In the mid-1970s, the Ministry of Communications of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics issued several series of postage stamps commemorating the nation’s fleet of Arctic ice-breakers. These included the very earliest vessels built for the Russian Empire as well as the nuclear-powered ships of the Cold War era. Interestingly, many of the early Russian ice-breakers were of British construction. One shipyard in particular – Armstrong-Whitworth – was responsible for the most famous of these mostly unarmed vessels, which, as will be shown, were to play important roles in the history of the Russian Arctic.
Despite its immense coastline, Imperial Russia and its successor the USSR historically lacked the warm-water ports that remained ice-free throughout the year as enjoyed by all other major maritime powers. Important links to the world’s oceans such as Kronstadt and St Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland, and Arkhangelsk, facing the Barents Sea, were frozen in for much of the year. Helsingfor, Reval and Riga, other Russian-controlled ports in the northern Baltic, were similarly ice-locked for varying periods of the winter, as were some of those along its Black Sea coast and even at Vladivostok in the Far East. The phenomenon was most acute along the Russian Empire’s vast Arctic coastline, which stretches over 24,000km between the Barents and Bering Seas. Ice-strewn seas and frozen ports not only restricted trading opportunities and resource exploitation within the northernmost regions of the Empire but also their political control.
The idea of modifying a vessel in order for it to withstand icy waters is centuries old. However, it wasn’t until the advent of metal hulls and steam engines that the notion of using a ship to systematically break up an ice-flow could be tested. In Soviet philatelic terms, the Russian ice-breaking era began with the Pilot. This vessel had been converted by the Kronstadt-based shipbuilder Mikhail Britnev from a Tyne-built single-screw steam tug [1]. The key design feature of all ice-breakers was a rounded hull and an angled bow – either sharp-cut or ‘spoon-shaped’ – that would allow the vessel to rise above the ice pack using its own weight to crack and displace the ice beneath. In the case of the Pilot, her bow was raised twenty degrees above the keel. Entering service in 1864, she was employed in the frigid waters around the isle of Kronstadt, St Petersburg’s main port, reputedly helping to extend the summer navigation season by some weeks. This success prompted Britnev to build two further ice-breakers, though these were also most likely conversions of existing vessels. The image of the Pilot that featured on the 4 Kopek stamp of the 1976 issue gives some idea of what this vessel and her immediate successors may have looked like, but its accuracy is questionable.
Although the Ermak, the ship represented on the 6 Kopak stamp of the 1976 issue, is often regarded as the first ice-breaker, it was preceded by several smaller purpose-built vessels. One of these was the Murtaja, which was built in Sweden in 1890 for the neighbouring Grand Duchy of Finland, which at the time was an autonomous state within the Russian Empire. The 930-ton vessel’s chief role was to maintain an open channel to the southern Finnish port of Hanko and assist ice-bound vessels in the vicinity. However, she proved to be insufficiently powered to perform these duties to any great effect.
The deficiencies in the design of this ship led the Finnish state to look to other European shipyards to construct a superior vessel, and Armstrong-Whitworth was among eight to tender bids for the order. Established on the banks of the River Tyne in 1847, the shipbuilder was by the 1890s the leading British supplier of warships to overseas navies, and was already building a vessel with ice-breaking capacities for the Russian Empire. The train-ferry Baikal was designed to carry trains of the Tran-Siberian Railway across Lake Baikal, and this existing work surely helped the company secure the new order. In fact, one of the design features insisted on by the Finnish authorities, one first developed in the United States, was for a bow-mounted propellor, and this was a feature of the Baikal [2]. The advantage of a forward propellor was explained in a contemporary marine engineering article:
‘The forward propellor, by giving to the water under the ice a high sternward velocity, deprives the ice of its support, which naturally reduces its resistance to crushing, so that the advancing bow of the vessel, which is arranged with a suitable overhang, cuts its way into the unsupported ice without experiencing either the shock or the resistance to which the former type of icebreaker was constantly exposed and very often failed to overcome.’ (The Marine Engineer, 1/5/98, cited in Tyne Built Ships)
The order for the new ship, to be named Sampo, was received on 6th June 1897. Armstrong had proposed an ambitious delivery time of seven months; but a strike at the company’s Low Walker yard meant she would take an additional nine months to deliver. Nevertheless, the resulting vessel proved to be a great improvement over her predecessor, assisting more than 100 ships in navigating the ice-strewn Gulf of Finland during her first year of service. Her success would lead the Finnish state to order a second ice-breaker from Armstrong in 1907, christened the Tarmo.
The Ermak was the first ice-breaker designed to operate in polar seas rather than simply iced-in Baltic ports. One of those involved in her design was Vice-Admiral Stepan Makarov, one of Imperial Russia’s most innovative and forward-thinking naval officers. In a report published by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society in 1900, Makarov explained his decision ‘to build an ice-breaker which in winter-time might clear the way through the ice to the port of St. Petersburg, and in summer-time help the navigation to the Siberian rivers flowing into the Kara Sea, barricaded by ice almost during the whole summer.’
