Battleship Giulio Cesare. Level 5 rescue. The death of the battleship "Novorossiysk": five versions Opinion of the government commission

The death of the battleship "Novorossiysk"

THE MYSTERY OF THE DEATH OF THE BATTLESHIP "NOVOROSSIYSK".

After the victory in World War II, the Allies divided the Italian fleet by decision of the Tripartite Commission in 1948. As a result Soviet Union got a light cruiser, 9 destroyers, 4 submarines and a battleship "Julius Caesar", built before the First World War. On February 6, 1949, the flag of the USSR Navy was hoisted over the ship, and a little later, in March, the battleship was renamed Novorossiysk.
The condition of the Julius Caesar during the transfer was unimportant: for five years, almost scrapped, the ship was rusting with a small, obviously insufficient for such a vessel, crew on board without proper maintenance. Did not save the situation and a small repair, carried out immediately before the transfer of the battleship to the Union.

Nevertheless, already in July 49, Novorossiysk took part in maneuvers as the flagship of the squadron. Subsequently, the battleship spent quite a lot of time in the repair docks, it was repaired as many as eight times and achieved some success: they replaced the combat and technical means, modernized the turbines, even figured out the inconvenient layout. They planned to completely rearm the ship, but decided to take their time and leave the Italian guns. In the future, it was supposed to equip the battleship with shells with tactical nuclear charges - and then, despite its venerable age of 35, it would begin to pose a real threat to the enemy.

October 28, 1955 "Novorossiysk" returned from the next campaign, moored in the area of ​​the Marine Hospital. on board, in addition to full-time sailors, there were soldiers transferred from the army to the navy and completely unprepared for what happened a little later: at half past two in the night, a powerful explosion was heard under the ship's hull (~ 1100-1800 kg of trinitrotoluene). Seeing that the flow of water could not be stopped, the acting commander, captain of the second rank G. Khorshudov, turned to the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Parkhomenko, with a proposal to evacuate part of the team, which, due to the flooding of the bow, began to gather on the poop and numbered several hundred people, but received refusal. At 4.15 the ship capsized after a roll, dragging hundreds of people under water who were on deck and in the compartments. At ten o'clock in the evening the battleship sank completely.

Despite the fact that there was enough time from the moment of the explosion to the moment of capsizing (not to mention the time of complete flooding, which occurred 20 hours after the accident), only 9 people were saved from the compartments: two were pulled out by divers, seven were pulled out through the cut bottom of the ship by rescuers from Karabakh.

As a result of the disaster, more than 600 people died: not only the crew of the battleship, but also those who came to the rescue got it. No one at that time knew about the fact of the tragedy, it was destined to become a state secret. In connection with this situation, Admiral Kuznetsov was removed from the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Navy: he was removed from his post, stripped of his rank and dismissed. First of all, the adoption of such a decision was influenced by the fact that a lot of people died, and not suddenly, but after a poorly organized procedure for saving the ship, because only a little less than a day had passed from the moment of the explosion to the time of the flood! It is also striking that the frankly outdated battleship continued to work on a par with younger ships and was even the flagship. Despite the long time spent by him in repairs, "Novorossiysk" could not compete with modern combat ships and did not meet some technical requirements. And, nevertheless, he went on sea trips, and did not stand as a museum in the port. Perhaps due to the fact that the USSR did not yet have its own large ships, and the need for powerful ocean-going vessels was felt.

Causes of the disaster "Novorossiysk" by different people in different time the negligence of the fleet command, and the sabotage carried out either by the Italians or the British, and an exploded mine or even a couple of mines from the Second World War were considered. Below we will consider in more detail two versions of what happened: Candidate of Technical Sciences Oleg Leonidovich Sergeev and Captain of the Second Rank Sergey Vasilyevich Elagin will share their opinions. The first researcher says that the sabotage could well have been carried out not by foreign special teams, but by Soviet professionals in order to discredit the high command of the fleet in the person of Admiral Kuznetsov and his entourage. The second author does not exclude the intervention of English combat swimmers, citing some examples from history. However, first things first...

Maxim Volchenkov

Evidence from the past - The death of Novorossiysk.

... Unexpected conclusions can be drawn from a comparison of the materials of the work of the government commission of the USSR (1955) on the fact of the tragic death of the battleship "Novorossiysk" and more than 600 sailors of its crew at the naval base of Sevastopol with the results and results of the work of the commission of officials of the British government (1956 when only one sailor from the 12th Flotilla of the Royal Navy of Great Britain, Lionel Crabbe, died in Portsmouth.
... It can be said with confidence that the attack on Novorossiysk was carried out by real professionals, experts in their field. There were so few of them at that time that it was not difficult to name each of them! It could only be combat swimmers from the Italian MAC flotilla, the British 12th flotilla or the German "K" formation. There were simply no other specialists with practical combat experience in Europe and NATO. Why did the government commission of the USSR in 1955 only timidly pull and immediately break the thin thread of the version that was reaching out to saboteurs from the 12th flotilla of the British naval forces in Portsmouth? There is a version indisputable facts in confirmation, at the time of the work of the government commission of the USSR, it seems to be not. Or were the commissions simply not allowed to complete what they had begun for political reasons in the light of the "Soviet-British friendship that grew stronger every day for eternity"?

On April 18, 1956, a detachment of Soviet ships arrived in England on an official visit. On board one of them was the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. The ships moored at the pier of the British naval base Portsmouth, which was guarded especially carefully. On ships, the main steam turbine power plants were taken out of action, the readiness of which to start moving (the beginning of the rotation of ship propellers) was more than 1 hour from a cold state.

The visit proceeded day by day in strict accordance with the official program. Suddenly, a whole series of interconnected "random" events occurs, in the center of which is the Soviet flagship cruiser "Ordzhonikidze". "Accidentally" under the bottom of this particular ship was a diver, "accidentally" the steam turbine installation of the cruiser turned out to be warmed up and capable of immediate launch, "accidentally" the cruiser's mechanics received an order: "Turn the propellers!", "accidentally" the diver was pulled under the spinning propellers cruisers. It is very likely that the cruiser's crew knew in advance about the plan and time of the visit without the invitation of a "saboteur" diver, whom she exponentially destroyed without using any weapons!

The Soviet side made an official protest to the British government. The British government apologized, saying that it knew nothing about this provocation, organized by unknown third parties with the aim of breaking good neighborly relations between the former allies in the anti-Hitler coalition.

The journalists reliably established that, tragically dead and unknown to anyone, this "saboteur" diver was one of the veterans of the super-secret 12th flotilla british navy, had the rank of captain of the 2nd rank and his name was Lionel Crabbe. During the Second World War, he successfully led the defense of the British naval base of Gibraltar from Italian combat swimmers and was rightfully considered one of the best divers in the British fleet. Lionel Crabbe personally knew many Italians from the 10th IAS Flotilla. Captured Italian combat swimmers not only advised specialists from the 12th flotilla, but also carried out joint combat operations.

The newest Soviet cruisers of the 68-bis project repeatedly shocked the British Admiralty. In the first decade of October 1955, the cruiser "Sverdlov" as part of the detachment Soviet ships began moving to the British naval base of Portsmouth on a friendly visit. Following the Belt, escorted by 2 destroyers, in dense fog, he did the impossible (by British standards). The ship briefly went out of order, deviated from the deep-water fairway and at full speed crossed a sandbar with a depth of only about 4 m! Having performed such an amazing (for NATO radar observation posts) maneuver, the ship returned to the deep-water fairway and exactly took its place in the ranks of Soviet ships. A gross mistake in the actions of the calculation of the Sverdlov's navigation bridge during the turn was taken by NATO specialists for "secret tests" of the lead cruiser of the 68-bis project, as close as possible to the conditions for a combat breakthrough of Soviet cruiser-raiders into the Atlantic from the Baltic Sea and decided to inspect at the first opportunity the bottom of the cruiser by a light diver (combat swimmer).

October 12, 1955 during a friendly visit of the cruisers "Sverdlov" and "Alexander Nevsky" (both projects 68-bis) moored at the wall of the naval base Portsmouth. But no one even tries to make a diving inspection of their bottoms - at the base of the 12th flotilla in Portsmouth at that time there are no combat swimmers who can be entrusted with such a responsible task.

On April 18, 1956, the serial cruiser "Ordzhonikidze" moored in Portsmouth during an official visit. And it is at this moment that the veteran of the 12th flotilla, Captain 2nd Rank Crabb, dies while performing a secret mission!

If in October 1955 the best combat swimmers were not in Portsmouth, then we must look for "traces" of their professional activities far enough beyond its borders. One such "trace" exists - a sabotage explosion on October 29, 1955 of the Soviet battleship Novorossiysk in the bay of Sevastopol! Over the past years, numerous authors of versions of the reasons for the death of the battleship Novorossiysk attributed the blame for this sabotage exclusively to the professionals of the Second World War from the unit of combat swimmers of Italy - the 10th MAC flotilla! But who can seriously believe that in 1955 the command of the Italian Navy could independently plan and carry out special operations of such a scale and such a level of possible military-political consequences without the sanction of the NATO command? It can be assumed that a single team of British and Italian combat swimmers was operating in the Sevastopol Bay, serving jointly in the 12th Flotilla of the Royal Navy.

The question remains about the motives for blowing up Novorossiysk. The answer can be found in the history of the Suez Canal! In February 1955, Britain initiates the formation of a military alliance - the Baghdad Pact, which initially includes Turkey and Iraq. Britain enters the Baghdad Pact on April 4, 1955, which allows it to establish dual military control (through NATO and the Baghdad Pact) over the Black Sea straits - the only way for the USSR Black Sea Fleet to enter the Mediterranean Sea. On May 14, 1955, the Warsaw Pact Organization was created, which includes Albania, which creates the possibility of a naval presence of the USSR in the Mediterranean, based on the Albanian port and naval base of Durres in close proximity to the strategic communications of the British Empire through the Suez Canal !

In September 1955, Egypt, in response to a real military threat from Great Britain, concludes "trade" agreements with the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland on the supply of modern weapons. On October 29, 1955, the battleship Novorossiysk was mysteriously blown up in Sevastopol, which could actually destroy the entire combat core of the Black Sea Fleet and disable its main naval base for a long period. On June 11, 1956, the last British soldier leaves the Suez Canal zone. In July 1956, the Egyptian government nationalizes the Suez Canal. October 29, 1956 Great Britain, France and Israel take aggressive action against Egypt in the Suez Canal zone. If you ask yourself what unites the dates October 29, 1955, October 29, 1956, then the answer lies in the plane of geopolitics - the Suez Canal!

Source: http://macbion.narod.ru, Sergey Elagin

Hidden Facts

The information layer raised over the past years by historians and writers highlighted the refusal of the government commission in the report of November 17, 1955 "On the death of the battleship Novorossiysk" and part of its crew "to give an objective answer to three main questions: what exploded, why it was not possible to save battleship after the explosion and who could carry out sabotage.

It follows from the available materials that the commission sought to prevent an explanation of the facts of a double explosion and to connect the catastrophe with a self-explosion of substandard artillery ammunition, and then, when this version was not confirmed, with an accidental detonation on an unexploded mine, for which speculative models were built, far from the real situation.

The key factor in organizing the struggle for damage was not considered - the absence at the time of the disaster of 80% of combat officers, including the commander of the ship and the commander of the BCH-5, which should be considered the main cause of the death of the battleship after the explosion.

Speaking of serious design flaws battleship, the commission belittles the courage and heroism of the sailors who managed to fight for the survivability of the ship that received fatal damage for 165 minutes. On the contrary, the "Empress Maria" stayed afloat for only 54 minutes, when the crew, in the conditions of an ongoing series of explosions, could not withstand the onslaught of the elements and began to escape.

The fact of the unscheduled exit of the battleship to the sea on October 28, 1955, which was not provided by the command and headquarters of the squadron, remained a mystery. The true reasons for the unsatisfactory organization of the rescue operations were not disclosed (the entire command of the fleet was simultaneously disabled when the battleship capsized), the possibility of preparing sabotage from the coast.

At that time, there was more than enough evidence and facts of sabotage, it was only necessary to dispose of them properly, accumulating information in accordance with the holistic concept - weapons, including means of destruction and delivery to the target, instruments and control and guidance devices. This approach required the involvement of specialists and scientists in explosive processes, who without much difficulty established the key cause of the death of the ship as a result of the simultaneous detonation of two bottom thousand-kilogram charges.

Failure to comply with these obvious requirements allowed the commission to disregard the significant differences between the seismograms of the real and experimental explosions, where the amplitude of the soil displacement during the real explosion is clearly visible twice as compared with the experimental explosion, as well as the difference in the duration of oscillatory processes and the features of the damage caused to the ship.

About the damage to the bow of the Novorossiysk LK, Salamatin, the commander of the emergency party of the cruiser Kerch, said the following: “I noticed that where there was an explosion, it was as if a hole had been made with a bore. Apparently, there was a directional explosion. Very strong. The sides near the nose completely whole."

It is obvious that it is impossible to cause through damage to the ship with one ammunition, as indicated in the commission's act.

A double explosion is confirmed by documentary evidence of participants in the events (also not taken into account during the investigation), who distinguished two shocks with a short time interval, as well as the discovery of two explosion craters in the anchorage area, an analysis of the configuration and relative position of which could provide important information about the nature of explosive processes, possible methods of delivery and setting charges.

Consequently, in addition to the total power and the number of charges, there are additional conditions necessary for the concentration of the energy of underwater explosions. Informative was the guess of the head of the mine and torpedo department of the Black Sea Fleet Markovsky about the connection between the destruction of the ship and the formation of a "gas chamber" during the explosion of two German mines of the RMH type, but the discussion of this topic was suppressed by the commission.

The scientific data of those years in the field of the theory of explosion and cavitation made it possible to explain what happened as follows. The first explosion of the charge occurred under the ship without causing fatal damage, however, the gas bubble created in the water column concentrated the energy of the explosion of the second charge, giving it a cumulative effect.

Accordingly, the conclusions on these facts could be as follows.

The battleship "Novorossiysk" was blown up by two charges with a total TNT equivalent of 1800 kg, installed on the ground in the area of ​​the bow artillery cellars, at an insignificant distance from the center plane of the ship and from each other. In terms of explosive power, the charges are close to German LBM mines or domestic AMD-1000.

The explosions occurred with a short time interval, which led to the creation of a cumulative effect and infliction of damage, as a result of which the ship sank.

The very formulation of the problem refuted the conclusion of the commission about blowing up Novorossiysk on a German mine left over from the war, installed without reference to a specific target, despite the fact that by 1955 German mines were out of order due to aging power sources, and being in a combat-ready state of two min takes this event out of reality.

In addition, the time interval between explosions, distinguishable by a person, is too long for the case of initiating a second charge due to detonation or triggering a proximity fuse, which indicates a targeted orientation and detonation of charges at a given time.

A slight discrepancy in the time of explosions, amounting to tenths of a second, indicates the use of high-precision and shock-resistant clockwork, since due to an error, domestic and German urgency devices used in mine weapons of those years were not suitable for this purpose.

Not only the choice of the time of day, but also the half-hour multiplicity of the installation of temporary fuse mechanisms can speak of the advance study of the plan of sabotage.

Turning to historical analogies, the commission could establish that, in terms of accuracy, the clock mechanisms of fuses are significantly inferior to those used by the British during the explosion of the German battleship Tirpitz in 1943 and are more consistent with domestic frequency response devices.

Another analogy is a coincidence - as on the "Empress Maria", the explosions began with a bypass of the artillery cellars. According to the testimonies of the sailors, the explosion occurred exactly at the moment the hatch of the forward artillery cell was opened. Not otherwise, when preparing the sabotage, the facts were taken into account national history and maintenance regulations.

