The hand that baptized Christ
The biggest event of this summer for Russian Christians was the stay of the ark with the right hand of St. John the Baptist. The shrine was worshiped by millions of believers. The Ark has long returned to Montenegro in the Cetinje Monastery, and the memory of true Christians again and again returns to the meeting with the right hand that baptized Jesus Christ. Our newspaper did not ignore this great event. Now that the passions have subsided, let's once again turn over the pages of the history of the shrine, and also recall the little-known facts from the history of Russia associated with it.
The imperishable hand of John the Baptist was brought by the Evangelist Luke from Sebastia, where the body of the Prophet was buried by his disciples, to Antioch, and later to Chalchidon. In the X century, the right hand was transferred to Constantinople, where it stayed for more than five centuries. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the shrine came into the possession of the Muslims.
In 1484, after the death of the conqueror of Constantinople Mehmed II, his son Sultan Bayezid II, guided by political goals, donated the greatest shrine of Christianity to the Order of Malta - right hand Holy Prophet and Baptist of the Lord John. In 1799-1913, the Russian imperial family owned the shrine, after the Knights of Malta donated it to Emperor Paul the First. On October 13, 1919, Count Pavel Ignatiev, Minister of Public Education of the Russian Empire, took them to Estonia, to the city of Revel. For some time she was there Orthodox Cathedral, and after that she was secretly transported to Denmark, where the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna was in exile. After her death, her daughters, Grand Duchess Xenia and Olga Alexandrovna, handed over the shrine to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad to Metropolitan Anthony. For some time, the shrine was in the Orthodox Cathedral of Berlin, but in 1932, shortly before the Nazis came to power in Germany, Bishop Tikhon handed over the shrine to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia Karageorgievich, who kept them in the chapel royal palace, and then in the church of the country palace on the island of Dedinya. In April 1941, with the beginning of the occupation of Yugoslavia by German troops, the 18-year-old King of Yugoslavia Peter II and the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Gabriel (Dozhich), took the great shrines, including the right hand of John the Baptist, to the remote Montenegrin monastery of St. Basil of Ostrog, where they secretly were preserved. In 1951, employees of the special service arrived at the monastery, confiscated the shrines and transferred them to the State Repository of the Historical Museum of the city of Cetinje. In 1993, the right hand of St. John the Baptist was returned to believers. Since that time, the shrine has been in the Cetinje Monastery.
The itinerary of the journey of the right hand of John the Baptist in Russia did not originally include the city of Gatchina. But the parishioners of the house church of the Gatchina Palace insisted on changing the route, and after St. Petersburg the ark was transported to this small town south of the northern capital. Church hierarchs listened to the opinion of these parishioners not by chance. Firstly, the parish in the house church is unusual. It consists exclusively of museum employees who, in free time are rebuilding the temple. Secondly, the ceremony of donating a Christian shrine to Emperor Paul the First took place right here, in his family estate, in Gatchina, beloved by this monarch. The gift was presented by the knights of the Catholic Order of Malta - the sovereign Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, to whom the Russian emperor granted political asylum.
In the autumn of 1799, a solemn transfer of ancient Christian shrines to the Russian emperors took place. Paul the First timed the wedding of his two daughters, Elena and Alexandra, on October 12 and 19, 1799, to this event. Paul blessed both daughters with Maltese shrines, and he himself attended the wedding ceremonies in the full vestments of the Grand Master of the Order of Malta. This was not only a sign of gratitude to the donors, on the contrary, it was a conscious choice of the monarch, who found it possible to unite in his person the incompatible titles of the Orthodox Tsar and the Supreme Leader of the Catholic Order.
And if today the worship of a Christian shrine in Orthodox Russian churches is not surprising, despite the fact that the shrine originally belonged to the knights of the Catholic order, then the adoption by the Orthodox Tsar Paul the First of the title of Grand Master of the Catholic Order of St. John of Jerusalem, commonly known under the abbreviated name Order of Malta, became one of the most controversial events in Russian history. This happened on November 13, 1798. Emperor Paul I assumed this title after he received a proclamation dated October 27, 1798 asking him to head the order instead of the still reigning Grand Master Fra Ferdinand von Hompes, which was made up of the knights of the order. Paul granted the Knights of Malta political asylum in Russia after their citadel on the island of Malta fell under the blows of the Napoleonic army.
