The office of Artur Chilingarov,the beared polar explorer and anointed hero of the Russian Federation,is at the end of a long hall in the Duma

Russia's Parliament,where he is deputy speaker,Its entrance is guarded by a poster of a nuclear icebreaker,the Yamal,a 492 foot monster with rows of painted-on fangs,and inside is a knee-high wooden penguin and two chicks,a pair of carved warlrus tusks,and eight miniature porcelain polar bears,an iconography of the Arctic and Antarctic.On a wall is a portrait of Vladimir Putin.It was dark,very dark he says of the descent.of course it was risky.Of course we were sacred.he and fellow parliamentarian,a business who had paid half a million dollars for his berth,peered out the portholes.which had one more paying adventurer,A swedish businessman and an Australian tour operator followed,The descent was to take nearly three hours,the return to the surface that long again,meanwhile the ice pack would be drifting.If they could not find the opening,they would be be stuck.The depressing thing,Chilingarov tells me was knowing no one could come rescue us.Just after midday I touched down on the flat, fine clay of the seabed.The sub scraped up samples of ocean floor,then moved to the pole itself,where its robotic arm firmly planted a titanium Russian flag in the muck.The submersibles return was harrowing-following Mir I up from the seabed,Mir II searched for an hour and a half before finding the ice opening-but the drama of the dive was soon drowned out by the supposed politics of it.More than 40 journalists were waiting aborad the surface vessels,and they quickly filed their reports.Russian claims the North pole!!!Chilingarov willingly stoked nationalist flames.The Arctic.he said at a press conference,has always been Russian.The dive soon became something it had scarcely been.an act of expansionism,not exploration-of geopolitics rather than glorified tourism.Observers seemed ready to believe that the Arctic's future would be decide by flags and warships.belligerence and brinkmanship.