Scientific leader of the Chelyuskinites. The first Heroes of the Soviet Union
The history of the Chelyuskin steamship, its first and last voyage are well studied literally by the day. The steamship "Lena" (later "Chelyuskin") was launched on March 11, 1933 in Copenhagen. July 16 "Chelyuskin" left Leningrad for Murmansk. Taking on board 112 people, on August 2, the ship left Murmansk for Vladivostok, working out the scheme for delivering goods along the Northern Sea Route in one navigation.
Captain Vladimir Voronin commanded the ship, and Otto Schmidt, head of the Main Northern Sea Route and the expedition, was also on board. September 23 "Chelyuskin" was completely covered with ice. The drift lasted almost 5 months. On November 4, along with the ice, the Chelyuskin entered the Bering Strait. Several kilometers remained to clear water, but the ship was carried back by ice. On February 13, 1934, as a result of strong compression, the Chelyuskin was crushed by ice and sank within two hours. As a result of the disaster, 104 people were on the ice (1 person died). On February 15, a special commission was formed in Moscow to save the Chelyuskinites, headed by Valerian Kuibyshev. On March 5, pilot Anatoly Lyapidevsky on an ANT-4 plane made his way to the camp and took ten women and two children off the ice floe. The last flight was made on April 13, 1934. All members of the crew of the steamer "Chelyuskin" were rescued.
To what extent did Chelyuskin manage to cope with the task? In fact, the flight ended in tragedy. Expensive, just bought abroad steamer was flooded. The shipment has not been delivered to its destination. The passage along the Northern Sea Route in one navigation was not carried out. Huge resources were spent to save people.
But, on the other hand, the passage of the Chelyuskin showed the whole world the seriousness of the USSR's claims to the Arctic. From the moment the ship was sent, this voyage was given not only important economic, but also ideological significance. After the passage in 1932 of the Northern Sea Route in one navigation on the icebreaker "Alexander Sibiryakov", the leadership of the Main Northern Sea Route was faced with the task of proving the possibility of navigation in high latitudes of an ordinary steamer without additional ice protection. The belief that this was possible was so great that the Chelyuskin steamer was loaded above the norm, and among the crew was the pregnant wife of one of the crew members.
The catastrophe that happened to the ship in the ice of the Chukchi Sea could be one of the greatest tragedies in the history of navigation, but it became a triumph for the USSR. In many ways, the adventurous idea with the passage of the Chelyuskin demonstrated to the whole world that the USSR is actively working in the Arctic, that the country is ready to go to any financial expense when developing the Arctic. And besides, a separate heroic story of the rescue of the Chelyuskinites by Soviet aviation demonstrated to the whole world the possibility of flying in high latitudes on not the most technically advanced aircraft.
Despite the loud celebrations and celebrations on the occasion of the return of the Chelyuskinites, the leadership of the country and the Main Northern Sea Route made the right conclusions on the issues of shipping in the Arctic. From now on, all ships operating in the Arctic were equipped with additional ice protection and worked with the help of icebreakers. Along the entire route of the Northern Sea Route, navigation and technical infrastructure began to be created. Separately, a project of research stations on drifting ice floes "North Pole" was launched.
The significance and importance of the development of the Northern Sea Route was confirmed by the Great Patriotic War. The Northern Sea Route has become the most important transport artery between the Far East and the European part of Russia. It was used to escort warships of the Pacific Fleet to the Barents Sea. It was along the Northern Sea Route that a large flow of national economic and military transportation went. Coal, nickel, copper, timber, consumer goods were delivered uninterruptedly along this sea route.
Working in the north in extremely difficult circumstances is not only a challenge to a person, but also a challenge to the viability of the state. As the experience of "self-elimination" of our country's leadership from the problems of the development of the northern territories in the early 90s of the XX century showed, the vacuum of state will is quickly filled by not always friendly neighboring states.
1. The first heroes.
2. Map of the expedition of O.Yu. Schmidt on the ship "Chelyuskin".
3. Mikhail Nesterov. Portrait of Otto Yulievich Schmidt. 1937.
4. Steamboat "Chelyuskin".
5. Speech by Schmidt before sailing. 1933.
6. Steamer "Chelyuskin" at the pier.
7. Pipes "Chelyuskin".
8. "Chelyuskin" sets off.
10. Schmidt and Captain Chelyuskin Vladimir Voronin.
11. Residents of Copenhagen welcome the arrival of Chelyuskin.
12. "Chelyuskin" sails from the port.
14. In the East Siberian Sea.
15. Repair of the bow.
16. Storm.
17. Floating ice.
21. Progress through the ice field.
22. "Chelyuskin" in the ice.
23. Photographing on ice.
24. Fedor Reshetnikov. The death of Chelyuskin.
25. First night in Schmidt's camp.
26. Chelyuskin camp.
27. At the flag.
28. Cracks in the ice.
29. Otto Yulievich Schmidt in a tent camp after the crash of the Chelyuskin.
30. A whaleboat from Chelyuskin surfaced at the place of death in February 1934.
31. Tent.
32. Signal tower.
33. A burning barrel of fuel oil as a signal fire for aircraft.
35. Aircraft polar aviation involved in the operation to rescue the Chelyuskinites.
36. Aircraft on ice.
37. Chelyuskins near the plane.
38. Great polar explorer Otto Schmidt.
39. Ernst Krenkel, senior radio operator of the expedition.
40. Georgy Ushakov, authorized by the government commission for the rescue of the Chelyuskinites.
41. Pilots - the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, participants in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites. Photo collage.
42. Pilots - the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, participants in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites.
43. Pilots - the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, participants in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites.
44. Pilots - the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, participants in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites.
45. First Hero of the Soviet Union Anatoly Lyapidevsky.
46. Vasily Molokov.
47. Ivan Doronin.
48. Mauritius Slepnev.
49. Mikhail Vodopyanov.
50. Mikhail Vodopyanov (right).
51. Nikolay Kamanin.
52. Pilots Nikolai Kamanin and Boris Pivenshtein.
53. Sigismund Levanevsky.
54. Fedor Kukanov, commander of the Chukotka air group to rescue the Chelyuskinites.
55. Alexander Svetogorov, border guard pilot, participant in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites.
56. On board the ship "Smolensk" upon completion of the operation to rescue the Chelyuskinites.
57. Meeting of the Chelyuskinites in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
60. Magazine "Change" No. 4 1934.
61. Moscow meets heroes.
62. On the streets of Moscow.
63. Moscow meets the Chelyuskinites.
64. Solemn meeting at the station. Schmidt, Nikolai Kamanin, Sigismund Levanevsky.
65. Meeting of Chelyuskinites on Red Square.
67. Chelyuskinites on Red Square.
68. O.Yu.Shmidt and I.V. Stalin.
69. Chelyuskinites, along with the leadership on the podium of the Lenin Mausoleum. THE USSR. 1934.
70. Chelyuskinites, together with the leadership of the USSR, on the podium of the Lenin Mausoleum.
71. Vasily Molokov and Otto Schmidt.
72. Ivan Papanin, Otto Schmidt and Mikhail Vodopyanov. 1938.
73. Poster about the rescue of the Chelyuskin crew. 1934.
74. Chelyuskins. Photo collage. 1934.
75. A book written by pilots who rescued Chelyuskinites. 1934.
On February 13, 1934, a tragedy occurred in the Chukchi Sea - the huge dry cargo ship Chelyuskin completely sank within two hours. The death of the “Soviet Titanic” threatened to become a grand defeat for the USSR in the Arctic, but turned into a triumph.
In March 1933, a ship was launched in Copenhagen, built by order of the Soviet foreign trade organization, originally named "Lena", because. it was assumed that it would be used to transport goods from the mouth of the Lena to Vladivostok. The ship had a reinforced hull for navigation in ice and, therefore, was classified as an icebreaking ship. It was this circumstance that made it possible to make a decision to use it in the campaign from Murmansk to Vladivostok along the seas of the Arctic Ocean in one navigation.
This was already the second attempt to overcome the Northern Sea Route in one season. The first, generally successful, except for the last leg of the journey, when the ship was caught in ice in the Chukchi Sea, had already been carried out by the icebreaker Alexander Sibiryakov in 1932. But there were few such ships as the Sibiryakov, and they could not take very much cargo.
So, "Lena" was renamed "Chelyuskin" in honor of the Russian explorer of the North of the 18th century Semyon Chelyuskin, loaded to the eyeballs with building materials for the station on about. Wrangel, coal for herself and accompanying icebreakers, food and other things, so that the ship's draft was 80 cm below the waterline, and solemnly sent from Leningrad to Murmansk. The leader of the expedition, Otto Schmidt, wanted to show by this voyage the possibility of regular passage of merchant and cargo ships along the Northern Sea Route, so the ship was not only professional sailors, but also builders, scientists, an artist, two cameramen and other workers, including ten women, one of there is a pregnant woman, and even a child - a girl of one and a half years. There are 112 people in total. Plus cows and pigs, as well as 500 tons of fresh water.