Remaining an Orthodox tsar, he took the title of Grand Master of the Order of Malta and introduced his symbol - an eight-pointed white cross - into the coat of arms of the Russian Empire. The four ends of the cross symbolize the Christian virtues, and the eight corners symbolize the good qualities of a Christian. The white cross symbolizes the impeccability of knightly honor on the bloody field of war. The Maltese cross also became the highest award for Russian nobles, who wore it above all other orders and insignia.
The Catholic Church also assessed the act of the Russian Tsar ambiguously. The proclamation of a married non-Catholic as the head of a Catholic monastic order was invalid, from the point of view of the Catholic bureaucracy, and was not recognized by the Holy See, which was then a necessary condition for legitimacy. However, Emperor Paul I was recognized by many knights and a number of European governments. IN official history He is regarded by the Order of Malta as the Grand Master de facto, but not de jure.
The Russian period in the history of the Order of Malta turned out to be short-lived and ended shortly after the death of Paul the First. On the night of March 12, 1801, the Emperor was assassinated. Alexander I never tried to become the Grand Master of the order. Both Grand Russian Priories established by Paul (subdivisions of the order in Russia) presented four candidates for the post of Grand Master to Pope Pius VII, and on February 9, 1803, the Italian Fra Tommasi became the new Grand Master. On January 20, 1817, Alexander I countersigned the resolution of the Council of Ministers, according to which the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Russia itself was declared non-existent. With this, the Sovereign Order of Malta ended its stay in Russia. Russian noblemen stop wearing Maltese crosses above all other awards, and his image disappears forever from the Russian coat of arms.
The Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta traces its history to a hospital in Jerusalem founded by several merchants from Amalfi, a city on the southern coast of Italy, between 1023 and 1040, shortly before the Great Schism of 1054, which divided Christians into Catholics and Orthodox . The hospital consisted of two separate buildings - for men and women. Under him, the Church of Mary the Latin was built, and the Day of Commemoration of John the Baptist was celebrated as the most solemn holiday. Therefore, the knights of the order were later called Johnnites. Their main concern was the creation of hospices in many cities of Palestine. Those in need were given bread, clothes, and shelter. After the capture of Jerusalem, the remnants of the crusaders at first found shelter in Cyprus (from 1291 to 1310), then the order settled in Rhodes for 214 years, where it turned into a small sovereign state, then the knights were transferred to the possession of the island of Malta, where they were located. headquarters until Napoleon kicked them out. Then the knights found patronage in the face of the Russian emperor.
But even 200 years later, traces of the stay of the Order of Malta in Russia can be found here and there. The most striking artistic symbol of that time was the Priory Palace in Gatchina, built by the architect Nikolai Lvov from earth-beaten bricks. The palace, like the history of the union itself Orthodox emperor with the Order of Malta, is fraught with many mysteries. On anyone who sees him, he makes a "bewitching" impression.
The author of the palace restoration project, Irina Lyubarova, tried to unravel the reason for such a strong emotional impression of the palace on the audience and proved that it was built using the proportions of the "golden" section. The palace is absolutely asymmetrical, but it is perceived by the human eye as a very harmonious architectural ensemble. The high-rise dominant of the palace - the tower corresponds to the total width of the building. The tower focuses the tension growing from the lake surface near the walls of the palace to the buildings, courtyard, roofs, while the ratios of neighboring elements are built along the Fibonacci series. Philosophical component architectural ensemble, according to Irina Lyubarova, symbolizes the relationship between "Yes" and "No", "towers" and "not towers", presence and absence, heights and failures. The prior never visited his residence.
