Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin

Ivan Papanin ( Russian Иван Дмитриевич Папанин ., Scientific transliteration Ivan Dmitrievič Papanin ; born November 14, ^jul. / 26. November  1894 ^greg. In Sevastopol ; † 30th January 1986 in Moscow ) was a Soviet polar explorers and led the expedition that who probably entered the geographic North Pole for the first time in 1937 .

childhood

Ivan Papanin grew up under the simplest of circumstances in a slum on the outskirts of Sevastopol. His father Dmitri Papanin worked as a simple seaman, but had no steady income. The mother Sekletinja Petrovna supported the family with sewing; six of the nine siblings survived. The boy was diving in the harbor for coins that tourists threw off the ships. He completed the four years of compulsory school with an examination so excellent that he could have continued to attend classes at state expense, but his father took him away from school. He became an apprentice in a workshop that manufactured navigation instruments for the Black Sea Fleet , where he was trained as a lathe operator. At the age of 18 he went to Reval to work in a shipyard .

revolution

In November 1914 Papanin was drafted into the Navy in the Crimea , where he witnessed the February and October revolutions . During the civil war he was initially involved in the fighting as a simple soldier of the Red Guard and then headed the repair shop of an armored train brigade in the 12th and 14th Army for two years. In 1919 he became a party member of the KPR (B) . In August 1920 he returned to the Crimea and made his way to the partisans, for whom he smuggled weapons.

After the conquest of the Crimea, he was appointed commander of the local Cheka in November 1920 . According to many sources, Papanin worked in the Cheka under the leadership of Rosalia Zemlyachka , one of the organizers of the Red Terror in Crimea. In 1920 and 1921, thousands of supporters and suspected supporters of the White Army and their family members were murdered by the Bolsheviks in the Crimea , with the Cheka playing the central role in this process.

A little later he became secretary of the Revolutionary War Council of the Black Sea Fleet and finally went to Moscow in April 1922 as commissioner of the main administration for maritime technology and economics, where he was demobilized.

First experiences in the Arctic

As head of the central administration in the People's Commissariat for Post and Telecommunications, Papanin first came into contact with the Arctic . As deputy site manager, he had to oversee a large radio station on Aldan in Yakutia , which was completed in half the estimated time. In 1931 there was another opportunity to travel to the Arctic: The "International Study Society for Exploring the Arctic by Airship" ( Aeroarctic ), which was dominated by German and Soviet scientists, undertook an expedition with the airship LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin" to the Soviet Arctic. This also was Franz Josef Land served where to finance the company post with the icebreaker Malygin should be replaced. Papanin received the order to set up a special post office on the ship. He was so enthusiastic about the experience that he applied to the Arctic Institute of the USSR: he was appointed head of the station in Tichaja Bay on Hooker Island for the 2nd International Polar Year 1932/33, on the occasion of which the Soviet Union set up numerous new polar stations . There he wintered for the first time in the Arctic.

In addition to setting up the station, the scientists have already been able to undertake numerous radio tests of the earth's atmosphere and track how radio waves propagate through reflection in the ionosphere . They succeeded in determining the location of the tropopause between the troposphere and the stratosphere . They also drew up a radiation balance over the course of the year under arctic conditions and observed strong magnetic anomalies on Franz Josef Land. When they were re-mapped, it turned out that many of the islands had previously been incorrectly recorded on the maps.

At Cape Chelyuskin

The Taimyr Peninsula (left half of the map)

In 1934 Iwan Papanin received the next order: he was to expand the existing polar station at the northernmost point of the Asian mainland - Cape Chelyuskin on the Taimyr peninsula . The location was of strategic interest because the adjacent Wilkizkistraße is the only halfway ice-free connection between Lake Kara and Lake Laptev . In the same summer, houses and depots, scientific stations and a wind turbine were set up there and from then on hydrological, meteorological and geophysical reports were sent to the Arctic Institute on a daily basis. The group overwintered again and explored the ice conditions in Wilkizkistraße the next spring with three aircraft. Papanin always involved women in such ventures, in this case the geophysicist Anna Viktorovna Fyodorow and his future wife Galina Kirillovna, then only the third or fourth woman in Soviet Arctic research.

Expedition to the North Pole

Souvenir special cover from the GDR from 1984 for the 90th birthday of Iwan Papanin with a motif about the drift of the polar station "Nordpol-1"

In 1936 the Politburo decided to set up an ice drift station at the North Pole for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution . Numerous technical problems had to be resolved, including that no Soviet aircraft had ever landed on drifting ice. Ivan Papanin was appointed head of the expedition. He was accompanied by the geophysicist and meteorologist Evgeni Fjodorow , the oceanologist Pyotr Schirschow and the radio operator Ernst Krenkel .

First was on the Rudolf Island of Franz Josef Land , a polar station, which is 900 kilometers from the North Pole, furnished. On May 5, 1937, a Soviet Tupolev PS-7 aircraft with the pilot Pavel Golovin flew over the pole on a reconnaissance flight for the first time . On May 21, an ANT-6 under the command of Mikhail Vodopyanov took a course for the pole and landed near it at 89 ° 25 'north and 78 ° 40' west at 11:35 a.m. Moscow time . Journalist and cameraman Mark Trojanowski jumped onto the ice first.

