been based since the late 1950s. Fiction that reaches for this location tends to inherit its genuine weight almost by default — a nuclear-armed fleet, a hostile Arctic climate, and a closed, secretive administrative culture are not inventions layered onto the setting so much as accurate descriptions of it, which gives this entry a different texture from most of the Archive's catalogue.
Tomb Raider: Chronicles — Zapadnaya Litsa and a Dying Fleet's Dignity
The Russia Section of Tomb Raider: Chronicles (2000) is the game's second act and stages the whole of its plot at Zapadnaya Litsa, a real closed naval town on the Kola Peninsula and genuine home port of the Soviet Union's first nuclear submarine, K-3 Leninsky Komsomol, since the late 1950s. The section opens with Charles Kane briefing Lara before she and Kane observe, from a distance, a Russian crime syndicate led by ex-KGB operative Sergei Mikhailov entering the port. From there the story is told across four consecutive levels — The Base, The Submarine, Deep Sea Dive, and Sinking Submarine — that trace Lara's infiltration from dry land to the ocean floor and back.
In The Base, Lara must find her way onto a submarine that is about to depart, working past Russian guards, a German Shepherd patrol dog, and snipers stationed around the harbor while she overhears Admiral Igor Yarofev and Mikhailov discussing an artefact — enough to convince her to stow away rather than turn back. The Submarine picks up the plot directly: Lara is discovered hiding in the cargo hold and imprisoned by Yarofev, escapes through a ventilation shaft, and works her way through the vessel's crew quarters and machine spaces to locate and assemble an Extreme Depth diving suit, fighting off the sub's onboard chef and several of Mikhailov's gangsters along the way. The remaining two levels carry the search underwater to the wreck of the World War II U-boat rumored to be carrying the Spear of Destiny, and finally back to a submarine flooding and sinking around her.
What distinguishes this arc from the Archive's usual pattern is its portrayal of Yarofev himself. He is written as a proud, honorable officer forced into the mafia's service only by the post-Soviet collapse of naval funding — the game gives him no ideological loyalty to Mikhailov, only financial desperation. He despises the arrangement openly, refuses to kill Lara once he finds her aboard his own ship, and, in the section's final level, chooses to go down with his crippled vessel rather than take the escape route Lara offers him. The game frames that death as a genuinely noble act rather than the collapse of a broken institution — a rare instance in this catalogue of a Russian military figure written with unambiguous respect, and one whose closing words to Lara, quoted above, ask specifically to be remembered as one of "the proud men of the Russian navy."
KURSK — Docudrama at Vidyayevo
Kursk (2018), developed by the Polish studio Jujubee, takes the opposite approach: rather than fictionalizing the setting, it reconstructs the real 2000 disaster in documentary detail. The game places the player as an intelligence operative in the closed naval town of Vidyayevo on the Kola Peninsula, aboard a meticulously modeled Oscar-II-class submarine, in the days leading up to the real K-141 Kursk's loss in the Barents Sea with its entire crew. Unlike most entries in this Archive, the game does not stage the setting as a menace to be neutralized or a stereotype to be reinforced; its stated intent, in the developers' own words, was realism and immersion in a tragedy that was internationally covered and genuinely mourned. Notably, one of the game's planned expansions, Kengir, tells the story of a prisoner's escape from the real Soviet Kengir labor camp in 1954 — linking this setting directly to the same historical material examined in this Archive's piece on The Gulag, treated here with the same documentary seriousness rather than as a generic backdrop.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert — The Sub Pen as Soviet Doctrine
The Red Alert series builds the Arctic submarine directly into Soviet military doctrine rather than staging it as a single mission. Beginning with the original Red Alert (1996), the Sub Pen is one of the Soviet faction's core naval structures, and the series' own unit lore justifies the emphasis on functional, climate-driven grounds: the northern Russian waters are described as icy enough to demand a vessel that could either break the ice or operate beneath it, which the games use to explain why Soviet naval doctrine leans on submarines rather than the surface fleets favored by the Allies. Multiple Soviet campaign missions across the series turn directly on submarine pens as objectives to defend, capture, or raze, including missions built around northern river and coastal choke points explicitly modeled on the same icy, submarine-favorable waters the unit fluff describes. The setting recurs so often across the series' three mainline entries and their expansions that it functions less as a single memorable level than as a permanent fixture of how the Soviet faction fights.
Modern Warfare 2 — Rybachiy and the Far Eastern Cousin
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) relocates the archetype from the Kola Peninsula to Russia's Pacific coast, staging its climactic "Contingency" mission at the Rybachiy Naval Base near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — a real submarine facility that, while technically outside the Arctic Circle, sits in the same snowbound, isolated register the rest of this Archive's entries draw on. Task Force 141, led by a newly rescued Captain Price, fights through a blizzard-choked town and Ultranationalist patrols to reach a docked Russian ballistic missile submarine, which Price then commandeers to launch a missile that detonates as an electromagnetic pulse over Washington, D.C., turning the tide of the war for the American defenders. The mission is worth noting for extending the trope geographically: Rybachiy's real function as a home port for Russia's Pacific submarine fleet gives the level the same grounding in an actual, functioning military installation that the Kola Peninsula entries share, even at the opposite end of the country.