Thanks to the study of the history of the Order of Malta in Russia, the historian and famous Pushkin literary critic Mikhail Safonov put forward a new version of the reason for the duel of Alexander Sergeevich. Safonov found the key to the new version in a libel well known to the entire literary community, which the poet received shortly before his death, and which is directly related to it. The scholar translated the French test in a different way than was customary, and found that its author was well aware of the intricacies of Maltese terminology and practice catholic church, and besides, he was a Russian man, as he wrote the French text on Russian tracing papers. These three factors narrowed the circle of potential authors of the libel, while excluding Heckeren from it, who was previously considered to be the author of the lines that mortally insulted Pushkin. In addition, Safonov's version removes suspicions of infidelity, and as a result, the cause of the duel, from the poet's wife, the beautiful Natalie. In Safonov's translation, Pushkin is called not the Master of the Order of the Cuckolds, but the Master of the Order of Unfaithful Spouses. The researcher believes that the author of the libel could mean the infidelity of the poet himself, and not his wife.
Apart from artistic culture, religion and architecture, the story of the Knights of Malta is ingrained in the minds of reality TV fans. The revival of the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, when its citizens suddenly began to remember their princely and county origin, led to the appearance of a huge number of impostors, including self-styled knights of Malta. The Sovereign Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, now based in Rome, founded a "Committee on False Orders," Peter Canisius von Canisius, Ambassador of the Sovereign Order of Malta in Russia, told Parliamentary Gazeta. He named 8 self-proclaimed "Orders of St. John of Jerusalem", currently operating also in Russian Federation, in Ukraine, in Estonia and Moldova. He noted that "these and other self-proclaimed" orders of St. John of Jerusalem "have common feature- they want to use for their own purposes the history, good name, prestige and status of the subject of international law of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta (the Sovereign Order of Malta). Some of these structures sometimes change their names or their location and thus add more confusion to the overall motley picture of self-proclaimed "orders". The Sovereign Order of Malta is resolutely taking all measures to expose and stop the activities of the self-styled "Grand Masters", "Grand Priors", "Priors" and their self-styled "Orders of Saint John" by all legal and appropriate means.
Natalia Mikhalchenko
The hand that baptized Christ
The biggest event of this summer for Russian Christians was the stay of the ark with the right hand of St. John the Baptist. The shrine was worshiped by millions of believers. The Ark has long returned to Montenegro in the Cetinje Monastery, and the memory of true Christians again and again returns to the meeting with the right hand that baptized Jesus Christ. Our newspaper did not ignore this great event. Now that the passions have subsided, let's once again turn over the pages of the history of the shrine, and also recall the little-known facts from the history of Russia associated with it.
The imperishable hand of John the Baptist was brought by the Evangelist Luke from Sebastia, where the body of the Prophet was buried by his disciples, to Antioch, and later to Chalchidon. In the X century, the right hand was transferred to Constantinople, where it stayed for more than five centuries. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the shrine came into the possession of the Muslims.
In 1484, after the death of the conqueror of Constantinople Mehmed II, his son Sultan Bayazid II, guided by political goals, donated to the Order of Malta the greatest shrine of Christianity - the right hand of the holy Prophet and Baptist of the Lord John. In 1799-1913, the Russian imperial family owned the shrine, after the Knights of Malta donated it to Emperor Paul the First. On October 13, 1919, Count Pavel Ignatiev, Minister of Public Education of the Russian Empire, took them to Estonia, to the city of Revel. For some time she was there in an Orthodox cathedral, and after that she was secretly transported to Denmark, where the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna was in exile. After her death, her daughters, Grand Duchess Xenia and Olga Alexandrovna, handed over the shrine to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Anthony. For some time the shrine was in the Orthodox Cathedral of Berlin, but in 1932, shortly before the Nazis came to power in Germany, Bishop Tikhon handed over the shrine to the King of Yugoslavia Alexander I Karageorgievich, who kept them in the chapel of the Royal Palace, and then in the church of the country palace on the island of Dedinya . In April 1941, with the beginning of the occupation of Yugoslavia by German troops, the 18-year-old King of Yugoslavia Peter II and the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Gabriel (Dozhich), took the great shrines, including the right hand of John the Baptist, to the remote Montenegrin monastery of St. Basil of Ostrog, where they secretly were preserved. In 1951, employees of the special service arrived at the monastery, confiscated the shrines and transferred them to the State Repository of the Historical Museum of the city of Cetinje. In 1993, the right hand of St. John the Baptist was returned to believers. Since that time, the shrine has been in the Cetinje Monastery.