Based on this information, the commission would have to conclude that there was a single plan and plan for the preparation and conduct of sabotage, and the explosion was carried out by the simultaneous operation of the temporary (hourly) fuse mechanisms of each of the charges set for 1 hour 30 minutes. October 29, 1955.

The foregoing completely excludes the widespread versions of the use of weapons systems of Italian or English origin - combat swimmers, human-controlled torpedoes and mini-submarines of the "Midget" type, the actions of which are limited by their operational and structural and technical elements.

Thus, the reaction time of the sabotage system ranged from several weeks to months, so frequent changes in the location of ships were an effective countermeasure. The order to stand on the anchor barrel No. 3 came when the Novorossiysk, returning to the base, had already landed on the Inkerman targets, which ruled out the possibility of retargeting, and even more so, the deployment of foreign sabotage forces and means.

And the delivery and installation of hundreds of underwater saboteurs to the battleship's parking lot of two tons of explosives is absolutely fantastic.

Along with this, it should be said about the very dubious military-political expediency of carrying out such an operation by any state during the period of nuclear confrontation, the development and implementation of which requires the involvement of many state structures with the inevitable leakage of information, which sooner or later becomes the property of foreign intelligence.

There is no need to say that the self-activity and recklessness of the "patriots" were severely suppressed by the special services of the state, to which the former Italian submarine saboteurs themselves drew the attention of Russian historians.

Preparing for the explosion

An analysis of the combat capabilities of foreign sabotage weapons should have led the commission to the idea of ​​​​delivering charges equivalent to AMD-1000 mines by surface small-sized watercraft flooded at the battleship's parking lot. This is evidenced by the mysterious disappearance of the boat and longboat, which were under the right shot at the explosion site, while the watercraft near the symmetrical shot of the port side were preserved and did not suffer.

At the same time, the divers noted that the depth and smoothness of the craters were insignificant for the power of the charges, which is typical for the case when explosions do not occur on the ground, but on a platform one and a half meters from the ground, which corresponds to the height of the side of the missing water craft.

It should be noted that the objects found by the divers at the site of the explosions were not examined by the commission for belonging to the indicated floating craft.

Taking into account the presence of up to 900 kg of gasoline in the tanks of the boat, the commission had to come to the following conclusions: the complete destruction of the wooden hulls of the boat and longboat occurred during underwater contact explosions of ammunition; under the created conditions, a volumetric explosion of the gasoline-air mixture naturally occurs.

Signs of a volumetric explosion recorded by observers include a bright flash and a black cap of smoke on the forecastle of the battleship, the presence of an air wave, a sharp pressure drop, the smell of gasoline, which caused the initial report of the explosion of a gasoline tank, which was never on the ship, as well as burning fuel, raised to the surface.

The question arises, how and in what terms could the covert delivery of ammunition and the flooding of watercraft be carried out? From the port side in the last hours before the explosion, sailors discharged ashore were received.

The arrival of the last longboats was reported by 00.30. At that time, on the forecastle of the battleship, from where the deck was clearly visible to the first tower of the main caliber and both shots, along with the duty service, there was a group of sailors who had arrived from the dismissal.

Consequently, the "charged" boat and longboat were already at that time under the right shot of the battleship.

The final preparation for the explosion, therefore, was carried out upon the arrival of the battleship in the harbor and included the loading and delivery of ammunition for the starboard shot.

The saboteurs needed to flood the boat of the senior assistant commander of the ship, Khurshudov, who had gone ashore after a more than strange announcement to the crew about the upcoming early exit to the sea, and a longboat with special cargo prepared for the explosion.

The direct executors of these operations solved the usual task for the naval special forces of checking the vigilance of the watch service and did not know about the "stuffing" of the boat and longboat.

In 1993, the performers of this action were named: a senior lieutenant of special forces and two midshipmen - a support group.

Based on the totality of the data, the commission should have made, but never voiced a conclusion that would be fatal for itself:

To aim at the artillery cellar of watercraft with charges, the right shot of the battleship "Novorossiysk" moored on the anchor barrel No. 3 was used. The undermining was prepared and carried out by domestic special services with the knowledge of the country's leadership exclusively for domestic political purposes.

Provocation against the naval commander

Who needed and against whom was this grandiose provocation directed? Khrushchev answered this question exactly two years after the death of Novorossiysk on October 29, 1957 at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU: “We were offered to invest more than 100 billion rubles in the fleet and build old boats and destroyers armed with classical artillery. Kuznetsov ... to think, to take care of the fleet, of defense, he turned out to be incapable. We need to evaluate everything in a new way. We need to build a fleet, but above all, build a submarine fleet armed with missiles. "

In the continental state - Russia, the fleet plays an extremely important, but not decisive role in the country's defense capability and the choice of priorities for military development. The naval commander, who during the war years proved himself a master of organizing interaction between the army and navy, could not help but know this.

As a person with a scientific mindset, he could not help but understand that in the conditions of economic restrictions, the high capital intensity of military shipbuilding prevented the nuclear and space-rocket industries from deploying land-based strategic missile systems.

As you know, in August 1945, by a decree of the State Defense Committee under the Council of People's Commissars, in order to speed up work on the creation of an atomic bomb, the 1st Main Directorate was formed, which required multibillion-dollar expenses.

Less than a year later, by the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of May 13, 1946 No. 1017-419ss "Issues of jet weapons", the leading defense ministries were tasked with the development and production of jet weapons.

In many ways, the fate of the ten-year program for the construction of the Navy, presented in September 1945 to the government and which included the production of aircraft carriers - large and small, cruisers, new submarines and destroyers, as well as personally Kuznetsov, who was relieved of his post in 1947, was decided by Stalin's words: " Sailors have always been distinguished by ignorance and unwillingness to reckon with the possibilities of industry."

This was the first warning of the military-industrial complex.

After being reinstated in 1951 as the Minister of the Navy of the USSR, Kuznetsov prepared a report on the obsolete fleet, on the construction of ships according to old designs, and on rocket weapons. He opposed the cancellation of the warranty period for newly built ships and weapons. These proposals did not evoke applause in the USSR Minsudprom.

Being an adherent of a balanced fleet, in 1954-1955 Kuznetsov raises the issue of a ten-year shipbuilding plan, achieves the installation of the first prototypes of sea-based and coastal-based jet weapons, approves the project of a nuclear submarine, takes measures to develop inertial systems and calculating devices for submarines, equipped with long range rocket weapons.

In the same period, after the successful testing of a thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb) in August 1953, the government of the USSR decided to develop a ballistic missile with an intercontinental range capable of hitting strategic targets in any area. the globe and output to space artificial satellite Earth.

The priority of strategic nuclear forces for this period has been finally adopted, which requires the transfer of most of the country's economic and intellectual resources to these purposes.

The ten-year shipbuilding plan, which does not reflect in the future the priority of developing the most capital-intensive and beneficial for the military-industrial complex, naval strategic nuclear forces, objectively could not be supported by the military-political leadership of the country, which sealed the fate of Kuznetsov for the second time.

Of the entire arsenal of the Middle Ages, by the time of the events described, the main weapon remained the discrediting of those who disagreed with a single course by showing the inferiority of the ideas defended, for which it was not considered shameful to sacrifice the lives of innocent people.

After Kuznetsov filed a report on May 26, 1955 with a request to be relieved of his post for health reasons, the field of action for discrediting narrowed, and the raised sword threatened to strike at an empty place, nullifying the entire effect of Khrushchev's "big fight". The fact that the country's leadership was looking for a way out of this situation is confirmed in the memoirs of Kuznetsov. About the events of those days, he writes: “In October of the same 1955, such conversations (about leaving office) acquired a real embodiment in the form of an official statement addressed to me that, of course, I should be released, but not because of illness, but for other reasons. ".

In a letter to his wife Vera Nikolaevna from Yalta dated October 20, 1955, Nikolai Gerasimovich wrote: "... As far as I was able to understand, the minister wants to have his own new Commander-in-Chief, but he wants to explain this with something serious and therefore hides from me."

The basis for the removal of the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy from his post could be a large-scale emergency, since it was impossible to postpone further the satisfaction of Kuznetsov's request.

The dismissal of Kuznetsov from his post on December 8, 1955 and the appointment of Gorshkov as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, which followed the death of Novorossiysk, opened the way for reducing the naval personnel and aviation of the Navy, cutting up unfinished ships for scrap.

In the future, the country's leadership, in order to achieve immediate political goals due to decisive superiority in the nuclear missile field, went to a sharp reduction in the armed forces, the destruction of the Air Force aircraft fleet and the curtailment of high-tech industries.

The mobilization potential of the military-industrial complex of the USSR was supported by fierce competition between industry and intra-industry groupings for obtaining state orders for the creation of weapons and military equipment.

Sometimes this struggle was waged not for life, but for death.

LK "Novorossiysk" and other captured ships turned out to be a bargaining chip, which became a burden for the industry, then the turn came to the cruisers and aviation complexes under construction, including promising strategic ones, not to mention thousands of dismissed specialists, the training of which took many years and resources.

The tragedy of "Novorossiysk" has its own optimistic component in the historical expediency of the priority development of productive forces, where the defense complex, for all its shortcomings, plays the role of a locomotive and master generator.

The Navy plays an exceptional role in the implementation of nuclear and missile projects, deployment Missile troops strategic purpose and the country's military space forces.

Russia still maintains the status of an advanced power in the field of space and nuclear technologies.

Janes is always right

From a short message from the Janes Fighting Ships reference book on warships of the world for 1957-1958. it follows that the battleship "Novorossiysk" was sunk by a "drifting" mine, the number of victims was hundreds of people. With reference to another report, it is claimed that the ship was used during "some experiments" in the Black Sea. The awareness of the publishers of the most authoritative reference book published since 1897 has never been questioned. It is hardly possible to ignore the presented version, which hides between the lines information obtained not only from the act of the government commission, but also from other, more objective sources of information.

The publication of "Janes Fighting Ships" about the tragedy of "Novorossiysk" two years late, its brevity and Aesopian language describing the situation (positioning and detonation of mines for certain purposes), can be explained by the desire not to "light up" sources of information not only in the Main Command of the Navy, the KGB , but also in the party leadership and the Council of Ministers of the USSR. It is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the conclusions drawn by the government commission in record time were programmed, aimed not at establishing the cause of the disaster, but at accusations, sometimes drawn, of the Navy command and attempts to relieve industry of responsibility for the unfulfilled set of measures to ensure the survivability and unsinkability of the ship and equip the fleet with modern hydroacoustic means to search for submarines.

In the tradition of eternal memory of the 30s. A man was appointed chairman of the commission who in 1952 accused Nikolai Kuznetsov of an anti-state case - "slandering the most modern ships." The members of the commission included Sergey Gorshkov - acting. commander-in-chief of the Navy, the former commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who is directly responsible for the state of affairs in this fleet, as well as representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB of the USSR.

Symptomatically adopted already at the beginning of 1956, the decision to destroy evidence materials and not initiate a criminal case against the direct perpetrators of the disaster in order to prevent an investigation that would inevitably lead to the disclosure of the true causes of the Novorossiysk disaster and the identification of its customers and perpetrators.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the established facts speak of a real opportunity to complete the investigation into the causes of the Novorossiysk disaster, involve the prosecutor's office in it, which should initiate a criminal case on the fact of the death of the warship, pay tribute to the heroism of the Black Sea sailors, who to the end fulfilled their military duty, but did not receive well-deserved awards.

Source: http://nvo.ng.ru, Oleg Sergeev

The death of the battleship "Novorossiysk": five versions

On October 29, 1955, the flagship of the Black Sea squadron of the Soviet Navy, the battleship Novorossiysk, sank in the Northern Bay of Sevastopol. More than 600 sailors were killed. According to the official version, an old German bottom mine exploded under the bottom of the ship. But there are other versions, unofficial, but very popular - allegedly Italian, British and even Soviet saboteurs are responsible for the death of Novorossiysk.

Giulio Cesare

At the time of the death of the battleship "Novorossiysk" was 44 years old - a respectable term for the ship. For most of her life, the battleship bore a different name - "Giulio Cesare" ("Julius Caesar"), sailing under the flag of the Italian Navy. She was laid down at Genoa in the summer of 1910 and launched in 1915. The battleship did not take part in the First World War, in the 1920s it was used as a training ship for the training of naval gunners.

In the mid-1930s, "Giulio Cesare" was overhauled. The displacement of the ship reached 24,000 tons, it could develop enough high speed at 22 knots. The battleship was well armed: two three-barreled and three turret guns, three torpedo tubes, anti-aircraft guns and heavy machine guns. During the Second World War, the battleship was mainly engaged in escorting convoys, but in 1942 the Navy command recognized it as obsolete and transferred it to the category of training ships.

In 1943, Italy capitulated. Until 1948, "Giulio Cesare" was in the parking lot, not being mothballed, with the minimum amount commands and without proper Maintenance.

According to a special agreement, the Italian fleet was to be divided among the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. The USSR accounted for a battleship, a light cruiser, 9 destroyers and 4 submarines, not counting small ships. On January 10, 1947, an agreement was reached in the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Allied Powers on the distribution of the transferred Italian ships between the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and other countries affected by the Italian aggression. So, for example, four cruisers, four destroyers and two submarines were allocated to France, and one cruiser to Greece. The battleships became part of groups "A", "B" and "C", intended for the three main powers.

The Soviet side claimed one of the two new battleships, which in their power surpassed even the German ships of the Bismarck type. But since by this time the Cold War had already begun between the recent allies, neither the United States nor England sought to strengthen the Soviet Navy with powerful ships. I had to throw lots, and the USSR received group "C". The new battleships went to the United States and England (later, these battleships were returned to Italy as part of the NATO partnership). By decision of the Tripartite Commission in 1948, the USSR received the battleship Giulio Cesare, the light cruiser Emmanuele Filiberto Duca D'Aosta, the destroyers Artilleri, Fuciliere, the destroyers Animoso, Ardimentoso, Fortunale and submarines. Marea" and "Nicelio".

December 9, 1948 "Giulio Cesare" left the port of Taranto and December 15 arrived in the Albanian port of Vlora. On February 3, 1949, the transfer of the battleship to the Soviet commission, headed by Rear Admiral Levchenko, took place in this port. February 6 raised over the ship naval ensign USSR, and two weeks later he left for Sevastopol, arriving at his new base on February 26. By order of the Black Sea Fleet dated March 5, 1949, the battleship was given the name "Novorossiysk".

As almost all researchers note, the ship was handed over by the Italians to Soviet sailors in a state of disrepair. The main part of the armament, the main power plant and the main hull structures - plating, framing, main transverse bulkheads below the armor deck were in relatively satisfactory condition. But general ship systems: pipelines, fittings, service mechanisms - required serious repair or replacement. There were no radar equipment on the ship at all, the fleet of radio communications equipment was scarce, and small-caliber anti-aircraft artillery was completely absent. It should be noted that immediately before the transfer to the USSR, the battleship underwent a small repair, which concerned mainly the electromechanical part.

When "Novorossiysk" settled in Sevastopol, the command of the Black Sea Fleet gave the order - to turn the ship into a full-fledged combat unit as soon as possible. The matter was complicated by the fact that part of the documentation was missing, and there were practically no naval specialists who spoke Italian in the USSR.

In August 1949, Novorossiysk took part in squadron maneuvers as a flagship. However, his participation was rather nominal, since in the three months allotted they did not manage to put the battleship in order (and they could not have time). However, the political situation demanded to demonstrate the success of Soviet sailors in the development of Italian ships. As a result, the squadron went to sea, and NATO intelligence was convinced that the Novorossiysk was floating.

From 1949 to 1955, the battleship was factory repaired eight times. It was equipped with 24 twin installations of Soviet 37-mm anti-aircraft guns, new radar stations, radio communications and intra-ship communications. They also replaced Italian turbines with new ones manufactured at the Kharkov plant. In May 1955, the Novorossiysk entered service with the Black Sea Fleet and went to sea several times until the end of October, practicing combat training tasks.

