At this time the company faced significant criticism from environmentalists which culminated from the Yablokov Report, drawn up by presidential adviser Aleksey Yablokov, which revealed that the Northern Fleet and the Murmansk Shipping Company had dumped some 2.5 million curies of liquid and solid radioactive waste in the Arctic Ocean between 1959 and 1991.

[7] In November 2018 the company signed a significant new contract to ship coal produced in the Russian arctic by VostokCoal along the Northern Sea Route to Europe.

The ships were maintained at the dry docks in Murmansk, and the Zvezdochka shipyard in Severodvinsk also made repairs to the reactors of the nuclear-powered icebreakers.

Among its displays were photographs of polar captains, ship bells, micro model replicas, marine equipment, with one section dedicated entirely to icebreakers and their history.

[14] Icebreakers represented by particularly fine models include Yermak (1898), Fyodor Litke (1909), Sedov (1909), Alexander Sibiryakov (1909), Sadko (1913), Semyon Dezhnov (1939), Severny Veter (1944), Lenin (1959), Kiev (1965), Artika (1972), Krasin (1976), Kapitan Dranitsyn (1980), Vladmimir Ignatyuk (1983), Rossiya (1985) and Taymyr (1989).