Odessa Last Breath of Soviet Liberty

VLADIVOSTOK, Far East ?€” It?€™s quitting time in the country?€™s largest Pacific seaport, and workers tromp down the gangway of the Odessa, a steamship that serves as a floating carpentry and repair shop for a fishing company.

The 139-meter vessel ?€” a black tub whose flat stern is backed up to a wharf ?€” looks unremarkable in a city whose harbors are filled with rusting freighters, aging navy cruisers and half-sunken diesel submarines.

But the Odessa is the Far East?€™s last Liberty Ship, one of 2,700 cargo steamships welded together in the United States during World War II in order to provide war materials for Britain and the Soviet Union. Built in Richmond, California, in 1943, the Odessa numbers among a handful of survivors of this fleet of "ugly ducklings" that carried the tanks, jeeps, barrels of fuel, airport equipment and canned butter and Spam that helped the Allies defeat Hitler.

And yet, the Odessa?€™s history is intertwined with tragedy. Built to defend freedom, within eight months of its launch it carried a cargo of gulag slave laborers to build a remote port in the Far East. Indeed, many who came in touch with Liberty Ships were swept into the maw of the gulag system ?€” as if Stalin?€™s Soviet Union found something detestable in the very name.

Nikolai Turkutyukov, 73, is a retired Vladivostok economist who helped prepare Liberty Ships for Soviet crews in Portland, Oregon, during the war. Every day, the shipyard finished and launched another vessel, and the teenage cadet eventually came home chattering about American movies, life and an industry that could crank out a steamer in months rather than the years it would take in a Soviet shipyard.

But Vladivostok in the 1930s and 1940s was a city filled with brigades of forced laborers in gray and black prison garb. Portraits of Stalin hung everywhere. An army sergeant sent to pick up a bust of the dictator hauled it back to camp slung over his shoulder with his belt; he was arrested for "lynching a bust of Stalin." In such circumstances, Turkutyukov?€™s enthusiasm for Liberty Ships didn?€™t go unnoticed.

"I was charged with praising the life of the working people in America, praising its culture while putting down ?€¦ the Soviet Union," he said. He spent five years in a labor camp.

Across the sea, the last two remaining Liberty Ships in the United States have found a place of honor. The Jeremiah O?€™Brien is docked at the National Maritime Museum in San Francisco, and the John W. Brown welcomes visitors in Baltimore?€™s inner harbor.

But an economically struggling nation has no money to preserve an obsolete ship. Two of the historic vessels in Vladivostok have been sold for scrap since 1998. The Odessa itself will soon be tugged off by Japanese or South Korean scrap metal dealers who buy ships at less than $150 a metric ton.

The Odessa was launched as a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt?€™s $350 million shipbuilding program, started in 1941. Within three years, American shipyards would build the equivalent of half the prewar merchant shipping fleet of the world ?€” even as they were christening the world?€™s largest naval fleet, according to the Historic Naval Ships Association, an organization dedicated to preserving old ships based in Annapolis, Maryland. They were built to be cheap and expendable, so that the loss of a ship to German or Japanese torpedoes wouldn?€™t be a crippling blow ?€” yet many of the ships continued to ply the seas for decades.

The Odessa?€™s builders, Permanent Metals Co., launched her as the Mary Cossat, according to Russian author Alla Paperno?€™s "Lend-Lease: The Pacific Ocean." A Soviet crew manned and rechristened the ship on May 31, 1943. On her third voyage disaster struck.

The Odessa was sailing from the United States to the northern port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with a cargo of rice, dried milk and other foodstuffs on Oct. 4 when a torpedo ?€” possibly Japanese ?€” blew a hole in the port hull, Paperno wrote. The explosion ripped a gash of 39 square meters in the ship?€™s steel skin.

Seawater flooded in and flushed out bags of rice and crates of cargo. Captain Ivan Ivanov and his crew scrambled to patch the side with a tarpaulin. The Soviet steamer Vyborg responded to a distress signal and towed the Odessa to Petropavlovsk, where she was repaired and sent to sea again.

While they served heroically in the war, the Liberty Ships were also drafted in a more darksome effort. Most slave laborers who worked in the northern string of gulag camps known as Kolyma were shipped by rail from central Russia to Vladivostok, and then by sea to the port of Magadan.

Turkutyukov, who has made an avocation of studying the Liberty Ships, said many served as gulag transport vessels, as there were other camps that needed a constant replenishing of prisoners.

On Odessa?€™s third cruise, beginning Dec. 17, 1943, Soviet officials dispatched her from Vladivostok to Vanino with a cargo of slave laborers. Packed below the decks were 3,000 young women accused of taking German lovers in the Ukraine and other occupied areas in the western Soviet Union.

These laborers would become the first settlers in the port of Vanino.

After the war, the Odessa continued to sail as a cargo vessel until it was retired in 1977. It has served as a wharfside repair shop ever since. Yet even today, there are a handful of old salts onboard the Odessa who remember her sailing days.

"There are veterans who sailed for 30 or 40 years for the fleet, and now they work as mechanics and motormen on our ship," said Captain Pyotr Adamov. "The Odessa herself is a veteran who gives them work and bread."