The itinerary of the journey of the right hand of John the Baptist in Russia did not originally include the city of Gatchina. But the parishioners of the house church of the Gatchina Palace insisted on changing the route, and after St. Petersburg the ark was transported to this small town south of the northern capital. Church hierarchs listened to the opinion of these parishioners not by chance. Firstly, the parish in the house church is unusual. It consists exclusively of museum workers who, in their free time, are engaged in the restoration of the temple. Secondly, the ceremony of donating a Christian shrine to Emperor Paul the First took place right here, in his family estate, in Gatchina, beloved by this monarch. The gift was presented by the knights of the Catholic Order of Malta - the sovereign Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, to whom the Russian emperor granted political asylum.
In the autumn of 1799, a solemn transfer of ancient Christian shrines to the Russian emperors took place. Paul the First timed the wedding of his two daughters, Elena and Alexandra, on October 12 and 19, 1799, to this event. Paul blessed both daughters with Maltese shrines, and he himself attended the wedding ceremonies in the full vestments of the Grand Master of the Order of Malta. This was not only a sign of gratitude to the donors, on the contrary, it was a conscious choice of the monarch, who found it possible to unite in his person the incompatible titles of the Orthodox Tsar and the Supreme Leader of the Catholic Order.
And if today the worship of a Christian shrine in Orthodox Russian churches is not surprising, despite the fact that the shrine originally belonged to the knights of the Catholic order, then the adoption by the Orthodox Tsar Paul the First of the title of Grand Master of the Catholic Order of St. John of Jerusalem, commonly known under the abbreviated name Order of Malta, became one of the most controversial events in Russian history. This happened on November 13, 1798. Emperor Paul I assumed this title after he received a proclamation dated October 27, 1798 asking him to head the order instead of the still reigning Grand Master Fra Ferdinand von Hompes, which was made up of the knights of the order. Paul granted the Knights of Malta political asylum in Russia after their citadel on the island of Malta fell under the blows of the Napoleonic army.
Remaining an Orthodox tsar, he took the title of Grand Master of the Order of Malta and introduced his symbol - an eight-pointed white cross - into the coat of arms of the Russian Empire. The four ends of the cross symbolize the Christian virtues, and the eight corners symbolize the good qualities of a Christian. The white cross symbolizes the impeccability of knightly honor on the bloody field of war. The Maltese cross also became the highest award for Russian nobles, who wore it above all other orders and insignia.
The Catholic Church also assessed the act of the Russian Tsar ambiguously. The proclamation of a married non-Catholic as the head of a Catholic monastic order was invalid, from the point of view of the Catholic bureaucracy, and was not recognized by the Holy See, which was then a necessary condition for legitimacy. However, Emperor Paul I was recognized by many knights and a number of European governments. In the official history of the Order of Malta, he is regarded as the Grand Master de facto, but not de jure.
The Russian period in the history of the Order of Malta turned out to be short-lived and ended shortly after the death of Paul the First. On the night of March 12, 1801, the Emperor was assassinated. Alexander I never tried to become the Grand Master of the order. Both Grand Russian Priories established by Paul (subdivisions of the order in Russia) presented four candidates for the post of Grand Master to Pope Pius VII, and on February 9, 1803, the Italian Fra Tommasi became the new Grand Master. On January 20, 1817, Alexander I countersigned the resolution of the Council of Ministers, according to which the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Russia itself was declared non-existent. With this, the Sovereign Order of Malta ended its stay in Russia. Russian noblemen stop wearing Maltese crosses above all other awards, and his image disappears forever from the Russian coat of arms.
The Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta traces its history to a hospital in Jerusalem founded by several merchants from Amalfi, a city on the southern coast of Italy, between 1023 and 1040, shortly before the Great Schism of 1054, which divided Christians into Catholics and Orthodox . The hospital consisted of two separate buildings - for men and women. Under him, the Church of Mary the Latin was built, and the Day of Commemoration of John the Baptist was celebrated as the most solemn holiday. Therefore, the knights of the order were later called Johnnites. Their main concern was the creation of hospices in many cities of Palestine. Those in need were given bread, clothes, and shelter. After the capture of Jerusalem, the remnants of the crusaders at first found shelter in Cyprus (from 1291 to 1310), then the order settled in Rhodes for 214 years, where it turned into a small sovereign state, then the knights were transferred to the possession of the island of Malta, where they were located. headquarters until Napoleon kicked them out. Then the knights found patronage in the face of the Russian emperor.
But even 200 years later, traces of the stay of the Order of Malta in Russia can be found here and there. The most striking artistic symbol of that time was the Priory Palace in Gatchina, built by the architect Nikolai Lvov from earth-beaten bricks. The palace, like the very history of the union of the Orthodox emperor with the Order of Malta, is fraught with many mysteries. On anyone who sees him, he makes a "bewitching" impression.
The author of the palace restoration project, Irina Lyubarova, tried to unravel the reason for such a strong emotional impression of the palace on the audience and proved that it was built using the proportions of the "golden" section. The palace is absolutely asymmetrical, but it is perceived by the human eye as a very harmonious architectural ensemble. The high-rise dominant of the palace - the tower corresponds to the total width of the building. The tower focuses the tension growing from the lake surface near the walls of the palace to the buildings, courtyard, roofs, while the ratios of neighboring elements are built along the Fibonacci series. The philosophical component of the architectural ensemble, according to Irina Lyubarova, symbolizes the relationship between "Yes" and "No", "towers" and "not towers", presence and absence, heights and failures. The prior never visited his residence.
Thanks to the study of the history of the Order of Malta in Russia, the historian and famous Pushkin literary critic Mikhail Safonov put forward a new version of the reason for the duel of Alexander Sergeevich. Safonov found the key to the new version in a libel well known to the entire literary community, which the poet received shortly before his death, and which is directly related to it. The scientist translated the French test differently than it was accepted, and found that its author was well aware of the subtleties of the terminology of the Maltese and the practice of the Catholic Church, and in addition, he was a Russian person, as he wrote the French text on Russian tracing papers. These three factors narrowed the circle of potential authors of the libel, while excluding Heckeren from it, who was previously considered to be the author of the lines that mortally insulted Pushkin. In addition, Safonov's version removes suspicions of infidelity, and as a result, the cause of the duel, from the poet's wife, the beautiful Natalie. In Safonov's translation, Pushkin is called not the Master of the Order of the Cuckolds, but the Master of the Order of Unfaithful Spouses. The researcher believes that the author of the libel could mean the infidelity of the poet himself, and not his wife.
In addition to artistic culture, religion and architecture, the history of the Knights of Malta is ingrained in the minds of reality TV fans. The revival of the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, when its citizens suddenly began to remember their princely and county origin, led to the appearance of a huge number of impostors, including self-styled knights of Malta. The Sovereign Military Order of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, now based in Rome, founded a "Committee on False Orders," Peter Canisius von Canisius, Ambassador of the Sovereign Order of Malta in Russia, told Parliamentary Gazeta. He named 8 self-proclaimed "Orders of St. John of Jerusalem", currently also operating in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Estonia and Moldova. He noted that "these and other self-proclaimed" orders of St. John of Jerusalem "have a common feature - they want to use for their own purposes the history, good name, prestige and status of the subject of international law of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta (Sovereign Order of Malta ) Some of these structures sometimes change their names or their location and thus add more confusion to the overall motley picture of the self-styled "orders". The Sovereign Order of Malta is resolutely taking all measures to expose and stop the activities of the self-styled "Grand Masters", "Grand Priors", "Priors" and their self-proclaimed "Orders of Saint John" by all legal and appropriate means.
