Dmitry Shparo: Difference between revisions
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== Goodwill Ambassador. == |
== Goodwill Ambassador. == |
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As a mathematician, Dmitry Shparo insisted that the North Pole, as an ever-shifting spot, existed only as a mathematical concept. But even with such an abstract goal in mind, his trips always had a very practical component. They had a far-reaching effect on the lives of thousands if not millions of people. Shparo had become one of the earliest Soviet true Ambassadors of goodwill to the West, long before the ice melts of [[Glasnost]] and [[Perestroika]]. Like a powerful icebreaker, Shparo was crashing down the barriers between two worlds – political, diplomatic and cultural. In 1988 Dmitry Shparo co-led the Soviet-Canadian expedition, first to cross Arctic Ocean from Russia via the North Pole to Canada. The |
As a mathematician, Dmitry Shparo insisted that the North Pole, as an ever-shifting spot, existed only as a mathematical concept. But even with such an abstract goal in mind, his trips always had a very practical component. They had a far-reaching effect on the lives of thousands if not millions of people. Shparo had become one of the earliest Soviet true Ambassadors of goodwill to the West, long before the ice melts of [[Glasnost]] and [[Perestroika]]. Like a powerful icebreaker, Shparo was crashing down the barriers between two worlds – political, diplomatic and cultural. In 1988 Dmitry Shparo co-led the Soviet-Canadian expedition, first to cross Arctic Ocean from Russia via the North Pole to Canada. The Ice Curtain that for half a century seemed to be so monumental and eternal, now became ephemeral |
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In 1989 Dmitry Shparo and his American colleague Paul Shurke lead the Bering Bridge Expedition from Siberia to Alaska in attempt to reconnect arctic cultures separated by the Cold War. Until the Second World War, the Inuits of Siberia and Alaska - sharing the same language - had traveled back and forth across the Bering Strait to hunt walrus and visit relatives. However, in 1948, the Stalin and the Truman governments locked down the border. In 1989 Shparo and Shurke asked Kremlin and the White House to open the border to a sled dog expedition. |
In 1989 Dmitry Shparo and his American colleague [[Paul Shurke]] lead the Bering Bridge Expedition from Siberia to Alaska in attempt to reconnect arctic cultures separated by the Cold War. Until the Second World War, the Inuits of Siberia and Alaska - sharing the same language - had traveled back and forth across the Bering Strait to hunt walrus and visit relatives. However, in 1948, the Stalin and the Truman governments locked down the border. In 1989 Shparo and Shurke asked Kremlin and the White House to open the border to a sled dog expedition. |
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Dog sled expedition was a relatively small thing. Not worthy attention of big authorities in Moscow and Washington DC. No one could foresee that from the shaggy and shaky dog sled, Shparo and Shurke would be able to accomplish the unthinkable: to knock down the Ice Curtain that has been separating two continents for over than 40 years.. Along with the preparation of dogs and sleds, Shparo and Shurke had drawn a protocol of intentions and talked the Governors of both Alaska and Chukotka into signing it on the ice on the Bering Strait. According this protocol, native Chukotkans and Alaskans were allowed to travel, hunt and trade freely again The Protocol was signed in the end of April 1989, several months before the Berlin Wall collapsed. The border was reopened and Presidents Bush and Gorbachev both prized Shparo and Shurke for their achievement. Desintegration of the Ice Curtain did not receive the same high profile treatment as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, yet the main goal of the expedition had been achieved: Innuit families across the border were reunited. |
Dog sled expedition was a relatively small thing. Not worthy attention of big authorities in Moscow and Washington DC. No one could foresee that from the shaggy and shaky dog sled, Shparo and Shurke would be able to accomplish the unthinkable: to knock down the Ice Curtain that has been separating two continents for over than 40 years.. Along with the preparation of dogs and sleds, Shparo and Shurke had drawn a protocol of intentions and talked the Governors of both Alaska and Chukotka into signing it on the ice on the Bering Strait. According this protocol, native Chukotkans and Alaskans were allowed to travel, hunt and trade freely again The Protocol was signed in the end of April 1989, several months before the Berlin Wall collapsed. The border was reopened and Presidents Bush and Gorbachev both prized Shparo and Shurke for their achievement. Desintegration of the Ice Curtain did not receive the same high profile treatment as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, yet the main goal of the expedition had been achieved: Innuit families across the border were reunited. |
