Where is ssv 33 ural now? The largest nuclear ship in the USSR. Interesting facts from the life of the ship
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (with the bookmark received the name "Ural") with a system of special technical means intelligence "Coral".
After arriving at the base (Strelok Bay, Tikhookeansky settlement, Pacific Fleet), the crew began preparations for a military campaign to the area of the US missile defense test site on Kwajelin Atoll. However, this campaign never took place. For a long time, the crew, even with the help of specialists from the Baltic Shipyard, could not fix a malfunction in the ship's cooling system. nuclear facility... Graduates of military land schools and academies are specialists in the operation of unique complexes of the "Coral" system, MVK "Elbrus" and functional software- did not want to serve in the navy anymore and began to write off to the shore.
The Navy could not solve the problem of operating an onboard nuclear installation and the main complexes of the Coral system for several years. After the collapse of the USSR, the equipment was mothballed, and the technological premises were welded. Such was the fate of the large nuclear reconnaissance ship "Ural" with the system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
Let's find out more about the history of this ship ...
In years cold war the USSR was faced with an urgent need to control potential launches of ballistic missiles from anywhere in the world. It was not possible to solve this problem by ground means, the USSR simply did not have military bases in many parts of the world. In turn, the ships of the Maritime Space Fleet ("Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and others, see the articles "History of the Maritime Space Fleet" and "The Last Voyage of Yuri Gagarin") did not have active radars and were intended to work on the "defendants" of domestic spacecraft ...
Thus, it was decided to create a special battleship, which would allow you to control any subspace object at any segment of its trajectory.
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (when it was laid down, named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". The preparation and approval of the draft resolution with numerous ministries and departments was ensured by a group of employees of the 10th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Leningrad branch of the State Industrial and Technological Industry under the leadership of V. Kuryshev, who at that time held the position of deputy head of the central board.
The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze. TsNPO Vympel of the Ministry of Radio Industry was appointed the lead developer of the Coral system. More than 200 research institutes, design bureaus, manufacturing plants and installation and adjustment organizations were involved in the creation of the Corall system. The head organization for carrying out installation and adjustment work on the complexes and the Coral system as a whole, conducting factory tests, ensuring state tests and handing over the system to the Navy was the Granit Production Association.
The Ural was laid down in June 1981, launched in 1983, and on January 6, 1989, the naval flag was raised on the ship. The ship received tail number SSV-33.
If there are ships that are written to become the floating misfortune of their own fleet, the Ural is in the forefront. Fans of mysticism can see an ominous sign in the very issue of the project of this floating island with a nuclear engine - 1941. It was necessary to think of it from the set of digital combinations for the "Ural" to choose just such. In our country, it is not worth explaining to anyone what tragedies it is associated with in the public consciousness. In a word, mysticism is to blame, or it’s not the point, but the 1941 project, on which billions of full-fledged Soviet rubles were dumped in the 80s, ended in failure.
To understand why the ill-fated Ural was needed, one has to look into the South Pacific. There, near nine dozen small islands of the Kwajalein Atoll, is the top-secret training ground of the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman and MX, launched for test purposes from the state of California, fly here. And since 1983, Kwavjalein has become one of the American research centers for the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived by President Ronald Reagan to disarm the USSR. From here, in preparation for the "Star Wars", they began to launch interceptor missiles designed to hit Soviet nuclear warheads. The telemetry information from these tests could tell Moscow a lot about Reagan's intrigues. However, how to get it?
The civilian vessels "Akademik Sergei Korolev", "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" or "Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov", equipped with special control and measuring systems for observing space objects, were not suitable for reconnaissance of what was happening on Kvadzhalein. The main thing is that they did not have active radars and were intended only to receive signals from domestic satellites. This means that it was necessary to build a special nuclear-powered combat ship that would be able to collect the entire amount of available information about any subspace object on any part of its trajectory in any region of the World Ocean. This is how the project 1941 "Titan" was born. The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze.
To collect a huge amount of intelligence about the launches of American ballistic missiles, electronics were needed with capabilities unprecedented at that time. 18 Soviet ministries with their design bureaus and research institutes worked on its creation for the "Ural" at once. Equipment unique ship the special equipment was dealt with by the Leningrad production and technical enterprise specially created for this purpose.
What happened in the end was called the "Coral" ship surveillance system. It was based on seven most powerful radioelectronic complexes... To process the information received, a unique, for its time, computer complex, consisting of several computers "ES-1046" and "Elbrus", was mounted at the Ural. With their help, it was possible to decipher the characteristics of any space object at a distance of up to 1500 kilometers. Experts say that the Ural crew was able to determine even the secrets of their fuel by the composition of the exhaust gases of ballistic missile engines.
In the event of a war in remote areas of the ocean, a unique ship should have been able to fend for itself. To do this, he received artillery, which approximately corresponded to the weapons of the destroyer: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and stern, four quad launchers of the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts AK-630 and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle. The aircraft hangar at the stern housed a Ka-32 helicopter. The nuclear power plant made it possible to go indefinitely at a speed of more than 20 knots.
The miracle ship was to be operated by a crew of about 1000 people, of which at least 400 were officers and warrant officers. The personnel of the reconnaissance complex was subdivided into 6 special services.
For the rest of sailors on long voyages in the Urals, a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool were provided.
It is clear that a huge ship hull was needed to accommodate all this technical splendor. It was made so, taking as a basis the design of the Project 1144 nuclear-powered missile cruiser of the "Kirov" type. As a result, the length of the "Ural" turned out to be about two football fields, and the height from keel to klotik was about a 28-storey building.
A truly unique fact speaks of the hopes that the USSR Ministry of Defense placed on the latest reconnaissance ship: the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, upon completion of the work, was immediately awarded the military rank of Rear Admiral. Well, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor is a matter of course.
Radar antenna "Atoll" without protective housing
At the Baltic plant "Ural" was laid in the summer of 1981. It was launched into the water in 1983. In 1989, the ship entered the combat composition of the USSR Navy. And immediately, under the command of Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov, he set off on a two-month transition to his permanent base in the Pacific Ocean. On the voyage, the reconnaissance ship was secretly accompanied by our multipurpose nuclear submarine. And also - a lot of planes and ships of NATO countries, which were lost in conjectures: why do Russians need this ocean giant with space antennas?
At first, everything went great. The crew on the way to the Pacific base tested the capabilities of their reconnaissance equipment. The launch of the American space shuttle Columbia was easily discovered a thousand miles away. Then - launching into orbit from the territory of the United States of two optical-electronic and electronic reconnaissance satellites launched under the program " star wars". Such trifles as the passing fixation of the parameters of radar stations located along the way of foreign military bases, as well as the NATO ships and aircraft accompanying the Ural, is not worth mentioning.
However, it would not have been Soviet military equipment if everything went smoothly with her. Especially with undeveloped samples, the operating experience of which no one had. Hundreds of representatives of the industry, together with the crew, went out on the ocean voyage, day and night tried to debug the equipment that was breaking down every now and then. The cooling system of the nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, the computer complex and some information collection complexes were malfunctioning. There was a five-degree roll to the port side, which was never eliminated.
Everything turned out to be even worse when the Ural arrived at its base in the Pacific settlement, nicknamed by the sailors of Texas. No one could have imagined that the first trip of the monstrously expensive unique ship would be the last. No berth wall had been prepared for him. How has nothing of the kind been prepared for the heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers Minsk and Novorossiysk. Therefore, it was impossible to supply ships with neither fuel, nor steam, nor water, nor electricity from the shore. Their diesel generators and boilers threshed non-stop, knocking out precious motor resources, which were supposed to be spent only on campaigns. It is not surprising that those cruisers, in fact, "ate" themselves and were scrapped long before the due date.
Now the same fate awaited Ural. He, too, spent most of the time on mooring barrels in Strelok Bay. And in the summer of 1990, a fire broke out on a nuclear reconnaissance ship, which disabled the aft engine room. Burned out electrical cables coming from the stern boiler. For more than a year, the power supply of the ship was provided only by the bow engine, but soon it also burned out. After that, only emergency diesel generators gave the ship all the energy. There was no money for repairs. The commander of the ship, Captain 1st Rank Keshkov, in despair, even wrote official letter to the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As expected, the commander received neither money for repairs nor an answer.
