Rescue expedition to evacuate Papanin residents. The North Pole was stormed by all the USSR Awards and revenues

The drift of the first research expedition led by Ivan Papanin began in May 1937. 9 months of work, observations and research at the North Pole station ended when an ice floe in the Greenland Sea collapsed and scientists had to curtail their activities.
The entire Soviet Union watched the epic of the rescue of 4 Papanin residents.

The expedition was preceded by a long 5-year preparation. Before that, none of the travelers and scientists had tried to live on a drifting ice floe for so long. Scientists, knowing the direction of the ice movement, could imagine their route, but none of them imagined how long the expedition would last and how it would end.

I.D. Papanin

The ideologist of this expedition was Otto Yulievich Schmidt. After Stalin's approval, he quickly found people for this project - all of them were no strangers to Arctic expeditions. The efficient team consisted of 4 people: Ivan Papanin, Ernst Krenkel, Evgeny Fedorov and Pyotr Shirshov. The head of the expedition was Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin. Although he was born on the Black Sea coast in Sevastopol, he connected his life with the seas of the Arctic Ocean. Papanin was first sent to the Far North in 1925 to build a radio station in Yakutia. In 1931, he took part in the expedition of the Malygin icebreaker to the Franz Josef Land archipelago, a year later he returned to the archipelago as the head of a field radio station, and then created a scientific observatory and a radio center at Cape Chelyuskin.

P.P. Shirshov

Hydrobiologist and hydrologist Petr Petrovich Shirshov was also no stranger to Arctic expeditions. He graduated from the Odessa Institute of Public Education, was an employee of the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences, but he was attracted by travel, and in 1932 he was hired on an expedition to the icebreaking ship A. Sibiryakov ", and a year later he became a member of the tragic flight on" Chelyuskin ".

E.K. Fedorov

The youngest member of the expedition was Evgeny Konstantinovich Fedorov. He graduated from Leningrad University in 1934 and devoted his life to geophysics and hydrometeorology. Fedorov knew Ivan Papanin even before this expedition "North Pole-1". He worked as a magnetologist at the polar station in Tikhaya Bay at the ZPI, and then at the observatory at Cape Chelyuskin, where Ivan Papanin was his chief. After these winters Fedorov was included in the team for drifting on the ice floe.

E. T. Krenkel

The virtuoso radio operator Ernst Teodorovich Krenkel graduated from the courses of radiotelegraphists in 1921. At the final exams, he showed such a high speed of work in Morse code that he was immediately sent to the Lyubertsy radio station. Since 1924, Krenkel worked in the Arctic - first at Matochkin Shara, then at several other polar stations of Novaya and Severnaya Zemlya. In addition, he took part in expeditions aboard the Georgy Sedov and Sibiryakov and in 1030 managed to set a world record by contacting the American Antarctic station from the Arctic.

Funny dog

Another full-fledged member of the expedition is Vesely the dog. It was presented by the winterers of the island of Rudolph, from which the planes made a rush to the Pole. He brightened up the monotonous life on the ice, and was the soul of the expedition. A thieving soul, because he never denied himself the pleasure of sneaking into the warehouse with food on occasion and stealing something edible. In addition to enlivening the atmosphere, the main duty of Vesely was to warn of the approach of polar bears, which he did an excellent job.
There was no doctor on the expedition. His duties were assigned to Shirshov.


When preparing the expedition, we tried to take into account everything that was possible - from the operating conditions of the equipment to household trifles. The Papanin people were supplied with a solid supply of food, a camping laboratory, a wind turbine that generated energy and a radio station for communication with the earth. However, the main feature of this expedition was that it was prepared on the basis of theoretical ideas about the conditions of stay on an ice floe. But without practice, it was difficult to imagine how the expedition might end and, most importantly, how scientists would have to be removed from the ice floe.