The first difficulties began almost immediately. Even during the transition from Leningrad to Murmansk, defects in the ship were revealed - I had to go to the docks of Copenhagen for repairs. The captain of the ship, P. Bezais, did everything to refuse to manage the Chelyuskin, and as a result, contrary to his will, the hereditary Pomor, experienced captain Vladimir Voronin, who initially went on the expedition as a passenger, was forced to take over these functions. He agreed to command the ship only as far as Murmansk, but fate decreed otherwise.
The first serious ice met "Chelyuskin" already in the Kara Sea. Even at the first inspection of the vessel, V. Voronin wrote: “The hull set is weak. The width of the Chelyuskin is large. The zygomatic part will be heavily impacted, which will affect the strength of the hull. "Chelyuskin" is a vessel unsuitable for this voyage. And now the first impressions of an experienced captain have been fully confirmed. Leaks arose in the holds, which, however, were promptly eliminated, but the Chelyuskin could not cope with multi-year ice on its own - the Krasin icebreaker was called to help. However, "Krasin" was significantly narrower than "Chelyuskin", so even following him, along a strip of clear water, "Chelyuskin" had to experience the pressure of the surrounding ice and crush them with his hull, which naturally affected the strength of the structure.
By September 1, Chelyuskin reached Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of mainland Eurasia. Here the ship left 8 people. But on the other hand, the team received an addition: on August 30, Dorothea Vasilyeva, the wife of the head of the polar station on Wrangel Island, gave birth to a girl. She was named after her place of birth: the Kara Sea, which means Karina. There were 105 people left on the ship.
It seemed, in spite of everything, the campaign was close to a successful conclusion. The ship has already passed three-quarters of the way, overcoming the Barents and Kara Seas, the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. However, in the Chukchi Sea, the Chelyuskin was caught in ice and he was forced to drift with them for about five months, until he was carried to the Bering Strait. And here, when the strait was less than two miles away, disaster struck. A large crack passed along the port side of the ship, as a result of which water began to penetrate into the holds. It was no longer possible to eliminate the leak, as was done before - the ice was rapidly crushing the ship.
During the forced drift, O.Yu. Schmidt received an order to transfer to Krasin and finish the trip, but chose not to carry it out, just as he decided not to accept the help of the Litke ice cutter in the hope that Chelyuskin would cope with the task himself. "Chelyuskin" failed, and on February 13, 1934, a huge ship in front of its inhabitants, who, almost in full force, with the exception of the supply manager B. Mogilevich, crushed by a load that had moved from a heel, urgently evacuated to the ice, went under water, making a rattle and crack tearing apart a huge structure.
People managed to save most of the property important for life, and immediately began to pitch tents, build houses from logs, equip a galley - in a word, organize life on ice, which, with the light hand of radio operator E. Krenkel, from now on became known as the "Schmidt camp" - that's right he began to sign his radiograms to the mainland, because Chelyuskin no longer existed. Several people expressed a desire to walk to the shore, leaving the camp, but Schmidt simply threatened to shoot them. This incident was over.
People on the ice floe showed miracles of endurance, calmness and organization. They lived as if no catastrophe had happened: in the mornings they still gathered for exercises, engaged in socially useful work, listened to lectures, held meetings, took walks with the children. All this became possible thanks to the outstanding organizational qualities and faith in the success of the expedition leader O.Yu.Schmidt. It was he, of course, together with the leadership of the country, who managed to turn his failure into a triumph.
Despite the ridicule of the Western press, reproaches for the stupidity of the enterprise, haste of action and confidence in the imminent unfavorable outcome - one Danish newspaper even published Schmidt's obituary, the entire Soviet people - on the contrary, not only followed the fate of the "Chelyuskinites" with bated breath, but also unconditionally believed to their salvation.
And salvation finally came - from heaven. Anatoly Lyapidevsky on his ANT-4 flew 28 times to the area of the Chelyuskin crash until he found the camp on March 5. He removed all ten women and two children from the ice floe. Then six more pilots joined him: Vasily Molokov, Nikolai Kamanin, Mikhail Vodopyanov, Mauritius Slepnev, Ivan Doronin, Mikhail Babushkin and Sigismund Levanevsky. And people on the ice floe tirelessly built landing strips for planes, they were broken all the time, and they cleared them again. The pilots made 23 flights, delivering people to the Vankarem Chukchi camp, and O. Schmidt, who fell ill with pneumonia while still on the ice floe, was sent to the city of Nome in Alaska by decision of the Government for treatment. Seven pilots became the first "Heroes of the Soviet Union" in history, including Levanevsky, although he did not save anyone and he himself needed help. All members of the expedition, 103 people, except for children, and the rescue headquarters of the Chelyuskinites were awarded the Order of the Red Star.
The train with the expedition members on the Chelyuskin made a long journey from Vladivostok to Moscow, stopping at each station, until Moscow met the Chelyuskinites on June 19, 1934. The solemnity of the meeting and the enthusiasm that reigned in the streets are well known from the chronicle: open cars with heroes were literally littered with flowers, greeting leaflets fell from the sky like rain. The country has shown the whole world that it never leaves its people in trouble. And the experience of the "Schmidt camp" and its rescue was very useful three years later - the four "Papanins" who landed on the ice floe with the help of aircraft and spent a long 9 months on it.
The Northern Sea Route has become one of the symbols of Russia's achievements. A well-established, well-functioning track in the polar zone is really a full-fledged reason for pride. However, the path to nuclear icebreakers and modern regular flights was not strewn with roses. The country had to fight with might and main for the Arctic.
The first journey along the Northern Route was made by Vilkitsky's expedition in 1915. But it was made a regular transport artery later, in the Soviet era. It was during the experiments on the Northern Sea Route that one of the most dramatic stories took place: the disaster of the Chelyuskin steamer and the rescue of its crew.
northern path
After the Civil War, the role of the Northern Sea Route only grew. The new authorities invested in the development of Siberia and its resources, in addition, the railways were in decline. For the construction of new polar stations, the compilation of sailing directions and maps, the piloting of ships with might and main, experts from the tsarist era were involved. Fortunately, the researchers could use the novelties of the industrial era - icebreakers and aircraft for ice reconnaissance.
At this stage, one of the main characters of the future epic, Otto Schmidt, arrived in the polar zone. This scientist came from the Baltic Germans. As a result of the Civil War, he did not leave - he explored the Pamirs, and headed the department at the Physics Department of Moscow State University, and compiled the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
When laying the Northern Sea Route, an obvious difficulty arose. Tasks in the Arctic were to be carried out by different people's commissariats, for each of which the Arctic was a deeply secondary region. Therefore, since 1932, a special department began to work - Glavsevmorput under the leadership of Schmidt - with broad powers and a range of tasks. The department was immediately engaged in organizing a network of sea and air transport, radio communications, building all the necessary infrastructure (ports, workshops, and so on), and scientific research.
One of the key questions was how to make the passage of the Northern Sea Route the fastest. Sevmore is freed from the ice for too long, but the idea to slip all the way in one navigation did not leave the explorers. In addition, it was not clear how free ordinary steamships, not icebreakers, could feel in the Arctic. Therefore, the newly created department quickly began to equip a new expedition.
The main hero of the new campaign was to be the Chelyuskin steamer. This ship was built in Denmark by order of the USSR, and its design was initially strengthened for navigation in the polar seas, although the Chelyuskin was not a real icebreaker. The main task of "Chelyuskin" was a breakthrough from Murmansk to Vladivostok. It was necessary to work out the transition, to establish interaction with icebreakers. Finally, the transition also had a narrowly practical goal - to change the winterers on Wrangel Island, who had been sitting there for years without getting out.
There was already experience in trying to break through the Sevmor in one fell swoop, but you can’t call it positive. In 1932, the Sibiryakov steamship passed from Arkhangelsk to the Chukchi Sea, crashed and lost its propeller. Then the team was able to get out of the situation in an original way: by installing home-made canvas sails.
The most trained part of the Chelyuskin team was made up of veterans of the Sibiryakov campaign, including Schmidt himself. The captain of the Chelyuskin, Vladimir Voronin, also used to sail on the Sibiryakov. This sailor hasn't left the Arctic at all since 1916. Another old polar explorer was Ernst Krenkel, who wintered on Novaya Zemlya and also flew the German airship Graf Zeppelin as part of the Soviet-German scientific program.
In addition to the sailors themselves, the ship carried personnel for the base on Wrangel Island - some with their wives and children, builders, scientists (from surveyors to zoologists) and journalists. In addition, a seaplane with a highly experienced polar explorer Mikhail Babushkin was loaded on board.
True, there was little time to prepare the flight. The Chelyuskin crew was pressured not only by the problems of the Wrangel station lost in the polar wilderness, but also by the assault, when they demanded from above to give a result as soon as possible. Therefore, it was out of the question to better prepare the ship and set out on the next navigation. August 2, 1933 "Chelyuskin" left Murmansk and went to Vladivostok.
The Arctic is a harsh mistress
Trouble began in the Kara Sea. There was a small leak in the hold. "Chelyuskin" coped well with fragile ice, the damage was not severe, but what was happening did not add confidence in the future.