On October 28, 1955, the battleship returned from the last campaign and took up a place in the North Bay on a "battleship barrel" in the area of ​​​​the Marine Hospital, about 110 meters from the coast. The water depth there was 17 meters of water and about 30 meters of viscous silt.

Explosion

At the time of the explosion, the commander of the battleship, Captain 1st Rank Kukhta, was on vacation. His duties were performed by senior assistant captain 2nd rank Khurshudov. According to the staffing table, there were 68 officers, 243 foremen, 1231 sailors on the battleship. After the "Novorossiysk" moored, part of the crew went on leave. More than one and a half thousand people remained on board: part of the crew and a new replenishment (200 people), cadets of naval schools and soldiers who had arrived on the battleship the day before.

On October 29, at 01:31 Moscow time, a powerful explosion was heard under the ship's hull from the starboard side in the bow. According to experts, its force was equivalent to an explosion of 1000-1200 kilograms of trinitrotoluene. On the starboard side in the underwater part of the hull, a hole was formed with an area of ​​​​more than 150 square meters, and on the port side and along the keel - a dent with a deflection arrow from 2 to 3 meters. The total area of ​​damage to the underwater part of the hull was about 340 square meters in a section 22 meters long. Outboard water poured into the resulting hole, and after 3 minutes there was a trim of 3-4 degrees and a roll of 1-2 degrees to starboard.

At 01:40, the incident was reported to the fleet commander. By 02:00, when the list to starboard reached 1.5 degrees, the head of the operational department of the fleet, captain 1st rank Ovcharov, ordered "to tow the ship to a shallow place", and the approaching tugboats turned it stern to the shore.

By this time, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral V.A. Parkhomenko, the chief of staff of the fleet, Vice Admiral S.E. Chursin, a member of the Military Council, Vice Admiral N.M. Kulakov, the acting squadron commander, Rear Admiral N .I. Nikolsky, Chief of Staff of the Squadron Rear Admiral A.I. Zubkov, Commander of the Cruiser Division Rear Admiral S.M. Lobov, Head of the Political Directorate of the Fleet Rear Admiral B.T. Kalachev and 28 other senior staff officers.

At 02:32 a list to port was discovered. By 03:30, about 800 unemployed sailors lined up on the deck, rescue ships stood at the side of the battleship. Nikolsky offered to transfer sailors to them, but received a categorical refusal from Parkhomenko. At 03:50, the list to port reached 10-12 degrees, while the tugs continued to pull the battleship to the left. After 10 minutes, the list increased to 17 degrees, while 20 were critical. Nikolsky again asked Parkhomenko and Kulakov for permission to evacuate the sailors who were not engaged in the fight for damage and was again refused.

"Novorossiysk" began to capsize upside down. Several dozen people managed to get into boats and onto neighboring ships, but hundreds of sailors fell from the deck into the water. Many remained inside the dying battleship. As Admiral Parkhomenko later explained, he "did not consider it possible to order the personnel to leave the ship in advance, since until the last minutes he hoped that the ship would be saved, and there was no thought that it would die." This hope cost the lives of hundreds of people who, having fallen into the water, were covered by the hull of the battleship.

By 04:14, the Novorossiysk, which had taken in more than 7,000 tons of water, listed to a fatal 20 degrees, swung to the right, just as suddenly fell to the left and lay on board. In this position, he remained for several hours, resting on solid ground with masts. At 22:00 on October 29, the hull completely disappeared under water.

In total, 609 people died during the disaster, including emergency parties from other ships of the squadron. Between 50 and 100 people died directly as a result of the explosion and flooding of the bow compartments. The rest died during the capsizing of the battleship and after it. Timely evacuation of personnel was not organized. Most of the sailors remained inside the hull. Some of them were kept in the air cushions of the compartments for a long time, but only nine people managed to be saved: seven went out through a neck cut in the aft part of the bottom five hours after capsizing, and two more were taken out after 50 hours by divers. According to the recollections of divers, the sailors who were immured and doomed to death sang "Varyag". Only by November 1 did the divers stop hearing the knocks.

In the summer of 1956, the special purpose expedition "EON-35" began lifting the battleship by blowing. Preparations for the ascent were fully completed by the end of April 1957. The general blowdown began on the morning of May 4 and completed the ascent on the same day. The ship surfaced with a keel on May 4, 1957, and on May 14 it was taken to the Cossack Bay, where it was turned over. When the ship was raised, the third turret of the main caliber fell out, which had to be raised separately. The ship was dismantled for metal and transferred to the Zaporizhstal plant.

Commission conclusions

To find out the causes of the explosion, a government commission was created, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Minister of the Shipbuilding Industry, Colonel General of the Engineering Service Vyacheslav Malyshev. According to the recollections of all who knew him, Malyshev was an engineer of the highest erudition. He perfectly knew his business and read theoretical drawings of any complexity, being well versed in issues of unsinkability and stability of ships. Back in 1946, having read the drawings of "Giulio Cesare", Malyshev recommended that this acquisition be abandoned. But he failed to convince Stalin.

The commission gave its conclusion two and a half weeks after the disaster. Tough deadlines were set in Moscow. On November 17, the conclusion of the commission was submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU, which accepted and approved the conclusions.

The cause of the disaster was called "an external underwater explosion (non-contact, bottom) of a charge with a TNT equivalent of 1000-1200 kg." The most probable was the explosion of a German magnetic mine left on the ground after the Great Patriotic War.

As for responsibility, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice-Admiral Parkhomenko, acting. squadron commander Rear Admiral Nikolsky and acting. battleship commander captain 2nd rank Khurshudov. The Commission noted that Vice Admiral Kulakov, a member of the Military Council of the Black Sea Fleet, also bears direct responsibility for the catastrophe with the Novorossiysk battleship, and especially for the death of people.

But despite the harsh conclusions, the case was limited to the fact that the commander of the battleship Kukhta was demoted in rank and sent to the reserve. Also removed from office and demoted in rank: Rear Admiral Galitsky, commander of the division for the protection of the water area, acting. squadron commander Nikolsky and a member of the Military Council of the Fists. A year and a half later, they were reinstated in ranks. The commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Viktor Parkhomenko, was severely reprimanded, and on December 8, 1955, he was removed from his post. No legal action has been taken against him. In 1956, the commander of the Soviet Navy, Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, was removed from his post.

The commission also noted that "the sailors, foremen and officers, as well as the officers who led the direct struggle to save the ship, - the acting commander of the warhead-5 t. Matusevich, the commander of the survivability division, t. Ivanov skillfully and selflessly fought against the water that entered the ship, everyone knew their business well, showed initiative, showed examples of courage and true heroism. ."

The documents of the commission spoke in detail about those who should have, but failed to organize the rescue of the crew and the ship. However, none of these documents gave a direct answer to the main question: what caused the disaster?

Version number 1 - mine

The initial versions - the explosion of a gas depot or artillery cellars - were swept aside almost immediately. The tanks of the fuel depot on the battleship were empty long before the disaster. As for the cellars, if they rushed, there would be little left of the battleship at all, and five cruisers standing nearby would also fly into the air. In addition, this version was immediately overturned by the testimony of the sailors, whose place of military service was the 2nd tower of the main artillery caliber, in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bwhich the battleship received a hole. It was precisely established that the 320-millimeter shells remained safe and sound.

There are still a few versions left: mine explosion, submarine torpedo attack and sabotage. After studying the circumstances, the mine version won the most votes. Which was quite understandable - mines in the Sevastopol bays were not uncommon since the time of the Civil War. The bays and the raid were periodically cleared of mines with the help of minesweepers and diving teams. In 1941, during the offensive German armies to Sevastopol, the German Air Force and Navy mined the water area both from the sea and from the air - mines different types and appointments were put up by them several hundred. Some worked during the fighting, others were removed and neutralized after the liberation of Sevastopol in 1944. Later, the Sevastopol bays and the roadstead were regularly trawled and inspected by diving teams. The last such comprehensive survey was conducted in 1951-1953. In 1956-1958, after the explosion of the battleship, 19 more German bottom mines were found in the Sevastopol Bay, including three at a distance of less than 50 meters from the place of the death of the battleship.

The testimonies of divers also spoke in favor of the mine version. As the squad leader Kravtsov testified: "The ends of the skin of the hole are bent inward. By the nature of the hole, burrs from the skin, the explosion was from the outside of the ship."

Version number 2 - torpedo attack

The next version was that the battleship was torpedoed by an unknown submarine. However, when studying the nature of the damage received by the battleship, the commission did not find characteristic signs corresponding to a torpedo strike. But she discovered something else. At the time of the explosion, the ships of the division for the protection of the water area, whose duty it was to guard the entrance to the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, were in a completely different place. On the night of the catastrophe, the outer raid was not guarded by anyone; the network gates were wide open, and the direction finders were inactive. Thus, Sevastopol was defenseless. And, theoretically, a foreign submarine could well enter the bay, choose a position and deliver a torpedo strike.

In practice, for a full-fledged attack, the boat would hardly have had enough depth. However, the military was aware that some Western navies already had small or midget submarines in service. So, theoretically, a dwarf submarine could penetrate the inner roadstead of the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. This assumption, in turn, gave rise to another - were saboteurs involved in the explosion?

Version number 3 - Italian combat swimmers

This version was supported by the fact that before falling under the red flag, Novorossiysk was an Italian ship. And the most formidable underwater special forces during the Second World War, the "10th Assault Flotilla", were with the Italians, and they were commanded by Prince Junio ​​Valerio Borghese, a staunch anti-communist who allegedly publicly swore after the transfer of the battleship to the USSR to avenge such a humiliation of Italy.

A graduate of the Royal Naval Academy, Valerio Borghese, was expected to have a brilliant career as a submarine officer, which was facilitated by a noble origin and excellent academic performance. The first submarine under the command of Borghese was part of the Italian legion, which, as part of Franco's assistance, acted against the Republican fleet of Spain. After that, the prince received a new submarine under his command. Later, Valerio Borghese completed a special training course in Germany on the Baltic Sea.

Upon his return to Italy, Borghese was given command of the most modern submarine, the Shire. Thanks to the skillful actions of the commander, the submarine returned back to its base unharmed from each military campaign. The operations of the Italian submariners aroused genuine interest in King Victor Emmanuel, who honored the prince-submariner with a personal audience.

After that, Borghese was asked to create the world's first flotilla of naval saboteurs-submarines. Ultra-small submarines, special guided torpedoes, manned exploding boats were created for her. On December 18, 1941, Italians in miniature submarines secretly entered the harbor of Alexandria and attached magnetic explosive devices to the bottoms of the British battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth. The death of these ships allowed the Italian fleet to seize the initiative in combat operations in the Mediterranean for a long time. Also, the "10th Assault Flotilla" took part in the siege of Sevastopol, based in the ports of Crimea.

Theoretically, a foreign submarine cruiser could deliver combat swimmers as close as possible to Sevastopol so that they carried out sabotage. Given the combat potential of first-class Italian scuba divers, pilots of small submarines and guided torpedoes, and also taking into account the sloppiness in matters of protecting the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, the version of underwater saboteurs looks convincing.

Version 4 - English saboteurs

The second unit in the world capable of such sabotage was the 12th Flotilla of the British Navy. It was commanded at that time by Captain 2nd Rank Lionel Crabbe, also a legendary man. During the Second World War, he led the defense of the British naval base of Gibraltar from Italian combat swimmers and was rightfully considered one of the best underwater saboteurs of the British fleet. Crabbe personally knew many of the Italians from the 10th Flotilla. In addition, after the war, captured Italian combat swimmers advised specialists from the 12th flotilla.

In favor of this version, the following argument is put forward - as if the Soviet command wanted to equip Novorossiysk with nuclear weapons. The USSR possessed the atomic bomb since 1949, but there were no naval means of using nuclear weapons at that time. The solution could only be large-caliber naval guns firing heavy projectiles over a long distance. The Italian battleship was ideally suited for this purpose. Great Britain, which is an island, in this case turned out to be the most vulnerable target for the Soviet Navy. In the case of the use of atomic explosive devices near the west coast of England, taking into account the wind rose, which in those parts all year round blow to the east, the whole country would be exposed to radiation contamination.

And one more fact - at the end of October 1955, the British Mediterranean squadron conducted maneuvers in the Aegean and Marmara seas.

Version 5 - the work of the KGB

Already in our time, the candidate of technical sciences Oleg Sergeev put forward another version. The battleship "Novorossiysk" was blown up by two charges with a total TNT equivalent of 1800 kg, installed on the ground in the area of ​​the bow artillery cellars, at an insignificant distance from the center plane of the ship and from each other. The explosions occurred with a short time interval, which led to the creation of a cumulative effect and infliction of damage, as a result of which the ship sank. The undermining was prepared and carried out by domestic special services with the knowledge of the country's leadership exclusively for domestic political purposes. In 1993, the performers of this action became known: a senior lieutenant of special forces and two midshipmen - a support group.

Who was this provocation directed against? According to Sergeyev, first of all, against the leadership of the Navy. Nikita Khrushchev answered this question two years after the death of Novorossiysk, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU on October 29, 1957: “We were offered to invest more than 100 billion rubles in the fleet and build old boats and destroyers armed with classical artillery. We had a big fight , Kuznetsov was removed ... he was unable to think, take care of the fleet, about defense. We need to evaluate everything in a new way. We need to build a fleet, but above all, build a submarine fleet armed with missiles. "

The ten-year shipbuilding plan, which does not reflect in the future the priority of developing the most capital-intensive and beneficial for the military-industrial complex, naval strategic nuclear forces, objectively could not be supported by the military-political leadership of the country, which sealed the fate of the commander-in-chief of the Navy Nikolai Kuznetsov.

The death of "Novorossiysk" was the beginning of a large-scale reduction in the Navy of the USSR. The obsolete battleships "Sevastopol" and " October Revolution", captured cruisers "Kerch" and "Admiral Makarov", many captured submarines, destroyers and ships of other classes of pre-war construction.

Version criticism

Critics of the mine version claim that by 1955 the power supplies of all bottom mines would inevitably have been discharged, and the fuses would have become completely unusable. Until now, there were no batteries capable of not being discharged for ten or more years. It is also noted that the explosion occurred after 8 hours of mooring the battleship, and all German mines had hourly intervals that were multiples of only 6 hours. Before the tragedy, Novorossiysk (10 times) and the battleship Sevastopol (134 times) were moored on barrel No. 3 at different times of the year - and nothing exploded. In addition, it turned out that in fact there were two explosions, and such a force that two large deep craters appeared at the bottom, which the explosion of one mine cannot leave.

As for the version about the work of saboteurs from Italy or England, in this case a number of questions arise. Firstly, an action of this magnitude is possible only with the participation of the state. And it would be very difficult to hide preparations for it, given the activity of Soviet intelligence on the Apennine Peninsula and the influence of the Italian Communist Party.

It would be impossible for private individuals to organize such an action - too large resources would be needed to ensure it, starting with several tons of explosives and ending with means of transportation (again, let's not forget about secrecy). This is acceptable in feature films like " Dogs of war", but in real life becomes known to the relevant services at the planning stage, as was the case, for example, with the unsuccessful coup in Equatorial Guinea. In addition, as the former Italian combat swimmers themselves admitted, their life after the war was tightly controlled by the state, and any attempt at amateur activity would have been stopped.

In addition, preparations for such an operation should have been kept secret from the allies, primarily from the United States. If the Americans had learned about the impending sabotage of the Italian or British navies, they would certainly have prevented this - in case of failure, the United States would not have been able to wash off the accusations of inciting war for a long time. It would have been insane to launch such a sally against a nuclear-weapon country in the midst of the Cold War.