As a result of all misadventures in 1992 nuclear reactors"Ural" was drowned out, and he himself was put to a distant pier, turning into an unprecedented size of an officer's hostel. For this, the Pacific people sarcastically nicknamed SSV-33 "Ural" a cabin carrier. And the abbreviation SSV began to be deciphered as follows: a special sleeping car.
V various sources there is information that the "Ural" was still on alert, despite the breakdowns, the ship successfully controlled the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, intercepting radio traffic in the networks of the Navy, Air Force and PLO of the United States and Japan.
In 2001, the ship, which had only gone on one military campaign, was finally decommissioned and put on a dock at a distant pier. Next to him, there was also a fellow in misfortune - missile cruiser"Admiral Lazarev" (formerly "Frunze", one of the four atomic missile attack cruisers of the project 1144 "Orlan"; the only cruiser of the project 1144 "Peter the Great" that remained in service is now the flagship Northern Fleet Russian Navy).
In April 2008, a tender was held for the disposal of the ship and its nuclear power plant.
The ship is dismantled (2010) at the Zvezda shipyard.
Tactical and technical data of the ship
SSV-33 "Ural"
Communication and control vessel
chief designer M.A. Arkharov
Baltic plant, 1988
Displacement: standard 32,780 tons, full 34,640 tons (according to other sources 32,780 tons / 36,500 tons);
Length: 265 meters;
Width: 30 m;
Draft: 7.8 m (7.5 m);
Reservations: absent;
Power plant: nuclear power plant OK-900 type, 2 x 171 MW, 2 boilers VDRK-500, 2 turbo-gear units GTZA-688;
Speed: 21.6 knots;
Navigation range: unlimited;
Autonomy: 180 days;
Armament: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and aft, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts "Oka" and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle;
Anti-aircraft armament: Igla MANPADS (16 9M-313 missiles);
Aviation: 1 Ka-32 helicopter;
Crew: 233 officers, 690 foremen and sailors (according to other sources - 890 crew members in total, of which at least 400 officers and warrant officers);
As part of the Navy from 01/06/89 to 2001
(38th brigade of reconnaissance ships - OSNAZ Pacific Fleet)
Completed 1 trip -
from Leningrad to Fokino, former Abrek
The basis electronic equipment the ship is the "Coral" reconnaissance complex, including two computers of the "Elbrus" type and several computers "ES-1046".
Elbrus is a series of Soviet supercomputers developed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and computing technology(ITMiVT) in the 1970s and 1990s, as well as processors and systems based on them.
The main difference of the Elbrus system is its orientation to the high-level languages of the 1980s. There are no assembly languages in the system. The base language - Autocode Elbrus El-76 (by V.M.Pentkovsky), in which the system-wide software (OSPO) is written, is the language of the Algol class. It resembles the Algol-68 language, the main difference is dynamic type binding, which is supported on the hardware level. At compilation, the El-76 program was translated into operand-free instructions of the stack architecture.
The main difference between the Elbrus architecture and most existing systems is the use of tags. In the Elbrus system, each memory word has, in addition to an information part containing a data element, a control part - an element tag, on the basis of which the processor hardware dynamically selects the desired operation option and controls the types of operands.
The hardware and OS implement a flexible mechanism for managing virtual memory (called "mathematical" in the documentation). The programmer is given the opportunity to describe arrays of up to 2 to the 20th power of elements.
Interesting Facts from the life of the ship
* Chief designer"Urala", Arkharov MA, received a medal and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for this unique project. In addition, as a civilian, he received the military rank of "Rear Admiral".
* The ship has a building (constant) roll - 2 degrees to the port side, which was due to a more developed superstructure on the left side. During the transition of the ship to the place of deployment and its location in Strelok Bay before the fire in 1990, this heel was compensated by the ship systems - the working sensors for pitching and rolling, as well as hull deflection showed a normal state.
* Due to its unique design, the Ural is the only three-masted warship in the world (apart from the training sailing ships).
* The complex of the ship's reconnaissance equipment included a "camera" with a lens diameter of about 1.5 meters.
* In 1988 "Ural" was visited by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, later the first and last President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. For him, part of the superstructure was specially cut off and a ladder was placed so that it would be convenient to climb to the third tier. But all this turned out to be in vain: the secretary general did not get on the ship.
* In 1990, during the fire of the main artillery ammunition of the Pacific Fleet, the ship was located 1.5-2 km from the place of fire. Despite the huge number of shells and missiles flying in different directions, thanks to the skillful leadership of Captain 1st Rank Keshkov and the selfless actions of the entire crew, not a single shell, missile or splinter hit the ship. The crew almost under heavy fire, at night, with the support of just one tug, took him to a safe place.
* The first commander of the Ural, Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov turned to Russian President Boris Yeltsin for help. I received no answer.
Journalist's impressions of the "Ural"
In 2006, a correspondent of the Trud newspaper visited the Ural. He managed to catch the last years of the ship.
In Strelok Bay in the south of Primorye, the nuclear reconnaissance ship SSV-33 "Ural" has been rotting at the berth for a decade and a half without any benefit. Caustically nicknamed by the Pacific Ocean's cabin-bearer. And also CER stands for “special sleeping car”. What else can you call this headache of the current admirals? Since 1992, after a single military campaign, a giant reconnaissance ship has been used as an officer's hostel. It was somehow possible to live on it.
And what were the hopes ... Almost a thousand crew members. The ability to stand off the coast of the United States for months and “cover” all their territory with electronic reconnaissance means. Capturing everything from ballistic missile trajectories to negotiations on mobile phones... Everything here is unique. Reconnaissance equipment and computing center - the latest technology. For recreation - a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool. It is not without reason that the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, after the commissioning of his brainchild, was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and Rear Admiral.
The picture that was revealed to us today aboard the "Ural" is terrifying. Perhaps the curse of the ship lies in the fatal number 1941 for the country? This is exactly how, unfortunately, it occurred to someone to call this unique project.
Strange, but through the checkpoint to the ship with a nuclear installation, they were allowed unhindered. The dark eye sockets of the windows of the former training detachment of signalmen, as well as the swimming pool, in which once sailors underwent light diving training, looked gloomily. Desolation and decay. And in the middle - Ural, tightly moored to the pier. Even just boarding it is dangerous now. Many ladders are already without handrails. Rails are cut along the sides. There are no handles on the doors. Copper plugs and taps have long been screwed together and sent for scrap. The crew "shrank" up to 15 people and fits in one cockpit. Nuclear reactors are shut down, one officer is looking after them. There is water in many rooms. Roll to starboard - 7 degrees. Two years ago, when it was a couple of degrees less, the Ural was docked and tried to level it. It didn't work out. They spat and left to rot.
Of course I can't help but remind you about the tragic fate of the spacecraft "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and about space
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a project 1941 ship (when it was laid down, which was named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
After arriving at the base (Strelok Bay, Tikhookeansky settlement, Pacific Fleet), the crew began preparations for a military campaign to the area of the US missile defense test site on Kwajelin Atoll. However, this campaign never took place. For a long time, the crew, even with the help of specialists from the Baltic Shipyard, could not fix a malfunction in the cooling system of the ship's nuclear installation. Graduates of military land schools and academies - specialists in the operation of unique complexes of the "Coral" system, MVK "Elbrus" and functional software - no longer wanted to serve in the navy and began to write off ashore.
The Navy could not solve the problem of operating an onboard nuclear installation and the main complexes of the Coral system for several years. After the collapse of the USSR, the equipment was mothballed, and the technological premises were welded. Such was the fate of the large nuclear reconnaissance ship "Ural" with the system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
Let's find out more about the history of this ship ...
Photo 2.