By the beginning of September, the Chelyuskin reached open water, but here, instead of ramming the ship, the ice floes had to overcome severe rolling. Meanwhile, the time for landing on Wrangel Island was approaching. However, this problem could not be solved: Voronin, who had already mastered aerial reconnaissance, flew around the route together with Babushkin and made the obvious conclusion: the ice was too dense to pass. "Chelyuskin" goes straight to the Bering Strait.
However, the Chukchi Sea is clogged with ice. In mid-September, the Chelyuskin made its way through the hummocks. The ice around the ship was shrinking. The speed dropped to several hundred meters per day. In the 20th of September, the ship freezes in the Kolyuchinskiy Bay, squeezed by ice.
Finding themselves at the devil's horns in dense ice, Schmidt and Voronin did not lose their heads. To begin with, they tried to blow up the ice around the Chelyuskin. However, with the same success, one could try to blow up the moon. Ammonal left only small craters on the ice.
"Chelyuskin" was freed from the ice ... and on October 16 again fell into a trap. The screw is dead. The ice drifted and dragged the doomed ship back, then the winds changed - the "Chelyuskin" shook in circles. The ice cutter Litke tried to help the Chelyuskin, but the ice situation worsened day by day: the attempts of the ice cutter to break through to the Chelyuskin quickly became dangerous for the rescuers themselves, and the operation was curtailed. "Chelyuskin" finally wiped out a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest shore.
On the "Chelyuskin" introduced a regime of austerity. The issuance of coal was reduced, handicraft stoves were built, powered by engine oil and waste. Nevertheless, the temperature in the cabins dropped to 10 degrees. Food and warm clothes were unloaded onto the ice in case of a sudden sinking of the ship. We had to wait until July next year.
However, "Chelyuskin" did not wait for July. On February 13, 1934, a huge ice field was carried to the Chelyuskin. The eight-meter mountain of ice moved as if alive.
Schmidt and Voronin immediately ordered the unloading of people and everything that was necessary for survival from the ship. The work was still going on when the ice floe pressed the port side and began to destroy the Chelyuskin. First, the surface of the ship collapsed, but then the ice broke through the hole and below the waterline. Water entered the engine room. There were only a few hours left to unload the Chelyuskin, but they were put to good use. The crew endured everything that could be useful to complete the winter. Decisions were made quickly, commands were carried out, the state of the ship was clearly monitored. At 15:50 "Chelyuskin" fell on the bow and went under the ice. One person died - supply manager Boris Mogilevich, unsuccessfully bruised by a broken barrel and thrown onto the deck when the team left the Chelyuskin. Another 104 people took to the ice.
help from heaven
They managed to save quite a lot of property - even film equipment and dishes were taken out. However, now it was necessary to set up camp in an empty place in a severe frost. Tents were hastily pitched on the ice. There would be no happiness - misfortune helped: neither builders nor building materials got to Wrangel Island. But now engineers and workers began to build a galley and barracks. Walls were upholstered in tents, floors were laid from improvised materials, handicraft lamps were made, in a word, they were arranged in earnest.
Lucky for those who are lucky: thanks to prompt, clear actions during the disaster, they managed to save quite a decent amount of food, from canned food and rice to fresh pork, chocolate, condensed milk and cocoa. The stocks were transferred to the caretaker, and everyone, including Schmidt, handed over excess warm clothes to him.
At this time, the radio operators under the command of Krenkel were working hard to restore radio contact with the earth. The antenna bent in the wind, the receiver had to be repaired with bare hands. The first thing we managed to catch on the restored walkie-talkie was ... a foxtrot. Soon, Krenkel drove those who spent the night near the radio to other tents and set up a full-fledged radio center. Soon we managed to contact the Uelen polar station. Schmidt described the situation - without panic, but also without embellishing his position.
Moscow reacted quickly to the misfortunes of the Chelyuskinites. The special commission for saving people was headed by Valerian Kuibyshev, one of the highest dignitaries of the state. Meanwhile, the rescue operation presented difficulties that had not been known before. The USSR had experience in evacuating polar explorers in distress.
The rescued themselves rendered great help to the future rescuers. Schmidt and Voronin initially proceeded from the fact that it was necessary to make life easier for the pilots, and sent people to clear the runway. Heaps of ice floes and pieces of ice standing on an edge were cleaned off by hand on a suitable site a few kilometers from the camp. The result was a runway 600 meters long, and when the ice crushed it, the construction of new ones began - in total, the Chelyuskinites built four (!) Runways.
Both Schmidt and Voronin on the ice and members of the commission in Moscow worked out the idea of making their way to salvation on their own. It had to be discarded: too many people required too much cargo for life support: all the necessary property simply would not have been carried away along the hummocks.
On March 5, in forty-degree frost, the first ANT-4 aircraft under the command of pilot Anatoly Lyapidevsky took off from Uelen to Chelyuskin. Soon they saw smoke from the air - it was Schmidt's people who gave signals. Under joyful cries from below, Lyapidevsky's car landed at the "airfield". The order was strictly observed: the first women and two little girls were taken away.
Lyapidevsky brought crowbars, picks, shovels, batteries and a fresh reindeer carcass to the polar explorers. The aviator had to start with the greatest accuracy from the ice - outside the makeshift Chelyuskin "runway" there were ropaks sticking out, which, in a collision, would simply destroy the plane with everyone on it. However, everything went well.
The beginning of the rescue was laid, but on the same night a disaster almost happened to the barracks: a crack formed in the ice, dividing it in two. People jumped out who was in what - they had to disperse to tents.
Lyapidevsky no longer flew to the Chelyuskin camp - his car crashed nine days later. Everyone survived, but he dropped out of the rescue operation. However, by this time, several aircraft had already arrived at the scene. Interestingly, the Americans helped the Russians in this: they provided two aircraft and airfields in Alaska as an additional base, moreover, American mechanics were included in the crews of the transferred aircraft for maintenance.
Rescue was approaching - on April 7, three planes arrived on the ice floe at once. Earned a real air bridge. The sick were taken out first. Schmidt himself fell seriously ill, but was one of the last to leave. On April 12, only six people remained on the ice, including Captain Voronin and radio operator Krenkel. On April 13, the last inhabitants of the ice camp were evacuated at the site of the sinking of the Chelyuskin steamer.
The survivors were greeted as heroes. The ship's disaster paled in comparison to the brilliant struggle of the crew for their own survival and rescue operation.
Schmidt was returning through America. In the United States, he was introduced to President Roosevelt, and the world press did not get tired of singing about the polar explorer, comparing him with Amundsen. At home, Schmidt and the others were given a standing ovation.
The voyage of the Chelyuskin, despite the catastrophe of the ship, gave a huge experience of operations in the Arctic, and related to both navigation and the organization of aviation in the Arctic. For most of the participants in this epic, fate smiled. Schmidt continued the work of the scientist, and died many years later. Seven pilots who rescued the Chelyuskinites from the ice became heroes of the Soviet Union, Lyapidevsky was the first to be awarded this title. Orders were awarded in general to all adult wintering participants and technical personnel who participated in the operation, including two Americans.
Except for the tragic accident that resulted in the death of one of the polar explorers, the rescue of the crew went, it would seem, almost routinely. But behind this outward simplicity lies precisely the brilliant work and steely self-control of the expedition leadership.
Lazar Freidheim
"CHELYUSKIN" AND "PIZHMA": ALL DOTS ABOVE "i"
More than 70 years is not a short time. However, the history of the Chelyuskin expedition continues to attract attention. Sometimes by the significance of the goals of the expedition and the heroic opposition of people to the cruel northern nature, sometimes by the husk of conjectures. The Chelyuskin epic became one of the first campaigns of Stalinist propaganda, emphasizing the heroism of Soviet reality, giving "spectacles" to the masses. Moreover, the effect of popular celebration was achieved in a situation of failure of the planned expedition. This situation is associated with additional difficulties in the analysis of the events that took place, since the information of those years could be radically distorted, and the memories of the participants carried the burden of modern events of prohibitions.
A bit of history
In February 1934, the Chelyuskin steamer sank, crushed by ice in the Chukchi Sea. One person died, and 104 crew members landed on the ice of the ocean. Part of the cargo and food was rushed off the ship. Such a colony of people on the ice of the Arctic Ocean is an unheard of case. How did it happen?
To ensure the delivery of goods to the easternmost regions of the coast by the Northern Sea Route, it was necessary to try to go all the way from Europe to Chukotka in one short summer navigation. The first to do this was the icebreaker Sibiryakov in 1932. But the icebreakers had insufficient cargo transportation capabilities. For cargo, commercial transportation, corresponding to the tasks of developing the North, ships with a larger commercial load, adapted to navigation in the conditions of the north, were needed. This led the Soviet leadership to the idea of using the Chelyuskin steamship for the development of the Northern Sea Route. It was built in 1933 in Denmark at the shipyards of Burmeister and Wain, B&W, Copenhagen by order of Soviet foreign trade organizations.