Finally, in order to mine a ship of this class in a protected harbor, it was necessary to collect complete information about the security regime, mooring places, ship exits to the sea, and so on. It is impossible to do this without a resident with a radio station in Sevastopol itself or somewhere nearby. All operations of Italian saboteurs during the war were carried out only after careful reconnaissance and never "blindly". But even after half a century, there is not a single evidence that in one of the most protected cities of the USSR, filtered through by the KGB and counterintelligence, there was an English or Italian resident who regularly supplied information not only to Rome or London, but personally to Prince Borghese.

Supporters of the Italian version argue that some time after the sinking of Novorossiysk, a message flashed in the Italian press about the awarding of orders to a group of officers of the Italian Navy "for performing a special task." However, so far no one has published a single photocopy of this message. Links to the Italian naval officers, who once declared to someone about their participation in the sinking of Novorossiysk, are unproven. There are many "absolutely reliable" interviews on the Internet with people who allegedly personally led midget submarines to Sevastopol. One problem - it immediately turns out that these people have either already died, or there is still no way to talk to them. And the descriptions of the sabotage attack are very different ...

Yes, information about the explosion of "Novorossiysk" in the Western press appeared very quickly. But Italian newspaper comments (with vague allusions) are a common journalistic device when "most reliable" evidence arises after the fact. One should also take into account the fact that the Italians allowed their "younger" battleships, received back from NATO allies, to be remelted. And if there hadn't been a catastrophe with Novorossiysk, only historians of the Navy would have remembered the battleship Giulio Cesare in Italy.

Belated Rewards

On the basis of the report of the government commission, in November 1955, the Black Sea Fleet command sent the Acting Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy, Admiral Gorshkov, submissions on awarding orders and medals to all the sailors who died along with the battleship. The awards were also presented to 117 people from among those who survived the explosion, sailors from other ships who came to the aid of Novorossiysk, as well as divers and doctors who distinguished themselves during rescue operations. In Sevastopol, at the headquarters of the fleet, the required number of awards was delivered. But the award never took place. Only forty years later it turned out that at the presentation by the head of the personnel department of the Navy of that time, a note was made: "Admiral Comrade Gorshkov does not consider it possible to come up with such a proposal."

Only in 1996, after repeated appeals from the ship's veterans, the Russian government gave appropriate instructions to the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Russian State Maritime Historical and Cultural Center and other departments. The main military prosecutor's office began to check the materials of the investigation conducted in 1955. All this time, the classified award lists for the "Novorossiysk" were kept in the Central Naval Archive. It turned out that 6 sailors were posthumously presented to the highest award of the USSR - the Order of Lenin, 64 (53 of them posthumously) - to the Order of the Red Banner, 10 (9 posthumously) - to the Orders of the Patriotic War of the 1st and 2nd degrees, 191 ( 143 posthumously) - to the Order of the Red Star, 448 sailors (391 posthumously) - to the medals "For Courage", "For Military Merit", Ushakov and Nakhimov.

Since by that time there was no longer any state under whose naval flag the Novorossiysk died, nor Soviet orders, all the Novorossiysk citizens were awarded the Orders of Courage.

Afterword

Will there ever be a definitive answer to the question of what exactly ruined Novorossiysk? Most likely not anymore. If the raised battleship, along with the specialists who determined the degree of its further suitability, were properly examined by specialists from the competent authorities and departments, they would be able to find certain "traces" of the hitherto unknown "charge" in the ship's bottoms. But the ship was quickly cut into metal, and the case was closed.

When writing the article, the following materials were used:
site battleships.spb.ru.
S.V. Suliga. Battleship "Giulio Cesare" ("Novorossiysk").
N.I. Nikolsky, V.N. Nikolsky. "Why did the battleship Novorossiysk die?"
Sergeev O.L. The disaster of the battleship "Novorossiysk". Evidence. Judgments. Data.
Publication of the journal of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation "Security Service" No. 3-4, 1996 of the materials of the investigation file on the death of the battleship "Novorossiysk" from the archives of the FSB.

Material from the site: http://flot.com/history/events/novorosdeath.htm

To the begining

Strange story. Believe it or not? The Italian swimmer nevertheless admitted to blowing up the battleship in Sevastopol ... But there are doubts about the veracity of this version.

Veteran of the Italian division of combat swimmers "Gamma" Hugo D'Esposito admitted that the Italian military was involved in the sinking of the Soviet battleship Novorossiysk. 4Arts writes about this, noting that the words of Hugo d'Esposito are the first recognition of involvement in the destruction of Novorossiysk by the Italian military, who previously categorically denied such a version. The Italian edition calls d'Esposito's confession in sabotage against Novorossiysk the most sensational in an interview with a veteran : "It directly confirms the probable hypothesis about the cause of the explosion on the ship."
According to Hugo D'Esposito, the Italians did not want the ship to go to the "Russians", so they made sure to flood it: "They did everything possible." But he did not specify exactly how the sabotage was carried out.
Previously, the version that the Novorossiysk sank as a result of sabotage organized by the Italians was not officially confirmed.

At the old fraternal cemetery in Sevastopol, there is a monument: a 12-meter figure of a grieving sailor with the inscription: "Motherland - to sons." On the stele it says: "To the courageous sailors of the battleship Novorossiysk, who died in the line of duty on October 29, 1955. Loyalty to the military oath was stronger than death for you." The figure of a sailor is cast from bronze of battleship propellers...
Few people knew about this ship and its mysterious death until the end of the 80s, when they were allowed to write about it.

"Novorossiysk" - Soviet warship, battleship of the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR Navy. Until 1948, the ship was part of the Italian Navy under the name "Giulio Cesare" ( Giulio Cesare, in honor of Gaius Julius Caesar).
Dreadnought " Giulio Cesare"- one of the five ships of the type" Conte di Cavour "( Giulio Cesare, Leonardo da Vinci, Conte di Cavour, Caio Duilio, Andrea Doria), built according to the project of engineer-general Edoardo Masdea and launched in 1910-1917.
Being the main force of the Italian fleet in two world wars, they did not bring him glory without inflicting the enemy, and at different times they were Austrians, Germans, Turks, French, British, Greeks, Americans and Russians - not the slightest damage. "Cavour" and "Da Vinci" did not die in battle, but in their bases.
And "Julius Caesar" was destined to become the only battleship that the victorious country did not scrap, did not use for experiments, but put into operation the current fleet, and even as a flagship, despite the fact that it was clearly technically and morally outdated .

Giulio Cesare was the second in the series, it was built by Ansaldo (Genoa). The ship was laid down on 06/24/1910, launched on 10/15/1911 and commissioned on 05/14/1914. It received the motto "To withstand any blow."
The armament consisted of guns of caliber 305, 120 and 76 mm. The displacement of the ship was 25 thousand tons.

Battleship "Giulio Cesare" after modernization in 1940

"Giulio Cesare" was involved in the battles of the First and Second World Wars. After the end of World War II, it went to the Soviet Union as reparations. At the Tehran conference, it was decided to divide the Italian fleet between the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and the countries that suffered from fascist aggression. By lot, the British received the latest Italian battleships of the Littorio type. The USSR, to which Cesare fell, was able to transfer it to Sevastopol only in 1949. By order of the Black Sea Fleet dated March 5, 1949, the battleship was given the name Novorossiysk.

The battleship was in an extremely neglected state - it had been mothballed in the port of Taranto for 5 years. Immediately before the transfer to the USSR, a small repair took place (mainly the electromechanical part). They could not translate the documentation, and the ship's mechanisms needed to be replaced. Experts noted the shortcomings of the battleship - the antediluvian level of intra-ship communication, poor survivability systems, damp cockpits with three-tier bunks, a tiny faulty galley.
In mid-May 1949, the battleship was placed in the Northern Dock and a few months later went to sea for the first time as part of the Black Sea Fleet. In subsequent years, it was constantly repaired and re-equipped, was in service, not meeting the requirements for a warship in many indicators of its technical condition. In connection with domestic difficulties, the priority repair and restoration work on the battleship was the equipment of a galley for the crew, insulation of residential and service premises under the forecastle deck with expansion, as well as the re-equipment of some bathrooms, washbasins and showers.
At the same time, the specialists were amazed both by the elegance of the contours of the underwater part, and by the nature of its fouling. Only the variable waterline area was intensively overgrown with shells, and the rest, covered with a paste of unknown composition, was almost not overgrown. But the bottom-outboard fittings turned out to be in an unsatisfactory condition. Moreover, as the last commander of the BCH-5 battleship I.I. Reznikov wrote, during the next repair it turned out that the pipelines of the fire system were almost completely overgrown with a shell, throughput which has decreased several times.
From 1950 to 1955, the battleship was factory repaired 7 times. However, some shortcomings were not eliminated until October 1955. Modernization work caused a small increasing the mass of the ship(about 130 tons) and deterioration in stability(transverse metacentric height decreased by 0.03 m).

In May 1955, Novorossiysk entered service with the Black Sea Fleet and went to sea several times until the end of October, practicing combat training tasks.
October 28, 1955 "Novorossiysk" returned from the last campaign and took a place on the "battleship barrel" in the area of ​​the Marine Hospital, where once last time stood "Empress Maria" ...

Before dinner, replenishment arrived on the ship - infantry soldiers transferred to the fleet. For the night they were placed in the bow quarters. For most of them, it was the first and last day of naval service.
On October 29 at 01.31 a powerful explosion was heard under the bow of the ship. An emergency combat alert was announced on the ship, and an alarm was also announced on the nearby ships. Emergency and medical groups began to arrive at Novorossiysk.
After the explosion, the bow of the ship sank into the water, and the given anchor held the battleship tightly, preventing it from being towed to the shallows. Despite all the measures taken, water continued to flow into the ship's hull. Seeing that the flow of water could not be stopped, the acting commander Khorshudov turned to the commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Parkhomenko, with a proposal to evacuate part of the team, but was refused. The command to evacuate was given too late. More than 1,000 sailors crowded at the stern. Boats began to approach the battleship, but only a small part of the crew managed to get on them. At 04:14 the ship's hull suddenly twitched and began to list to the port side and in a moment turned over with a keel. According to one version, Admiral Parkhomenko, not imagining the size of the hole, gave the command to tow to the dock, and this ruined the ship.

"Novorossiysk" turned over as rapidly as almost half a century before it "Empress Maria". Hundreds of sailors were in the water. Many, especially former infantrymen, under the weight of wet clothes and boots quickly went under water. Part of the team managed to climb onto the bottom of the ship, others were picked up on boats, some managed to swim to the shore. The stress from the experience was such that some of the sailors who sailed to the shore could not stand the heart, and they immediately fell dead. Many heard a frequent knock inside the hull of the overturned ship - these were signals from sailors who did not have time to get out of the compartments.
One of the divers recalled: “At night, I then dreamed for a long time of the faces of people whom I saw under water in the windows, which they tried to open. With gestures, I made it clear that we would save. People nodded, they say, they understood ... I plunged deeper, I hear, they are knocking with Morse code, - the knock in the hearth is clearly audible: “Save us faster, we are suffocating ...” I also tapped them: “Be strong, everyone will be saved.” And this is where it started! They started knocking in all the compartments so that they knew from above that the people who were under water were alive! He moved closer to the bow of the ship and could not believe his ears - they sing "Varangian"!
Through a hole cut in the stern of the bottom, 7 people were pulled out. Two others were rescued by divers. But air began to escape with increasing force from the cut hole, and the overturned ship began to slowly sink. In the last minutes before the death of the battleship, it was heard how the sailors, immured in the compartments, sang "Varyag". In total, 604 people died during the explosion and flooding of the battleship, including emergency parties from other ships of the squadron.

In the summer of 1956, the special purpose expedition EON-35 began lifting the Novorossiysk. The operation was completed in the morning of May 4 and on the same day the ascent was completed. The news of the upcoming ascent of the battleship spread throughout Sevastopol, and, despite the heavy rain, all the shores of the bay and the nearby hills were strewn with people. The ship floated up with a keel, and it was taken to the Cossack Bay, where it was turned over and hastily dismantled for scrap.

As it was then stated in the order for the fleet, the cause of the explosion of the battleship was a German magnetic mine, allegedly lying at the bottom since the war for more than 10 years, which for some reason unexpectedly came into action. Many sailors were surprised, because in this place of the bay, immediately after the war, careful trawling was carried out and, finally, the mechanical destruction of mines in the most critical places. On the barrel itself, ships anchored hundreds of times ...

After lifting the battleship, the commission carefully examined the hole. It was monstrous in size: more than 160 square meters. The force of the explosion was so incredible that it was enough to break through eight decks - including three armored ones! Even the upper deck was mangled from starboard to port... It is easy to calculate that this would require a few more than a ton of TNT. Even the largest German mines did not have such power.

The death of Novorossiysk gave rise to many legends. The most popular of them is the sabotage of Italian naval saboteurs. This version was also supported by an experienced naval commander, Admiral Kuznetsov.

Valerio Borghese

During the war years, Italian submariners were stationed in the captured Sevastopol, so some of Borghese's associates were familiar in the Sevastopol Bay. But how could the penetration of an Italian submarine to the entrance to the main fleet base 10 years after the end of the war go unnoticed? How many trips from the submarine to the battleship did the saboteurs have to make in order to place several thousand tons of TNT on it? Maybe the charge was small and served only as a detonator for a huge mine, which the Italians placed in a secret compartment at the bottom of the battleship? Such a tightly certified compartment was discovered in 1949 by Captain 2nd Rank Lepekhov, but there was no reaction from the command to his report.

Some historians argue that the members of the commission, with the support of Khrushchev, distorted many facts of the tragedy, after which only vice-admiral V.A., the acting commander of the Black Sea Fleet, was punished. Parkhomenko and Fleet Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, removed from the leadership of the Navy and reduced by two steps. There is a version that Khrushchev thus took revenge on the admiral for his harsh comment about the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR.
Shortly after the death of the Novorosisisk, the head of intelligence of the Black Sea Fleet, Major General Namgaladze, and the commander of the OVR (protection of the water area), Rear Admiral Galitsky, left their posts.

By order of the fleet, the families of the dead were given lump-sum benefits - 10 thousand rubles each. for dead sailors and 30 thousand for officers. After that, they tried to forget about Novorossiysk ...
Only in May 1988, the Pravda newspaper published for the first time a small article on the death of the battleship Novorossiysk with the memories of eyewitnesses of the tragedy, which described the heroic behavior of the sailors and officers who were inside the capsized ship.
(from here)

After the death of Novorossiysk, various versions were put forward.

Versions about the causes of the explosion
Official version. According to the official version put forward by the government commission, the battleship was blown up by a bottom magnetic mine installed by the Germans in 1944 when leaving Sevastopol. On November 17, the conclusion of the commission was submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU, which accepted and approved the conclusions. The cause of the disaster was called "an external underwater explosion (non-contact, bottom) of a charge with a TNT equivalent of 1000-1200 kg." The explosion of a German magnetic mine, which remained on the ground after the Great Patriotic War, was recognized as the most probable.
However, power supplies etched in the 50s. bottom mines turned out to be discharged, and the fuses were inoperative.

Professor, engineer-captain 1st rank N. P. Muru in his book "The Disaster in the Inner Roadstead" proves that the most likely cause of the death of the ship is the explosion of a bottom mine (two mines). N.P. Muru considers the direct confirmation of the version of the mine explosion that after the catastrophe, 17 similar mines were found by trawling the bottom silt, of which 3 were located within a radius of 100 m from the place of the death of the battleship.

