SS Chelyuskin
ship built in 1934
SS Chelyuskin (Russian: «Челю́скин», IPA: [tɕɪˈlʲuskʲɪn]) was a Soviet steamship, reinforced to navigate through polar ice, that in 1934 became ice-bound in Arctic waters during a navigation along the Northern Maritime Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok 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 the Northern Maritime Route in a single navigation season.
It was built in Denmark in 1933 by Burmeister & Wain, Copenhagen and named after the 18th century Russian polar explorer Semion Ivanovich Chelyuskin. The head of the expedition was Otto Yuliyevich Shmidt and the ship's captain was V. I. Voronin. There were 111 people on board the steamship, including Soviet cinematographers Mark Troyanovsky and Arkadii Shafran who documented on film the entire voyage, including the rescue. The crew members were known as Chelyuskintsy, with the singular form "Chelyuskinets".
Mission
After leaving Murmansk on 2 August 1933, the steamship managed to get through most of the Northern Route before it was caught in the ice 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Chelyuskin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.