Dudinka began as a winter settlement linked to Mangazeya, the legendary fur-trading outpost that drew Russian Cossacks and merchants deep into Siberia. In 1930, the settlement was designated the administrative center of the Taimyr Dolgan-Nenets National Region. Five years later, polar explorer Otto Schmidt recommended expanding it into a proper town. By 1937, port facilities and a railroad to Norilsk were completed, binding the two settlements together in a relationship that endures. Town status came officially in 1951. The Nenets people, who call the place Tutyn, had known this stretch of the Yenisei long before any of these designations. Their presence here predates the Russian expansion by centuries.

Dudinka's Arctic port is unique not only for its annual flooding but for its dual nature. From mid-June through October, both seagoing vessels and river boats from Krasnoyarsk, some 2,000 kilometers upstream, can dock here. When navigation season opens, the effect on the town is immediate: fruit and vegetable stalls appear in the streets, and grocery prices drop as fresh food arrives from the mainland. When the Yenisei freezes, ice-class vessels take over, following the Northern Sea Route to deliver fuel and raw materials while carrying away nickel, copper, and other metals from the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Combine. The Messoyakha-Dudinka-Norilsk natural gas pipeline, laid in 1969, adds another thread to the supply network. All large cargo moves exclusively by water.

Dudinka's history is not all industrial triumph. In the 1940s and 1950s, deported Finns and Soviet Germans were buried in the Lighthouse cemetery, casualties of forced relocation policies that uprooted entire communities and sent them to the Arctic. In the 1990s, two crosses were erected at the cemetery in their memory. The town's role as an administrative center also made it a waypoint in the vast Soviet system of internal exile and forced labor that built much of the infrastructure of northern Siberia, including the railroad to Norilsk. The permafrost preserves what time might otherwise erase, and the ground beneath Dudinka holds stories that the town's official history has only recently begun to acknowledge.

Dudinka's Taymyr ice arena is the northernmost facility in the world rated for high-level international events, with seating for 350 spectators. In May 2017, the arena hosted the CCT Arctic Cup, the first-ever international women's curling tournament held beyond the Arctic Circle. Teams from Russia, Canada, the United States, Finland, and Switzerland competed on ice at the 69th parallel. The men's test event had been held the year before, in 2016. Since then, the Arctic Curling Cup has become an annual fixture. In 2018, ten teams competed in mixed doubles, with Maria Komarova and Daniel Goryachov taking bronze. It is a peculiar and wonderful thing: a town that floods every spring and freezes for months has become an international destination for a sport played on ice.

Dudinka sits more than two degrees above the Arctic Circle, and its subarctic climate makes no concessions to comfort. Average high temperatures remain below freezing even in May. Summer, such as it is, arrives in mid-June and lasts two months. The midnight sun offers continuous daylight, but the winters answer with polar night. Precipitation falls as rain in the brief warm season and as snow for the rest of the year. The town is served by Dudinka Airport and connected to Norilsk by rail, but there is no road linking Dudinka to the broader Russian highway network. Everything and everyone arrives by water, by rail from Norilsk, or by air. It is one of Russia's road-inaccessible communities, a designation that says everything about the isolation that defines life here.