"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 set at Zapadnaya Litsa, a real naval base 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 plot follows Lara Croft stowing away aboard a submarine commandeered by the Russian mafia boss Sergei Mikhailov, who has bribed its commander, Admiral Igor Yarofev, into ferrying him to a sunken World War II U-boat in search of the Spear of Destiny. What distinguishes this entry from the Archive's usual pattern is its portrayal of Yarofev himself: a proud, honorable officer forced into corruption only by the post-Soviet collapse of naval funding, who despises Mikhailov openly, refuses to kill Lara once he discovers her aboard, and ultimately dies choosing to go down with his crippled vessel rather than take the escape pod Lara offers him. The game frames his 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.
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.
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 |
| 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, 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 and Modern Warfare 2 stage it as a single high-stakes raid on opposite coasts of the same country; KURSK drops the fiction altogether and reconstructs a real tragedy in the same waters. What unites 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.