In 274 days, “ North Pole-1 ” drifted 2500 kilometers along the east coast of Greenland before the expedition was resumed by an icebreaker at 70 degrees 54 minutes north latitude. Papanin always assumed that the American Robert Peary was the first to reach the North Pole. Since this and Frederick Cook's priority are now doubted for good reasons, the expedition he led probably brought people onto the ice near the North Pole for the first time.

Headquarters Northern Sea Route

Through his North Pole expedition, Ivan Papanin had become one of the most popular Soviet citizens of the Stalin era. However, the following lecture tours took him so much that he suffered a heart attack in 1938. Nevertheless, he was appointed deputy head of the Northern Sea Route Headquarters in the same year ; a year later to their head. His first task was to build a ship repair yard in Murmansk , for which he mobilized 20,000 young people through the press. In the shipping period of 1939 he sailed the entire Northern Sea Route from west to east and back again. He was also a member of the Revision Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU , Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, as well as the Moscow City Soviet .

War in the Arctic

During the Finnish-Soviet War , Papanin organized military transports on the White Sea . In 1941/42 he was deployed in Arkhangelsk , where he had several ports expanded, through which the Allied supplies ran under the " Lend Lease Act ". He also had the port of Murmansk repaired, despite its proximity to the front, because it was free of ice even in winter. In 1943, appointed Rear Admiral, he spent in the eastern section of the Northern Sea Route to organize the transfer of aircraft from the United States. In addition, some convoys coming from the east also ran through the Northern Sea Route (detailed description of war activities in the article Headquarters of the Northern Sea Route ). From 1944 onwards, Iwan Papanin had such severe problems because of his heart disease that he finally had to give up the management of the Northern Sea Route headquarters in 1946.

Development of the Soviet research fleet

In the autumn of 1948, his comrade from the North Pole expedition, Pyotr Schirschow, who was now head of the Institute of Oceanology at the Academy of Sciences , visited him and suggested that he become his deputy, responsible for expeditions. A motor cargo ship was converted into the first research ship and named Vitjas (Recke). In 60 trips from 1949 onwards, the ship explored the Pacific and Indian Oceans in particular; almost every Soviet oceanologist studied on the Vityaz . One focus of the work was on researching the spawning and fishing grounds of important species of farmed fish. Later, a marine expeditions department was set up for Papanin at the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.

First he had old fishing ships converted for expeditions; In 1952 ten small trawlers from the GDR were added. In preparation for the International Geophysical Year 1957/58, a total of three ocean-going ships were built, initially the Michail Lomonossow , which was used in the Atlantic. From here the Lomonosov Current was discovered, which flows at a depth of 50 to 200 meters along the equator from South America to Africa. In addition, a special non-magnetic schooner was put into service to measure the earth's magnetic field . On November 30, 1955, the first Soviet Antarctic expedition left.

The Borok Biological Station

In 1951 Papanin examined the Borok biological station on the upper reaches of the Volga . The station was so run down that it either had to be closed or greatly upgraded. In addition to his duties as head of the Soviet sea expeditions, he temporarily assumed the position of director. Here he spent the next 20 years of his life. In 1956 the station was upgraded to the Institute for Biology of Reservoirs. Using the example of the Rybinsk reservoir and the Volga, the problem of overfishing was examined and rules for sustainable use were drawn up. Catching during the spawning season was banned, poaching was combated and fishing with close-meshed nets was prohibited. The institute has become the leading research center for freshwater biology in the Soviet Union and has played a pioneering role in environmental protection. In 1972 he gave up the management of the institute.

Ivan Papanin died in Moscow in 1986 at the age of 91.

Awards and honors

For his achievements he was honored twice (1937 and 1940) as Hero of the Soviet Union and nine times with the Order of Lenin . He also received the Order of the October Revolution in 1971 .

A cape on the Taimyr Peninsula and a deep sea mountain in the Pacific Ocean bear his name. Then there are the Papanin Nunatakker in the Antarctic Enderbyland .

2019 was launch a named after Papanin, combatants icebreaker, the first of its class.

literature

• Iwan Papanin: Life on an Ice Floe. A diary . SWA, Berlin 1947 (reissued under the title Drift on the Ice Floe , Leipzig 1970).
• Iwan Papanin: Ice and Flame: Memories . Dietz, Berlin 1981 (original edition: Лёд и пламень . Politisdat, Moscow 1977).
• Papanin . In: Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (translation of the third Russian edition). Vol. 19, MacMillan, New York 1978, p. 224.

Web links

Commons : Iwan Dmitrijewitsch Papanin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Iwan Dmitrijewitsch Papanin in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oleg Dmitriev: Ivan Papanin , biographical entry on russiapedia.rt.com (accessed October 4, 2012).
2. ↑ Russia: Launch of the icebreaker "Ivan Papanin". Accessed November 2, 2019 (German).