Opinion Y. Lepekhova, lieutenant engineer of the battleship Novorossiysk: German magnetic underwater mines served as the cause of the explosion. But at the same time, due to the nature of the destruction of the battleship's hull (the ship was pierced through the explosion, and the hole in the bottom does not match the hole on the deck), it is believed that the mine explosion caused the detonation of the charge, which was laid on the ship by the Italians even before it was transferred to the Soviet side. Lepekhov claims that when, during the acceptance, he and other members of the commission examined the ship, they ran into a blank bulkhead in the bow of the battleship. At that time, they did not attach any importance to this, but now Lepekhov believes that there was a powerful explosive charge behind this bulkhead. This charge was supposed to be activated some time after the transfer of the ship, but for some reason this did not happen. But already in 1955, this charge detonated, serving as the main cause of the death of the ship.

In a number of later studies of the death of the battleship, it was shown that in order to cause the destruction that Novorossiysk received - penetrating the hull from the keel to the upper deck, it would take about 2-5 tons of TNT, when placing charges directly at the bottom of the hull, or 12, 5 tons of TNT, when placing charges on the bottom, under the battleship, at a depth of 17,5 m. damage to the battleship during its explosion on the ground. In this case, only the first and second bottom would have been pierced at the battleship, which is also confirmed by experimental data. In the area of ​​the explosion, searches were made for fragments of a mine, silt was washed out, but nothing was found.

Explosion of a ship's ammunition. This version disappeared after the inspection of the hull: the nature of the destruction indicated that the explosion had occurred outside.

Meeting in Sevastopol in September 1955. There is a version that the ship was deliberately blown up during a discussion about the direction of the development of the fleet. Let's get back to this version...

Sabotage. The conclusions of the commission did not rule out the possibility of sabotage. On the eve of the transfer of the battleship to the USSR in Italy, there were open calls to prevent the pride of the Italian fleet from being under the Soviet flag. Some bloggers claim that it was planned to prepare the Novorossiysk's 320-mm main caliber for firing nuclear-armed projectiles. As if, just the day before, the battleship, after long failures, allegedly fired experimental special projectiles (without a nuclear charge) at training targets.

In the mid-2000s, the Itogi magazine published a story by a certain submarine officer Nikolo, who was allegedly involved in sabotage. According to him, the operation was organized by the former commander of the flotilla of underwater saboteurs V. Borghese, after the transfer of the ship he swore "to take revenge on the Russians and blow it up at all costs." The sabotage group arrived on a mini-submarine, which, in turn, was secretly delivered by a cargo ship that arrived from Italy. The Italians allegedly set up a secret base in the area of ​​the Sevastopol Omega Bay, mined the battleship, and then took the submarine to the open sea and waited for "their" steamer to pick them up.

Reference:

prince Junio ​​Valerio Scipione Borghese(ital. Junio ​​Valerio Scipione Ghezzo Marcantonio Maria dei principi Borghese; June 6, 1906, Rome - August 26, 1974, Cadiz) - Italian military and political figure, captain 2nd rank (ital. capitano di fregata).
Born into an aristocratic Borghese family. In 1928, Borghese graduated from the Naval Academy in Livorno and joined the submarine fleet.
An interesting detail: in 1931, Borghese married a Russian countess Daria Vasilievna Olsufieva(1909-1963), with whom he had four children and who tragically died in a car accident in 1962. Her name is a prize for connoisseurs of Rome.

Since 1933, Borghese - the commander of the submarine, carried out a number of successful operations, sank the Allied ships with a total displacement of 75 thousand tons. He received the nickname "Black Prince". He initiated the creation of a unit that used combat swimmers as part of the X flotilla. Since 1941, as acting, since 1943 he officially commanded the X Flotilla, which became the most successful unit of the Italian Navy.

10-flotilla of assault assets ( Decima Flottiglia MAS) - a detachment of naval saboteurs as part of the Italian Navy, created in 1941. It consisted of a surface unit (boats with explosives) and an underwater unit (guided torpedoes). He also had a special unit "Gamma", which included combat swimmers. The unit was originally part of the 1st IAS Flotilla, then received the name "IAS Tenth Flotilla". MAS is an abbreviation for Italian. Mezzi d'Assalto- assault weapons; or ital. Motoscafo Armato Silurante- armed torpedo boats.

The SLC guided torpedo, referred to in the tenth flotilla as the "piglet", was essentially a small boat capable of diving to shallow depths. Dimensions - 6.7 m long and 53 cm wide. Thanks to tanks for ballast and compressed air, the torpedo could dive to a depth of 30 m. Two propellers were driven by an electric motor powered by a battery of batteries. The torpedo developed a speed of three knots (5.5 km / h) and had a range of 10 nautical miles (18.5 km).

The torpedo was delivered to the place of hostilities on an ordinary submarine. Then two saboteurs sat on her astride one after another, like a horse. The pilot and commander of the torpedo sat on it. They were protected from wave impacts by a glass shield, and at the base of the shield were on-board instruments: a magnetic compass, a depth gauge, a roll gauge, a steering lever, engine and pump switches that hold the torpedo at the desired depth.
Behind the pilot was a mechanic diver. With his back he leaned against a container with tools (a cutter for locking networks, a spare oxygen device, ropes and clamps for fixing an explosive charge). The crew was dressed in light space suits and used an oxygen device for breathing. Cylinders with oxygen were enough for 6 hours.
Having sailed to the enemy ship as close as possible, the torpedo sank, and the diver fixed the 300-kilogram explosive charge brought with him on the ship's hull. Having set the clockwork, the swimmers boarded the torpedo and returned to base.

At first there were failures: the "pigs" drowned, they were destroyed, they were caught in the net, the crew was poisoned and suffocated due to the imperfection of the air supply system, the torpedoes were simply lost in the sea, etc. But then the "pigs" began to make progress: on the night of November 18-19, 1941, "live torpedoes" sank two British ships - Queen Elizabeth and Valiant: "The Italians won one of the most brilliant victories in history naval wars. 6 people seriously damaged 2 battleships in a heavily guarded port."
(from here)

Nuance: the practice of underwater saboteurs, both English and Italian, during World War II did not involve hanging such large charges under the ship's hull as in Sevastopol.
Italian submarine saboteurs on guided torpedoes ("Maiale") hung under the bottom of a charge weighing only about 300 kg. So they acted, carrying out sabotage in Alexandria on 12/19/1941, damaging 2 British battleships (Queen Elizabeth and Valiant) and in Gibraltar in 1941-1943.
The charges were suspended for side keels ships with the help of special clips, called "sergeants".
Note that the side keels on the battleship "Novorossiysk" in the area of ​​​​the explosion (30-50 frames) were absent ...

Another sabotage version: installation under the bottom of the battleship magnetic mines. But it was necessary to have about hundreds underwater saboteurs-swimmers carrying a magnetic mine under water to create a charge under the bottom near 2 t.. For example, Italian divers from the "Gamma Detachment", which is part of the 10th IAS flotilla, carried charges of the "Mignatta" or "Bauletti" type with a total weight of no more than 12 kg.

Should I trust Signor Hugo D'Esposito? It still doesn't seem quite clear to me. How did the Italian swimmers manage to penetrate the Sevastopol bay, and most importantly, deliver a bunch of explosives to the place of sabotage? Maybe the former saboteur still lied?

From the "Reference on the regime in the area of ​​​​the Main Base dated October 29, 1955", it follows that during October 27-28, 1955, the following foreign ships were at the crossing in the Black Sea:
- Italian "Gerosi" and "Ferdinando" from Odessa to the Bosphorus;
- Italian "Esmeraldo" and French "Sanche Condo" from Novorossiysk to the Bosphorus;
- French "Roland" from Poti to the Bosphorus;
- Turkish "Demirkalla" from the Bosporus to Sulina.
All ships were at a considerable distance from the main base ...

Underwater saboteurs also had to have full information about the security regime of the Main Base of the Black Sea Fleet, the places of parking and exit of ships. They should have known that the boom gates to the Sevastopol Bay would be open, that the battleship, returning from the sea on 10/28/1955, would stand on barrels No. 3, and not in its regular place - barrels No. 14 in the very depths of the bay.
Such information could only be collected by a reconnaissance resident located in Sevastopol, and it was possible to transmit a “signal” to saboteurs on a submarine only by radio. But the presence of such a resident in the closed (1939-1959) Sevastopol and his possible actions precisely in the interests of Prince Borghese seem unrealistic.
Yes, and he could not get information about which barrels the battleship would stand on, because. it was transferred to Novorossiysk when it was already at the Inkerman ranges directly in front of the entrance to the base.

Asked:
- where did the saboteurs install mines in "magnetic cylinders" if the battleship was at sea all day on October 28?
- how could they finish all the work on October 28 by “sunset” and even “sail” back to Omega if the sun on October 28, 1955 in the Sevastopol region set at 17.17 (it got dark at 18.47), and the battleship Novorossiysk by the time of sunset the sun has not finished mooring yet? He anchored and barrels 10/28/1955 only in 17.30 !

Suppose the saboteurs managed to plant mines. Taking into account their double return and the possible weight of explosive charges (for example, the Mignatta type - 2 kg, the Bauletti - 4.5 kg, which were used by Italian saboteurs, and each swimmer wore 4-5 such mines on his belt), they could install a charge weighing a maximum of 540 kg under the bottom of the battleship. This is clearly not enough to inflict the damage that the battleship received. We also note that the Minyatta type mine was attached to the underwater part of the ship by suction, and the Bowletti mine was attached to the side keel of the ship with two clamps, i.e. these were not magnetic mines. There were no side keels on the Novorossiysk in the area of ​​the explosion. Assume that magnetic mines were specially made? But why, if the Italians had mines already tested in real life?

Opinion of former Italian submarine saboteurs.
A.N. Norchenko met with these people in 1995 in Italy, and these meetings are described in his book The Cursed Secret:
- Luigi Ferraro, an underwater saboteur who served in a detachment of divers ("Gamma detachment"), who blew up several ships during the war, a national hero of Italy, holder of the Grand Gold Medal for military valor.
- Evelino Marcolini, a former torpedo saboteur, during the war he participated in an operation against the English aircraft carrier Aquila, for which he was awarded the Big Gold Medal for military prowess.
- Emilio Legnani, began his service as a young officer on the battleship "Giulio Cesare", after the war he went to Malta on it, a former katernik-saboteur who served in the detachment of assault and torpedo boats of the 10th MAS flotilla. During the war he visited Gurzuf, Balaklava, Sevastopol. After the war, in 1949, he commanded a detachment of ships, ensuring the safety of a group of ships, which, according to reparations, was intended for the USSR and went to Albania, where they were transferred. This detachment of ships was responsible for the security of the group of transferred ships up to the Albanian coast.
All of them were intimately acquainted with Prince Borghese. All of them were awarded, but for their military actions during the war.

Answers to questions about the involvement of Italian saboteurs in blowing up the battleship Novorossiysk:
L. Ferrari:
“This question is not new for us. It has already been asked to us in various letters. Everyone asked if we had blown up Giulio Cesare in Sevastopol? I speak responsibly and definitely: these are all fictions. At that time, our country was in ruins, there were enough problems of our own! .. And why do we need all this? This is already a distant story. I would admit my participation without any problems, but I don’t want to invent something that didn’t exist.
... I can't imagine for 95 percent who, except for the Italians, could do this. But I am 100% sure that they are not Italians. We had equipment and trained people. It seems that there is no one but us, many people think so. But we have nothing to do with this act. This is absolutely accurate. He was of no use to us. And in general, you know, Senor Alessandro, if I had blown up the Giulio Cesare in combat conditions, I would have reported it to you with pride. And I don’t want to take credit for it.”.

E.Marcolini:
“We are all aware of the fact that more than a ton of explosives exploded under the battleship. On my Mayal (a guided torpedo driven by E. Marcolini during the war), I could deliver no more than 280 kilograms. To deliver our charge to the battleship, we would need means of support: either a submarine or something like the Olterra. And that they were close. Because there would be practically no power reserve for the return: the torpedo would then have to be drowned, and we would just get out ourselves.
And this is physically impossible in a little-known place. And in a matter of minutes...
There is nothing to say about swimmers from Gamma. They wouldn't last long in your water.(the water temperature on 10/28/1955 in the Sevastopol region was 12-14 degrees). So I have no idea how I would do it myself. And why did we need it?
If we actually took part in the blowing up of the Giulio Cesare, then everyone would immediately know this, and then they would deal with us very quickly, they would have been torn to pieces. And above all our leftists, they had great power in Italy at that time.

E. Legnani answers questions, including about the oath of Prince Borghese on his golden sword to sink the battleship, but not let it serve the Bolsheviks:
“Fantasy is everything. The prince, as far as I knew him, did not take any such oaths to anyone. Yes, and we all had the same swords. And in general, why did we Italians take risks to blow up this rusty box, which barely floated and could hardly shoot?! I personally know this better than others. Because of him, there was nothing to risk, let him swim and ruin your treasury ... And if anyone had revenge, it was England and America - they took the completely new battleships Vittorio Veneto and Italy from us, and the Germans bombed the Roma on the day of the armistice. So, from any side, this action with Giulio Cesare in Italy was absolutely unnecessary ... Guilty and interested must be sought elsewhere.

The answer is somewhat cynical, but apparently frank.
All these interlocutors advised: identify, who needed and benefited from all this.
M-yes. It seems that Hugo D'Esposito just decided to brag in his old age.

As for the version about the involvement of English saboteurs in blowing up Novorossiysk, their problems would be the same as those pointed out when analyzing information about a possible “Italian trace”. Besides, no English ships and ships, which could deliver underwater saboteurs or a midget submarine, were not observed in the Black Sea at that time.

But if not the sabotage of combat swimmers, then what caused the death of the battleship?
Version analysis was carried out in his study by A.D. Sanin ( Once again about the "damned secret" and various versions of the death of the battleship "Novorossiysk").
Interestingly, in the area of ​​​​the explosion was found "a torn part of a barge with a winch, 8-9 m long, 4 m wide, protruding from the ground by 2.5-4 m.", i.e. to the bottom of the battleship. It was quite possible to place explosive charges on the barge, with a total mass of 2-2.5 tons or more. At the same time, the explosion becomes no longer bottom, but near-bottom and practically under the very bottom of the battleship (3-5 m remain to the bottom). An "iron sheet without fouling" measuring 4x2 m, 20 mm thick could be used to better shield charges from the bottom and make the explosion directed upward. As it is easy to calculate, the weight of this sheet is about 1.2 tons
To deliver such a quantity of explosives (more than 2 tons) to a barge under water and drag a sheet of iron to it, of such dimensions and weight, is clearly beyond the power of underwater saboteurs ... It follows from this that such an operation, if it was carried out, was carried out surface way with the subsequent flooding of this rusty barge in the area of ​​anchorage No. 3.
A.N. Norchenko, comparing the documents on the explosion of the battleship and various objects found at the bottom of the funnel in the area of ​​​​its parking on barrels No. 3, gives a possible scheme for installing charges under the Novorossiysk battleship: the first charge detonation occurred closer to the port side of the battleship. The cavern he created in the water accumulated the energy of the explosion of the second charge and gave it a more directed character. The insignificant depth and smoothness of the craters just indicate that the explosions occurred at a certain distance from the ground, equal to the height of the submerged barge, i.e., near-bottom directed explosions were realized.

The proposed scheme (reconstruction) of the installation of the charge LK "Novorossiysk" using a flooded barge

Fragment of the map of the Novorossiysk LK parking lot on barrels No. 3

The second sabotage version (O. Sergeev) of the explosion can be associated with the disappearance without a trace after the explosion of the regular battleship longboat No. 319 and command boat No. 1475, which were under fire, from the starboard side of the battleship at a distance of 10-15 m from the side.
From the explanatory note of the assistant commander of the battleship captain 3rd rank Serbulov dated 10/30/55:
“... Hearing the explosion, after 2-3 minutes he went to the poop. Following to the site of the explosion, from the waist I saw people floating ... and there I discovered that there was no boat No. 1475 and longboat No. 319 under the right shot.
The commission also did not attach any importance to the fact of the disappearance of the boat and longboat, although all the first reports of the explosion were related to the fact that some gasoline containers had exploded.
From the explanatory note of the Fleet Commander Parkhomenko presented to the commission: “... At about 01.40, captain 3rd rank Ksenofontov called me at the apartment of the OD fleet and reported that at 01.30 gasoline tanks had exploded on the battleship Novorossiysk.”
But there was no gasoline in the bow of the battleship, gasoline was in boat No. 1475. A completely logical conclusion suggests itself that the complete destruction of the boat and longboat could have occurred during underwater explosions of charges and the explosion of the gasoline-air mixture that occurred at the same time. This led to the smell of gasoline and the first report of a gasoline tank explosion.

