"Now this pile of scrap metal will be a monument to the USSR"
Submarine stakeholders have come together in a common desire to preserve the giant TK-208 Dmitri Donskoy and turn her into a museum. “It will be a monument about no one and nothing,” says submarine expert-in-exile, Aleksandr Nikitin.
Capable of carrying 20 ballistic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, the Typhoon-class was the biggest ever submarines in the world. Six of the class were built in the late years of the Soviet Union at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk in northern Russia.
After the break-up of the USSR, three of the Typhoons were scrapped with the help of funding from the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program in the 1990ties.
Two more, the Severstal and Arkhangelsk, were laid up in Severodvinsk where they still remain today with their missile hatches open so U.S. satellites can see that no new missiles are loaded onboard.
It is the last Typhoon, the Dmitri Donskoy, a submarine that until early 2023 was sailing as a test platform for the Bulava missiles and other systems, that now will be turned into a museum.
Although the idea of preserving Dmitri Donskoy is not new, a lobby group of stakeholders, including representatives of submarine yards, veterans, the navy and Rosatom have now managed to get acceptance from the Ministry of Defence and the United Shipbuilding Corporation to put the plan into life, Kremlin-controlled newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta reports.
St. Petersburg navy museum
The Dmitri Donskoy was formally decommissioned in February 2023. She is laid-up at the Zvezdochkha yard in Severodvinsk, next to another of the Soviet Union's giant warships now decommissioned, the nuclear-powered battle cruiser Admiral Ushakov.
Turning the submarine into a museum sounds easier than it is.
First, the spent nuclear fuel from the two reactors have to be unloaded in a safe way. That operation alone can take years. Thereafter, the compartment with the still-highly radioactive reactors have to be cut out of the hull.
Russia has some experience with making former submarines into museum. The only nuclear-powered one, though, is the K-3 Leninsky Komsomol, the Soviet Union's first reactor-powered submarine that now is open to public at Kronstadt outside St. Petersburg.
The K-3 was made ready at the Nerpa shipyard north of Murmansk, a work the reportedly costed about 650 million rubles. Work on the significantly larger Typhoon submarine will likely cost tens of billions of rubles.
Also Dmitri Donskoy will be heading to St. Petersburg when ready. Here, she will get a prominent mooring by the Peter the Great Central Naval Museum, according to Rossiskya Gazeta. Exact location for the 170 meter long giant submarine is not said.
Traditionally, high-ranking submarine officers from the Northern Fleet's bases on the Kola Peninsula have received prominent apartments in St. Petersburg upon retirement. The club of veteran officers, among them several admirals, is a powerful lobby-group that a war-time Vladimir Putin needs as allies.
Recently, a group of specialists visited Severodvinsk and examined the conditions of Dmitri Donskoy with the aim to work out a plan how to rebuild the Typhoon into a museum.
After shipyard preparations, the submarine will floated around Scandinavia to St. Petersburg. The Dmitri Donskoy is likely to large for the inner waterways via the White Sea channel, Onega and Ladoga lakes to the Neva River.
A symbol of the Cold War
Built in the late 70ties and 80ties, the six Typhoon submarines became a symbol of the nuclear arms race in the last decade of the Cold War.
The fame of the Typhoons was helped by Tom Clancy's 1984 novel The Hunt for the Red October, and the following film starring Sean Connery in the role as the Soviet captain.
Aleksandr Nikitin, a former submarine officer who himself has served in the Northern Fleet's base in Zapadnaya Litsa, says rebuilding the Dmitri Donskoy into a museum is like creating a "monument about no one and nothing."
Nikitin today lives in exile in Oslo and works with nuclear safety for the Bellona foundation.
"These boats were big, expensive and useless as they did not solve anything," he tells to the Barents Observer.
"Now this pile of scrap metal will be a monument to the USSR country, which no longer exists."
