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 fieldsin September. After that it drifted in the ice pack before sinking on 13 February 1934, crushed by the icepacks near Kolyuchin Island in the Chukchi Sea. The crew managed to escape onto the ice and built a makeshift airstrip using only a few spades, ice shovels and two crowbars. They had to rebuild the airstrip thirteen times, until they were rescued in April of the same year and flown to the village of Vankarem on the coast of the sea. From there, some of the Chelyuskinites were flown further to the village of Uelen, while fifty-three men walked over 300 miles to get there. The aircraft pilots who took part in search and rescue operations were the first people to receive the newly established highest title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Those pilots were Anatoly Liapidevsky, Sigizmund Levanevsky, Vasily Molokov, Mavriky Slepnyov, Mikhail Vodopianov, Nikolai Kamanin and Ivan Doronin. Liapidevsky flew an ANT-4, the civilian version of the TB-1heavy bomber, while Slepnev and Levanevsky flew a Consolidated Fleetster specially brought in from the US for the mission, and the other pilots flew the Polikarpov R-5. Two American air mechanics, Clyde Goodwin Armitstead, and William Latimer Lavery, also helped in the search and rescue of the Chelyuskintsy, on 10 September 1934, and were awarded the Order of Lenin. As the steamship became trapped at the entrance to the Bering Strait, the USSR considered the expedition mainly successful, as it had proven that a regular steamship had a chance to navigate the whole Northern Maritime Route in a single season. After a few additional trial runs in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially opened and commercial exploitation began in 1935. Next year, part of the Soviet Baltic Fleet made the passage to the Pacific where an armed conflict with Japan was looming. There were 10 ladies and two small kids on board. One of the kids was only 6 months old. Throughout the voyage one passenger got sick and died.
Legacy
In the wake of the catastrophe, a central square in Yaroslavl was renamed after the Chelyuskintsy, as was Chelyuskinites Park in Minsk. Marina Tsvetayeva wrote a poem applauding the rescue team. In 1970, East German television produced Tscheljuskin, a film about the ship's voyage, directed by Rainer Hausdorf and featuring Eberhard Mellies as Prof. Schmidt, Dieter Mann as the surveyor Vasiliev and Fritz Diez as Valerian Kuybyshev. Efforts to find the wreck of the ship were made by at least four different expeditions, and it was finally discovered in September 2006, at a depth of about 50 metres in the Chukchi Sea. The polar explorer Artur Chilingarov argued that the ship should be raised and converted into a museum. Michael Roberts, an English poet, wrote a poem "Chelyuskin", which was included in his collection Poems, published by Jonathan Cape in 1936.