During the Cold War, the USSR faced an urgent need to control potential ballistic missile launches from anywhere in the world. It was not possible to solve this problem by ground means, the USSR simply did not have military bases in many parts of the world. In turn, the ships of the Maritime Space Fleet ("Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and others, see the articles "History of the Maritime Space Fleet" and "The Last Voyage of Yuri Gagarin") did not have active radars and were intended to work on the "defendants" of domestic spacecraft ...
Thus, it was decided to create a special warship, which would make it possible to control any subspace object at any segment of its trajectory.
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (when it was laid down, named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". The preparation and approval of the draft resolution with numerous ministries and departments was ensured by a group of employees of the 10th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Leningrad branch of the State Industrial and Technological Industry under the leadership of V. Kuryshev, who at that time held the position of deputy head of the central board.
The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze. TsNPO Vympel of the Ministry of Radio Industry was appointed the lead developer of the Coral system. More than 200 research institutes, design bureaus, manufacturing plants and installation and adjustment organizations were involved in the creation of the Corall system. The head organization for carrying out installation and adjustment work on the complexes and the Coral system as a whole, conducting factory tests, ensuring state tests and handing over the system to the Navy was the Granit Production Association.
The Ural was laid down in June 1981, launched in 1983, and on January 6, 1989, the naval flag was raised on the ship. The ship received the tail number SSV-33.
If there are ships that are written to become the floating misfortune of their own fleet, the Ural is in the forefront. Fans of mysticism can see an ominous sign in the very issue of the project of this floating island with a nuclear engine - 1941. It was necessary to think of it from the many digital combinations for the "Ural" to choose just such. In our country, it is not worth explaining to anyone what tragedies it is associated with in the public consciousness. In a word, mysticism is to blame, or it’s not the point, but the 1941 project, on which billions of full-fledged Soviet rubles were spent in the 80s, ended in failure.
To understand why the ill-fated Ural was needed, one has to look into the South Pacific. There, near nine dozen small islands of the Kwajalein Atoll, is the top-secret training ground of the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman and MX, launched for test purposes from the state of California, fly here. And since 1983, Kwavjalein has become one of the American research centers for the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived by President Ronald Reagan to disarm the USSR. From here, in preparation for the "Star Wars", they began to launch interceptor missiles designed to hit Soviet nuclear warheads. The telemetry information from these tests could tell Moscow a lot about Reagan's intrigues. However, how to get it?
The civilian vessels "Akademik Sergei Korolev", "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" or "Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov", equipped with special control and measuring systems for observing space objects, were not suitable for reconnaissance of what was happening on Kvadzhalein. The main thing is that they did not have active radars and were intended only to receive signals from domestic satellites. This means that it was necessary to build a special nuclear-powered combat ship that would be able to collect the entire amount of available information about any subspace object on any part of its trajectory in any region of the World Ocean. This is how the project 1941 "Titan" was born. The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze.
To collect a huge amount of intelligence about the launches of American ballistic missiles, electronics were needed with capabilities unprecedented at that time. 18 Soviet ministries with their design bureaus and research institutes worked on its creation for the "Ural" at once. The Leningrad production and technical enterprise, specially created for this purpose, was engaged in equipping the unique ship with special equipment.
Photo 4.
What happened in the end was called the "Coral" ship surveillance system. It was based on seven powerful electronic systems. To process the information received, a unique, for its time, computer complex, consisting of several computers "ES-1046" and "Elbrus", was mounted at the Ural. With their help, it was possible to decipher the characteristics of any space object at a distance of up to 1500 kilometers. Experts say that the Ural crew was able to determine even the secrets of their fuel by the composition of the exhaust gases of ballistic missile engines.
In the event of a war in remote areas of the ocean, a unique ship should have been able to fend for itself. To do this, he received artillery, which approximately corresponded to the weapons of the destroyer: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and stern, four quad launchers of the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts AK-630 and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle. The aircraft hangar at the stern housed a Ka-32 helicopter. The nuclear power plant made it possible to go indefinitely at a speed of more than 20 knots.
Photo 5.
The miracle ship was to be operated by a crew of about 1000 people, of which at least 400 were officers and warrant officers. The personnel of the intelligence complex was subdivided into 6 special services.
For the rest of sailors on long voyages in the Urals, a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool were provided.
It is clear that a huge ship hull was needed to accommodate all this technical splendor. It was made so, taking as a basis the design of the Project 1144 nuclear-powered missile cruiser of the "Kirov" type. As a result, the length of the "Ural" turned out to be about two football fields, and the height from keel to klotik - about a 28-storey building.
A truly unique fact speaks of the hopes that the USSR Ministry of Defense placed on the latest reconnaissance ship: the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, upon completion of the work, was immediately awarded the military rank of Rear Admiral. Well, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor is a matter of course.
Photo 6.
Photo 7.
Radar antenna "Atoll" without protective housing
At the Baltic plant "Ural" was laid in the summer of 1981. It was launched into the water in 1983. In 1989, the ship entered the combat composition of the USSR Navy. And immediately, under the command of Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov, he set off on a two-month transition to his permanent base in the Pacific Ocean. On the voyage, the reconnaissance ship was secretly accompanied by our multipurpose nuclear submarine. And also - a lot of planes and ships of NATO countries, which were lost in conjectures: why do Russians need this ocean giant with space antennas?
At first, everything went great. The crew on the way to the Pacific base tested the capabilities of their reconnaissance equipment. The launch of the American space shuttle Columbia was easily discovered a thousand miles away. Then - the launch into orbit from the territory of the United States of two satellites for optoelectronic and electronic reconnaissance, launched under the "Star Wars" program. Such trifles as the passing fixation of the parameters of radar stations located along the way of foreign military bases, as well as the NATO ships and aircraft accompanying the Ural, is not worth mentioning.
Photo 8.
However, this would not be Soviet military equipment if everything went smoothly with it. Especially with undeveloped samples, the operating experience of which no one had. Hundreds of representatives of the industry, together with the crew, went out on the ocean voyage, day and night tried to debug the equipment that was breaking down every now and then. The cooling system of the nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, the computer complex and some information collection complexes were malfunctioning. There was a five-degree roll to the port side, which was never eliminated.
Everything turned out to be even worse when the Ural arrived at its base in the Pacific settlement, nicknamed by the sailors of Texas. No one could have imagined that the first trip of the monstrously expensive unique ship would be the last. No berth wall had been prepared for him. How has nothing of the kind been prepared for the heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers Minsk and Novorossiysk. Therefore, it was impossible to supply ships with neither fuel, nor steam, nor water, nor electricity from the shore. Their diesel generators and boilers threshed non-stop, knocking out precious motor resources, which were supposed to be spent only on campaigns. It is not surprising that those cruisers, in fact, "ate" themselves and were scrapped long before the due date.
Photo 9.
Now the same fate awaited Ural. He, too, spent most of the time on mooring barrels in Strelok Bay. And in the summer of 1990, a fire broke out on a nuclear reconnaissance ship, which disabled the aft engine room. Burned out electrical cables coming from the stern boiler. For more than a year, the power supply of the ship was provided only by the bow engine, but soon it also burned out. After that, only emergency diesel generators gave the ship all the energy. There was no money for repairs. In despair, the ship's commander, Captain 1st Rank Keshkov, even wrote an official letter to the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As expected, the commander received neither money for repairs nor an answer.
As a result of all the misadventures in 1992, the nuclear reactors of the Ural were drowned out, and he himself was put to a remote pier, turning into an unprecedented size of an officer's dormitory. For this, the Pacific people sarcastically nicknamed SSV-33 "Ural" a cabin carrier. And the abbreviation SSV began to be deciphered as follows: a special sleeping car.
In various sources, there is information that the "Ural" was still on alert, despite the breakdowns, the ship successfully controlled the North Pacific Ocean, intercepting radio traffic in the networks of the Navy, Air Force and PLO of the United States and Japan.
Photo 10.
In 2001, the ship, which had only gone on one military campaign, was finally decommissioned and put on a dock at a distant pier. Near him, too, was at a standstill a fellow in misfortune - the missile cruiser "Admiral Lazarev" (the former "Frunze", one of the four atomic missile attack cruisers of the project 1144 "Orlan"; the only cruiser of the project 1144 "Peter the Great" that remained in service is now the flagship Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy).
