In November 1920, after the Bolshevik takeover of Crimea, Papanin was appointed prosecutor and commandant of the Crimean branch of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka.

[1][2] In 1922 he received his first Soviet award, the order of the Red Banner for exemplary performing a task in liquidation of counterrevolutionaries in Crimea, Kharkiv, and other places.

[3][4] Four researchers, Ivan Papanin, Ernst Krenkel, Yevgeny Fyodorov and Pyotr Shirshov, landed on the drifting ice-floes in an airplane flown by Mikhail Vodopyanov.

For 234 days, Papanin's team carried out a wide range of scientific observations in the near-polar zone, until they were taken back by the two icebreakers Murman and Taimyr.

[5] In 1939-1946 Papanin was the successor to Otto Schmidt as head of the Glavsevmorput' (Glavniy Severniy Morskoy Put') - an establishment that oversaw all commercial operations on the Northern Sea Route.

During World War II he was the representative of the State Defence Committee (Gosudarstvennij Komitet Oborony) responsible for all transportation by the Northern Sea Route.