Natalia Mikhalchenko
The Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic has a photograph of the wires of the icebreaker "Alexander Sibiryakov" in Arkhangelsk on July 28, 1932 - the embankment is full of people. It was a time of concentration of the state's efforts in a new direction - the development of the Arctic. Newspaper editorials told about the polar explorers, artists Lev Kantorovich and Fyodor Reshetnikov, photographer and cameraman Pyotr Novitsky, director and cameraman Mark Troyanovsky, journalist Vladimir Shneiderov, the future first host of the Film Travelers Club, were taken on board the Sibiryakov on the legendary flight.
Reshetnikov, known to any schoolchild from the picture from the primer "Again a deuce," patiently listened to Schmidt's two refusals in a request to take him on an expedition. Only his perseverance helped: before going out to sea, Fedor hung a whole wall in the Sibiryakov's mess with funny caricatures, near which the members of the expedition, including Schmidt and the head of the scientific part of the expedition, Vladimir Vize, stopped and laughed heartily. The works of Reshetnikov and Kantorovich, the films of Troyanovsky, and a dozen books by the expedition participants allow us to reconstruct the course of the expedition almost by the minute and feel its atmosphere.
"Alexander Sibiryakov" became the first ship in the world to pass the Northern Sea Route from Arkhangelsk to the Far East in one navigation. Sailors have been dreaming about this since the second half of the 19th century. In 1878–79, the Swedish Arctic explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld tried to make the transition in one navigation on the ship Vega, but was forced to spend the winter, a little before reaching the Bering Strait. While he was collecting a botanical collection on one of the islands, the ice completely closed the passage. The Russian Hydrographic Expedition of the Arctic Ocean (HESLO) in 1910–1915 on the icebreakers Taimyr and Vaigach tried several times to pass the route and returned, wintered, then again tried to get from Vladivostok to Arkhangelsk and, finally, reached - in 1915 .
The Soviet expedition led by Otto Schmidt in 1932 was able to solve the problem.
ice conditions
“The voyage was associated with a certain risk, especially since the Alexander Sibiryakov was a rather weak steamer,” says Sergey Frolov, head of the ice navigation laboratory of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of Roshydromet. “He had only one steam engine - about two thousand horsepower. For comparison: a modern nuclear-powered icebreaker has a capacity of 75,000 horsepower, the scientific expedition ship "Akademik Treshnikov" - 16.8 thousand horsepower. There was very little data on the ice situation. What we now call hydrometeorological support was absent. Navigators had little experience in piloting ships in ice."
The composition of the ice reconnaissance air groups at that time consisted mainly of seaplanes, which were based on ships. The plane landed on the water, then it was lifted to the deck by a crane. The seaplane, which was supposed to carry out ice reconnaissance during the voyage, crashed, and had to go based on their own observations from the ship.
In the 30s of the twentieth century, the first warming was planned - the ice edge receded to the north, it was "something similar to what is happening now," says Sergey Frolov. But interannual variability was also present: "Sibiryakov" in 1932 passed the track, and "Chelyuskin" in 1934 was crushed by ice and sank.
Propeller failure and drift
Approaching the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, the expedition members discovered that the Vilkitsky Strait was clogged with heavy ice. To the north is open water. So "Sibiryakov" for the first time in the history of navigation rounded the archipelago from the north. The second bypass of the archipelago without an icebreaker took place only in 1995, after 63 years. “I participated in this expedition. On the Kandalaksha steamer with the Japanese, we went around Severnaya Zemlya from east to west as part of the international Northern Sea Route program,” says Sergey Frolov.
In the Chukchi Sea, the ice situation began to deteriorate. "Ice was our enemy, and the harder the fight against it became, the more we hated it," Vladimir Vize wrote in his book "On the Sibiryakovo - to the Pacific Ocean." In the area of the Kolyuchinskaya Bay, the expedition began to come across heaps of ice floes.