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In 1996 Shparo attempted to cross the Bering Strait again – this time on skis and in the company of his two young sons. The expedition failed when overnight the coastal ices had drifted the sleeping adventurers several hundreds miles away into the open sea. Next year the attempt was resumed. It failed again when Nikita, the oldest of Shparo’s children, fell through the weak ice and sustained severe frostbite. In 1998, in the course of the third attempt, Dmitry and Matvey Shparo managed to successfully cross the Bering Strait, becoming the first people to do so by skis and thus securing another spot in the Guinness World Records and personal wows from presidents Clinton and Eltsin. |
In 1996 Shparo attempted to cross the Bering Strait again – this time on skis and in the company of his two young sons. The expedition failed when overnight the coastal ices had drifted the sleeping adventurers several hundreds miles away into the open sea. Next year the attempt was resumed. It failed again when Nikita, the oldest of Shparo’s children, fell through the weak ice and sustained severe frostbite. In 1998, in the course of the third attempt, Dmitry and Matvey Shparo managed to successfully cross the Bering Strait, becoming the first people to do so by skis and thus securing another spot in the Guinness World Records and personal wows from presidents Clinton and Eltsin. |
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In 1989, Dmitry Shparo influenced by Rick Hansen, a Canadian paraplegic athlete and activist for people with spinal cord injuries, founded Adventure Club. It is a Moscow-based charity foundation that in the past 17 years sponsored countless adventures for disabled athletes and disadvantaged children all across the world. Under personal leadership of Dmitry Shparo, blind, deaf, amputees and quadriplegic ascended highest picks and crossed deadliest deserts, including the ice ones. |
In 1989, Dmitry Shparo influenced by [[Rick Hansen]], a Canadian paraplegic athlete and activist for people with spinal cord injuries, founded Adventure Club. It is a Moscow-based charity foundation that in the past 17 years sponsored countless adventures for disabled athletes and disadvantaged children all across the world. Under personal leadership of Dmitry Shparo, blind, deaf, amputees and quadriplegic ascended highest picks and crossed deadliest deserts, including the ice ones. |
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Revision as of 21:05, 27 December 2006
The Iceman.
Dmitry Shparo is a Russian Arctic explorer and holder of several endurance records. Shparo gained international fame for twice reaching the North Pole on skis . Reports credit him with leading more expeditions to the polar region than any other explorer. In 1979 Shparo led the first ski expedition from Eurasia to the North Pole and then in 1988 he completed a full traverse across the Arctic Ocean from Russia to Canada via the North Pole. In 1998, Dmitry Shparo and his son Matvey became the first people in modern times to ski across the Bering Strait, from Russia into America.
Mathematician.
Dmitry Shparo was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1941, shortly after the Soviet Union had been invaded by German troops. His father, Igor Shparo, of a Swedish decent, was a journalist and a fiction writer, his mother, Nina Gimer, was a mathematician. Many Gimers became victims of the political repressions. In 1927 , when Nina Gimer was only three, her father was arrested, declared “enemy of the nation”, sent to a labor camp in the North and where he vanished soon thereafter. After Stalin’s death in 1953 Nina Gimer got a job at the Institute of Applied Mechanics, where she was involved in calculating the trajectories of the first Soviet cruise missile and the first Earth artificial satellite, Sputnik. Dmitry Shparo graduated from mathematics department of the Moscow State University .After getting his PhD in 1967, he went on a full-time teaching at the University of Steel and Ferro-alloys, the leading technical school in Moscow.
Adventurer.