In April 2008, a tender was held for the disposal of the ship and its nuclear power plant.
The ship is dismantled (2010) at the Zvezda shipyard.
Tactical and technical data of the ship
SSV-33 "Ural"
Communication and control vessel
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a project 1941 ship (when it was laid down, which was named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
After arriving at the base (Strelok Bay, Tikhookeansky settlement, Pacific Fleet), the crew began preparations for a military campaign to the area of the US missile defense test site on Kwajelin Atoll. However, this campaign never took place. For a long time, the crew, even with the help of specialists from the Baltic Shipyard, could not fix a malfunction in the cooling system of the ship's nuclear installation. Graduates of military land schools and academies - specialists in the operation of unique complexes of the "Coral" system, MVK "Elbrus" and functional software - no longer wanted to serve in the navy and began to write off ashore.
The Navy could not solve the problem of operating an onboard nuclear installation and the main complexes of the Coral system for several years. After the collapse of the USSR, the equipment was mothballed, and the technological premises were welded. Such was the fate of the large nuclear reconnaissance ship "Ural" with the system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
Let's find out more about the history of this ship ...
During the Cold War, the USSR faced an urgent need to control potential ballistic missile launches from anywhere in the world. It was not possible to solve this problem by ground means, the USSR simply did not have military bases in many parts of the world. In turn, the ships of the Maritime Space Fleet ("Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and others, see the articles "History of the Maritime Space Fleet" and "The Last Voyage of Yuri Gagarin") did not have active radars and were intended to work on the "defendants" of domestic spacecraft ...
Thus, it was decided to create a special warship, which would make it possible to control any subspace object at any segment of its trajectory.
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (when it was laid down, named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". The preparation and approval of the draft resolution with numerous ministries and departments was ensured by a group of employees of the 10th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Leningrad branch of the State Industrial and Technological Industry under the leadership of V. Kuryshev, who at that time held the position of deputy head of the central board.
The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze. TsNPO Vympel of the Ministry of Radio Industry was appointed the lead developer of the Coral system. More than 200 research institutes, design bureaus, manufacturing plants and installation and adjustment organizations were involved in the creation of the Corall system. The head organization for carrying out installation and adjustment work on the complexes and the Coral system as a whole, conducting factory tests, ensuring state tests and handing over the system to the Navy was the Granit Production Association.
The Ural was laid down in June 1981, launched in 1983, and on January 6, 1989, the naval flag was raised on the ship. The ship received the tail number SSV-33.
If there are ships that are written to become the floating misfortune of their own fleet, the Ural is in the forefront. Fans of mysticism can see an ominous sign in the very issue of the project of this floating island with a nuclear engine - 1941. It was necessary to think of it from the set of digital combinations for the "Ural" to choose just such. In our country, it is not worth explaining to anyone what tragedies it is associated with in the public consciousness. In a word, mysticism is to blame, or it’s not the point, but the 1941 project, on which billions of full-fledged Soviet rubles were dumped in the 80s, ended in failure.
To understand why the ill-fated Ural was needed, one has to look into the South Pacific. There, near nine dozen small islands of the Kwajalein Atoll, is the top-secret training ground of the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman and MX, launched for test purposes from the state of California, fly here. And since 1983, Kwavjalein has become one of the American research centers for the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived by President Ronald Reagan to disarm the USSR. From here, in preparation for the "Star Wars", they began to launch interceptor missiles designed to hit Soviet nuclear warheads. The telemetry information from these tests could tell Moscow a lot about Reagan's intrigues. However, how to get it?
The civilian vessels "Akademik Sergei Korolev", "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" or "Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov", equipped with special control and measuring systems for observing space objects, were not suitable for reconnaissance of what was happening on Kvadzhalein. The main thing is that they did not have active radars and were intended only to receive signals from domestic satellites. This means that it was necessary to build a special nuclear-powered combat ship that would be able to collect the entire amount of available information about any subspace object on any part of its trajectory in any region of the World Ocean. This is how the project 1941 "Titan" was born. The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze.
To collect a huge amount of intelligence about the launches of American ballistic missiles, electronics were needed with capabilities unprecedented at that time. 18 Soviet ministries with their design bureaus and research institutes worked on its creation for the "Ural" at once. The Leningrad production and technical enterprise, specially created for this purpose, was engaged in equipping the unique ship with special equipment.
What happened in the end was called the "Coral" ship surveillance system. It was based on seven powerful electronic systems. To process the information received, a unique, for its time, computer complex, consisting of several computers "ES-1046" and "Elbrus", was mounted at the Ural. With their help, it was possible to decipher the characteristics of any space object at a distance of up to 1500 kilometers. Experts say that the Ural crew was able to determine even the secrets of their fuel by the composition of the exhaust gases of ballistic missile engines.
In the event of a war in remote areas of the ocean, a unique ship should have been able to fend for itself. To do this, he received artillery, which approximately corresponded to the weapons of the destroyer: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and stern, four quad launchers of the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts AK-630 and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle. The aircraft hangar at the stern housed a Ka-32 helicopter. The nuclear power plant made it possible to go indefinitely at a speed of more than 20 knots.
The miracle ship was to be operated by a crew of about 1000 people, of which at least 400 were officers and warrant officers. The personnel of the intelligence complex was subdivided into 6 special services.
For the rest of sailors on long voyages in the Urals, a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool were provided.
It is clear that a huge ship hull was needed to accommodate all this technical splendor. It was made so, taking as a basis the design of the Project 1144 nuclear-powered missile cruiser of the "Kirov" type. As a result, the length of the "Ural" turned out to be about two football fields, and the height from keel to klotik was about a 28-storey building.
A truly unique fact speaks of the hopes that the USSR Ministry of Defense placed on the latest reconnaissance ship: the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, upon completion of the work, was immediately awarded the military rank of Rear Admiral. Well, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor is a matter of course.
Radar antenna "Atoll" without protective housing
At the Baltic plant "Ural" was laid in the summer of 1981. It was launched into the water in 1983. In 1989, the ship entered the combat composition of the USSR Navy. And immediately, under the command of Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov, he set off on a two-month transition to his permanent base in the Pacific Ocean. On the voyage, the reconnaissance ship was secretly accompanied by our multipurpose nuclear submarine. And also - a lot of planes and ships of NATO countries, which were lost in conjectures: why do Russians need this ocean giant with space antennas?
At first, everything went great. The crew on the way to the Pacific base tested the capabilities of their reconnaissance equipment. The launch of the American space shuttle Columbia was easily discovered a thousand miles away. Then - the launch into orbit from the territory of the United States of two satellites for optoelectronic and electronic reconnaissance, launched under the "Star Wars" program. Such trifles as the passing fixation of the parameters of radar stations located along the way of foreign military bases, as well as the NATO ships and aircraft accompanying the Ural, is not worth mentioning.
However, this would not be Soviet military equipment if everything went smoothly with it. Especially with undeveloped samples, the operating experience of which no one had. Hundreds of representatives of the industry, together with the crew, went out on the ocean voyage, day and night tried to debug the equipment that was breaking down every now and then. The cooling system of the nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, the computer complex and some information collection complexes were malfunctioning. There was a five-degree roll to the port side, which was never eliminated.
Everything turned out to be even worse when the Ural arrived at its base in the Pacific settlement, nicknamed by the sailors of Texas. No one could have imagined that the first trip of the monstrously expensive unique ship would be the last. No berth wall had been prepared for him. How has nothing of the kind been prepared for the heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers Minsk and Novorossiysk. Therefore, it was impossible to supply ships with neither fuel, nor steam, nor water, nor electricity from the shore. Their diesel generators and boilers threshed non-stop, knocking out precious motor resources, which were supposed to be spent only on campaigns. It is not surprising that those cruisers, in fact, "ate" themselves and were scrapped long before the due date.