A tent was a dwelling and a camping laboratory during the drift. This structure was small - 4 x 2.5 m.It was insulated according to the principle of a down jacket: the frame was covered with 3 covers: the inner one was sewn from canvas, the middle cover was made of silk stuffed with eider down, the outer one was made of thin black tarpaulin soaked in waterproof compound. Reindeer skins lay on the canvas floor of the tent as insulation.
The Papanin residents recalled that it was very cramped inside and they were afraid of touching anything (laboratory samples were also kept in the tent, raised from the depths of the Arctic Ocean and preserved in alcohol in flasks).


I. Papanin cooking dinner
The food requirements for the polar explorers were quite strict - each day's diet had to consist of food with calories up to 7000 kcal. At the same time, the food had to be not only nutritious, but also contain a significant amount of vitamins - mainly vitamin C. For the nutrition of the expedition, concentrated soup mixtures were specially developed - a kind of present "bouillon cubes", only more useful and rich. One packet of this mixture was enough to make a good soup for four members of the expedition. In addition to soups, it was possible to prepare porridge, compotes from such mixtures.Also, even cutlets were prepared in a dry form for the expedition - in total, about 40 types of instant concentrates were developed - this required only boiling water, and all the food was ready in 2-5 minutes.
In addition to the usual dishes, absolutely new products with an interesting taste have appeared in the diet of polar explorers: in particular, croutons, 23% consisting of meat and "salty chocolate with an admixture of meat and chicken powder." In addition to concentrates, the Papanin residents had butter, cheese, and even sausage in their diet. Also, the expedition members were provided with vitamin tablets and sweets.
All the dishes were made on the principle that one item fits into another to save space. This subsequently began to be used by manufacturers of tableware, not only expeditionary, but also ordinary, household.


Almost immediately after landing on the ice, work began. Pyotr Shirshov carried out depth measurements, took soil samples, water samples at different depths, determined its temperature, salinity, oxygen content in it. All samples were immediately processed in a field laboratory. Evgeny Fedorov was responsible for meteorological observations. Atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative air humidity, wind direction and speed were measured. All information was transmitted by radio to Rudolf Island. These communication sessions were carried out 4 times a day.
To communicate with the ground, the central radio laboratory in Leningrad made two special-order radio stations - a powerful 80-watt and a 20-watt emergency one, with a wind turbine as the main power source (besides it there was a hand-operated engine). All this equipment (its total weight was about 0.5 tons) was made by the personal observation of Krenkel and the leadership of radio engineer N.N. Stromilov.


Difficulties began after the new 1938. The ice floe drifted south and fell into bad weather. A crack appeared on it and its size was rapidly decreasing. However, the polar explorers tried to remain calm and observed the usual daily routine.
“In the tent, our glorious old living tent, a kettle was boiling, dinner was being prepared. Suddenly, in the midst of pleasant preparations, there was a sharp jolt and a creaky rustle. It seemed that silk or linen was being torn somewhere nearby, ”Krenkel recalled about how the ice cracked.
“Dmitrich (Ivan Papanin) could not sleep. He smoked (the first sign of excitement) and fiddled with household chores. Sometimes he looked longingly at the loudspeaker suspended from the ceiling. With the jolts, the loudspeaker swayed slightly and rattled. In the morning, Papanin proposed to play chess. They played thoughtfully, calmly, with full awareness of the importance of the work being done. And suddenly, through the roar of the wind, an unusual noise broke through again. The ice floe shuddered convulsively. We decided not to stop the game, ”he wrote about the moment when the ice floe cracked under the tent itself.
Krenkel then rather casually transmitted Papanin's message on the radio: “As a result of a six-day storm at 8 am on February 1 in the area of ​​the station, the field was torn apart by cracks from half a kilometer to five. We are on a fragment of a field 300 meters long and 200 meters wide (the initial size of the ice floe was approximately 2 X 5 km). Two bases were cut off, as well as a technical warehouse with minor property. Everything valuable has been saved from the fuel and utility depots. There was a crack under the living tent. We will move to a snow house. I will inform you additionally the coordinates today; in case of disconnection, please do not worry "
The ships "Taimyr" and "Murman" have already advanced to the polar explorers, but it was not easy to get to the station because of the difficult ice conditions. The planes also could not pick up the polar explorers from the ice - the site for their landing on the ice collapsed, and one plane sent from the ship itself got lost, and a rescue expedition was created to search for it. The ships were able to break through to the station only when an ice hole formed, they received significant damage in the ice along the way.
On February 19, at 13:40, Murman and Taimyr moored to the ice field 1.5 km from the polar station. They took on board all the members of the expedition and their equipment. The last message of the expedition was as follows: “... At this hour we are leaving the ice floe at coordinates 70 degrees 54 minutes of the Nordic, 19 degrees 48 minutes of the messenger, and having covered over 2500 km in 274 days of drift. Our radio station was the first to report the news of the conquest of the North Pole, ensured reliable communication with the Motherland, and this telegram ends its work ”. On February 21, the Papanin people went to the Ermak icebreaker, which delivered them to Leningrad on March 16.