E.I. Belimov "The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition", which introduced the myth of the existence of the ship "Pyzhma", built according to the same project and sailing as part of the Chelyuskin expedition with 2000 prisoners to work in tin mines. After the death of the main steamer, this second ship was allegedly sunk. Such a gloomy horror story, sewn to the idea of a scientific expedition, quickly spread. The essay has been reprinted by many publications and many Internet sites. This epidemic is still going on. Thanks to the efforts of journalists greedy for sensationalism, the version was overgrown with a whole series of witnesses and participants, in whose memory the events of those distant years allegedly surfaced. All these details exactly repeat the fragments of Belimov's literary opus. The same names, the same miraculous salvation, the same priests and shortwave champions... It is noteworthy that all interviews, memoirs and publications of this kind, without exception, appeared after the publication of Belimov's work.
I took up a detailed analysis of the described events in comparison with other known sources. My initial opinion about the reality of Belimov's version has changed dramatically. This resulted in a large analytical article about the versions of the Chelyuskin expedition, first published at the end of September 2004. It unequivocally concluded that Belimov's work is a literary fiction. A year later, based on additional data, I published the results of a continuation of the search, removing the remaining unanswered questions. This article combines the analysis of all found documents and evidence.
Main official version
The steamer with a displacement of 7500 tons called "Lena" set off on its first voyage from Copenhagen on June 3, 1933. It made its first transition to Leningrad, where it arrived on June 5, 1933. On June 19, 1933, the steamer "Lena" was renamed. It received a new name - "Chelyuskin" in memory of the Russian navigator and explorer of the north S.I. Chelyuskin.
The ship immediately began to prepare for a long voyage in the northern seas. On July 16, 1933, having on board 800 tons of cargo, 3,500 tons of coal and more than a hundred members of the team and members of the expedition, the Chelyuskin left the port of Leningrad and headed west, to its birthplace - Copenhagen. At the shipyard, shipbuilders eliminated the noticed defects in six days. Then transfer to Murmansk with additional loading. The equipment received replenishment in the form of the Sh-2 amphibious aircraft. On August 2, 1933, with 112 people on board, the Chelyuskin left Murmansk on its historic voyage.
The voyage proceeded successfully up to Novaya Zemlya. "Chelyuskin" entered the Kara Sea, which was not slow to show its bad character. Serious deformation of the hull and a leak appeared on August 13, 1933. There was a question about returning back, but it was decided to continue the journey.
An important event brought the Kara Sea - a daughter was born to Dorothea Ivanovna (maiden name Dorfman) and Vasily Gavrilovich Vasiliev, who were heading for the winter on Wrangel Island. The birth record was made by V. I. Voronin in the ship's journal "Chelyuskin". This entry read: "August 31, 5:30 a.m., a child was born to the Vasilievs, a girl. Calculated latitude 75 ° 46 "51" N, longitude 91 ° 06" E, sea depth 52 meters. "On the morning of September 1 The ship's broadcast read: "Comrades, congratulations on the appearance of a new member of our expedition. Now we have 113 people. The wife of the surveyor Vasiliev gave birth to a daughter.
On September 1, 1933, six Soviet steamships were anchored at Cape Chelyuskin. These were icebreakers and steamships "Krasin", "Sibiryakov", "Stalin", "Rusanov", "Chelyuskin" and "Sedov". The ships greeted each other.
Heavy ice began to appear in the East Siberian Sea; On September 9 and 10, Chelyuskin received dents on the starboard and port sides. One of the frames burst. The leak of the ship has intensified... The experience of the Far Eastern captains who sailed the northern seas stated: September 15-20 is the latest date for entering the Bering Strait. Swimming in the autumn in the Arctic is difficult. Winter is impossible.
Already at this stage, the expedition leadership had to think about a possible wintering in the ice. On one of the autumn-winter September days (autumn according to the calendar, winter in the cold), several dog teams arrived at Chelyuskin. It was a visit of courtesy and friendship of the Chukchi, whose village was located 35 kilometers from the ship. No one knew how long the ice confinement would last, where every extra person could be a fairly serious problem. Eight Chelyuskinites, sick, weak, or simply not needed in drifting conditions, were sent on foot ... 105 people remained on the ship.
On November 4, 1933, thanks to a successful drift, the Chelyuskin entered the Bering Strait. Clear water was only a few miles away. But no efforts of the team could save the situation. Movement to the south became impossible. In the strait, ice began to move in the opposite direction, and the Chelyuskin again ended up in the Chukchi Sea. The fate of the ship depended entirely on the ice situation. Clamped by ice, the steamer could not move independently. Fate was not merciful ... All this preceded the famous radiogram from O.Yu. Schmidt, which began with the words: "On February 13 at 15:30, 155 miles from Cape Severny and 144 miles from Cape Wellen, the Chelyuskin sank, crushed by the compression of ice ..."
When people were on the ice, a government commission was formed to save the Chelyuskinites. Her actions were constantly reported in the press. Many experts did not believe in the possibility of salvation. Some Western newspapers wrote that people on the ice are doomed, and it is inhumane to arouse hopes of salvation in them, this will only aggravate their torment. Icebreakers that could sail in the winter conditions of the Arctic Ocean did not yet exist. There was only hope for aviation. The government commission sent three groups of aircraft to rescue. Note that in addition to two "Fleisters" and one "Junkers", the rest of the aircraft were domestic.
The results of the work of the crews are as follows: Anatoly Lyapidevsky made one flight and took out 12 people; Vasily Molokov for nine flights - 39 people; Kamanin for nine flights - 34 people; Mikhail Vodopyanov made three flights and took out 10 people; Mauritius Slepnev in one flight - five people, Ivan Doronin and Mikhail Babushkin made one flight each and took out two people each.
For two months, from February 13 to April 13, 1934, 104 people fought for their lives, carried out heroic work to establish an organized life on the ice of the ocean and build an airfield that was constantly breaking apart, covered with cracks and hummocks, covered with snow. It is a great feat to save the human team in such extreme conditions. The history of the development of the Arctic knows cases when people in such conditions not only lost the ability to collectively fight for life, but even committed serious crimes against their comrades for the sake of personal salvation. The soul of the camp was Otto Yulievich Schmidt. There, on the ice floe, Schmidt published a wall newspaper and lectured on philosophy, which was reported daily in the entire central Soviet press. The entire world community, aviation experts and polar explorers gave the Chelyuskin epic the highest rating.
In connection with the successful completion of the epic, the highest degree of distinction was established - the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. It was awarded to pilots A. Lyapidevsky, S. Levanevsky, M. Slepnev, V. Molokov, N. Kamanin, M. Vodopyanov, I. Doronin. At the same time, they were all awarded the Orders of Lenin. Subsequently, the Gold Star No. 1 was awarded to Lyapidevsky. All flight mechanics were awarded, including two American ones. All members of the expedition who were on the ice floe, except for children, were awarded the Order of the Red Star.
Additional unofficial version
In 1997, the first public mention of the secrets associated with the Chelyuskin expedition appeared in the Izvestia newspaper. Its author was Anatoly Stefanovich Prokopenko, a historian-archivist, in the past he headed the famous Special Archive (now the Center for the Storage of Historical and Documentary Collections) - a huge top-secret repository of captured documents from twenty European countries. In 1990, Prokopenko presented to the Central Committee of the CPSU irrefutable documentary evidence of the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. After the Special Archives - Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Archives of the Government of the Russian Federation, consultant of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions under the President of the Russian Federation. The newspaper literally said the following: “From the fund of the famous polar pilot Molokov, you can find out why Stalin refused foreign assistance in rescuing the crew of the Chelyuskin icebreaker. And because, by the will of fate, a barge-grave with prisoners froze into the ice nearby.
The version about the presence of a second ship in the Chelyuskin expedition is described by Eduard Ivanovich Belimov in his work The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition. The author of the work - E Belimov - candidate of philological sciences, worked for more than twenty years at the NETI at the Department of Foreign Languages, then left for Israel. He presented his version of events in the form of the story of the son of a man who survived after the death of the second steamer "Pizhma", driven by the ship "Chelyuskin". This man also became a close friend of Karina, who was born on Chelyuskin. Such a source of information makes you take every word and detail very seriously.
An almost identical version appeared in the Versty newspaper on behalf of Israeli citizen Joseph Zaks, whose information was cited by St. Petersburg journalists. He claims that in the winter of 1934 in the Chukchi Sea, on Stalin's orders, the Pizhma ship, which accompanied the legendary Chelyuskin, was blown up and sunk. According to Zaks, on board this ship, or rather, in the holds, there were 2,000 prisoners who were taken to work in the mines of Chukotka under the escort of NKVD officers. Among the prisoners on the "Pizhma" was a large group of cool shortwave radio amateurs. After the explosions on the Pizhma, they got to the spare set of the radio transmitter, and their call signs were heard at the bases of American aviation. True, the pilots managed to save a few. Later, all those saved, including the father of Joseph Zaks, allegedly took another citizenship. It seems that E. Belimov's Yakov Samoilovich corresponds exactly to Joseph Zaks, quoted by the Petersburgers.
