Стр. 36 - V

Author : S. Brilev
Anchor of the Vesti v Subbotu (News on Saturday) program on the Rossiya TV channel, member of the Pre-
sidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Moscow, co-founder and president of the Bering-Belling-
shausen Institute for the Americas, Montevideo, Candidate of Science (History)
IN JULY OF LAST YEAR, people living in apartments
in Vladivostok that face Amur Bay could have witnessed
a whole chain of strange events.
Looking at the navy boat through a pair of binoculars, you
would have seen smoke coming out of smoke bombs and
stretchers being laid on the deck. If your binoculars were
very powerful, you could have seen that, for some reason,
the navy boat sailors had not "Pacific Fleet" but "Black
Sea Fleet" written on their caps.
Those two people were Ella Tukhareli, the director of a new documentary film on unknown foreign
voyages by the Soviet Navy during World War II, and myself, the author of the script and narrator.
The movie had been commissioned by the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Com-
pany (VGTRK).
In Vladivostok, London, Moscow, Edinburgh, and even in Montevideo (especially in Montevideo,
in fact), we filmed scenes based on unique archival records of what de facto was the first around-
the-world voyage in Soviet history, an unprecedented trip by Soviet cruiser-icebreaker Anastas
Mikoyan 75 years ago, during the severest wartime winter of 1941/42. Soviet and Russian historians
and journalists have got interested in that voyage ever since information about it was partially de-
classified in the 1950s.
Because of the format of a TV documentary, much of what we found out will inevitably remain
outside the film, but it seemed to me that some of it would be of interest to readers of International
Affairs.
The purpose of disarming Anastas Mikoyan was to enable it to pass through the straits of neutral
Turkey. After that, the cruiser was to set off on a journey to the Northern Sea Route past the
Tokarevsky Lighthouse in Vladivostok.
Something else was a problem, though. The purpose of disarming Anastas Mikoyan was to have it
comply with the rules of passing through neutral Turkey. But beyond the Bosphorus and the Dar-
danelles was the Mediterranean, which was literally swarming with fascist (Italian) ships and sea-
planes.
Anastas Mikoyan wasn't the first Russian ship to reach the Rio de la Plata. It's well known that Soviet
merchant ship Tbilisi was in Argentina, next door to Uruguay, when Nazi Germany attacked the
Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
But what were Soviet merchant ships doing in South America in the early stages of World War II?
That is a special and undoubtedly very controversial page in our history. Surely our sailors weren't
doing more than obeying orders, but the latter included orders to pick up Latin American goods
Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
The Fiery Voyage Around the World