The scientific results obtained in the unique drift were presented to the General Meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences on March 6, 1938 and were highly appreciated by specialists. All members of the expedition were awarded academic degrees and titles of Hero of the Soviet Union. Also, this title was awarded to the pilots - A. D. Alekseev, P. G. Golovin, I. P. Mazuruk and M. I. Shevelev.
Thanks to this first expedition, the following became possible - in the 1950s, the North Pole-2 expedition followed, and soon such wintering grounds became permanent. In 2015, the last North Pole expedition took place.

79 years ago, the drift of the world's first polar research station and the "North Pole - 1" began in the Arctic. Four polar explorers - head of the expedition Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, hydrobiologist and oceanologist Pyotr Petrovich Shirshov, astronomer and magnetologist Yevgeny Konstantinovich Fedorov, and radio operator Ernst Teodorovich Krenkel spent 274 days on the expedition - from the end of May 1937 to February 19, 1938. During this time, the ice floe with the researchers passed more than 2000 km from the pole to the shores of Greenland. At the end of the campaign, the now famous four polar explorers were admitted to the State Geographical Society (as the Russian Geographical Society was then called) as honorary members.

The main task of the expedition, the organization of which took exactly one year - from spring 1936 to spring 1937, was to study meteorological conditions, sea currents and ice in the very center of the Arctic. In addition to the four polar explorers, whose names were recognized by the whole world during and after the expedition, the expedition was provided by the staff of the Northern Sea Route (its chief, the Chelyuskin hero Otto Yulievich Schmidt, was the initiator of SP-1) and polar aviation pilots, including Heroes Soviet Union Mikhail Vodopyanov and Vasily Molokov. Attention to the SP-1 drift was universal and global - therefore, it is not surprising that the expedition was carefully controlled by the first persons of the USSR.

The main burden of training, however, lay on the four polar explorers. Papanin personally supervised the construction of a polar tent insulated with eider down at the Kauchuk plant, and Krenkel oversaw the assembly of radio stations - the main one and the reserve one. Shirshov mastered medicine - it was he who got the additional role of a doctor on the expedition.

The base of the expedition was the northernmost of the Soviet Arctic islands - Rudolf Island, part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago. In the summer of 1936, an expedition camp with a capacity of about 60 people was built on the island, with an airfield, telephone, radio beacon and other necessary elements.

They flew to the pole, guided by the radio beacon about. Rudolph. Arrangement of four polar explorers on a huge ice floe with an area of ​​about 4 square meters. km took about 16 days. On June 6, the planes left the expedition, "North Pole - 1" went into autonomous drift mode.

Almost immediately after the start of the drift, "SP-1" completed a crucial task - it provided meteorological data for the record transarctic flights of Valery Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov from the USSR to North America.

“Never before have scientific observations in the Central Polar Basin been conducted according to such a broad program, with such intensity and the greatest care,” O. Yu. Schmidt noted in the final article “Expedition to the Pole”.

The glory of the Papanin quartet was deafening and instantaneous - after the expedition, all four were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, in March 1938 Papanin, Krenkel, Fedorov and Shirshov were awarded the titles of doctors of geographical sciences.