Correspondent of the newspaper "Trud" in Kazan on July 18, 2001. referred to the story of the famous Kazan radio amateur V.T. Guryanov that his mentor, a polar aviation pilot, said that in 1934 he intercepted the radio session of American pilots based in Alaska. The story was like a legend. It was about rescuing the Russians in the area where the Chelyuskin was killed, but not the crew members, not the members of the scientific expedition of Otto Schmidt, but some mysterious political prisoners who found themselves in the area of the famous Chelyuskin drift. After getting acquainted with Belimov's version, it became clear to him what he was talking about.
On August 30, 2001, the Russian television channel TV-6 in the program "Today" showed a story about the "Pizhma", which went to sea along with the "Chelyuskin" and on which there were 2,000 prisoners with guards. Unlike the previously published version of Belimov, in the television version, the guards took their families with them. The purpose of "Pyzhma" is to check the possibility of delivering the ZK by sea at this time. When the Chelyuskin was captured by ice and an operation to rescue it began, it was decided to blow up the Pizhma. The families of the guards were transported on sledges to the Chelyuskin, and 2,000 prisoners went to the bottom along with the ship.
In mid-September 2004, another statement appeared about the possible voyage of the second ship. Alexander Shchegortsov wrote that, in his opinion, the hypothesis of a second vessel following the Chelyuskin has a right to exist. Perhaps the ship had a different name (not "Pyzhma") and it is likely that it did not sink like the "Chelyuskin". At the same time, the author did not provide any additional grounds for his opinion. Unfortunately, such a message is very similar to the old “Armenian” anecdote: Is it true that Academician Hambardzumyan won a hundred thousand in the lottery? We answer: true, but not an academician, but a janitor, and he didn’t win, but lost, and not in the lottery, but in cards, and not a hundred thousand, but a hundred rubles. (I apologize for such a digression from the serious spirit of the exposition).
Version discussion
First, note that neither version excludes the other. The official version, as it were, does not know about the existence of other options, lives (or pretends to) independently. The second version gloomily complements the first one, gives a broad inhuman interpretation of the realization of the expedition's goals. Mentally returning to the days of the Chelyuskin voyage, one can imagine that Otto Yulievich Schmidt, the scientific leader of the expedition, set himself the most interesting scientific task of studying the Northern Sea Route and could not refuse the imposed conditions of this expedition. It could not be a question of the scientific future, but a question of life.
Our task is to try to form a true picture according to the information available today. If possible, dismantle these two decks and discard the fake cards.
Within the framework of the official version, perhaps, only three questions arise: about the compliance of the steamer with the tasks of the expedition, about the number of people and the coordinates of the death of the steamer.
"Chelyuskin" and its characteristics.
For the expedition along the Northern Sea Route, a ship was used, specially designed by Soviet shipbuilders for navigation in the ice of the Arctic basin. According to the technical data, the steamer was the most modern passenger-and-freight ship for that time. The ship was designed to sail between the mouth of the Lena (hence the original name of the ship "Lena") and Vladivostok. The construction order was placed at one of the most famous European shipyards Burmeister&Wain (B&W) Copenhagen.
A year ago, attempts were made to obtain information about this order from the builder. The reason for unsuccessful attempts was as follows. The shipyard Burmeister & Wain (B&W) Copenhagen went bankrupt in 1996, and a large amount of documentation was lost in the process. The surviving part of the archives was transferred to the B&W museum. The head of the museum, Christian Hviid Mortensen, kindly made it possible to use the preserved materials related to the construction of the Chelyuskin. These include photographs of the launch of the Lena and the test voyage of the ship (published for the first time), as well as a press release describing the Chelyuskin, giving an idea of the technical excellence of the ship.
A fragment of the photograph of the launching was posted by me on the website www.cheluskin.ru in
hope to establish the names of the participants in this event. However, we were unable to identify anyone in the image. In 1933, only one steamship was built for the Soviet Union, designed to sail in the ice conditions of the seas of the Arctic Ocean. The company did not build other steamships for these sailing conditions either in 1933 or later. The ship "Sonja", which is referred to on the site www.cheluskin.ru, was intended for other operating conditions and had, perhaps, only an external resemblance to the "Lena". In addition, B&W supplied the USSR with two more refrigerated ships and two self-unloading cargo ships. B&W's next delivery to the USSR included three timber transport vessels in 1936.
In accordance with the manufacturer's data, the steamship with a displacement of 7500 tons called "Lena" was launched on March 11, 1933. The test voyage took place on May 6, 1933. The ship was built to the special requirements of Lloyd's, the world's most respected and respected shipbuilding organization, with the note "Reinforced for ice navigation". It should also be noted that in a press release from B&W, the Chelyuskin cargo-and-passenger ship, the steamer was classified as the ice breaking type.
We have received copies of the Lloyd Register registers for 1933-34. from London. The steamship Lena was registered by Lloyd in March 1933 under the number 29274.
Tonnage 3607 t
Time of construction 1933
Builder Burmeister&Wain Copenhagen
Owner of Sovtorgflot
Length 310.2'
Width 54.3'
Depth 22.0’
Port of registry Vladivostok, Russia
Engine (special version)
Stat +100 A1 strengthened for navigation in ice
Decoding class symbols:
+ (Maltese cross) - means that the ship was built under the supervision of Lloyd;
100 - means that the ship was built according to Lloyd's rules;
A1 - means that the ship was built for special purposes or for special merchant shipping;
The number 1 in this symbol means that the vessel is well and efficiently equipped in accordance with Lloyd's regulations;
strengthened for navigation in ice - reinforced for navigation in ice.
After the renaming, a new entry was made in the Register under the number 39034. The name of the ship is given in the following transcription “Cheliuskin”. All the main characteristics have been repeated.
In the register of lost ships of the Lloyd's register, the Chelyuskin with registration number 39034 is listed with the following cause of death: "Destroyed by ice on the northern coast of Siberia on February 13, 1934." There are no other records relating to this period in the register.
After the first voyage to Leningrad and back, the shortcomings noticed by the Soviet side were eliminated at the shipyard in Copenhagen. Compliance with all the terms of the contract for the construction of the ship is also indirectly confirmed by the fact that there are no data on the claims of the Soviet side to the manufacturer after the death of the Chelyuskin, as well as further orders from Soviet foreign trade organizations to this company. This is also evidenced by the act of inspection of the vessel on July 8, 1933 in Murmansk according to the norms of the Soviet Maritime Register, which does not contain comments.
Thus, the assertion of many, including the members of the expedition, that the ship was an ordinary passenger-and-freight steamer, not intended for passage in ice conditions, is certainly erroneous. According to E. Belimov, the Danish government sent notes protesting against the use of steamships made in Copenhagen for navigation in ice. Why didn't there follow other demarches when reporting the death of one of them and the disappearance of the other? (We could not find confirmation of the existence of such interstate notes. Their presence contradicts the logic of international relations, since trading companies, and not the USSR and the Kingdom of Denmark, were the customers and manufacturers of the steamships). But the main thing: the Chelyuskin steamer, as mentioned above, was designed and built specifically for sailing in the ice of the Northern Basin. There could be not only diplomatic, but also technical grounds for the notes of the government of Denmark to the government of the USSR on the inadmissibility of using the Chelyuskin in the northern seas. One can not presumably, but unequivocally state that this part of E. Belimov's story, allegedly documented by the secret archive "The Secret Folder of the Central Committee of the CPSU", is a fiction.
When sailing from Murmansk, according to I. Kuksin, there were 111 people on the ship, including one child - the daughter of the new head of wintering on Wrangel Island. This number included 52 people of the ship's crew, 29 people of the expedition and 29 people of the staff of the research station of Wrangel Island. On August 31, 1933, a girl was born on the ship. There were 112 people on the Chelyuskin. More accurate is the above number of 113 people. As mentioned above, before the start of the drift in mid-September, 8 people on dogs were sent to the ground. After that, 105 people were to remain on the ship. One person died when the ship was immersed in the depths of the sea on February 13, 1934. The given data, with an accuracy of 1 person, coincides with the number of people according to the decree on rewarding participants in the Schmidt camp. The reason for the discrepancy could not be determined.
Of particular interest is the question of the coordinates of the death of "Chelyuskin". It would seem that this question should have been unambiguously defined. These coordinates, of course, were recorded in the ship's log, reported to the mainland to ensure the search and rescue of people from the ice floe, and should have been known to every crew of the aircraft participating in the rescue of the polar explorers.
However, in August 2004, the expedition to search for Chelyuskin with the help of the scientific vessel Akademik Lavrentiev ended in failure. The study used the data indicated in the navigator's log of 1934. Then the leader of the expedition, Otto Schmidt, reported the exact coordinates in a radiogram. All coordinates known in the archives, left by the expeditions of 1974 and 1979, were checked. The head of the expedition, director of the Russian Underwater Museum Alexei Mikhailov, said that the reason for the failure was the falsification of data on the place of death of the ship. There is an assumption that for some reason or because of the tradition of classifying any information, the changed coordinates are reflected in the press. In this regard, the author made an attempt to find these data in the foreign press during the rescue of the Chelyuskinites. In the Los Angeles Times of April 12, 1934, the following coordinates were given: 68o 20 's. latitude and 173o 04’ west. longitude. In the navigation charts of the Far Eastern Shipping Company, it is noted that the Chelyuskin sank at the coordinates of 68 degrees 17 minutes north latitude and 172 degrees 50 minutes west longitude. This point lies 40 miles from Cape Vankarem, on which the village of the same name is located.