Now the same fate awaited Ural. He, too, spent most of the time on mooring barrels in Strelok Bay. And in the summer of 1990, a fire broke out on a nuclear reconnaissance ship, which disabled the aft engine room. Burned out electrical cables coming from the stern boiler. For more than a year, the power supply of the ship was provided only by the bow engine, but soon it also burned out. After that, only emergency diesel generators gave the ship all the energy. There was no money for repairs. In despair, the ship's commander, Captain 1st Rank Keshkov, even wrote an official letter to the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As expected, the commander received neither money for repairs nor an answer.
As a result of all the misadventures in 1992, the nuclear reactors of the Ural were drowned out, and he himself was put to a remote pier, turning into an unprecedented size of an officer's dormitory. For this, the Pacific people sarcastically nicknamed SSV-33 "Ural" a cabin carrier. And the abbreviation SSV began to be deciphered as follows: a special sleeping car.
In various sources, there is information that the "Ural" was still on alert, despite the breakdowns, the ship successfully controlled the North Pacific Ocean, intercepting radio traffic in the networks of the Navy, Air Force and PLO of the United States and Japan.
In 2001, the ship, which had only gone on one military campaign, was finally decommissioned and put on a dock at a distant pier. Near him, too, was at a standstill a fellow in misfortune - the missile cruiser "Admiral Lazarev" (the former "Frunze", one of the four atomic missile attack cruisers of the project 1144 "Orlan"; the only cruiser of the project 1144 "Peter the Great" that remained in service is now the flagship Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy).
In April 2008, a tender was held for the disposal of the ship and its nuclear power plant.
The ship is dismantled (2010) at the Zvezda shipyard.
Tactical and technical data of the ship
SSV-33 "Ural"
Communication and control vessel
chief designer M.A. Arkharov
Baltic plant, 1988
Displacement: standard 32,780 tons, full 34,640 tons (according to other sources 32,780 tons / 36,500 tons);
Length: 265 meters;
Width: 30 m;
Draft: 7.8 m (7.5 m);
Reservations: absent;
Power plant: nuclear power plant of OK-900 type, 2 x 171 MW, 2 boilers VDRK-500, 2 turbo-gear units GTZA-688;
Speed: 21.6 knots;
Navigation range: unlimited;
Autonomy: 180 days;
Armament: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and aft, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts "Oka" and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle;
Anti-aircraft armament: Igla MANPADS (16 9M-313 missiles);
Aviation: 1 Ka-32 helicopter;
Crew: 233 officers, 690 foremen and sailors (according to other sources - 890 crew members in total, of which at least 400 officers and warrant officers);
As part of the Navy from 01/06/89 to 2001
(38th brigade of reconnaissance ships - OSNAZ Pacific Fleet)
Completed 1 trip -
from Leningrad to Fokino, former Abrek
The basis of the ship's electronic equipment is the "Coral" reconnaissance complex, including two computers of the "Elbrus" type and several computers "ES-1046".
Elbrus is a series of Soviet supercomputers developed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITMiVT) in the 1970s and 1990s, as well as processors and systems based on them.
The main difference of the Elbrus system is its orientation to the high-level languages of the 1980s. There are no assembly languages in the system. The base language - Autocode Elbrus El-76 (by V.M.Pentkovsky), in which the system-wide software (OSPO) is written, is the language of the Algol class. It resembles the Algol-68 language, the main difference is dynamic type binding, which is supported on the hardware level. At compilation, the El-76 program was translated into operand-free instructions of the stack architecture.
The main difference between the Elbrus architecture and most existing systems is the use of tags. In the Elbrus system, each memory word has, in addition to an information part containing a data element, a control part - an element tag, on the basis of which the processor hardware dynamically selects the desired operation option and controls the types of operands.
The hardware and OS implement a flexible mechanism for managing virtual memory (called "mathematical" in the documentation). The programmer is given the opportunity to describe arrays of up to 2 to the 20th power of elements.
Interesting facts from the life of the ship
* The chief designer of "Ural", Arkharov MA, received a medal and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for this unique project. In addition, as a civilian, he received the military rank of "Rear Admiral".
* The ship has a building (constant) roll - 2 degrees to the port side, which was due to a more developed superstructure on the left side. During the transition of the ship to the place of deployment and its location in Strelok Bay before the fire in 1990, this heel was compensated by the ship systems - the working sensors for pitching and rolling, as well as hull deflection showed a normal state.
* Due to its unique design, the Ural is the only three-masted warship in the world (apart from the training sailing ships that are part of many navies).
* The complex of the ship's reconnaissance equipment included a "camera" with a lens diameter of about 1.5 meters.
* In 1988 "Ural" was visited by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, later the first and last President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. For him, part of the superstructure was specially cut off and a ladder was placed so that it would be convenient to climb to the third tier. But all this turned out to be in vain: the secretary general did not get on the ship.
* In 1990, during the fire of the main artillery ammunition of the Pacific Fleet, the ship was located 1.5-2 km from the place of fire. Despite the huge number of shells and missiles flying in different directions, thanks to the skillful leadership of Captain 1st Rank Keshkov and the selfless actions of the entire crew, not a single shell, missile or splinter hit the ship. The crew almost under heavy fire, at night, with the support of just one tug, took him to a safe place.
* The first commander of the Ural, Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov turned to Russian President Boris Yeltsin for help. I received no answer.
Journalist's impressions of the "Ural"
In 2006, a correspondent of the Trud newspaper visited the Ural. He managed to catch the last years of the ship.
In Strelok Bay in the south of Primorye, the nuclear reconnaissance ship SSV-33 "Ural" has been rotting at the berth for a decade and a half without any benefit. Caustically nicknamed by the Pacific Ocean's cabin-bearer. And also CER stands for “special sleeping car”. What else can you call this headache of the current admirals? Since 1992, after a single military campaign, a giant reconnaissance ship has been used as an officer's hostel. It was somehow possible to live on it.
And what were the hopes ... Almost a thousand crew members. The ability to stand off the coast of the United States for months and “cover” all their territory with electronic reconnaissance means. Capture everything from ballistic missile trajectories to cell phone calls. Everything here is unique. Reconnaissance equipment and computing center - the latest technology. For recreation - a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool. It is not without reason that the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, after the commissioning of his brainchild, was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and Rear Admiral.
The picture that was revealed to us today aboard the "Ural" is terrifying. Perhaps the curse of the ship lies in the fatal number 1941 for the country? This is exactly how, unfortunately, it occurred to someone to call this unique project.
Strange, but through the checkpoint to the ship with a nuclear installation, they were allowed unhindered. The dark eye sockets of the windows of the former training detachment of signalmen, as well as the swimming pool, in which once sailors underwent light diving training, looked gloomily. Desolation and decay. And in the middle - Ural, tightly moored to the pier. Even just boarding it is dangerous now. Many ladders are already without handrails. Rails are cut along the sides. There are no handles on the doors. Copper plugs and taps have long been screwed together and sent for scrap. The crew "shrank" up to 15 people and fits in one cockpit. Nuclear reactors are shut down, one officer is looking after them. There is water in many rooms. Roll to starboard - 7 degrees. Two years ago, when it was a couple of degrees less, the Ural was docked and tried to level it. It didn't work out. They spat and left to rot.
Of course I can't help but remind you about the tragic fate of the spacecraft "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and about space
After arriving at the base (Strelok Bay, Tikhookeansky settlement, Pacific Fleet), the crew began preparations for a military campaign to the area of the US missile defense test site on Kwajelin Atoll. However, this campaign never took place. For a long time, the crew, even with the help of specialists from the Baltic Shipyard, could not fix a malfunction in the cooling system of the ship's nuclear installation. Graduates of military land schools and academies - specialists in the operation of unique complexes of the "Coral" system, MVK "Elbrus" and functional software - no longer wanted to serve in the navy and began to write off ashore.
The Navy could not solve the problem of operating an onboard nuclear installation and the main complexes of the Coral system for several years. After the collapse of the USSR, the equipment was mothballed, and the technological premises were welded. Such was the fate of the large nuclear reconnaissance ship "Ural" with the system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
Let's find out more about the history of this ship ...