Hitman: Contracts — Bjarkhov's Base and a Sub Turned Bomb Factory
Hitman: Contracts (2004) relocates the setting further east again, to a fictional Russian Navy submarine supply depot on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and gives the archetype its darkest variation. The base, known informally as Bjarkhov's Base after the officer stationed there, is run by renegade Commander Sergei Bjarkhov, a former Red Army officer and Chechen sympathizer who has converted a partially dismantled nuclear submarine into a dirty bomb production facility, selling the output to buyers that include Austrian terrorist Fabian Fuchs. Agent 47 infiltrates by cargo plane disguised among Fuchs's own arrival party, works through an airfield and a dock area connected by a rail tram, and ultimately plants explosives on the submarine's hull to sink it along with both targets. Bjarkhov himself alludes, in dialogue overheard on the dock, to a previous accident aboard the vessel and the punishment of whoever he held responsible — a small detail that gestures toward the same institutional secrecy and cover-up culture the Archive traces in its piece on The Gulag, applied here to a functioning military asset rather than a prison camp.
A detail that sharpens the setting's realism: the uniforms' shoulder patches correspond to a real Northern Fleet submarine unit, B-448 "Tambov," while the cap insignia matches the genuine Project 1910 deep-water research submarine AS-33 — the same close borrowing from actual Russian naval iconography this Archive traces elsewhere, applied even in a level that never claims to be based on a real base or a real disaster. Flags of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria planted around the airfield tie Bjarkhov's operation to Chechen separatist financing, framing him as a figure who has turned Cold War military infrastructure toward black-market proliferation rather than national defense. Unlike Admiral Yarofev's honorable last stand in Tomb Raider: Chronicles, Bjarkhov inverts the trope entirely: the submarine here is the villain's asset to be destroyed, not the site of a dignified sacrifice, making this the Archive's clearest case of the setting used for straightforward villainy rather than respect.
What the Trope Gets Right
Unlike the frozen wasteland it borrows its climate from, this setting is unusually well-grounded in current strategic reality rather than Cold War nostalgia. The Kola Peninsula remains, by any current defense assessment, the core of Russia's Arctic military posture: the submarine bases at Gadzhiyevo and Okolnaya, along with the broader Northern Fleet infrastructure Zapadnaya Litsa was built to serve, still house the Delta-IV-class and Borei-class submarines that form the sea-based leg of Russia's nuclear deterrent under its modern "bastion defense" doctrine. The severe, near-permanent polar night and inhospitable terrain that games use as atmosphere are not exaggeration; Zapadnaya Litsa itself sees roughly forty-three days of continuous winter darkness. Where most of this Archive's settings take a specific fact and stretch it into eternal menace, the Arctic submarine base is one of the few where the fiction's stakes and the region's actual, ongoing strategic significance are closely aligned.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Location | Framing |
|---|---|---|
| Tomb Raider: Chronicles (2000) | Zapadnaya Litsa, Kola Peninsula | Post-Soviet naval decline, framed with dignity and honor |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert series (1996–2008) | Sub Pens, Soviet naval doctrine | Core faction structure, justified by real Arctic ice conditions |
| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) | Rybachiy Naval Base, Kamchatka | Climactic raid on a real Pacific submarine facility |
| Hitman: Contracts (2004) | Bjarkhov's Base, Kamchatka Peninsula | Repurposed sub as dirty bomb factory, rogue officer as villain |
| KURSK (2018) | Vidyayevo, Kola Peninsula | Documentary reconstruction of a real 2000 disaster |
Conclusion
Across four decades and as many genres — action-adventure, real-time strategy, military shooter, stealth assassination, and documentary docudrama — the submarine base has proven one of the medium's more durable Russian settings precisely because it never needed much invention to begin with. Red Alert builds it into the Soviet faction's core identity as standing doctrine; Tomb Raider: Chronicles, Modern Warfare 2, and Hitman: Contracts each stage it as a single high-stakes raid across three different corners of the country; KURSK drops the fiction altogether and reconstructs a real tragedy in the same waters. What unites most of them, more than most of this Archive's other entries, is a rare tendency toward respect rather than caricature: Admiral Yarofev's fictional death and the real, still-mourned loss of the Kursk crew both insist that the story being told is one of sacrifice and duty carried out under a harsh flag and an even harsher climate, not villainy to be dismantled. Hitman: Contracts is the exception that proves the rule — Bjarkhov is a straightforward antagonist, and his base exists to be infiltrated and destroyed rather than mourned — but even there, the setting's authenticity down to unit patches and insignia shows the same instinct running through the whole catalogue: reach for the real geography and hardware of the Russian submarine fleet even when the story built on top of it has no interest in dignifying it.