Explosive charges could possibly be placed on longboat No. 319, whose displacement is about 12 tons, length - 12 m, width - 3.4 m, side height - 1.27 m. It was possible to place charges weighing up to 2.5 tons or more (for example, 2 FAB-1000 bombs), as well as a “sheet of iron without fouling” weighing 1.2 tons to make explosions directed upwards.
If longboat No. 319, when the battleship went to sea on October 28, 1955, did not board it, but remained at the battleship’s boat base in the Sevastopol Bay, then it could well have been “charged” with such an amount of explosives in advance, and then simply drowned at the side battleship.

O. Sergeev believes that the battleship was blown up by two charges with a total TNT equivalent of 1800 kg, installed on the ground in the area of ​​​​the bow artillery cellars, at a small distance from the center plane of the ship and from each other. The explosions occurred with a short time interval, which led to the creation of a cumulative effect and infliction of damage, as a result of which the ship sank. The undermining was prepared and carried out by domestic special services with the knowledge of the country's leadership for domestic political purposes. Who was this provocation directed against? According to Sergeyev, against the leadership of the Navy. The death of "Novorossiysk" was the beginning of a large-scale reduction of the Soviet Navy. The obsolete battleships "Sevastopol", "October Revolution", the captured cruisers "Kerch", "Admiral Makarov", many captured submarines, destroyers and ships of other classes of pre-war construction went to scrap.

M-yes. It turns out that they still blew up their? For the GRU or the KGB, this was clearly easier than for foreign swimmers, who simply did not physically have the opportunity.

It is strange that for decades, experts have not been able to establish the cause of the death of the battleship.
And another mystery: 40 years before the explosion of the flagship battleship of the Soviet fleet on the same Sevastopol roadstead and under the same unclear circumstances, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the dreadnought "Empress Maria" died ...

Eternal memory to the dead sailors.

Now I propose to see a photo of the ship.

After Italy's withdrawal from the war, the victorious countries divided the Italian warships as reparations. The Soviet Union claimed new battleships of the Littorio type, but they only got the outdated Giulio Cesare. It was not possible to immediately get the ship, so the British temporarily handed over to the USSR their old dreadnought "Royal Sovereign", which received the name "Arkhangelsk" in the Soviet fleet. In 1948, after Cesare went to a Soviet port, Arkhangelsk was returned to England for scrapping.

Although by the end of the war only two old battleships, Sevastopol and Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya, remained in service from Soviet heavy ships, the USSR still had ambitious plans for the construction of battleships, and it was planned to use the Cesare for crew training.

On December 9, 1948, Cesare left the Taranto naval base and moved to Augusta, from where on December 15 she headed for the Albanian port of Vlora (Valona). There, on February 3, 1949, the battleship, which received the temporary designation Z11, was transferred to the Soviet commission, headed by Rear Admiral G. I. Levchenko. On February 6, the naval ensign of the USSR was hoisted on the ship, and two weeks later she sailed for Sevastopol, arriving at the new base on February 26. By order of the Black Sea Fleet dated March 5, 1949, the battleship was given the name "Novorossiysk".

"Giulio Cesare" in completion, Genoa autumn 1913

"Giulio Cesare", formation of the crew at the stern 1925-1926

"Giulio Cesare" on maneuvers, 1926

"Giulio Cesare" in Taranto, October 1937

"Giulio Cesare" after modernization, 1940

Damage to the add-ons "Giulio Cesare" from hitting 381-mm shells from the battleship "Worspite" in the battle on July 9, 1940

Battleship "Giulio Cesare", 1941

37mm twin automatic mounts on the Giulio Cesare, May 1941

"Giulio Cesare" in the Mare Piccolo Basin, Taranto November 1948

Battleship "Novorossiysk" in Sevastopol, 1949

"Novorossiysk" in Sevastopol, early 1950s

On the deck of the battleship "Novorossiysk" in Sevastopol, early 1950s

The main caliber of the battleship "Novorossiysk"

On the deck of Novorossiysk, 1954

Battleship Novorossiysk and tanker Fiolent, 1954

The rise of the battleship Novorossiysk, May 1957

On October 29, 1955, the flagship of the Black Sea squadron of the Soviet Navy, the battleship Novorossiysk, sank in the Northern Bay of Sevastopol. More than 600 sailors were killed. According to the official version, an old German bottom mine exploded under the bottom of the ship. But there are other versions, unofficial, but very popular - supposedly Italian, English and even Soviet saboteurs are responsible for the death of Novorossiysk.

At the time of the death of the battleship "Novorossiysk" was 44 years old - a respectable period for the ship. For most of her life, the battleship bore a different name - "Giulio Cesare" ("Julius Caesar"), sailing under the flag of the Italian Navy. She was laid down at Genoa in the summer of 1910 and launched in 1915. The battleship did not take part in the First World War, in the 1920s it was used as a training ship for the training of naval gunners.

In the mid-1930s, Giulio Cesare underwent a major overhaul. The displacement of the ship reached 24,000 tons, it could reach a fairly high speed of 22 knots. The battleship was well armed: two triple-barreled and three turret guns, three torpedo tubes, anti-aircraft guns and heavy machine guns. During the Second World War, the battleship was mainly engaged in escorting convoys, but in 1942 the Navy command recognized it as obsolete and transferred it to the category of training ships.

In 1943, Italy capitulated. Until 1948, the Giulio Cesare lay in the parking lot, not being mothballed, with a minimum number of crew and without proper maintenance.

According to a special agreement, the Italian fleet was to be divided among the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. The USSR accounted for a battleship, a light cruiser, 9 destroyers and 4 submarines, not counting small ships. On January 10, 1947, an agreement was reached in the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Allied Powers on the distribution of the transferred Italian ships between the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and other countries affected by the Italian aggression. For example, four cruisers, four destroyers and two submarines were allocated to France, and one cruiser to Greece. The battleships became part of groups "A", "B" and "C", intended for the three main powers.

The Soviet side claimed one of the two new battleships, which in their power surpassed even the German ships of the Bismarck type. But since by this time the Cold War had already begun between the recent allies, neither the United States nor England sought to strengthen the Soviet Navy with powerful ships. I had to throw lots, and the USSR received group "C". The new battleships went to the United States and England (later, these battleships were returned to Italy as part of the NATO partnership). By decision of the Tripartite Commission in 1948, the USSR received the battleship Giulio Cesare, the light cruiser Emmanuele Filiberto Duca D'Aosta, the destroyers Artilleri, Fuchiliere, destroyers Animoso, Ardimentoso, Fortunale and submarines. Marea" and "Nicelio".

On December 9, 1948, the Giulio Cesare left the port of Taranto and on December 15 arrived in the Albanian port of Vlora. On February 3, 1949, the transfer of the battleship to the Soviet commission, headed by Rear Admiral Levchenko, took place in this port. On February 6, the naval flag of the USSR was hoisted over the ship, and two weeks later it sailed for Sevastopol, arriving at its new base on February 26. By order of the Black Sea Fleet dated March 5, 1949, the battleship was given the name Novorossiysk.

"Novorossiysk"

As almost all researchers note, the ship was handed over by the Italians to Soviet sailors in a state of disrepair. In a relatively satisfactory form was the main part of the armament, the main power plant and the main hull structures - sheathing, framing, main transverse bulkheads below the armored deck. But general ship systems: pipelines, fittings, service mechanisms, required serious repair or replacement. There were no radar equipment on the ship at all, the fleet of radio communications equipment was scarce, and small-caliber anti-aircraft artillery was completely absent. It should be noted that immediately before the transfer to the USSR, the battleship underwent a small repair, which concerned mainly the electromechanical part.

When the Novorossiysk settled in Sevastopol, the command of the Black Sea Fleet gave the order to turn the ship into a full-fledged combat unit as soon as possible. The matter was complicated by the fact that part of the documentation was missing, and there were practically no naval specialists who spoke Italian in the USSR.

In August 1949, Novorossiysk took part in squadron maneuvers as a flagship. However, his participation was rather nominal, since in the three months allotted they did not manage to put the battleship in order (and they could not have time). However, the political situation demanded to demonstrate the success of Soviet sailors in the development of Italian ships. As a result, the squadron went to sea, and NATO intelligence made sure that the Novorossiysk was floating.

From 1949 to 1955, the battleship was factory repaired eight times. It was equipped with 24 twin installations of Soviet 37-mm anti-aircraft guns, new radar stations, radio communications and intra-ship communications. They also replaced Italian turbines with new ones manufactured at the Kharkov plant. In May 1955, Novorossiysk entered service with the Black Sea Fleet and went to sea several times until the end of October, practicing combat training tasks.

On October 28, 1955, the battleship returned from the last campaign and took up a place in the Northern Bay on a "battleship barrel" in the area of ​​​​the Marine Hospital, about 110 meters from the coast. The water depth there was 17 meters of water and about 30 meters of viscous silt.

Explosion

At the time of the explosion, the commander of the battleship, Captain 1st Rank Kukhta, was on vacation. His duties were performed by senior assistant captain 2nd rank Khurshudov. According to the staffing table, there were 68 officers, 243 foremen, 1231 sailors on the battleship. After the "Novorossiysk" moored, part of the crew moved out on dismissal. More than one and a half thousand people remained on board: part of the crew and a new replenishment (200 people), cadets of naval schools and soldiers who had arrived on the battleship the day before.

On October 29, at 01:31 Moscow time, a powerful explosion was heard under the ship's hull from the starboard side in the bow. According to experts, its force was equivalent to an explosion of 1000-1200 kilograms of trinitrotoluene. On the starboard side in the underwater part of the hull, a hole was formed with an area of ​​​​more than 150 square meters, and on the port side and along the keel - a dent with a deflection arrow from 2 to 3 meters. The total area of ​​damage to the underwater part of the hull was about 340 square meters in a section 22 meters long. Outboard water poured into the resulting hole, and after 3 minutes there was a trim of 3-4 degrees and a roll of 1-2 degrees to starboard.

At 01:40, the incident was reported to the fleet commander. By 02:00, when the list to starboard reached 1.5 degrees, the head of the operational department of the fleet, captain 1st rank Ovcharov, ordered "to tow the ship to a shallow place", and the approaching tugboats turned it stern to the shore.

By this time, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral V.A. Parkhomenko, the chief of staff of the fleet, Vice Admiral S.E. Chursin, a member of the Military Council, Vice Admiral N.M. Kulakov, the acting squadron commander, Rear Admiral N .I. Nikolsky, Chief of Staff of the Squadron Rear Admiral A.I. Zubkov, Commander of the Cruiser Division Rear Admiral S.M. Lobov, Head of the Political Directorate of the Fleet Rear Admiral B.T. Kalachev and 28 other senior staff officers.

At 02:32 a list to port was discovered. By 03:30, about 800 unemployed sailors lined up on the deck, rescue ships stood at the side of the battleship. Nikolsky offered to transfer sailors to them, but received a categorical refusal from Parkhomenko. At 03:50, the list to port reached 10-12 degrees, while the tugs continued to pull the battleship to the left. After 10 minutes, the list increased to 17 degrees, while 20 were critical. Nikolsky again asked Parkhomenko and Kulakov for permission to evacuate the sailors who were not engaged in the fight for damage and was again refused.

"Novorossiysk" began to capsize upside down. Several dozen people managed to get into boats and onto neighboring ships, but hundreds of sailors fell from the deck into the water. Many remained inside the dying battleship. As Admiral Parkhomenko later explained, he "did not find it possible to order the personnel to leave the ship in advance, because until the last minutes he hoped that the ship would be saved, and there was no thought that he would die." This hope cost the lives of hundreds of people who, having fallen into the water, were covered by the hull of the battleship.

By 04:14, the Novorossiysk, which had taken in more than 7,000 tons of water, listed to a fatal 20 degrees, swung to the right, just as suddenly fell to the left and lay on board. In this position, he remained for several hours, resting on solid ground with masts. At 22:00 on October 29, the hull completely disappeared under water.

In total, 609 people died during the disaster, including emergency parties from other ships of the squadron. Between 50 and 100 people died directly as a result of the explosion and flooding of the bow compartments. The rest died during the capsizing of the battleship and after it. Timely evacuation of personnel was not organized. Most of the sailors remained inside the hull. Some of them were kept in the air cushions of the compartments for a long time, but only nine people managed to be saved: seven went out through a neck cut in the aft part of the bottom five hours after capsizing, and two more were taken out after 50 hours by divers. According to the recollections of divers, the sailors immured and doomed to death sang "Varyag". Only by November 1 did the divers stop hearing the knocks.

In the summer of 1956, the special purpose expedition "EON-35" began lifting the battleship by blowing. Preparations for the ascent were fully completed by the end of April 1957. The general blowdown began on the morning of May 4 and completed the ascent on the same day. The ship surfaced with a keel on May 4, 1957, and on May 14 it was taken to the Cossack Bay, where it was turned over. When the ship was raised, the third turret of the main caliber fell out, which had to be raised separately. The ship was dismantled for metal and transferred to the Zaporizhstal plant.

Commission conclusions

To find out the causes of the explosion, a government commission was created, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Minister of the Shipbuilding Industry, Colonel General of the Engineering Service Vyacheslav Malyshev. According to the recollections of all who knew him, Malyshev was an engineer of the highest erudition. He perfectly knew his business and read theoretical drawings of any complexity, being well versed in issues of unsinkability and stability of ships. Back in 1946, after reading the drawings of "Giulio Cesare", Malyshev recommended that this acquisition be abandoned. But he failed to convince Stalin.

The commission gave its conclusion two and a half weeks after the disaster. Tough deadlines were set in Moscow. On November 17, the conclusion of the commission was submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU, which accepted and approved the conclusions.

The cause of the disaster was called "an external underwater explosion (non-contact, bottom) of a charge with a TNT equivalent of 1000-1200 kg." The explosion of a German magnetic mine, which remained on the ground after the Great Patriotic War, was recognized as the most probable.

As for responsibility, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice-Admiral Parkhomenko, acting. squadron commander Rear Admiral Nikolsky and acting. battleship commander captain 2nd rank Khurshudov. The Commission noted that Vice Admiral Kulakov, a member of the Military Council of the Black Sea Fleet, also bears direct responsibility for the disaster with the Novorossiysk battleship, and especially for the death of people.

But despite the harsh conclusions, the case was limited to the fact that the commander of the battleship Kukhta was demoted in rank and sent to the reserve. Also removed from office and demoted in rank: Rear Admiral Galitsky, commander of the division for the protection of the water area, acting. squadron commander Nikolsky and a member of the Military Council of the Fists. A year and a half later, they were reinstated in ranks. The commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Viktor Parkhomenko, was severely reprimanded, and on December 8, 1955, he was removed from his post. No legal action has been taken against him. In 1956, the commander of the Soviet Navy, Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, was removed from his post.

The commission also noted that “sailors, foremen and officers, as well as officers who led the direct struggle to save the ship, - acting. comrade Matusevich, the commander of the survivability division, comrade Gorodetsky, and the head of the technical department of the fleet, comrade Ivanov, who helped them, skillfully and selflessly fought the water that entered the ship, everyone knew his job well, showed initiative, showed examples of courage and true heroism . But all the efforts of the personnel were devalued and nullified by the criminally frivolous, unskilled and indecisive command ... "

The documents of the commission spoke in detail about those who should have, but failed to organize the rescue of the crew and the ship. However, none of these documents gave a direct answer to the main question: what caused the disaster?

