Mayor Yury Luzhkov to drive a submarine to Moscow

For one and a half a year, dockyards of the city of Severodvinsk (Arkhangelsk Region) have been carrying out reequipment of 641B diesel-electric submarine (Tango) of the Northern Fleet into a museum of Russian submarine fleet. The idea to turn the ship into a museum was proposed by Yury Luzhkov already in 1996, while laying Yury Dolgoruky atomic submarine (it is probably not by chance that Yury Luzhkov became current of namely this submarine building) in building berth of Severodvinsk Northern Machine-Building Works. The idea was welcomed not only by the works’ leaders, but by serious capital financiers and businessmen, too. According to their calculations, the true submarine presented to visitors by Moscow-River quay will be repaid already in first two or three years of “museum” exploitation. There are examples of such “transformations”: the Chinese turned a heavy aircraft-carrier of Soviet production into a unique entertaining complex with casinos and sport halls, which repaid within 9 months (it is probably because it was bought in Russia as scrap metal). So, in autumn of 2000, Tango submarine was towed to Severodvinsk and put on the building berth. The reequipment should have been completed by this summer, though because of the spasmodic financing the terms will be most likely postponed. So far, the works’ specialists have only realized the technical part of the project and now unship mechanisms and enlarge passages. According to the project, in the works only two compartments of the seven will reequipped. The rest will be equipped in Moscow, in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest where the submarine will be transported through White-Sea-Baltic Channel. The Severodvinsk workers will also cut out openings in the bow and in the stern of the submarine to make entrances for excursions. Already this autumn, it will be clear when the first Moscow submarine occupies its place by Moscow-River quay.

Andrei Mikhailov Specially for PRAVDA.Ru Severodvinsk

Translated by Vera Solovieva

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/north-west/2002/05/28/41851.html