"It was a band broken ice- explains Sergey Frolov. - Then the tactics of coastal navigation were used. It was believed that the farther to the North, the heavier the ice. Then it only turned out that sometimes the ice presses against the shore, and to the north there is a space with clean water. The Sibiryakov team had no information on where the ice was."
They tried to drive the steamer at low speed, in which the impact of the propeller on the ice floe is not so strong. But when the machine was running at low speed, the ship did not move forward at all: the ice was very heavy. In the end, the screw was completely broken on the ice. It happened on September 18, when the ship had covered 3,500 miles, and about a hundred remained to the Bering Strait.
Vladimir Vize described the most dramatic moment of the campaign as follows: “A terrible crack is heard - we have never heard anything like this before - then an eerie silence sets in. This is no longer a blade, it is the end of the propeller that has broken off, and we have lost the entire propeller, which now lies at the bottom of the sea. " Sibiryakov" ceased to be a ship and became a toy of currents and winds. I sat down at the piano in the wardroom and began to play "Prince Igor".
"There is no evil without good"
The question of drift direction became practically a matter of life and death for the crew. All changes in drift, wind and ice conditions were recorded every hour. No one has worked in this mode before. By that time, almost nothing was known about the prevailing currents in the Chukchi Sea.
“There is no silver lining,” I wrote in my diary that day, writes Vize. “Our drift will provide interesting material for judging the current regime in the Chukchi Sea, which, of course, we would not have obtained without losing the propeller.” Hydrobiologists also took advantage of the new opportunities and lowered a special trap, which sometimes came with a rich catch. searching for the beast, but almost always returned empty-handed.Only once did they catch a seal - it became the prey of a bear cub that was on the "Sibiryakov".
Initially, the drift speed was about 0.6 miles per hour. Past the sheer cliffs of Cape Heart-Stone, the steamer was already moving at a speed of about 5 miles per hour. For three days, the Sibiryakov drifted 45 miles towards the Bering Strait. There were still 60 miles to Cape Dezhnev when the drift speed began to decrease, and from September 21 the ship was dragged in the opposite direction. The Arctic grossly violated the calculations of the Siberians, who calculated that there were four days left to drift. We anchored, but this did not help for long: as soon as a more powerful ice floe fell on the anchor chain, the ship began to drift at the speed of the surrounding ice.
Icebreaker "Alexander Sibiryakov"
The ship was built in English shipyards in 1909 under the name "Bellavenchur" and was used for seal fishing. In 1915, it was purchased by the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Russian Empire for winter voyages in the White Sea and renamed in honor of the businessman and explorer of Siberia Alexander Sibiryakov. In the Great Patriotic War, the ship worked as a supply, light weapons were installed on it. On August 26, 1942, the ship caught fire and sank during the battle with the heavy German cruiser Admiral Scheer. The team was partially killed, 13 people were taken prisoner, fireman Pavel Vavilov escaped on Belukha Island.
The place of death of "Sibiryakov" was discovered only in 2014. A memorial plaque in memory of the dead sailors was fixed on the hull of the icebreaking steamer
Continuation
Under sail and northern lights
On September 27, the pressure began to grow, a north-west wind blew, and water lines began to form around the ship. There were no sails on the Sibiryakov, but there were large tarpaulins that served to cover the hold hatches. They were pulled, and the steamer went along the leads at the speed of a half-knot. Everyone's mood became the most cheerful, and those who "got crazy" immediately turned into ardent optimists, Vize wrote. "Sibiryakov" moved, albeit slowly, but independently.
It is this sailing event that is depicted on a fresco in the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic. The artist Lev Kantorovich, who participated in the expedition, depicted in an engraving a ship with homemade sailing equipment surrounded by northern lights. Sergey Frolov noted that the solution with sails was also implemented because a significant part of the team was from Arkhangelsk. "And Pomors have the ability to handle sails at the genetic level," he says.