The concept of drifting polar stations in the Arctic was recognized as successful: SP-1 was followed in 1950 by SP-2 under the leadership of Mikhail Mikhailovich Somov, who later founded the first Soviet stations in Antarctica. By the late 1950s, the North Pole drifting expeditions had become almost constant. The longest expedition of the series was "SP-22", which began work in September 1973 and ended on April 8, 1982. From 1991 to 2003, the Arctic drifting stations "North Pole" did not operate, the first station after the break, "SP-32" was launched on April 25, 2003.

Mikhailov Andrey 06/13/2019 at 16:00

There are many glorious pages in the history of the discovery and study of the Russian Arctic. But there is a special chapter in it, with which the heroic polar epic began. On May 21, 1937, the polar air expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences reached the North Pole and landed the North Pole-1 scientific station on the drifting ice for nine long months.

This expedition began the systematic development of the entire Arctic basin, thanks to which navigation along the Northern Sea Route became regular. Its members were to collect data in the field of atmospheric phenomena, meteorology, geophysics, hydrobiology. The station was headed by Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, hydrologist Pyotr Petrovich Shirshov, geophysicist-astronomer Evgeny Konstantinovich Fedorov and radio operator Ernst Teodorovich Krenkel became its employees. The expedition was led by Otto Yulievich Schmidt, the pilot of the flagship aircraft N-170 was the hero of the Soviet Union Mikhail Vasilyevich Vodopyanov.

And it all started like that. On February 13, 1936, at a meeting in the Kremlin on the organization of transport flights, Otto Schmidt outlined a plan for an air expedition to the North Pole and the establishment of a station there. Stalin and Voroshilov, on the basis of the plan, instructed the Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (Glavsevmorput) to organize an expedition to the North Pole region in 1937 and deliver equipment for the scientific station and winterers there by plane.

An air expedition squadron was formed from four four-engined aircraft ANT-6-4M-34R "Aviaarktika" and a twin-engined reconnaissance aircraft R-6. In the spring of 1936 pilots Vodopyanov and Makhotkin went on reconnaissance to select the location of the intermediate base for the assault on the pole on Rudolf Island (Franz Josef Land). In August, the icebreaking steamer Rusanov headed there with cargo for the construction of a new polar station and equipment for the airfield.

The whole country was preparing the expedition. For example, a tent for a residential camp was created by the Moscow plant "Kauchuk". Its frame was made of easily disassembled aluminum pipes, the canvas walls were paved with two layers of eiderdown, and the rubber inflatable floor was also supposed to keep warm.

The Central Radio Laboratory in Leningrad produced two radio stations - a powerful 80-watt and a 20-watt emergency one. The main power source was two sets of alkaline batteries charged from a small wind turbine or from a dynamo - a light gasoline engine (there was also a hand-operated engine). All equipment, from the antenna to the smallest spare parts, was made under the personal supervision of Krenkel, the weight of the radio equipment fit in half a ton.

According to special drawings, the Leningrad Shipyard named after Karakozov built ash sleds that weighed only 20 kilograms. The Institute of Catering Engineers prepared meals for the drifting station for a whole year and a half, weighing about 5 tons.

On May 21, 1937, at about five in the morning, Mikhail Vodopyanov's car took off from Rudolf Island. Throughout the flight, radio communication was maintained, the weather and the nature of the ice cover were clarified. During the flight, an accident occurred: in the upper part of the radiator of the third engine, a leak formed in the flange, and antifreeze began to evaporate. The flight mechanics had to cut the wing skin in order to put a rag that absorbed the liquid, squeeze it into a bucket, and from it pump the coolant back into the engine reservoir with a pump.

The mechanics had to carry out this operation until the very landing, sticking out their bare hands from the wing in -20 and a fast wind. At 10:50 we reached the pole. And on May 25, the rest of the group of aircraft was launched.