During the Cold War, the USSR faced an urgent need to control potential ballistic missile launches from anywhere in the world. It was not possible to solve this problem by ground means, the USSR simply did not have military bases in many parts of the world. In turn, the ships of the Maritime Space Fleet ("Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and others, see the articles "History of the Maritime Space Fleet" and "The Last Voyage of Yuri Gagarin") did not have active radars and were intended to work on the "defendants" of domestic spacecraft ...
Thus, it was decided to create a special warship, which would make it possible to control any subspace object at any segment of its trajectory.
In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (when it was laid down, named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". The preparation and approval of the draft resolution with numerous ministries and departments was ensured by a group of employees of the 10th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Leningrad branch of the State Industrial and Technological Industry under the leadership of V. Kuryshev, who at that time held the position of deputy head of the central board.
The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze. TsNPO Vympel of the Ministry of Radio Industry was appointed the lead developer of the Coral system. More than 200 research institutes, design bureaus, manufacturing plants and installation and adjustment organizations were involved in the creation of the Corall system. The head organization for carrying out installation and adjustment work on the complexes and the Coral system as a whole, conducting factory tests, ensuring state tests and handing over the system to the Navy was the Granit Production Association.
The Ural was laid down in June 1981, launched in 1983, and on January 6, 1989, the naval flag was raised on the ship. The ship received the tail number SSV-33.
If there are ships that are written to become the floating misfortune of their own fleet, the Ural is in the forefront. Fans of mysticism can see an ominous sign in the very issue of the project of this floating island with a nuclear engine - 1941. It was necessary to think of it from the set of digital combinations for the "Ural" to choose just such. In our country, it is not worth explaining to anyone what tragedies it is associated with in the public consciousness. In a word, mysticism is to blame, or it’s not the point, but the 1941 project, on which billions of full-fledged Soviet rubles were dumped in the 80s, ended in failure.
To understand why the ill-fated Ural was needed, one has to look into the South Pacific. There, near nine dozen small islands of the Kwajalein Atoll, is the top-secret training ground of the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman and MX, launched for test purposes from the state of California, fly here. And since 1983, Kwavjalein has become one of the American research centers for the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived by President Ronald Reagan to disarm the USSR. From here, in preparation for the "Star Wars", they began to launch interceptor missiles designed to hit Soviet nuclear warheads. The telemetry information from these tests could tell Moscow a lot about Reagan's intrigues. However, how to get it?
The civilian vessels "Akademik Sergei Korolev", "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" or "Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov", equipped with special control and measuring systems for observing space objects, were not suitable for reconnaissance of what was happening on Kvadzhalein. The main thing is that they did not have active radars and were intended only to receive signals from domestic satellites. This means that it was necessary to build a special nuclear-powered combat ship that would be able to collect the entire amount of available information about any subspace object on any part of its trajectory in any region of the World Ocean. This is how the project 1941 "Titan" was born. The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze.
To collect a huge amount of intelligence about the launches of American ballistic missiles, electronics were needed with capabilities unprecedented at that time. 18 Soviet ministries with their design bureaus and research institutes worked on its creation for the "Ural" at once. The Leningrad production and technical enterprise, specially created for this purpose, was engaged in equipping the unique ship with special equipment.
What happened in the end was called the "Coral" ship surveillance system. It was based on seven powerful electronic systems. To process the information received, a unique, for its time, computer complex, consisting of several computers "ES-1046" and "Elbrus", was mounted at the Ural. With their help, it was possible to decipher the characteristics of any space object at a distance of up to 1500 kilometers. Experts say that the Ural crew was able to determine even the secrets of their fuel by the composition of the exhaust gases of ballistic missile engines.
In the event of a war in remote areas of the ocean, a unique ship should have been able to fend for itself. To do this, he received artillery, which approximately corresponded to the weapons of the destroyer: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and stern, four quad launchers of the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts AK-630 and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle. The aircraft hangar at the stern housed a Ka-32 helicopter. The nuclear power plant made it possible to go indefinitely at a speed of more than 20 knots.
The miracle ship was to be operated by a crew of about 1000 people, of which at least 400 were officers and warrant officers. The personnel of the intelligence complex was subdivided into 6 special services.
For the rest of sailors on long voyages in the Urals, a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool were provided.
It is clear that a huge ship hull was needed to accommodate all this technical splendor. It was made so, taking as a basis the design of the Project 1144 nuclear-powered missile cruiser of the "Kirov" type. As a result, the length of the "Ural" turned out to be about two football fields, and the height from keel to klotik was about a 28-storey building.
A truly unique fact speaks of the hopes that the USSR Ministry of Defense placed on the latest reconnaissance ship: the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, upon completion of the work, was immediately awarded the military rank of Rear Admiral. Well, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor is a matter of course.
Radar antenna "Atoll" without protective housing
At the Baltic plant "Ural" was laid in the summer of 1981. It was launched into the water in 1983. In 1989, the ship entered the combat composition of the USSR Navy. And immediately, under the command of Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov, he set off on a two-month transition to his permanent base in the Pacific Ocean. On the voyage, the reconnaissance ship was secretly accompanied by our multipurpose nuclear submarine. And also - a lot of planes and ships of NATO countries, which were lost in conjectures: why do Russians need this ocean giant with space antennas?
At first, everything went great. The crew on the way to the Pacific base tested the capabilities of their reconnaissance equipment. The launch of the American space shuttle Columbia was easily discovered a thousand miles away. Then - the launch into orbit from the territory of the United States of two satellites for optoelectronic and electronic reconnaissance, launched under the "Star Wars" program. Such trifles as the passing fixation of the parameters of radar stations located along the way of foreign military bases, as well as the NATO ships and aircraft accompanying the Ural, is not worth mentioning.
However, this would not be Soviet military equipment if everything went smoothly with it. Especially with undeveloped samples, the operating experience of which no one had. Hundreds of representatives of the industry, together with the crew, went out on the ocean voyage, day and night tried to debug the equipment that was breaking down every now and then. The cooling system of the nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, the computer complex and some information collection complexes were malfunctioning. There was a five-degree roll to the port side, which was never eliminated.
Everything turned out to be even worse when the Ural arrived at its base in the Pacific settlement, nicknamed by the sailors of Texas. No one could have imagined that the first trip of the monstrously expensive unique ship would be the last. No berth wall had been prepared for him. How has nothing of the kind been prepared for the heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers Minsk and Novorossiysk. Therefore, it was impossible to supply ships with neither fuel, nor steam, nor water, nor electricity from the shore. Their diesel generators and boilers threshed non-stop, knocking out precious motor resources, which were supposed to be spent only on campaigns. It is not surprising that those cruisers, in fact, "ate" themselves and were scrapped long before the due date.
Now the same fate awaited Ural. He, too, spent most of the time on mooring barrels in Strelok Bay. And in the summer of 1990, a fire broke out on a nuclear reconnaissance ship, which disabled the aft engine room. Burned out electrical cables coming from the stern boiler. For more than a year, the power supply of the ship was provided only by the bow engine, but soon it also burned out. After that, only emergency diesel generators gave the ship all the energy. There was no money for repairs. In despair, the ship's commander, Captain 1st Rank Keshkov, even wrote an official letter to the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As expected, the commander received neither money for repairs nor an answer.
As a result of all the misadventures in 1992, the nuclear reactors of the Ural were drowned out, and he himself was put to a remote pier, turning into an unprecedented size of an officer's dormitory. For this, the Pacific people sarcastically nicknamed SSV-33 "Ural" a cabin carrier. And the abbreviation SSV began to be deciphered as follows: a special sleeping car.
In various sources, there is information that the "Ural" was still on alert, despite the breakdowns, the ship successfully controlled the North Pacific Ocean, intercepting radio traffic in the networks of the Navy, Air Force and PLO of the United States and Japan.
In 2001, the ship, which had only gone on one military campaign, was finally decommissioned and put on a dock at a distant pier. Near him, too, was at a standstill a fellow in misfortune - the missile cruiser "Admiral Lazarev" (the former "Frunze", one of the four atomic missile attack cruisers of the project 1144 "Orlan"; the only cruiser of the project 1144 "Peter the Great" that remained in service is now the flagship Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy).