Version number 1 - mine

The initial versions - the explosion of a gas depot or artillery cellars - were swept aside almost immediately. The tanks of the fuel depot on the battleship were empty long before the disaster. As for the cellars, if they rushed, there would be little left of the battleship at all, and five cruisers standing nearby would also fly into the air. In addition, this version was immediately overturned by the testimony of the sailors, whose place of military service was the 2nd tower of the main artillery caliber, in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bwhich the battleship received a hole. It was precisely established that the 320-millimeter shells remained safe and sound.

There are still a few versions left: mine explosion, submarine torpedo attack and sabotage. After studying the circumstances, the mine version won the most votes. Which was quite understandable - mines in the Sevastopol bays were not uncommon since the time of the Civil War. The bays and the raid were periodically cleared of mines with the help of minesweepers and diving teams. In 1941, during the offensive of the German armies on Sevastopol, the German Air Force and Navy mined the water area both from the sea and from the air - they laid several hundred mines of various types and purposes. Some worked during the fighting, others were removed and neutralized after the liberation of Sevastopol in 1944. Later, the Sevastopol bays and the roadstead were regularly trawled and inspected by diving teams. The last such comprehensive survey was conducted in 1951-1953. In 1956-1958, after the explosion of the battleship, 19 more German bottom mines were found in the Sevastopol Bay, including three at a distance of less than 50 meters from the place of the death of the battleship.

The testimonies of divers also spoke in favor of the mine version. As the squad leader Kravtsov testified: “The ends of the skin of the hole are bent inward. By the nature of the hole, the burrs from the skin, the explosion was from the outside of the ship.

Version number 2 - torpedo attack

The next version was that the battleship was torpedoed by an unknown submarine. However, when studying the nature of the damage received by the battleship, the commission did not find characteristic signs corresponding to a torpedo strike. But she discovered something else. At the time of the explosion, the ships of the division for the protection of the water area, whose duty it was to guard the entrance to the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, were in a completely different place. On the night of the catastrophe, the outer raid was not guarded by anyone; the network gates were wide open, and the direction finders were inactive. Thus, Sevastopol was defenseless. And, theoretically, a foreign submarine could well enter the bay, choose a position and deliver a torpedo strike.

In practice, for a full-fledged attack, the boat would hardly have had enough depth. However, the military was aware that some Western navies already had small or midget submarines in service. So, theoretically, a dwarf submarine could penetrate the inner roadstead of the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. This assumption, in turn, gave rise to another - were saboteurs involved in the explosion?

Version number 3 - Italian combat swimmers

This version was supported by the fact that before falling under the red flag, Novorossiysk was an Italian ship. And the most formidable underwater special forces during World War II, the 10th Assault Flotilla, were with the Italians, and they were commanded by Prince Junio ​​Valerio Borghese, a staunch anti-communist who allegedly publicly swore after the transfer of the battleship to the USSR to avenge such a humiliation of Italy.

A graduate of the Royal Naval Academy, Valerio Borghese, was expected to have a brilliant career as a submarine officer, which was facilitated by a noble origin and excellent academic performance. The first submarine under the command of Borghese was part of the Italian legion, which, as part of Franco's assistance, acted against the Republican fleet of Spain. After that, the prince received a new submarine under his command. Later, Valerio Borghese completed a special training course in Germany on the Baltic Sea.

Upon his return to Italy, Borghese was given command of the most modern submarine, the Shire. Thanks to the skillful actions of the commander, the submarine returned back to its base unharmed from each military campaign. The operations of the Italian submariners aroused genuine interest in King Victor Emmanuel, who honored the prince-submariner with a personal audience.

After that, Borghese was asked to create the world's first flotilla of naval saboteurs-submarines. Ultra-small submarines, special guided torpedoes, manned exploding boats were created for her. On December 18, 1941, Italians in midget submarines secretly entered the harbor of Alexandria and attached magnetic explosive devices to the bottoms of the British battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth. The death of these ships allowed the Italian fleet to seize the initiative in combat operations in the Mediterranean for a long time. Also, the "10th Assault Flotilla" took part in the siege of Sevastopol, based in the ports of Crimea.

Theoretically, a foreign submarine cruiser could deliver combat swimmers as close as possible to Sevastopol so that they carried out sabotage. Given the combat potential of first-class Italian scuba divers, pilots of small submarines and guided torpedoes, and also taking into account the sloppiness in matters of protecting the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, the version of underwater saboteurs looks convincing.

Version 4 - English saboteurs

The second unit in the world capable of such sabotage was the 12th Flotilla of the British Navy. It was commanded at that time by Captain 2nd Rank Lionel Crabbe, also a legendary man. During the Second World War, he led the defense of the British naval base of Gibraltar from Italian combat swimmers and was rightfully considered one of the best underwater saboteurs of the British fleet. Crabbe personally knew many of the Italians from the 10th Flotilla. In addition, after the war, captured Italian combat swimmers advised specialists from the 12th flotilla.

In favor of this version, the following argument is put forward - as if the Soviet command wanted to equip Novorossiysk with nuclear weapons. The USSR possessed the atomic bomb since 1949, but there were no naval means of using nuclear weapons at that time. The solution could only be large-caliber naval guns firing heavy projectiles over a long distance. The Italian battleship was ideally suited for this purpose. Great Britain, which is an island, in this case turned out to be the most vulnerable target for the Soviet Navy. In the case of the use of atomic explosive devices near the western coast of England, taking into account the wind rose, which in those parts blow east all year round, the entire country would be exposed to radiation contamination.

And one more fact - at the end of October 1955, the British Mediterranean squadron conducted maneuvers in the Aegean and Marmara seas.

Version 5 - the work of the KGB

Already in our time, the candidate of technical sciences Oleg Sergeev put forward another version. The battleship "Novorossiysk" was blown up by two charges with a total TNT equivalent within 1800 kg, installed on the ground in the area of ​​the bow artillery cellars, at a small distance from the center plane of the ship and from each other. The explosions occurred with a short time interval, which led to the creation of a cumulative effect and infliction of damage, as a result of which the ship sank. The undermining was prepared and carried out by domestic special services with the knowledge of the country's leadership exclusively for domestic political purposes. In 1993, the performers of this action became known: a senior lieutenant of special forces and two midshipmen - a support group.

Who was this provocation directed against? According to Sergeyev, first of all, against the leadership of the Navy. Two years after the death of Novorossiysk, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU on October 29, 1957, Nikita Khrushchev answered this question: “We were offered to invest more than 100 billion rubles in the fleet and build old boats and destroyers armed with classical artillery. We had a big fight, removed Kuznetsov ... he was incapable of thinking, taking care of the fleet, of defense. Everything needs to be re-evaluated. It is necessary to build a fleet, but above all, build a submarine fleet armed with missiles.

The ten-year shipbuilding plan, which does not reflect in the future the priority of developing the most capital-intensive and beneficial for the military-industrial complex, naval strategic nuclear forces, objectively could not be supported by the military-political leadership of the country, which sealed the fate of the commander-in-chief of the Navy Nikolai Kuznetsov.

The death of "Novorossiysk" was the beginning of a large-scale reduction in the Navy of the USSR. The obsolete battleships "Sevastopol" and "October Revolution", the captured cruisers "Kerch" and "Admiral Makarov", many captured submarines, destroyers and ships of other classes of pre-war construction went to scrap.

Version criticism

Critics of the mine version claim that by 1955 the power supplies of all bottom mines would inevitably have been discharged, and the fuses would have become completely unusable. Until now, there were no batteries capable of not being discharged for ten or more years. It is also noted that the explosion occurred after 8 hours of mooring the battleship, and all German mines had hourly intervals that were multiples of only 6 hours. Before the tragedy, Novorossiysk (10 times) and the battleship Sevastopol (134 times) were moored on barrel No. 3 at different times of the year - and nothing exploded. In addition, it turned out that in fact there were two explosions, and such a force that two large deep craters appeared at the bottom, which the explosion of one mine cannot leave.

As for the version about the work of saboteurs from Italy or England, in this case a number of questions arise. Firstly, an action of this magnitude is possible only with the participation of the state. And it would be very difficult to hide preparations for it, given the activity of Soviet intelligence on the Apennine Peninsula and the influence of the Italian Communist Party.

It would be impossible for private individuals to organize such an action - too large resources would be needed to provide it, starting with several tons of explosives and ending with means of transportation (again, let's not forget about secrecy). This is acceptable in feature films like "Dogs of War", but in real life it becomes known to the relevant services at the planning stage, as was the case, for example, with the unsuccessful coup in Equatorial Guinea. In addition, as the former Italian combat swimmers themselves admitted, their life after the war was tightly controlled by the state, and any attempt at amateur activity would have been stopped.

In addition, preparations for such an operation should have been kept secret from the allies, primarily from the United States. If the Americans had known about the impending sabotage of the Italian or British navies, they would certainly have prevented this - in case of failure, the United States would not have been able to wash off the accusations of inciting war for a long time. It would have been insane to launch such a sally against a nuclear-weapon country in the midst of the Cold War.

Finally, in order to mine a ship of this class in a protected harbor, it was necessary to collect complete information about the security regime, mooring places, ship exits to the sea, and so on. It is impossible to do this without a resident with a radio station in Sevastopol itself or somewhere nearby. All operations of Italian saboteurs during the war were carried out only after careful reconnaissance and never "blindly". But even after half a century, there is not a single evidence that in one of the most protected cities of the USSR, filtered through by the KGB and counterintelligence, there was an English or Italian resident who regularly supplied information not only to Rome or London, but personally to Prince Borghese.

Supporters of the Italian version argue that some time after the death of Novorossiysk, a message flashed in the Italian press about the awarding of orders to a group of officers of the Italian Navy "for performing a special task." However, so far no one has published a single photocopy of this message. References to the Italian naval officers themselves, who once declared to someone about their participation in the sinking of Novorossiysk, were unsubstantiated for a long time.

Yes, information about the explosion of "Novorossiysk" in the Western press appeared very quickly. But Italian newspaper comments (with vague allusions) are a common journalistic device, when after the fact there is "most reliable" evidence. It should also be taken into account that the Italians allowed their "younger" battleships, received back from NATO allies, to be melted down. And if there hadn’t been a catastrophe with Novorossiysk, only historians of the Navy would have remembered the battleship Giulio Cesare in Italy.

Belated Rewards

Based on the report of the government commission, in November 1955, the Black Sea Fleet command sent the Acting Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy, Admiral Gorshkov, submissions on awarding orders and medals to all the sailors who died along with the battleship. The awards were also presented to 117 people from among those who survived the explosion, sailors from other ships who came to the aid of Novorossiysk, as well as divers and doctors who distinguished themselves during rescue operations. In Sevastopol, at the headquarters of the fleet, the required number of awards was delivered. But the award never took place. Only forty years later it turned out that at the presentation by the hand of the head of the personnel department of the Navy of that time, a note was made: "Admiral Comrade Gorshkov does not consider it possible to come up with such a proposal."

Only in 1996, after repeated appeals from the ship's veterans, the Russian government gave appropriate instructions to the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Russian State Maritime Historical and Cultural Center and other departments. The main military prosecutor's office began to check the materials of the investigation conducted in 1955. All this time, secret award lists for Novorossiysk soldiers were kept in the Central Naval Archive. It turned out that 6 sailors were posthumously presented to the highest award of the USSR - the Order of Lenin, 64 (53 of them posthumously) - to the Order of the Red Banner, 10 (9 posthumously) - to the Orders of the Patriotic War of the 1st and 2nd degrees, 191 ( 143 posthumously) - to the Order of the Red Star, 448 sailors (391 posthumously) - to the medals "For Courage", "For Military Merit", Ushakov and Nakhimov.

Since by that time there was no longer a state under whose naval flag the Novorossiysk died, nor Soviet orders, all the Novorossiysk citizens were awarded the Orders of Courage.

a memorial at the Fraternal Cemetery in the form of a 12-meter figure of the Grieving Sailor, cast from the bronze propellers of the battleship, installed in 1963

The real reason for the death of the battleship.

Most recently, news agencies reported that Hugo D'Esposito, a veteran of the Italian frogmen unit Gamma, admitted that the Italian military was involved in the sinking of the Soviet battleship Novorossiysk. 4Arts writes about it.

According to Hugo D'Esposito, the Italians did not want the ship to go to the "Russians", so they made sure to flood it.

Previously, the version that the Novorossiysk sank as a result of sabotage organized by the Italians was not officially confirmed.

After the death of Novorossiysk, various explanations for a possible sabotage were put forward (according to one of them, the explosives were allegedly hidden in the ship's hull already at the time of its transfer to the Soviet Union).

In the mid-2000s, the Itogi magazine, having published material on this topic, placed in it the story of a certain submarine officer Nikolo, allegedly involved in sabotage. According to him, the operation was organized by the former commander of underwater saboteurs Valerio Borghese, after the transfer of the ship he swore "to take revenge on the Russians and blow it up at all costs." The sabotage group, according to the source, arrived in a mini-submarine, which, in turn, was secretly delivered by a cargo ship that arrived from Italy. The Italians, as the newspaper wrote, equipped a secret base in the area of ​​Sevastopol's Omega Bay, mined the battleship, and then took the submarine to the open sea and waited for "their" steamer to pick them up.

Now I wonder if the relatives of the victims will sue Italy? Here is the site dedicated to the battleship and sailors.

sources
http://flot.com/history/events/novorosdeath.htm
http://lenta.ru/news/2013/08/21/sink/
http://korabley.net/news/2009-04-05-202

Let me remind you a few more ship stories: for example, Is it really. Here's another interesting story - The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -

New facts of an old tragedy

On the last Sunday of October, the veterans of the battleship Novorossiysk and the public of Sevastopol celebrated the mournful 60th anniversary of the death of the flagship of the USSR Black Sea Fleet. As a result of this tragedy, which broke out in the inner roadstead, more than 800 people died in one night. The battleship turned over, and in its hull, as in a steel grave, there were hundreds of sailors who fought for the ship ...

Materials about the death of the battleship "Novorossiysk" I began to collect in the late 80s with light hands Chief of the Emergency and Rescue Service of the USSR Navy, Rear Admiral-Engineer Nikolai Petrovich Chiker. He was a legendary man, a shipbuilding engineer, a real Epronian, a godson of Academician A.N. Krylova, friend and deputy of Yves Cousteau for the International Federation of Underwater Activities. Finally, the most important thing in this context is that Nikolai Petrovich was the commander of the EON-35 special-purpose expedition to raise the battleship Novorossiysk. He also developed the master plan for lifting the ship. He also supervised all lifting operations on the battleship, including its transfer from the Sevastopol Bay to the Cossack Bay. Hardly anyone else knew more about the ill-fated battleship than he did. I was shocked by his story about the tragedy that broke out in the inner roads of Sevastopol, about the heroism of the sailors who stood at their combat posts to the end, about the martyrdom of those who remained inside the overturned hull ...

Once in Sevastopol that year, I began to look for participants in this bitter epic, rescuers, witnesses. There were a lot of them. To this day, alas, more than half have passed away. And then the chief boatswain of the battleship, and the commander of the division of the main caliber, and many officers, midshipmen, and sailors of Novorossiysk were still alive. I walked along the chain - from address to address ...

By great happiness, I was introduced to the widow of the commander of the electrical division, Olga Vasilievna Matusevich. She has collected an extensive photo archive in which you can see the faces of all the sailors who died on the ship.

The then head of the technical department of the Black Sea Fleet, Rear Admiral-engineer Yuri Mikhailovich Khaliulin, was very helpful in the work.