Ermak appears to have been ordered after the Sampo, being launched on 17th October 1898, just a week before the latter vessel had sailed to Helsingfors. At 5128grt, she was three times larger than the Sampo, and at 305ft, 50% longer. Her beam of 71ft and draught of 40.6ft were also much greater than the Finnish ice-breaker. Ermak had a double-skinned hull with 48 watertight compartments, but to deal with Arctic seas, the ship needed to be not only more robust but also more powerful. Drawing on six boilers, her four VTE engines were capable of generating 10,000hp, powering her three stern propellors to a top speed of 12kn.
Makarov was in command of the Ermak when she left Tyneside on her delivery voyage to St Petersburg, navigating 160 miles of icy seas before making a triumphant arrival at Kronstad on 4th March 1899. Soon afterwards, the vessel visited Reval and other Russian Baltic anchorages, where, according to Makarov, it succeeded in releasing dozens of ice-bound ships. In addition, she rescued the crew of the doomed Norwegian steamer Frigg before she was crushed by ice in the Bay of Bothnia. Ermak also proved valuable to the Russian Navy, assisting in the salvage of the General-Admiral Apraksin and Gromoboi; two warships that ran aground in icy conditions inside the Gulf of Finland. The ice-breaker was also tested in the Arctic, penetrating beyond the island of Spitzbergen as far north as 81°21′. Contrasting this voyage with that previously undertaken by Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen; whose strengthened ship Fram had endured a long, drifting entrapment in the ice; Makarov lauded it as ‘the first time man had taken offensive action against polar ice’:
‘In charging `hummock’ or `pack’ ice the bow of the Ermak rises up 8ft or so; the field cracks, and the ship then falls down and goes ahead, moving both sides of the debris of the ice-field. It is most exciting to see some of the big pieces of ice fall down into the water and the others coming to the surface from the great depths, every detached piece trying to find a new position, while the ice-breaker herself, always being pushed along gradually, rises, cracks the ice, and falls again.’ [3]
Despite Makarov’s publicised delight with the performance of the Ermak, in 1900 the ship returned to the Tyne for structural alterations including the fitting of a new bow section and the removal of her forward propellor. Nevertheless, this ship set the standard for succeeding Russian ice-breakers.
The northern Baltic was a busy theatre for naval activity during World War One, though principally for mine-laying and submarine operations. The region’s harsh winters left the larger warships of Russia’s Baltic Fleet bottled up in Kronstadt and other strategic anchorages for long periods, ice-breaking operations being restricted largely to keeping these ports open for the passage of cargo vessels. Several of these ice-breakers were, however, defensively armed. After the Russian army’s ‘Great Retreat’ through 1915 following the Germany’s Gorlice-Tarnów offensive, which pushed the Eastern Front as far back as the Dvina River on the outskirts of Riga, the need for more vessels of this type became essential. Since the arrival of the Ermak, only two small ice-breakers had been added to the country’s ice-breaking fleet [4]. With its Baltic Fleet increasingly under threat by German naval forces, the Russian government was having to rely increasingly on its Arctic ports, principally Arkhangelsk, for imports of war materials and food.
To this end, five vessels were purchased; all of them sourced from Britain’s wintry North American dominions. The Tyne-built SS Lintrose (renamed Sadko) and the SS Bruce (Solovei Budimirovich) had formed part of the ‘Alphabet Fleet’ of the Reid Newfoundland Company, which linked remote coastal settlements on the self-governing island. The SS Beothic (Georgiy Sedov) and SS Bellaventure (Aleksandr Sibiriyakov) were also Newfoundland-registered vessels, the latter operating as a seal-hunter. Both had been constructed on the Clyde by D&W Henderson. Finally, the Barrow-built SS Earl Grey had provided an ‘ice-breaking freight and passenger service’ along the St Lawrence River. Renamed Kanada and later Fyodor Litke (in honour of a 19th century Russian Arctic explorer) this distinctive clipper-bowed ship would be memorialised on the 10K stamp of the 1976 issue. (All of the other purchased vessels, save the Solovei Budimirovich would feature on stamps of the 1977 issue.) The Litke and Sadko were among those ice-breakers deployed at Arkhangelsk, their efforts enabling the port, which normally became unnavigable due to ice around mid-November, to remain open until January of 1915. In June of 1916, the Sadko sank in shallow waters in the Kandalaska Gulf while transporting railroad construction materials through the White Sea. The Solovei Budimirovich was also utilised as a coastal supply ship, linking Murmansk with the White Sea settlement of Belomorsk.
[1] The original vessel had a strong connection to Armstrong, having been constructed at Charles Mitchell’s Low Walker yard, which would merge with William Armstrong’s business in 1882 to create Armstrong-Mitchell, which in turn became Armstrong-Whitworth in 1897.
[2] Armstrong-Whitworth also built a second vessel for Lake Baikal; the Angara (1900) was designed to ferry train cargo and passengers. However, both ships would be made obsolete when the railway line was completed in 1905.
[3] Fyfe, H.C. (1900) “To the Poles by Ice-Breaking Steamer. An Interview with Vice-Admiral Makaroff”, The Strand Magazine.
[4] Constructed at the Nevsky Shipyard in St Petersburg in 1909, the Vaygach and Taymyr were Russia’s first purpose-built ice-breakers.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 