After landing at the North Pole, the researchers made many discoveries. Every day they took soil samples, measured the depth and speed of drift, determined the coordinates, conducted magnetic measurements, hydrological and meteorological observations. Soon after the landing, an ice floe drifting was discovered, on which the researchers' camp was located. Her wanderings began in the North Pole region, after 274 days the ice floe turned into a piece of 200 by 300 meters.

On this day, May 21, 1937 - 79 years ago, the expedition of I. Papanin, E. Krenkel, P. Shirshov, E. Fedorov landed on the ice of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole and deployed the first polar station "North Pole-1".

For tens of years, thousands of desperate travelers and explorers of the North have sought to get to the North Pole, trying at all costs to plant the flag of their country there, marking the victory of their people over the harsh and mighty forces of nature.

With the advent of aviation, new opportunities arose to reach the North Pole. Such as the flights of R. Amundsen and R. Byrd on airplanes and flights of the airships "Norway" and "Italy". But for serious scientific research in the Arctic, these expeditions were short-lived and not very significant. The real breakthrough was the successful completion of the first high-latitude Soviet air expedition and the landing on the drifting ice in 1937 of the heroic "four" under the leadership of ID Papanin.

So, O. Yu. Schmidt headed the air part of the transfer to the Pole, and ID Papanin was responsible for its sea part and wintering at the SP-1 drifting station. The plans of the expedition included a landing in the North Pole area for a year, during which it was supposed to collect a huge amount of various scientific data on meteorology, geophysics, hydrobiology. Five planes took off from Moscow on March 22. The flight ended on May 21, 1937.

At 11:35 a.m., the flagship aircraft under the control of the commander of the flight squadron of the Hero of the Soviet Union M.V. Vodopyanova landed on the ice, having flown 20 km over the North Pole. And the last of the planes landed only on June 5, the conditions of flight and landing were so difficult. On June 6, the USSR flag was raised over the North Pole, and the planes set off on their way back.

On the ice floe remained four brave explorers with a tent for life and work, two radio stations connected by an antenna, a workshop, a meteorological booth, a theodolite for measuring the height of the sun and warehouses built of ice. The expedition included: P.P. Shirshov - hydrobiologist, glaciologist; E.K. Fedorov - meteorologist-geophysicist; THIS. Krenkel - radio operator and I.D. Papanin is the head of the station. Months of exhausting work and hard life lay ahead. But it was a time of mass heroism, high spirituality and impatient striving forward.

Every day of their stay at the North Pole brought new discoveries to researchers, and the first of them was the depth of water under the ice at 4290 meters. Every day, at certain observation times, soil samples were taken, the depths and drift speed were measured, coordinates were determined, magnetic measurements, hydrological and meteorological observations were carried out.

Soon, the drift of the ice floe was discovered, on which the camp of the researchers was located. Her wanderings began in the North Pole region, then the ice floe rushed south at a speed of 20 km per day.

A month after the Papaninites landed on the ice floe (this is how the brave quartet all over the world were christened), when a solemn meeting of the participants of the World's First Air Expedition to the North Pole took place in the Kremlin, a decree was read out to award O.Yu. Schmidt and I.D. Papanin of the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the rest of the drift participants were awarded the Orders of Lenin. The ice floe, on which the Papanin's camp was located, after 274 days turned into a fragment no more than 30 meters wide with several cracks.

A decision was made to evacuate the expedition. Behind there was a path of 2500 km along the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Sea. On February 19, 1938, the icebreakers Taimyr and Murman took the polar explorers off the ice. On March 15, the polar explorers were taken to Leningrad.

The scientific results obtained in the unique drift were presented to the General Meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences on March 6, 1938 and were highly appreciated by specialists. The scientific staff of the expedition were awarded academic degrees. Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin received the title of Doctor of Geographical Sciences.

With the heroic drift of the Papaninites, the systematic development of the entire Arctic basin began, which made regular navigation along the Northern Sea Route. Despite all the gigantic obstacles and difficulties of fate, the Papaninites, with their personal courage, have written one of the brightest pages in the history of the development of the Arctic.