In April 2008, a tender was held for the disposal of the ship and its nuclear power plant.
The ship is dismantled (2010) at the Zvezda shipyard.
Tactical and technical data of the ship
SSV-33 "Ural"
Communication and control vessel
chief designer M.A. Arkharov
Baltic plant, 1988
Displacement: standard 32,780 tons, full 34,640 tons (according to other sources 32,780 tons / 36,500 tons);
Length: 265 meters;
Width: 30 m;
Draft: 7.8 m (7.5 m);
Reservations: absent;
Power plant: nuclear power plant of OK-900 type, 2 x 171 MW, 2 boilers VDRK-500, 2 turbo-gear units GTZA-688;
Speed: 21.6 knots;
Navigation range: unlimited;
Autonomy: 180 days;
Armament: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and aft, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts "Oka" and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle;
Anti-aircraft armament: Igla MANPADS (16 9M-313 missiles);
Aviation: 1 Ka-32 helicopter;
Crew: 233 officers, 690 foremen and sailors (according to other sources - 890 crew members in total, of which at least 400 officers and warrant officers);
As part of the Navy from 01/06/89 to 2001
(38th brigade of reconnaissance ships - OSNAZ Pacific Fleet)
Completed 1 trip -
from Leningrad to Fokino, former Abrek
The basis of the ship's electronic equipment is the "Coral" reconnaissance complex, including two computers of the "Elbrus" type and several computers "ES-1046".
Elbrus is a series of Soviet supercomputers developed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITMiVT) in the 1970s and 1990s, as well as processors and systems based on them.
The main difference of the Elbrus system is its orientation to the high-level languages of the 1980s. There are no assembly languages in the system. The base language - Autocode Elbrus El-76 (by V.M.Pentkovsky), in which the system-wide software (OSPO) is written, is the language of the Algol class. It resembles the Algol-68 language, the main difference is dynamic type binding, which is supported on the hardware level. At compilation, the El-76 program was translated into operand-free instructions of the stack architecture.
The main difference between the Elbrus architecture and most existing systems is the use of tags. In the Elbrus system, each memory word has, in addition to an information part containing a data element, a control part - an element tag, on the basis of which the processor hardware dynamically selects the desired operation option and controls the types of operands.
The hardware and OS implement a flexible mechanism for managing virtual memory (called "mathematical" in the documentation). The programmer is given the opportunity to describe arrays of up to 2 to the 20th power of elements.
Interesting facts from the life of the ship
* The chief designer of "Ural", Arkharov MA, received a medal and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for this unique project. In addition, as a civilian, he received the military rank of "Rear Admiral".
* The ship has a building (constant) roll - 2 degrees to the port side, which was due to a more developed superstructure on the left side. During the transition of the ship to the place of deployment and its location in Strelok Bay before the fire in 1990, this heel was compensated by the ship systems - the working sensors for pitching and rolling, as well as hull deflection showed a normal state.
* Due to its unique design, the Ural is the only three-masted warship in the world (apart from the training sailing ships that are part of many navies).
* The complex of the ship's reconnaissance equipment included a "camera" with a lens diameter of about 1.5 meters.
* In 1988 "Ural" was visited by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, later the first and last President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. For him, part of the superstructure was specially cut off and a ladder was placed so that it would be convenient to climb to the third tier. But all this turned out to be in vain: the secretary general did not get on the ship.
* In 1990, during the fire of the main artillery ammunition of the Pacific Fleet, the ship was located 1.5-2 km from the place of fire. Despite the huge number of shells and missiles flying in different directions, thanks to the skillful leadership of Captain 1st Rank Keshkov and the selfless actions of the entire crew, not a single shell, missile or splinter hit the ship. The crew almost under heavy fire, at night, with the support of just one tug, took him to a safe place.
* The first commander of the Ural, Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov turned to Russian President Boris Yeltsin for help. I received no answer.
Journalist's impressions of the "Ural"
In 2006, a correspondent of the Trud newspaper visited the Ural. He managed to catch the last years of the ship.
In Strelok Bay in the south of Primorye, the nuclear reconnaissance ship SSV-33 "Ural" has been rotting at the berth for a decade and a half without any benefit. Caustically nicknamed by the Pacific Ocean's cabin-bearer. And also CER stands for “special sleeping car”. What else can you call this headache of the current admirals? Since 1992, after a single military campaign, a giant reconnaissance ship has been used as an officer's hostel. It was somehow possible to live on it.
And what were the hopes ... Almost a thousand crew members. The ability to stand off the coast of the United States for months and “cover” all their territory with electronic reconnaissance means. Capture everything from ballistic missile trajectories to cell phone calls. Everything here is unique. Reconnaissance equipment and computing center - the latest technology. For recreation - a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool. It is not without reason that the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, after the commissioning of his brainchild, was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and Rear Admiral.
The picture that was revealed to us today aboard the "Ural" is terrifying. Perhaps the curse of the ship lies in the fatal number 1941 for the country? This is exactly how, unfortunately, it occurred to someone to call this unique project.
Strange, but through the checkpoint to the ship with a nuclear installation, they were allowed unhindered. The dark eye sockets of the windows of the former training detachment of signalmen, as well as the swimming pool, in which once sailors underwent light diving training, looked gloomily. Desolation and decay. And in the middle - Ural, tightly moored to the pier. Even just boarding it is dangerous now. Many ladders are already without handrails. Rails are cut along the sides. There are no handles on the doors. Copper plugs and taps have long been screwed together and sent for scrap. The crew "shrank" up to 15 people and fits in one cockpit. Nuclear reactors are shut down, one officer is looking after them. There is water in many rooms. Roll to starboard - 7 degrees. Two years ago, when it was a couple of degrees less, the Ural was docked and tried to level it. It didn't work out. They spat and left to rot.
Of course I can't help but remind you about the tragic fate of the spacecraft "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and about space
Nuclear ship SSV-33 "Ural" - video
BRZK SSV-33 "Ural" - a warship, the world's largest reconnaissance ship, the only ship of the 1941 project, cipher "Titan". In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a project 1941 ship (when it was laid down, which was named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral".
After arriving at the base (Strelok Bay, Tikhookeansky settlement, Pacific Fleet), the crew began preparations for a military campaign to the area of the US missile defense test site on Kwajelin Atoll. However, this campaign never took place. For a long time, the crew, even with the help of specialists from the Baltic Shipyard, could not fix a malfunction in the cooling system of the ship's nuclear installation. Graduates of military land schools and academies - specialists in the operation of unique complexes of the "Coral" system, MVK "Elbrus" and functional software - no longer wanted to serve in the navy and began to write off ashore.
The Navy could not solve the problem of operating an onboard nuclear installation and the main complexes of the Coral system for several years. After the collapse of the USSR, the equipment was mothballed, and the technological premises were welded. Such was the fate of the large nuclear reconnaissance ship "Ural" with the system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". During the Cold War, the USSR faced an urgent need to control potential ballistic missile launches from anywhere in the world. It was not possible to solve this problem by ground means, the USSR simply did not have military bases in many parts of the world. In turn, the ships of the Maritime Space Fleet ("Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" and others, see the articles "History of the Maritime Space Fleet" and "The Last Voyage of Yuri Gagarin") did not have active radars and were intended to work on the "defendants" of domestic spacecraft ...
Thus, it was decided to create a special warship, which would make it possible to control any subspace object at any segment of its trajectory. In 1977, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Decree on the creation of a ship of project 1941 (when it was laid down, named "Ural") with a system of special technical means of reconnaissance "Coral". The preparation and approval of the draft resolution with numerous ministries and departments was ensured by a group of employees of the 10th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Leningrad branch of the State Industrial and Technological Industry under the leadership of V. Kuryshev, who at that time held the position of deputy head of the central board. the designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze. TsNPO Vympel of the Ministry of Radio Industry was appointed the lead developer of the Coral system. More than 200 research institutes, design bureaus, manufacturing plants and installation and adjustment organizations were involved in the creation of the Corall system. The head organization for carrying out installation and adjustment work on the complexes and the Coral system as a whole, conducting factory tests, ensuring state tests and handing over the system to the Navy was the Granit Production Association.
