You probably haven’t lost a lot of sleep over what happened to the shipping industry during the pandemic. While the demand for freight capacity increased, passenger numbers slumped as cruises all but disappeared. That led to a number of historic ships being scrapped, among them the last surviving vessel of a class of Sovietera liners often referred to as ‘the five poets’ as each of the five ships originally bore the name of a poet associated with one of the Soviet Republics.
‘The poets’ were all built at Wismar in East Germany, with the first of the ships commencing her maiden voyage in November 1964, picking up passengers in Riga for a winter cruise to the Mediterranean. She was named after Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko, after whom the vessel class took its official name, viz. the Franko-class liners, even if colloquially the ships were known as ‘the poets’.
In the years after her launch, the MS Ivan Franko was joined by ships named after Pushkin, Shevchenko, Rustaveli and Lermontov. That one of these ships, the MS Aleksandr Pushkin, remained in service until the start of the pandemic was remarkable.
‘The poets’ became important and lucrative ambassadors for the Soviet Union. The Pushkin in particular was frequently used on the regular shipping services between Leningrad and London, with some sailings continuing across the Atlantic to Montréal. The MS Aleksandr Pushkin arrived in the Thames Estuary from Leningrad on 4 April 1966 after her very first trip with paying passengers; she docked at Tilbury (in the lower reaches of the River Thames), inaugurating an association with the Essex port which was to continue for over half a century.
On the leg between Leningrad and London, there were usually stops in Helsinki and then also in either Copenhagen or Göteborg. Another Leningrad to London routing featured a stop in Bremerhaven.
A winning formula
Quite apart from their transatlantic routes, ‘the poets’ quickly became mainstays in Europe’s maritime network. It wasn’t at all unusual for travellers from London to Helsinki in the late 1960s to take the train down to Tilbury and there board the Franko or the Pushkin for the sailing to Finland. Schedules varied over the years, but passengers sailing from London to Le Havre or Bremerhaven would often find themselves booked on a Soviet-flagged vessel and, if they were lucky, it would be one of the five poets.
Is it not extraordinary that, at the height of the Cold War, budget conscious Americans looking for a good value summer cruise in European waters opted for a Soviet ship?
These well-appointed ocean liners also offered cruises in European waters. The Pushkin, for example, had winter sailings from Rotterdam and London (which in practice meant departure from Tilbury) to the Canary Islands, Casablanca and Gibraltar. There were summer-season trips from other ports around the North Sea to the Mediterranean, with some cruises venturing as far as Odesa in the Black Sea. A brochure from 1965, in anticipation of the Pushkin entering service, promised that “passengers on the MS Aleksandr Pushkin will taste the famous Russian black and red caviar, Kamchatka crabmeat, Russian vodka, Ukrainian gorilka, Georgian and Crimean wines, Armenian cognac — the best wines recognized at international fairs will be available.”
Is it not extraordinary that, at the height of the Cold War, budget-conscious Americans looking for a good value summer cruise in European waters opted for a Soviet ship? Small wonder then that at congressional hearings into the state of the US passenger ship industry in 1970, eyebrows were raised at how, with so many American mariners laid off work and passenger ships just idle, US citizens were favouring Soviet cruises. British travellers too knew a good bargain, and cruises with the Pushkin from Tilbury were very popular. With a mix of cruise traffic, augmented by passengers just making point-to-point journeys between particular ports, there was not a lot of spare capacity on the Pushkin or her sister ships.
The success of the Soviet venture at Tilbury encouraged a Polish competitor and in the early 1970s, Gdynia America Line started offering a service from Gdynia to Montréal with an outward stop at Tilbury, and a Southampton port of call on the homebound voyage. Like the Soviet ‘poets’, the Polish ship made a medley of European stops, usually including Rotterdam and often either Hamburg or Copenhagen. It was thus perfectly possible to book on the TSS Stefan Batory to sail from Southampton to Rotterdam or Hamburg to Tilbury, journeys which respectively required one or two nights on board. For Poland, as for the Soviet Union, these journeys were an important source of hard currency. The Batory had a real touch of luxury, and is particularly remembered by her fans for the high quality of the live music on her transatlantic sailings. She had two professional orchestras on board.
The Stefan Batory remained in service until 1990, a sterling performance for a vessel that was much older than the Soviet Frankoclass liners. She was 38 years old on her last cruise, although curiously she wasn’t scrapped until fully ten years later.
Staying power
So what became of the five poets? The MS Mikhail Lermontov was the youngest of the class, having entered service in 1972. Her demise in 1986 was as dramatic as that of her namesake. The talented Russian Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov died at the age of just 26 in a duel. The ship named after him foundered on rocks in New Zealand, as a local pilot, navigating the vessel in waters he knew well, took an ill-advised short cut. The vessel sunk, although all passengers and crew, bar for the ship’s engineer, were saved.
The Shevchenko, the Rustaveli and the Franko all had long working lives, eventually being scrapped around the turn of the century. But it was the Pushkin which showed real staying power. She served the Leningrad to Montréal route until 1979, still keeping that Tilbury stop on the way. The Pushkin, the Stefan Batory and Cunard’s QE2 were the only three liners offering regular scheduled transatlantic crossings from England in the late 1970s.
The Pushkin sailed under the Soviet flag until 1991, when she was sold and reregistered in the Bahamas. She was renamed MS Marco Polo and after a spell cruising outside Europe, she returned to Tilbury, operating cruises that took her to northern Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and even as far afield as South America. Her classic lines with a striking dark hull and teak decks gave the Pushkin a real touch of class. At a time when many cruises relied on huge, floating palaces, the MS Pushkin in her new incarnation as the Marco Polo became much sought after for her modest size and retro-style.
In early January 2020, the MS Marco Polo sailed from Britain on a long cruise to Africa, South Asia and the Indian Ocean. The word coronavirus was hardly known when the vessel left Europe. Her last voyage took her to Cape Verde, St Helena, the Seychelles, India, Oman, Israel and dozens of other ports. It was the swansong for the last of ‘the poets’. By the time the ship returned to England on 24 March, the world had changed. Only the previous day, the UK government had announced coronavirus restrictions. The ship’s passengers were permitted to disembark, but crew members were required to stay on board the vessel.
A few weeks later, the company which owned the M S Marco Polo went bankrupt. The ship’s crew was still stranded on the ship, unable to return to their home countries, many of them unpaid for weeks. They were eventually repatriated, and the last of ‘the poets’ was sold for scrap. The ship’s last voyage was to India where she was broken up in 2021 at Alang in Gujarat. One of the finest ocean liners of her era, the vessel saw a remarkable 55 years of active service, and by a long stretch outlived the Russian poet after whom she was initially named. Aleksandr Pushkin died in St Petersburg at the age of 37.