Since 1973, Shparo developed a second profession. He stepped on a path of explorer, a slippery and potentially deadly path for anyone with a curious mind in the USSR. Scarce explorers were tamed and yet looked at with a great deal of suspicion. Their routes had to be approved by the Communist Party committees and KGB local offices. Self-styled adventurers, that what Dmitry Shparo happened to be by nature, had little chance for survival. Nevertheless, Shparo, a born mathematician and a ”genius of calculations” managed to calculate his way through labyrinths of soviet bureaucracy and stay in shade that allowed him a certain sense of freedom. He led several low-profile expeditions up the outskirts of Russia. In 1970 Shparo traveled from Lake Taimir, the. largest freshwater body in Eurasia north of the Arctic Circle, to Cape Cheluskin(the northernmost point of Asia) via notable islands of Komsomolskya Pravda in the Laptev Sea, named after the largest Communist youth paper in the USSR. The paper prized Shparo for his venture, published his diary and announced the launch of a new polar paper-sponsored polar expedition with Dmitry Shparo leading the way. The main goal of the expedition – a ski trip to the North Pole – was yet to be revealed to the public and to the government. Soviet authorities were taking the Arctic Region seriously. Polar Ocean was a place d'armes of the ongoing military competition with the US. Kremlin wanted to see victories in this battle field and not the defeats. The stakes of the proposed ski-trip to the North Pole were such that the final decision rested with the Politburo. Its response was laconic: the expedition to the North Pole was “unsuitable and pointless”. Yet, in March, 1979, Shparo left to the North Pole on skis secretly, without Politburo’s permission. When in late April a news about a flagrant disobedience finally reached Politburo, its conformist majority was outraged. The men atop the Kremlin leadership urged the Chief of the KGB and the Minister of Defense to send out military helicopters in order to return the escapees and punish them accordingly. But Shparo and his teammates were already half way there and Mihail Suslov, the Party’s chief ideologist , suggested that chances of their successful arrival to the Pole were quite high. Shparo was allowed to finish his epopee. On May 31st, 1979, Dmitry Shparo reached the North Pole. Overnight, from the “Enemy of the People” Shparo became the “Hero of the Soviet Youth”. From an unknown professor of boring mathematics he turned into a national idol. In the absence of other popular idols, his fame reached the cosmic heights. Thousands of young fans dreamed of traveling to the top of the world, and skiing, after years of disgrace, became a favorite national sports once again.
Soon after Dmitry Shparo’s name went into the Guinness World Records, he undertook a new trip towards the North. This trip arguably became the most amazing expedition, yet the most underestimated in the history of exploration of the Arctic. Shparo crossed the Polar Ocean during the Arctic night—in total darkness. He walked in the night for two months, from the drifting polar station “North Pole-27” to another drifting polar station “North Pole -28”. His 700 km route laid through constantly drifting and crashing ices, temperatures dropping as low as minus 70 degrees C. In February 1986 he arrived to the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility, thus becoming the first man on Earth to reach it on skis.
Goodwill Ambassador.
As a mathematician, Dmitry Shparo insisted that the North Pole, as an ever-shifting spot, existed only as a mathematical concept. But even with such an abstract goal in mind, his trips always had a very practical component. They had a far-reaching effect on the lives of thousands if not millions of people. Shparo had become one of the earliest Soviet true Ambassadors of goodwill to the West, long before the ice melts of Glasnost and Perestroika. Like a powerful icebreaker, Shparo was crashing down the barriers between two worlds – political, diplomatic and cultural. In 1988 Dmitry Shparo co-led the Soviet-Canadian expedition, first to cross Arctic Ocean from Russia via the North Pole to Canada. The Ice Curtain that for half a century seemed to be so monumental and eternal, now became ephemeral In 1989 Dmitry Shparo and his American colleague Paul Shurke lead the Bering Bridge Expedition from Siberia to Alaska in attempt to reconnect arctic cultures separated by the Cold War. Until the Second World War, the Inuits of Siberia and Alaska - sharing the same language - had traveled back and forth across the Bering Strait to hunt walrus and visit relatives. However, in 1948, the Stalin and the Truman governments locked down the border. In 1989 Shparo and Shurke asked Kremlin and the White House to open the border to a sled dog expedition. Dog sled expedition was a relatively small thing. Not worthy attention of big authorities in Moscow and Washington DC. No one could foresee that from the shaggy and shaky dog sled, Shparo and Shurke would be able to accomplish the unthinkable: to knock down the Ice Curtain that has been separating two continents for over than 40 years.. Along with the preparation of dogs and sleds, Shparo and Shurke had drawn a protocol of intentions and talked the Governors of both Alaska and Chukotka into signing it on the ice on the Bering Strait. According this protocol, native Chukotkans and Alaskans were allowed to travel, hunt and trade freely again The Protocol was signed in the end of April 1989, several months before the Berlin Wall collapsed. The border was reopened and Presidents Bush and Gorbachev both prized Shparo and Shurke for their achievement. Desintegration of the Ice Curtain did not receive the same high profile treatment as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, yet the main goal of the expedition had been achieved: Innuit families across the border were reunited. In 1996 Shparo attempted to cross the Bering Strait again – this time on skis and in the company of his two young sons. The expedition failed when overnight the coastal ices had drifted the sleeping adventurers several hundreds miles away into the open sea. Next year the attempt was resumed. It failed again when Nikita, the oldest of Shparo’s children, fell through the weak ice and sustained severe frostbite. In 1998, in the course of the third attempt, Dmitry and Matvey Shparo managed to successfully cross the Bering Strait, becoming the first people to do so by skis and thus securing another spot in the Guinness World Records and personal wows from presidents Clinton and Eltsin. In 1989, Dmitry Shparo influenced by Rick Hansen, a Canadian paraplegic athlete and activist for people with spinal cord injuries, founded Adventure Club. It is a Moscow-based charity foundation that in the past 17 years sponsored countless adventures for disabled athletes and disadvantaged children all across the world. Under personal leadership of Dmitry Shparo, blind, deaf, amputees and quadriplegic ascended highest picks and crossed deadliest deserts, including the ice ones.