The Ural was laid down in June 1981, launched in 1983, and on January 6, 1989, the naval flag was raised on the ship. The ship received the tail number SSV-33. If there are ships that are written to become the floating misfortune of their own fleet, the Ural is in the forefront. Fans of mysticism can see an ominous sign in the very issue of the project of this floating island with a nuclear engine - 1941. It was necessary to think of it from the many digital combinations for the "Ural" to choose just such. In our country, it is not worth explaining to anyone what tragedies it is associated with in the public consciousness. In a word, mysticism is to blame, or it’s not the point, but the 1941 project, on which billions of full-fledged Soviet rubles were spent in the 80s, ended in failure.
To understand why the ill-fated Ural was needed, one has to look into the South Pacific. There, near nine dozen small islands of the Kwajalein Atoll, is the top-secret training ground of the United States. Intercontinental ballistic missiles Minuteman and MX, launched for test purposes from the state of California, fly here. And since 1983, Kwavjalein has become one of the American research centers for the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived by President Ronald Reagan to disarm the USSR. From here, in preparation for the "Star Wars", they began to launch interceptor missiles designed to hit Soviet nuclear warheads. The telemetry information from these tests could tell Moscow a lot about Reagan's intrigues. However, how to get it?
The civilian vessels "Akademik Sergei Korolev", "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin" or "Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov", equipped with special control and measuring systems for observing space objects, were not suitable for reconnaissance of what was happening on Kvadzhalein. The main thing is that they did not have active radars and were intended only to receive signals from domestic satellites. This means that it was necessary to build a special nuclear-powered combat ship that would be able to collect the entire amount of available information about any subspace object on any part of its trajectory in any region of the World Ocean. This is how the project 1941 "Titan" was born. The designer of the ship was the Leningrad Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" of the Ministry of State Industry, the construction plant - the Baltic Shipyard named after S. Ordzhonikidze.
To collect a huge amount of intelligence about the launches of American ballistic missiles, electronics were needed with capabilities unprecedented at that time. 18 Soviet ministries with their design bureaus and research institutes worked on its creation for the "Ural" at once. The Leningrad production and technical enterprise, specially created for this purpose, was engaged in equipping the unique ship with special equipment.
What happened in the end was called the "Coral" ship surveillance system. It was based on seven powerful electronic systems. To process the information received, a unique, for its time, computer complex, consisting of several computers "ES-1046" and "Elbrus", was mounted at the Ural. With their help, it was possible to decipher the characteristics of any space object at a distance of up to 1500 kilometers. Experts say that the Ural crew was able to determine even the secrets of their fuel by the composition of the exhaust gases of ballistic missile engines.
In the event of a war in remote areas of the ocean, a unique ship should have been able to fend for itself. To do this, he received artillery, which approximately corresponded to the weapons of the destroyer: one 76-mm artillery mount at the bow and stern, four quad launchers of the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system, four six-barreled 30-mm gun mounts AK-630 and four double-barreled 12.7-mm machine gun mounts "Utyos-M". The ammunition should have been enough for at least 20 minutes of the battle. The aircraft hangar at the stern housed a Ka-32 helicopter. The nuclear power plant made it possible to go indefinitely at a speed of more than 20 knots.
The miracle ship was to be operated by a crew of about 1000 people, of which at least 400 were officers and warrant officers. The personnel of the intelligence complex was subdivided into 6 special services. For the rest of sailors on long voyages in the Urals, a smoking room, a billiard room, a sports and cinema halls, a nature salon, slot machines, two saunas and a swimming pool were provided. It is clear that a huge ship hull was needed to accommodate all this technical splendor. It was made so, taking as a basis the design of the Project 1144 nuclear-powered missile cruiser of the "Kirov" type. As a result, the length of the "Ural" turned out to be approximately two football fields, and the height from keel to klotik was about a 28-storey building.
A truly unique fact speaks of the hopes that the USSR Ministry of Defense placed on the latest reconnaissance ship: the absolutely civilian chief designer of the Ural Arkharov, upon completion of the work, was immediately awarded the military rank of Rear Admiral. Well, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor is a matter of course.
At the Baltic plant "Ural" was laid in the summer of 1981. It was launched into the water in 1983. In 1989, the ship entered the combat composition of the USSR Navy. And immediately, under the command of Captain 1st Rank Ilya Keshkov, he set off on a two-month transition to his permanent base in the Pacific Ocean. On the voyage, the reconnaissance ship was secretly accompanied by our multipurpose nuclear submarine. And also - a lot of planes and ships of NATO countries, which were lost in conjectures: why do Russians need this ocean giant with space antennas?
At first, everything went great. The crew on the way to the Pacific base tested the capabilities of their reconnaissance equipment. The launch of the American space shuttle Columbia was easily discovered a thousand miles away. Then - the launch into orbit from the territory of the United States of two optical-electronic and electronic reconnaissance satellites launched under the "Star Wars" program. Such trifles as the passing fixation of the parameters of radar stations located along the way of foreign military bases, as well as the NATO ships and aircraft accompanying the Ural, is not worth mentioning.
Hundreds of representatives of the industry, together with the crew, went out on the ocean voyage, day and night tried to debug the equipment that was breaking down every now and then. The cooling system of the nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, the computer complex and some information collection complexes were malfunctioning. There was a five-degree roll to the port side, which was never eliminated.
Everything turned out to be even worse when the Ural arrived at its base in the Pacific settlement, nicknamed by the sailors of Texas. No one could have imagined that the first trip of the monstrously expensive unique ship would be the last. No berth wall had been prepared for him. How has nothing of the kind been prepared for the heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers Minsk and Novorossiysk. Therefore, it was impossible to supply ships with neither fuel, nor steam, nor water, nor electricity from the shore. Their diesel generators and boilers threshed non-stop, knocking out precious motor resources, which were supposed to be spent only on campaigns. It is not surprising that those cruisers, in fact, "ate" themselves and were scrapped long before the due date.
Now the same fate awaited Ural. He, too, spent most of the time on mooring barrels in Strelok Bay. And in the summer of 1990, a fire broke out on a nuclear reconnaissance ship, which disabled the aft engine room. Burned out electrical cables coming from the stern boiler. For more than a year, the power supply of the ship was provided only by the bow engine, but soon it also burned out. After that, only emergency diesel generators gave the ship all the energy. There was no money for repairs. In despair, the ship's commander, Captain 1st Rank Keshkov, even wrote an official letter to the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As expected, the commander received neither money for repairs nor an answer.
As a result of all the misadventures in 1992, the nuclear reactors of the Ural were drowned out, and he himself was put to a remote pier, turning into an unprecedented size of an officer's dormitory. For this, the Pacific people sarcastically nicknamed SSV-33 "Ural" a cabin carrier. And the abbreviation SSV began to be deciphered as follows: a special sleeping car.
In various sources, there is information that the "Ural" was still on alert, despite the breakdowns, the ship successfully controlled the North Pacific Ocean, intercepting radio traffic in the networks of the Navy, Air Force and PLO of the United States and Japan. In 2001, the ship, which had only gone on one military campaign, was finally decommissioned and put on a dock at a distant pier. Near him, too, was in a trickle of a fellow unfortunate - missile cruiser "Admiral Lazarev" (former "Frunze", one of the four atomic missile attack cruisers of Project 1144 "Orlan"; the only cruiser of project 1144 "Peter the Great" that remained in service is now the flagship Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy).
In April 2008, a tender was held for the disposal of the ship and its nuclear power plant. The ship was dismantled (2010) at the Zvezda Far East shipyard. June 2012 general manager FSUE "Rosatomflot" of the state corporation "Rosatom" Vyacheslav Ruksha announced his intention to use the equipment and power plant BARZK "Ural" for the repair of existing nuclear icebreakers... In September 2014, a repeated tender was announced for the disposal of the Ural BARZK.
The performance characteristics of the SSV-33 Ural spacecraft
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