15 years ago, in September 1989, the sunken "Chelyuskin" was found by Sergey Melnikoff on the hydrographic vessel "Dmitry Laptev". He published the updated coordinates of the death of the Chelyuskin, verified as a result of diving to the steamer. In connection with the statement about the falsification of coordinates after the end of Mikhailov's expedition, he wrote: “Let me object and cite the exact coordinates of the Chelyuskin camp, which were at the disposal of the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation, obtained by me as a result of a week-long search on the hydrographic vessel Dmitry Laptev using systems satellite orientation "Magnavox" and the military system "Mars": 68 ° 18; 05; north latitude and 172° 49; 40; western longitude. With numbers like that, don't drop anchors there! These are coordinates with an accuracy of one meter.
Given the inconsistency in the estimates of the coordinates of the sunken Chelyuskin, the author attempted to clarify the controversial points from Sergei Melnikoff, who claims that he dived to the sunken ship and took photographs in the immediate vicinity of the ship at a depth of 50 meters. When asked about the significance of the discrepancies in coordinates and the presence of falsification of the initial data, S. Melnikoff answered that “the discrepancy is not significant. Half a nautical mile. Due to the fact that in those days the coordinates were taken using a manual sextant, and I used the satellite system, this is a normal mistake. The search was carried out “on the maps of the General Staff, on which there are no other sunken ships in the area. And found half a mile from the place of its designation on the map. Therefore, with almost 100% certainty, we can say that this is "Chelyuskin". Echolocation also speaks of this - the object has 102 meters in length and 11 meters in height. Apparently, the ship is slightly tilted to the port side "and is practically not immersed in silt or bottom sediments. The insufficient validity of Mikhailov's statement about the falsification of data was confirmed by a member of the Chelyuskin-70 expedition, the head of the staff of the Commission of the Federation Council for Youth and Sports, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Alexander Schegortsov.
Since we undertake the task of conducting an independent investigation, when analyzing the factual side of the case, we will proceed from the “presumption of innocence”, i.e. we will assume that all the basic information presented by the author E. Belimov in The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition reflects real facts known to the author and is not burdened by conscious literary fiction.
Let us note that until today it was believed that the first publication of the work “The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition” was on the Khronograph website, published under the slogan “XX century. Documents, events, faces. Unknown pages of history ... ". In the preface to the site, editor Sergey Shram points out: “Many pages of this site will seem unusually harsh to some, and even offensive to some. Well, that's the nature of the genre I work in. This feature is the authenticity of the fact. What is the difference between fiction and history? Fiction tells what could have been. History is just what happened. At the turning points of epochs, people are more willing to spend time reading historical publications that tell "what happened." Before you is just such a publication ... ". Therefore, it is not surprising that such a problematic article, making public the statement of the expedition members on a very acute problem, was reprinted by many publications and Internet sites.
The search shows that the traditional reference to the "Chronograph" as the primary source is not correct. The publication in the "Chronograph" dates back to August 2001. The first publication of the work of E. Belimov was in the weekly "New Siberia", No. 10 (391) on March 9, 2000, published in Novosibirsk. In addition, this publication has a link: "specially for" New Siberia ". In this case, the author's place of work at NETI becomes absolutely certain, the abbreviation of which did not say anything during repeated publications. NETI is the Novosibirsk Electrotechnical Institute, later renamed the Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU). Let us also pay attention to the fact that the Israeli version also appeared in print later than the publication in New Siberia, but it also precedes the publication in Chronograph.
Anti-tansy
When it comes to comparing different versions, there is always the danger that the versions refer to different entities and their inconsistencies are not mutually exclusive. In this case, there are two unique and single events considered in both versions, information about which cannot be dual. Only OR-OR. This is the only, first and last, Chelyuskin's campaign, for which there can be no different dates. And the only case of a girl being born in the Kara Sea: there cannot be different dates of birth and different parents.
Therefore, we will first turn to the comparison of information on these issues.
According to the official version, the ship left Murmansk on August 2, 1933. Already on August 13, 1933, a serious deformation of the hull and a leak appeared in the Kara Sea. On November 7, 1934, the leader of the expedition, O. Schmidt, while in the Bering Strait, sent a congratulatory radiogram to the Soviet government. After that, the ship was no longer able to navigate independently and drifted in the ice in a northerly direction until the day of its death. E. Belimov writes: “So, let's go back to the distant past on December 5, 1933. At about 9 or 10 in the morning, Elizaveta Borisovna (Karina's future mother according to Belimov - approx. LF) was brought to the pier and helped to board the Chelyuskin. The departure began almost immediately. Steamboats honked, rockets burst in the black sky, music played somewhere, everything was solemn and a little sad. Following the Chelyuskin, the Tansy floats, all in lights, like a fairy-tale city. We can add a number of additional milestones showing that the Chelyuskin could not start sailing from Murmansk on December 5, 1933. In accordance with this, it can be firmly argued that the dating of the Chelyuskin expedition in the work of E. Belimov is erroneous.
In the Kara Sea on the Chelyuskin, a girl was born, named after her birthplace Karina. Most sources in this regard refer to the following entry in the ship's log: “August 31. 5 o'clock 30 pm the Vasilyevs had a child, a girl. Calculated latitude 75 ° 46 "51" north, longitude 91 ° 06 "east, sea depth 52 meters. " In the work of E. Belimov it is indicated: "And only once the twin ships moored to each other. This happened on January 4, 1934 year, on Karina's birthday. The head of the convoy, Kandyba, wished to personally see the newborn daughter. Elizaveta Borisovna occupied suite number 6, the same as that of the captain and head of the expedition. Karina was born in the farthest corner of the Kara Sea. There were some 70 km left to Cape Chelyuskin, and beyond it begins another sea - the East Siberian. The mother, at the place of birth in the Kara Sea, suggested naming her daughter "Karina." Captain Voronin immediately wrote a birth certificate on the ship's letterhead, indicating the exact coordinates - northern latitude and eastern longitude , - signed and attached the ship's seal". Comparison of these records allows us to distinguish two fundamental differences. In the first version, the girl was born on August 31, 1934. According to the second version, on January 4, 1934, Chelyuskin approached Cape Chelyuskin on the border of Kars which sea on September 1, 1933. In January 1934, the Chelyuskin steamer was already trapped by ice near the Bering Strait and in no way could it independently approach another ship, moreover, in the Kara Sea. This makes the only possible version about the birth of Karina on August 31, 1933. In the first version, the Vasilyevs are indicated as the girl's parents. The group of winterers included the surveyor Vasiliev V.G. and his wife Vasilyeva D.I. In the version of E. Belimov, Kandyba (without first name and patronymic) and Elizaveta Borisovna (without last name) are named as parents. It should also be noted that in the second version, the cited record of the birth of the girl does not mention the parents at all. Many memoirs speak of the birth of Karina in the Vasiliev family. Especially in detail, as about the family of his teacher, Ilya Kuksin writes about this. According to documentary data and memories, there is no place for another child to appear on the ship with other parents. Participants of the voyage by the name of Kandyba or with the name of Elizaveta Borisovna could not be found either in the examined documents or in the memoirs. All this unequivocally allows us to conclude that E. Belimov's version of the birth of Karina is not well-reasoned. In confirmation of the reality of the girl who was born on the ship to the members of the Vasilyev expedition, we present a photograph of Karina Vasilyeva in our time. Photo courtesy of www.cheluskin.ru. For her, who lived all her life with her parents, the far-fetched version of other parents and a different life described by Belimov was especially obvious.
The question of the number of winterers on a drifting ice floe is a very serious one, taking into account the voyage of two ships. This issue has not been addressed in any of the publications known to me. After the death of the Chelyuskin, 104 people were on the ice. They included 52 members of the Chelyuskin team, 23 members of the expedition O.Yu. Schmidt and 29 participants of the proposed wintering on about. Wrangel, including 2 children. At the same time, the regular number of members of the ship's crew should be somewhat larger, since on the eve of wintering in September 1933, several members of the crew were sent to land for health reasons. Exactly this number of people - 104 people - was taken by the pilots of the rescue expedition to the ground. E. Belimov hints that the number of people transferred to the ground could be higher, given the significant number of aircraft involved in the rescue. Therefore, we considered it necessary to give such scrupulous data on the number of flights and the number of people taken out by each pilot. Among the rescued winterers there is no place even for the mythical Kandyba and his wife Elizaveta Borisovna. At the same time, a team of the same size was needed to pilot a second ship like the Chelyuskin. We are not talking about the protection of prisoners. What is their fate in the presence of the second steamer, flooded by order carried out personally by Kandyba?