The weather changed on September 29, and the ship was quickly dragged south. The next day, the researchers saw Cape Dezhnev. "Here we go around the last ice floe and finally go out to clean water, - wrote Wiese. - We are free! We won! A mighty cheer breaks out of the chest of the Siberians and spreads across the expanse of the sea. They salute with rifle volleys from the tank."
The first "northeast passage" in one navigation ended on 1 October. At 15:10, the tug "Ussuriets" approached the ship.
In tow, "Alexander Sibiryakov" moved for another month across the Pacific Ocean to the Japanese Yokohama, where it got up for repairs. When approaching Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka, Otto Schmidt received a government telegram: "Hot greetings and congratulations to the members of the expedition, who successfully solved the historic problem of through navigation in the Arctic Ocean in one navigation. Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Janson."
After a two-week stay in Tokyo, the expedition members returned to Moscow and Leningrad via Vladivostok, and the ship, having received a new propeller, left Japan on January 1, 1933. Having circumnavigated the southern route of Eurasia, the steamer arrived in Murmansk on March 7th. "Sibiryakov" became the second ship to circumnavigate the entire mainland. "Vega" Nordenskiöld spent 672 days on this path, "Sibiryakov" - 223.
The conclusions made by the participants of the expedition became a program for the development of the Arctic, implemented quite quickly. They consisted in the fact that the Northern Sea Route can be used for practical navigation throughout, but it is necessary to create and use special vessels that can actively deal with ice. One icebreaker should be in the area of the Taimyr Peninsula, and the other in the Chukchi Sea.
Air bases should be set up for ice reconnaissance. Small planes should be on the lead ships of the caravans. Several fuel bases should be set up on the Northern Sea Route. The ice regime of the Arctic seas should be studied in detail. Navigation planning should be based on long-range ice forecasts.
Glavsevmorput
The campaign "Sibiryakov" became a trigger for the development of the Northern Sea Route, Sergei Frolov believes. "Things were moving towards that, but it was the Sibiryakov's campaign that launched the process," the scientist says. According to him, this campaign was very knowledge-intensive. "The Sibiryakov team collected primary data on currents, water and air temperatures, synoptic, geological, hydrographic studies," says Frolov.
An important result of the expedition was the creation of an interdepartmental structure for the development of the Arctic - the Glavsevmorput. From the moment of its creation, on December 17, 1932, the structure was headed by the leader of the expedition on the "Alexander Sibiryakov" Otto Schmidt.
“The development of knowledge of the Arctic and the need for transportation of goods at the time of the Sibiryakov’s campaign reached peak values,” says Sergey Frolov. “The development of the Arctic met the geopolitical interests of the state: it was a new route on which our country could establish its own rules and be a monopolist. and a purely economic interest - there was something to carry, and a military one - it was necessary to defend their territories from the north.
The Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route was responsible for the national economic development of the Arctic and the provision of navigation along the Northern Sea Route. Glavsevmorput united everything: agriculture, transport, industry, education, and at some stage there was an overabundance of functions. According to Frolov, this was logical, since the Arctic conditions are close to those of the army: this is a constant danger, economic risks, and the sensitivity of northern nature to careless impacts.
The overabundance of functions of the Glavsevmorput led to their gradual transfer to other departments in the post-war period and to the disbandment of the structure itself.
"Now the reconstruction of the Main Northern Sea Route is impossible," Sergei Frolov believes. "The principles of organizing economic activity are different. The leading shipping companies that worked on the route - Murmansk, Far East - have now become private and decide for themselves what is more profitable for them to transport and where." According to the scientist, some experience of the Glavsevmorput can again be adopted. He considers the restoration of a single administration of the Northern Sea Route, which is located in Moscow, as an element of this approach. Frolov also believes that it is necessary to significantly strengthen the hydrographic and hydrometeorological support of the route, since there is still a lot of unexplored on it.
The expert does not agree with the thesis that is often heard now: "Russia is returning to the Arctic." "Russia didn't go anywhere from there," he says. "At some point, there was a slightly smaller presence, projects were closed, but the observation cycle remained uninterrupted."
Natalia Mikhalchenko, Alina Imamova