Focus Today.
Adventures for people with disabilities:
1991 – a marathon in wheel chairs: Moscow – Kiev – Krivoy Rog (1400 km);
1992 - marathon in wheel-chairs, Vladivostok – St. Petersburg (11000 km)
1993 – marathon in wheel chairs, St. Petersburg – Alma-Ata along 15 countries of FIS and Baltic countries (9000 km);
1995 – an ascent of the Mt. Kazbek (5047 m),the highest pick of Georgia, by disabled sportsmen in wheel chairs;
1996 – the ecological marathon in wheel chairs Semipalatinsk(former Soviet nuclear polygon) – Cheliabinsk – Chernobyl, 10000 km,
1997 – an ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, 5895 m, made by a team of disabled sportsmen;
2000 – a ski crossing Greenland by a team including an athlete with spinal cord injury;
2002 – an ascent of the Mt. McKinley (6194 m, Alaska, USA) by disabled sportsmen in wheel chairs.
Adventures for children:
1990 – a scientific expedition to Chukotka (observation of a total solar eclipse);
1992 – kayak expeditions along the rivers of the USA and Canada;
1997 – a scientific expedition to Chita region (observation of a total solar eclipse);
1998 – a youth ecological expedition to Mt. Elbrus;
1999 – a youth ecological expedition to Kamchatka;
2000-06 – youth ecological camp in the Republic of Karelia.
Dmitry Shparo also stood behind the parachute jumps on the North Pole, running races to the top of Europe – Mt.Elbrus, round-the world ZIL truck expedition Moscow – Uelen – Seattle – Toronto – New York – London – Kaliningrad – Moscow and circumnavigation of the yacht “Apostol Andrey” (The Cruising Club of America's Bluewater Medal 2001 was awarded to the crew in New York). In 2005 Dmitry Shparo with the World Race Trust co-organized the Great Russian Race - a 15-week, 7,000 mile charity ultra-marathon relay from Vladivostok – at the intersection of North Korea, Russia and China, 7 time zones east of Moscow – to St. Petersburg – near the border of Finland and Russia. $340,000 were raised for the benefit of abandoned, orphaned and homeless children in Russia.
Dmitry Shparo is a distinguished polar researcher and historian. His projects include expedition to Franz-Josef Land where the wintering heim of Fridtjof Nansen was found; an expedition to the Commander Islands in Kamchatka where the grave of Vitus Bering, a world famous navigator, was discovered, and many others.
Dmitry Shparo is indisputably a leading authority on cold weather safety and travel in the Arctic. In 2005 Prince Albert of Monaco chose Dmitry Shparo along with son Matvey as partners and advisers in his April 2006 North Pole dog-sled expedition aimed to highlight the global warming and to commemorate his great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert I, who made four Arctic trips a century ago.
Shparo’s career as an author has developed alongside that of explorer. Among his books are «A way to the North», « To the Pole! » and « Three mysteries of the Arctic » . In 2006 Shparo accomplished a biography of Frederick Cook which proved to be a very robust defense of Cook’s achievements and reputation which had been strongly questioned by other historians and biographers.
Awards and Honors.
In recognition of his polar achievements, Dmitry Shparo has received several honors and awards: the “Order of Lenin,” the highest national decoration of the former Soviet Union(other prizewinners were cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Fidel Castro, and Nikita Khrushchev), the Order of the Red Banner of Labor , the prestigious UNESCO award "Fair Play and the gold medals of several Geographical Societies.