The brutality of the Stalinist regime and the methods of treatment of prisoners by the NKVD have long ceased to be a secret. Repeated cases of the execution of prisoners by flooding them in the holds of old barges were published and documented.
Suppose that in order to destroy all witnesses to the transportation of prisoners and their drowning, a decision was made, which is difficult to implement by one person, to destroy all the guards and members of the ship's crew along with the prisoners. But even the implementation of such a solution does not eliminate dangerous bystanders. The Northern Sea Route in those years was no longer an ice desert at all. The many-month voyage was accompanied by repeated meetings with other ships, the periodic participation of icebreakers in the expedition's piloting. We pointed to a meeting of six ships at Cape Chelyuskin, a meeting with a large group of Chukchi. E. Belimov describes repeated contacts between the teams of Chelyuskin and Tansy, both before the death of Chelyuskin and after. To destroy the witnesses, equally drastic measures would have to be taken in relation to all people who were or could be witnesses to the voyage of the second ship. Moreover, from these positions, sending O.Yu. Schmidt, an old intellectual, a man with an impeccable reputation in the scientific world, for treatment in the United States immediately after the evacuation from the ice floe. It is well known that the holders of secrets were under no circumstances able to travel abroad, especially without a reliable escort.
In 1932, within the structure of the NKVD, a Special Expedition of the Narkomvod was created. She served the Gulag, transported people and goods from Vladivostok and Vanino to the Kolyma and the mouth of the Lena. The flotilla numbered a dozen ships. In one navigation they did not have time to go to the Lena and back, they wintered in the ice. Documents relating to the activities of the Special Expedition are kept in the closed funds of the NKVD. It is possible that there is information about the sunken steamer. But they are hardly related to the Chelyuskin epic. The well-known English researcher Robert Conquest devoted many years to studying the processes of violence against his own people in the USSR. Separate works are devoted to the death camps in the Arctic and the transportation of prisoners. He compiled a complete list of ships used to transport prisoners. Not a single Arctic flight in 1933 is on this list. The name of the ship "Pizhma" ("Pizhma" - "Tansy") is missing.
The author reviewed a set of the Los Angeles Times newspaper from the first page to announcements for the period from February 1 to June 30, 1934. The search made it possible to find photographs of the death of the Chelyuskin, the coordinates of the sunken ship, a number of reports about the drifting ice camp, stages of preparation and the rescue of the Chelyuskinites, the participation of the Americans in this, the transportation and treatment of O. Schmidt. No other newspaper reports were found about other SOS signals from the Soviet Arctic or the location of escaped prisoners. The only mention of radio signals associated with prisoners is a note by a Trud correspondent from Kazan, dated 2001. No such reports were found in foreign studies about the Soviet Arctic. Over the past 70 years, we are not aware of a single publication in the foreign press about prisoners who escaped or died in 1934, who were in the northern seas at the same time as the Chelyuskin.
Soviet leaders often applied the principle that the end justifies the means. Both in peacetime and in wartime, turning people into camp dust was a common thing. From this side, sacrificing masses of people for the development of the North would be commonplace. But for all the recognized cruelty of the authorities in major undertakings, she was not stupid. To accomplish the same task with greater profit, a simple way out is striking. With even greater pomp, the passage of the Northern Sea Route in one navigation is announced not by one, but by two steamers. Openly, legally, to the sounds of orchestras, as Belimov said, two steamships proudly go along a given route. They are not afraid of witnesses and encounters with other ships. Only the “stuffing” of one of the ships remains a mystery: instead of timber, food and coal reserves, living building materials are hidden in the holds. There is no disappearance of a newly built ship, there are no many problems ... It is hard to imagine that the arbiters of destinies chose such a more vulnerable option than was possible. All this suggests that these problems did not exist, because the expedition did not have a second ship. The above information from the archives of the shipbuilder indicates that in 1933 only one steamship "Lena" was built for the USSR, renamed "Chelyuskin" before leaving for its only voyage. The registration books of the English Lloyd allow us to establish the presence of only this ship.
It was possible to attract shortwaves to active participation in the search. According to Belimov, a large group of cool radio amateurs - shortwavers were on "Pizhma" and they were assigned a significant role. The beginning of the 1930s was a time of widespread enthusiasm for shortwave communications. Many hundreds and thousands of radio amateurs in the USSR and abroad received personal call signs and went on the air. It was an honor to establish a large number of contacts, competitions were held among shortwaves. The proof of the establishment of two-way communication was the presence in the received information of the call sign belonging to the sender of the signal. Links to the presence of distress signals from shortwaves that did not belong to Chelyuskin were cited by journalists from third parties after the publication of the Tansy version. Each of them included details exactly repeating Belimov's text. Famous shortwave Georgy Chliyants (callsign UY5XE), author of the recently published book "Flipping through the old<
Let us dwell on some less significant details of E. Belimov's story, which do not agree well with reality. An obvious discrepancy is connected with the name of the ship. The author points out that something like this was written in English on a small copper plate: "Chelyuskin" was launched on June 3, 1933. The date fixed by the builder for launching the steamer is March 11, 1933. When launched, the ship had a different name - "Lena". There is no similar information about the second ship at all, although in essence Belimov's essay, it was precisely this information that was needed. With mathematics, the philologist Belimov, apparently, things were not going well. The following two episodes speak of this, in particular. He writes: "Five people took part in the meeting: four men and one woman." And immediately after this, he says that Karina's mother spoke, and Karina herself followed her. Already after the death of the Chelyuskin, according to Belimov, Pizhma turned out to be a new home for women and children: “On February 14, in the evening, snowmobiles rolled up to the starboard side of the Pizhma, first one, and then the second. The doors swung open, and children of all ages poured out like peas. And this despite the fact that there were only two girls on the ship, one of whom was less than 2 years old, and the second a few months.
The documentary essay, the form of which is claimed by The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition, requires accuracy in identifying the characters. Belimov does not have a single person with a first name, patronymic and surname. The protagonist of the essay, who spins all the intrigue of the ghost steamer, remains Yakov Samoilovich without a surname - a short, dense man with a round head, as happens with mathematicians. It could be assumed that the author does not want to reveal incognito, but the essay was written in the 90s, and the author and his main character are in Israel. Therefore, there is no objective reason for this. At the same time, information about the connection between Yakov Samoilovich and Karina would be quite enough for the KGB (MVD) to reveal incognito. In contrast, the captain of the Tansy has only the surname Chechkin without a first and middle name. An attempt to find such a captain in the northern fleet, who led the ships in the 30s, did not give a result.
Frank "literature" is manifested in a detailed presentation of conversations about the campaign of "Chelyuskin" against the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the leaders of the NKVD. In some episodes, the nature of the presentation of the material in The Secret of the Chelyuskin Expedition is similar to cases of making counterfeit dollars with the manufacturer's own portrait.
Chelyuskin resident Ibragim Fakidov calls the Israeli version "fiction". A graduate of the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, whose dean was Academician Ioffe, remained to work at the institute as a researcher. In 1933, I. Fakidov was invited to join the scientific expedition to the Chelyuskin. The Chelyuskinites, quick to nicknames, called the young physicist Faraday as a sign of respect. In 2000, I.G. Fakidov was indignant: “This is some kind of colossal misunderstanding! After all, if everything were true, I, being on the Chelyuskin, could not help but find out about it. I had close contact with everyone on the ship: I was a great friend of the captain and head of the expedition, I knew every researcher and every sailor. Two ships got into trouble, and they are broken to death by ice, but they do not know each other - some kind of nonsense! The last member of the Chelyuskin expedition, Yekaterinburg professor Ibragim Gafurovich Fakidov, who headed the laboratory of electrical phenomena at the Sverdlovsk Institute of Metal Physics, died on March 5, 2004.
The rewarding of Chelyuskinites has several interesting features. It was not the participants of the expedition who were awarded for performing some tasks and scientific research, but the participants of the Schmidt camp, "for exceptional courage, organization and discipline shown by a detachment of polar explorers in the ice of the Arctic Ocean at the time and after the death of the Chelyuskin steamer, which ensured the preservation of people's lives, preservation of scientific materials and property of the expedition, which created the necessary conditions for their assistance and rescue. The list does not include eight participants and specialists who have gone through the entire difficult main path during extreme swimming and work, but who were not among the winterers on the ice floe.
All participants in the Schmidt camp - from the leader of the expedition and the captain of the sunken ship to carpenters and cleaners - were awarded the same - the Order of the Red Star. Similarly, all the pilots who were originally included in the rescue group were awarded the titles of Heroes of the Soviet Union, including Sigismund Levanevsky, who, due to the plane crash, did not take a direct part in the rescue of the Chelyuskinites. They did the same with aircraft mechanics, awarding them all the Orders of Lenin. At the same time, the Sh-2 pilot and his mechanic, who provided air support for the entire navigation route and independently flew to the mainland, were awarded only as participants in the wintering.
