68°18′05″N172°49′40″W / 68.3014°N 172.8278°W /68.3014; -172.8278
 Chelyuskin | |
| History | |
|---|---|
| Name | Chelyuskin |
| Owner |  Sovtorgflot |
| Operator | Glavsevmorput[1] |
| Builder | Burmeister and Wain (B&W)Copenhagen,Denmark |
| Launched | 11 March 1933 |
| Christened | Semion Chelyuskin |
| Completed | 1933 |
| Maiden voyage | 6 May 1933 |
| Fate | Sank 13 February 1934 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type | Steam ship |
| Tonnage | 7,500t |
| Length | 310.2 ft (94.5 m) |
| Beam | 54.3 ft (16.6 m) |
| Height | 22.0 ft (6.7 m) |
| Installed power | 2400hp |
| Speed | 12,5 knots |
| Crew | 111 |
SSChelyuskin[2] (Russian:«Челю́скин»,IPA:[tɕɪˈlʲuskʲɪn]) was aSovietsteamship, reinforced to navigate through polar ice, that in 1934 became ice-bound inArctic waters during a navigation along theNorthern Maritime Route fromMurmansk toVladivostok and sank. 111 people were on board the Chelyuskin, and all but one were rescued by air. The expedition's task was to determine the possibility to travel by non-icebreaker through theNorthern Maritime Route in a single navigation season.
It was built inDenmark in 1933 by Burmeister and Wain (B&W, Copenhagen) and named after the 18th centuryRussianpolar explorerSemion Ivanovich Chelyuskin. The head of the expedition wasOtto Yuliyevich Shmidt and the ship'scaptain wasV. I. Voronin. There were 111 people on board the steamship, including Soviet cinematographersMark Troyanovsky andArkadii Shafran who documented on film the entire voyage, including the rescue. The crew members were known asChelyuskintsy, with the singular form "Chelyuskinets".
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(February 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
After leavingMurmansk on 2 August 1933, the steamship managed to get through most of the Northern Route before it was caught in theice fields in September. Eight members of the crew had been dropped off at Kolyuchin Island, so there were 104 people on board including 10 women and two small children. One of the children was only 6 months old: geodesicist Vasily Vasiliev's daughter Karina, born on August 31, 1933, during the voyage in the Kara Sea. After becoming icebound, the shipdrifted in the ice pack before sinking on 13 February 1934, crushed by theicepacks nearKolyuchin Island in theChukchi Sea. During the wreck one crew member, B. G. Mogilevich, was killed by deck cargo. The survivors made a camp on the ice floe. The women and children were airlifted out byAnatoly Liapidevsky on March 5 after 29 rescue flight attempts, but the men in the crew were not rescued until April after over two months on the ice. The crew managed to escape onto the ice and built a makeshift airstrip using only a few spades, ice shovels and two crowbars. They had to rebuild the airstrip thirteen times, until they were rescued in April of the same year and flown to the village ofVankarem on the coast of the sea. From there, some of the Chelyuskinites were flown further to the village ofUelen, while fifty-three men walked over 300 miles to get there.
The aircraft pilots who took part insearch and rescue operations were the first people to receive the newly established highest title ofHero of the Soviet Union. Those pilots wereAnatoly Liapidevsky,Sigizmund Levanevsky (who crashed en route to the camp, but survived),Vasily Molokov,Mavriky Slepnyov,Mikhail Vodopianov,Nikolai Kamanin andIvan Doronin. Liapidevsky flew an ANT-4, the civilian version of theTB-1 heavy bomber, while Slepnev and Levanevsky flew aConsolidated Fleetster specially brought in from the US for the mission, and the other pilots flew thePolikarpov R-5. TwoAmerican air mechanics, Clyde Goodwin Armitstead, and William Latimer Lavery,[3] also helped in thesearch and rescue of theChelyuskintsy, on 10 September 1934, and were awarded theOrder of Lenin.
As the steamship became trapped at the entrance to theBering Strait, theUSSR considered the expedition mainly successful, as it had proven that a regular steamship had a chance to navigate the whole Northern Maritime Route in a single season. After a few additional trial runs in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially opened and commercial exploitation began in 1935. The following year part of the SovietBaltic Fleet made the passage to the Pacific where an armed conflict withJapan was looming.
In the wake of the catastrophe, a central square inYaroslavl was renamed after theChelyuskintsy, as wasChelyuskinites Park inMinsk.Marina Tsvetayeva wrote a poem applauding the rescue team. Nine days after the two Soviet cameramen aboard reached Moscow, their footage was developed, edited and released as a feature documentary motion picture. In 1970,East German television producedTscheljuskin, a film about the ship's voyage, directed by Rainer Hausdorf and featuring Eberhard Mellies as Prof. Schmidt,Dieter Mann as the surveyor Vasiliev andFritz Diez asValerian Kuybyshev.[4]
Efforts to find the wreck of the ship were made by at least four different expeditions, and it was finally discovered in September 2006, at a depth of about 50 metres in theChukchi Sea.[5] The polar explorerArtur Chilingarov argued that the ship should be raised and converted into a museum.
Michael Roberts, an English poet, wrote a poem "Chelyuskin", which was included in his collectionPoems, published by Jonathan Cape in 1936.
The story was dramatised in the radio dramaThe Cruise of the Chelyuskin.
Shipwrecks and maritime incidents in 1934 | |
|---|---|
| Shipwrecks |
|
| Other incidents |
|
