THE TRAGIC STORY OF ADMIRAL NAKHIMOV

The coming year will mark the 35th anniversary of a Russian shipping disaster which took the lives of 423 people and mandated the retirement of all of Russia’s remaining older passenger vessels. The incident took place only a few miles off the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and involved the 61-year-old Soviet liner Admiral Nakhimov, a ship with a history that included transatlantic service and use as a floating hospital during World War II.

The two-funnelled liner had been launched on 25 March 1925 as the 15,286gt by the Bremer Vulkan yard at Vegesack and commissioned on 17 September that year for Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Bremen-Southampton-Cherbourg-New York service. The ship’s first Atlantic