In connection with the awarding of S. Levanevsky, it was suggested that he deliberately made, as it were, an emergency landing in order to prevent the American mechanic Clyde Armstead from seeing the ship with the prisoners. In this version, it becomes difficult to explain the participation in the flights of the second American mechanic Levari William almost at the same time together with Slepnev.
On the advice of one of the participants in the search, Ekaterina Kolomiets, who assumed the presence of her relative, a clergyman on the Pizhma, we contacted representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in the USA. We were unable to obtain additional information. A similar request was made by our correspondent in the circles of the Moscow Patriarchate - also with zero results.
The participation of E. Kolomiets and her information are very typical of attempts to restore the truth from memories. In the first letter, she wrote: “In my family, from generation to generation, the story of my great-grandfather, who was on the Pizhma at the time of his collapse among political prisoners, was passed down, he was an Orthodox priest, lived in Moscow and, according to him, occupied a high rank. In 1933 he was repressed along with his family.” The specificity of the information made it possible to rely on it as a guiding thread. However, later it turned out that the legend contradicts the facts. Some time later, in response to our questions, the correspondent wrote: “I found out such a fact that my great-great-grandfather was familiar with E.T. Krenkel. He often came to them in Kimry. And Nikolai Georgievich himself (the son of his great-grandfather), he is now 76 years old, worked all the time in a sailor for Papanin's protégé. The legend was replaced by the truth of life, in which there was no place for either Chelyuskin or Tansy. Specifically, she herself admitted that these data are not related to Chelyuskin and Pizhma. These are the problems of another family drawn into the maelstrom of Stalinist repressions.
Many people involved in Chelyuskino problems after the publication of the work of E.I. Belimov, would like to clarify serious issues in communication with the author. I also made persistent attempts to find an opportunity to find out the relationship between literary fiction and fact directly from the author. No attempts to establish contact with the author E. Belimov over the years that have passed since the publication of his work have been unsuccessful, which has been reflected on many sites and Internet forums. My appeals to the editor of "Chronograph" Sergei Shram, who was considered the first publisher of the material, and to the editors of the weekly "New Siberia" remained unanswered. Unfortunately, I can report that to get the opinion of E.I. Belimov no one will succeed. According to his old colleagues, he died in Israel in 2002.
Verification of all the main provisions of the work of E. Belimov or the Israeli version, as some authors call it, is completed. The facts and publications were considered, the memories of witnesses were heard. This allows today to put an end to the investigation of the "secrets" of the Chelyuskin expedition. The presumption of innocence has come to an end. In accordance with all the information known today, it can be argued that the Tansy version is a literary fiction.
In modern conditions of greater openness, an attempt was made to find out if the families of the expedition members had any assumptions about the presence of any ship or barge with prisoners in the Chelyuskin drift zone. In the families of O.Yu. Schmidt and E.T. Krenkel answered unequivocally that such a version had never arisen. In addition to the ice hummocks around the ship, neither during the last period of the voyage, nor during the drift of the camp, there was nothing and no one - an ice desert.
We could not find any facts and information confirming the presence of a second steamer, which was on the same expedition as the Chelyuskin. I would like to quote Confucius: "It is difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there." We have done this hard work and responsibly testify: it was not there! There was no ship with prisoners as part of the Chelyuskin expedition. The Chelyuskin, a cargo-and-passenger ship specially designed for navigation in ice, under the guidance of strong and courageous people, tried to solve the problem of laying the Northern Sea Route for ships of a non-icebreaking type. The problem was half a step away from the solution. But she didn't give in. The risk of such sinking without escort by icebreakers turned out to be so serious that no more attempts were made.
In conclusion, I want to express my deep gratitude for the responsiveness and participation, desire to help the head of the B&W, Copenhagen museum Christian Mortensen, Anna Kovn, an employee of the Lloyd’s Register information department, Sergey Melnikoff, publisher and traveler, Alexei Mikhailov, director of the Russian Underwater Museum, T.E. Krenkel - son of radio operator E.T. Krenkel, V.O. Schmidt, the son of the expedition leader O.Yu. Schmidt, shortwave Georgy Chliyants, Ekaterina Kolomiets, as well as many other correspondents who took part in the discussion and responded to difficult questions of Russian history.
Reviews
Of course, the history of the expedition of a huge steamboat that had just been made for colossal money and left into the polar night at the whim of Schmidt overflowing with enthusiasm is falsified, and the history of the feat of 28 Panfilov’s men is overgrown with new historical details.
This is our time.
From the page of the author Tansy ():
"Eduard Belimov was born in Siberia in 1936 in the family of a historian. At the age of sixteen he completely lost his sight, but despite this, he graduated with honors from the Novosibirsk Pedagogical Institute, received a philological education. For thirty-three years he taught German at the Novosibirsk Technical University and at the same time was engaged in science: languages and ethnography of the small peoples of Siberia.PhD in Philology.He made ten expeditions to the regions of the Far North.
10 expeditions being blind. Fiction, of course!
PS. "The country has the greatest famine in history. 32-33. At the same time, the country spends an enormous amount of money to order a non-standard and expensive ship. Which, in an incredible hurry, neglecting all the proven methods of such travel, without really checking it, is driven on a very dubious voyage and it sinks.
An accident with human casualties is called a catastrophe.
Schmidt is responsible. Could rest and not swim until the start of the next navigation. . I would find an excuse. In the worst case, one bearded head would fly and not risk a hundred lives.
Question - what is the urgency and priority? Like other problems before the country, science and industry did not stand? I don't understand. There are only assumptions.
An attempt to pave the way to the DB, except for the Trans-Siberian?
BAM was built for the same purpose, starting from the year 38.
Got hot with Japan? No wonder the Koreans were evicted to Wed. Asia already at 37m.
Just do not say that the goal was to explore the Arctic and the station on about. Wrangel with a nursing mother and a baby, a toilet in the outskirts in the polar night and with a furious wind.
78 years ago on April 13, 1934, the operation to rescue the Chelyuskinites in the Arctic was completed
In the summer of 1933, a scientific expedition led by O. Schmidt on the Chelyuskin steamer set sail from Murmansk. The purpose of the expedition, in addition to collecting various materials, was to check the possibility of passage by the Northern Sea Route by transport ships, which had previously been possible only by the icebreaker Sibiryakov, which for the first time in the history of navigation passed from the White Sea to the Pacific Ocean in one summer navigation.
Boarding women and children
The voyage was successful, but already at the end of the journey, having passed five seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chelyuskin was caught in ice in the Bering Sea. Due to the threat of flooding, the crew and members of the expedition were forced to leave the ship. On February 13, 1934, the ship was crushed by ice and sank.
Thanks to the operational work of the Chelyuskinites, all the necessary things and provisions were brought on deck in advance and quickly dropped onto the ice. An ice camp was set up on a drifting ice floe, in which there were 104 people, including 10 women and two little girls born during the voyage. This camp lasted 2 months.
People did not lose heart, they believed that they would be saved. They constantly cleared the ice, preparing airfields for the landing of rescue aircraft.
Two days after the crash of the ship in Moscow, a special commission was formed, headed by Valerian Kuibyshev. To rescue the Chelyuskinites, polar aviation and ships were thrown - "Krasin", "Stalingrad" and "Smolensk". At Cape Olyutorka, aircraft were unloaded from the ships and assembled for flights to the Schmidt camp. The pilots did the impossible: they got there on light planes.
About three weeks after the sinking of the ship, on March 5, pilot Anatoly Lyapidevsky on an ANT-4 aircraft made his way to the camp and removed ten women and two children from the ice floe. First of all, all women and children were taken from the ice floe, then the rest of the Chelyuskinites. At temperatures below 40 degrees, the pilots made more than a dozen flights and evacuated those in trouble.
The next flight was made only on April 7th. For a week, pilots Vasily Molokov, Nikolai Kamanin, Mauritius Slepnev, Mikhail Vodopyanov and Ivan Doronin took the rest of the Chelyuskinites to the mainland. The last flight was made on April 13, 1934. In total, the pilots made 24 flights, transporting people to the Vankarem camp in Chukotka, located 140-160 km from the ice camp. Pilot M.S. Babushkin and flight mechanic Georgy Valavin on April 2 independently flew from the ice floe to Vankarem on the Sh-2 aircraft, which served the Chelyuskin for ice reconnaissance.
On April 13, 1934, the operation to rescue the Chelyuskinites was completed, and the ice camp ceased to exist. Through the joint efforts of pilots and sailors, the participants of the northern expedition were saved. In the port of Vladivostok, ships with Chelyuskins and hero pilots on board entered 7 June.
The significance of the Chelyuskin rescue operation at that time was so great that it was for this feat that the Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on April 16, 1934 established the honorary title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The first holders of this award were the pilots who participated in this operation - A. Lyapidevsky, S. Levanevsky, M. Slepnev, N. Kamanin, V. Molokov, I. Doronin and M. Vodopyanov.
The first Heroes of the Soviet Union - the pilots who saved the Chelyuskins (from left to right): A. Lyapidevsky, S. Levanevsky, M. Slepnev, V. Molokov, N. Kamanin, M. Vodopyanov, I. Doronin.
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