Cheliuskin

a Soviet steamship with a displacement of 7,500 tons, built in Denmark in 1933 and named in honor of S. I. Cheliuskin.

The Cheliuskin set out in 1933 to make a voyage from Murmansk to Vladivostok by way of the Northern Sea Route during one navigation season. The head of the expedition was O. Iu. Shmidt, and the captain of the ship was V. I. Voronin; 111 persons sailed on the voyage. After becoming ice-bound in the Bering Strait, the Cheliuskin was carried into the Chukchi Sea, where it was crushed by the ice and sank on Feb. 13, 1934. In a rescue that concluded on April 13, the members of the expedition were taken from the ice to Cape Vankarem on the mainland. Their rescuers, Soviet pilots A. V. Liapidevskii, S. S. Levanevskii, V. S. Molokov, N. P. Kamanin, M. T. Slepnev, M. V. Vodop’ianov, and I. V. Doronin, were the first to be honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union.