I learned grains of truth about the death of the battleship from firsthand and documents, alas, still classified at that time.

I even managed to talk to the former commander of the Black Sea Fleet in that fateful year, Vice Admiral Viktor Parkhomenko. The range of information was extremely wide - from the commander of the fleet and the commander of the rescue expedition to the sailors who managed to get out of the steel coffin ...

The folder of "special importance" contained a recording of a conversation with the commander of the Black Sea Fleet combat swimmers squad, captain 1st rank Yuri Plechenko, with counterintelligence officer of the Black Sea Fleet Yevgeny Melnichuk, and also with Admiral Gordey Levchenko, who in 1949 ferried the battleship Novorossiysk from Albania to Sevastopol.

And I got to work. The main thing was not to drown in the material, to build a chronicle of the event and give each episode an objective commentary. I titled a rather voluminous essay (on two newspaper pages) with the name of Aivazovsky's painting "Explosion of a Ship". When everything was ready, he took the essay to the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda. I really hoped that this authoritative publication would be allowed to tell the truth about the death of Novorossiysk. But even in the "epoch" of Gorbachev's glasnost, this proved impossible without the permission of the censor. The Pravdinsky censor sent me to the military censor. And that one - even further, more precisely higher - to the General Staff of the USSR Navy:

- Now, if the Chief of the General Staff signs, then print.

Admiral of the Fleet Nikolai Ivanovich Smirnov, Chief of the General Staff of the USSR Navy, was in the hospital. He was undergoing examination before being transferred to the reserve and agreed to meet with me in the ward. I'm going to see him in Silver Lane. A room with the comfort of a good two-room apartment. The admiral carefully read the galleys he had brought, and remembered that he, then still a captain of the 1st rank, took part in the rescue of the "Novorossiysk" who found themselves in a death trap of a steel hull.

“I suggested using an underwater sound system to communicate with them. And they heard my voice underwater. I urged them to calm down. He asked to indicate by knocking who was where. And they heard. The hull of the overturned battleship responded with blows to the iron. Knocked from everywhere - from the stern and bow. But only nine people were rescued ...

Nikolai Ivanovich Smirnov signed the proofs for me - “I authorize for publication”, but warned that his visa was valid only for the next day, since tomorrow there would be an order for his dismissal to the reserve.

Can you print in a day?

I made it. On the morning of May 14, 1988, the Pravda newspaper came out with my essay - Explosion. So a breach was made in the veil of silence over the battleship Novorossiysk.

The Chief Engineer of the Special Purpose Expedition, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor Nikolai Petrovich Muru signed his brochure “Instructive Lessons from the Accident and Loss of the Battleship Novorossiysk” for me: “To Nikolai Cherkashin, who initiated publicity about the tragedy.” For me, this inscription was the highest award, just like the commemorative medal "Battleship Novorossiysk", which was presented to me by the chairman of the council of veterans of the ship, Captain 1st Rank Yuri Lepekhov.

A lot has been written about how the battleship died, with what courage the sailors fought for its survivability, and how they were later rescued. More has been written about the cause of the explosion. There are just turuses on wheels erected, dozens of versions for every taste. The best way to hide the truth is to bury it under a pile of assumptions.

Of all the versions, the State Commission chose the most obvious and safest for the naval authorities: an old German mine, which, under the combination of several fatal circumstances, took and worked under the bottom of the battleship.

Bottom mines, with which the Germans threw the Main Harbor during the war, are still being found today, after more than 70 years, in one corner of the bay, then in another. Everything is clear and convincing here: they trawled, trawled the Northern Bay and not quite carefully. Who is in demand now?

Another thing is sabotage. There is a whole line of people who are responsible

From this fan of versions, I personally choose the one that was expressed by sailors highly respected by me (and not only by me), authoritative specialists. I will name just a few. This is the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of the USSR during the war and in the fifties, Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union N.G. Kuznetsov, deputy commander-in-chief for combat training in the 50s, Admiral G.I. Levchenko, rear admiral engineer N.P. Chiker, a remarkable ship historian captain 1st rank N.A. Zalessky. The fact that the explosion of the Novorossiysk was the work of combat swimmers was also convinced by the acting commander of the battleship, Captain 2nd Rank G.A. Khurshudov, as well as many officers of Novorossiysk, employees of a special department, combat swimmers of the Black Sea Fleet. But even among like-minded people, opinions differ not only in details. Without going into consideration of all the "sabotage versions", I will focus on one - the "Leibovich-Lepekhov version", as the most convincing. Moreover, today it is highly supported by the recently published book in Italy by the Roman journalist Luca Ribustini, The Secret of the Russian Battleship. But about her a little later.

“The ship shuddered from a double explosion…”

“Perhaps it was an echo, but I heard two explosions, the second, however, is quieter. But there were two explosions,” writes reserve midshipman V.S. Sporynin from Zaporozhye.

“At 30 o’clock there was a strange sound of a strong double hydraulic shock ...” - the captain of the 2nd rank-engineer N.G. Filippovich.

Former foreman of the 1st article Dmitry Alexandrov from Chuvashia on the night of October 29, 1955, was the head of the guard on the cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov. “Suddenly, our ship trembled from a double explosion, from a double explosion,” Alexandrov emphasizes.

The former understudy of the chief boatswain of the Novorossiysk, midshipman Konstantin Ivanovich Petrov, also speaks of a double explosion, and other sailors write about him, both from Novorossiysk and from ships that were not far from the battleship. Yes, and on the tape of the seismogram, the marks of a double shaking of the soil are easily visible.

What's the matter? Maybe it is in this "duality" that the key to the cause of the explosion lies?

“A bunch of mines that went into the ground would not have been able to break through the battleship from the keel to the “moon sky”. Most likely, the explosive device was mounted inside the ship, somewhere in the holds.” This is the assumption of the former foreman of the 2nd article A.P. Andreev, once from the Black Sea, and now from St. Petersburg, seemed to me at first absurd. Could it be that the battleship Novorossiysk carried its own death within itself for six years?!

But when retired colonel engineer E.E. Leibovich not only made the same assumption, but also drew on the battleship diagram where, in his opinion, such a charge could be located, I began to work out this seemingly unlikely version.

Elizariy Efimovich Leibovich is a professional and most authoritative shipbuilding engineer. He was the chief engineer of the special-purpose expedition that raised the battleship, the right hand of Patriarch EPRON Nikolai Petrovich Chiker.

- The battleship was built with a ram-type bow. During the modernization in 1933-1937, the Italians built up the nose by 10 meters, providing it with a double-streamlined boule to reduce hydrodynamic resistance and thereby increase the speed. At the junction of the old and new noses, there was a certain damping volume in the form of a tightly welded tank, in which an explosive device could be placed, taking into account, firstly, structural vulnerability, secondly, proximity to the main caliber artillery cellars and, secondly, third, inaccessibility for inspection.

“What if it really was like that?” - I thought more than once, looking at the diagram sketched by Leibovich. The battleship could be mined in such a way that, upon arrival in Sevastopol with part of the Italian team on board, they could launch an explosive device, setting on it, if possible, the most remote explosion time: a month, six months, a year,

But, contrary to the initial conditions, without exception, all Italian sailors were removed from the ship back in Valona, ​​in Albania.

So the one who was supposed to cock the long-term clockwork in Sevastopol also descended with them.

So the Novorossiysk went with a “bullet in the heart” for all six years, until the SX-506 sabotage submarine was built in Livorno. Probably, the temptation was too great to activate the powerful mine already laid in the bowels of the ship.

There was only one way for this - an initiating explosion at the side, more precisely, at the 42nd frame.

Small (only 23 meters in length), with a sharp nose characteristic of surface vessels, the submarine could easily be disguised as a seiner or self-propelled tanker barge. And then it could be like this.

Whether in tow, or under its own power, a certain "seiner" under a false flag passes the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and on the high seas, dropping false superstructures, sinks and heads for Sevastopol. During the week (as long as autonomy allowed, taking into account the return return to the Bosphorus), SX-506 could monitor the exit from the North Bay. And finally, when the return of Novorossiysk to the base was noticed through the periscope, according to the readings of hydroacoustic instruments, the underwater saboteur lay down on the ground, released four combat swimmers from the airlock. They removed the seven-meter plastic "cigars" from the external hangers, took their places under the transparent fairings of the double cabins and silently moved towards the unguarded, wide-open net gates of the harbor. The masts and chimneys of the Novorossiysk (its silhouette was unmistakable) loomed against the moonlit sky.

It is unlikely that the drivers of underwater transporters had to maneuver for a long time: a direct path from the gate to the battleship anchor barrels could not take much time. Depths at the side of the battleship are ideal for light divers - 18 meters. Everything else was the work of a long and well-established technique ...

A double explosion - delivered and laid earlier - of charges shook the battleship's hull in the dead of night, when the SX-506, having taken on board underwater saboteurs, was heading for the Bosphorus ...

The interaction of these two charges can also explain the L-shaped wound in the body of Novorossiysk.

Captain 2nd rank Yuri Lepekhov, in his lieutenant tenure, served on the Novorossiysk as the commander of the hold group. He was in charge of all the bottoms of this huge ship, the double-bottom space, holds, cofferdams, tanks ...

He testified: “In March 1949, being the commander of the hold group of the battleship Julius Caesar, which became part of the Black Sea Fleet under the name Novorossiysk, a month after the ship arrived in Sevastopol, I inspected the holds of the battleship. On the 23rd frame, I found a bulkhead in which floor cutouts (a transverse connection of the bottom floor, consisting of vertical steel sheets bounded from above by the flooring of the second bottom, and from below by the bottom lining ) were brewed. The welding seemed pretty fresh to me compared to the welds on the bulkheads. I thought - how to find out what is behind this bulkhead?

If cut with an autogen, a fire may start or even an explosion may occur. I decided to check what is behind the bulkhead by drilling with a pneumatic machine. There was no such machine on the ship. On the same day I reported this to the commander of the survivability division. Did he report this to the command? I don't know. That is how this question was forgotten.” Let us remind the reader who is not familiar with the intricacies of maritime rules and laws that, according to the Ship Charter, on all warships of the fleet, without exception, all premises, including hard-to-reach ones, must be inspected several times a year by a special permanent corps commission chaired by the first mate. The condition of the hull and all hull structures is inspected. After that, an act is written on the results of the inspection under the supervision of the operational department of the technical management of the fleet to make a decision, if necessary, on the performance of preventive maintenance or emergency.

How Vice-Admiral Parkhomenko and his staff allowed that a “secret pocket” remained on the Italian battleship “Julius Caesar”, which was not accessible and never examined, is a mystery!

An analysis of the events preceding the transfer of the battleship to the Black Sea Fleet leaves no doubt that after they lost the war, the Italian militare had enough time for such an action.

And captain 2nd rank engineer Yu. Lepekhov was right - there was plenty of time for such an action: six years. That's just the "Militare Italiano", the official Italian fleet, was aloof from the intended sabotage. As Luca Ribustini writes, “post-war fragile Italian democracy” could not sanction such a large-scale sabotage, the young Italian state had enough internal problems to get involved in international conflicts. But it is fully responsible for the fact that the 10th Flotilla of the IAU, the most effective formation of underwater saboteurs during the Second World War, was not disbanded. They did not disband, despite the fact that the international tribunal clearly identified the 10th IAS flotilla as a criminal organization. The flotilla survived as if by itself, as a veteran association scattered around the port cities: Genoa, Taranto, Brindisi, Venice, Bari ... These thirty-year-old "veterans" retained subordination, discipline, and most importantly their combat experience and the spirit of underwater special forces - "we can do anything ". Of course, in Rome they knew about them, but no action was taken to stop public performance far-right Falangists were not taken by the government. Perhaps because, according to the Italian researcher, these people were in the area of ​​special attention of the CIA and British intelligence services. They were needed in the conditions of the growing cold war from the USSR. The people of the "black prince" Borghese actively protested against the transfer of part of the Italian fleet to the Soviet Union. And the "part" was not a small one. In addition to the pride of the Italian fleet - the battleship "Giulio Cesare" - more than 30 ships departed for us: a cruiser, several destroyers, submarines, torpedo boats, landing ships, auxiliary vessels - from tankers to tugboats, as well as a handsome sailing ship "Christopher Columbus". Of course, among the sailors of the “militare marinare” passions were in full swing.

However, the allies were inexorable, and international agreements came into force. "Giulio Cesare" cruised between Taranto and Genoa, where the local shipyards carried out very superficial repairs, mainly electrical equipment. A kind of tuning before the transfer to the new owners of the ship. As the Italian researcher notes, no one was seriously engaged in the protection of the battleship. It was a passage yard, not only workers, but anyone who wanted to, boarded the alienated battleship. Security was minimal and highly symbolic. Of course, among the workers there were "patriots" in the spirit of Borghese. They knew the underwater part of the ship well, since the battleship was undergoing a major modernization at these shipyards in the late 30s. What did they need to show the "activists" of the 10th flotilla a secluded place to place the charge, or place it themselves in the double-bottom space, in the damping compartment?

Just at this time, in October 1949, in the military harbor of Taranto, unknown persons stole 3800 kg of TNT. In this extraordinary case, an investigation began.

Police and agents returned 1,700 kg. Five kidnappers were identified, three of them were arrested. 2100 kg of explosives disappeared without a trace. The carabinieri were told that they had gone to illegal fishing. Despite the absurdity of such an explanation - thousands of kilograms of explosives are not needed to poach fish, the carabinieri did not investigate further. However, the Naval Disciplinary Commission came to the conclusion that the officials of the fleet were not involved in it, and the case was soon hushed up. It is logical to assume that the disappeared 2100 kilograms of explosives just fell into the steel bowels of the bow of the battleship.

Another important detail. If all the other ships were transferred without ammunition, then the battleship went with full artillery cellars - both charge and projectile. 900 tons of ammunition plus 1,100 powder charges for main battery guns, 32 torpedoes (533 mm).

Why? Was this stipulated in the conditions for the transfer of the battleship to the Soviet side? After all, the Italian authorities knew about the close attention of the soldiers of the 10th flotilla to the battleship, they could have placed this entire arsenal on other ships, minimizing the possibility of sabotage.

True, in January 1949, just a few weeks before the transfer of part of the Italian fleet to the USSR, the most rabid fighters of the 10th flotilla were arrested in Rome, Taranto and Lecce, who were preparing murderous surprises for reparation ships. Perhaps that is why the sabotage action developed by Prince Borghese and his associates failed. And the idea was this: to blow up the battleship at the passage from Taranto to Sevastopol with a night blow from a self-exploding fire-ship. At night on the high seas, a battleship overtakes a speedboat and rams it with a load of explosives in the bow. The driver of the boat, having directed the fire-ship at the target, is thrown overboard in a life jacket and another boat picks him up. All this was worked out more than once during the war years. There was experience, there was explosives, there were people ready to do it, and it was not difficult for the thugs from the 10th flotilla to steal, get, buy a couple of speedboats. From the explosion of the boat, the charge cellars would detonate, as well as the TNT laid in the bowels of the hull. And all this could easily be attributed to a mine not cleared in the Adriatic Sea. Nobody would ever know.

But the militants' cards were also confused by the fact that the Soviet side refused to accept the battleship in the Italian port, and offered to overtake it to the Albanian port of Vlora. The people of Borghese did not dare to drown their sailors. "Giulio Cesare" went first to Vlora, and then to Sevastopol, carrying a good ton of TNT in its womb. You can't hide an awl in a bag, you can't hide a charge in a ship's hold. Among the workers were communists who warned the sailors about mining the battleship. Rumors about this reached our command.

The transfer of Italian ships to Sevastopol was led by Rear Admiral G.I. Levchenko. By the way, it was in his cap that the draw for the division of the Italian fleet was carried out. Here is what Gordey Ivanovich said.

“At the beginning of 1947, an agreement was reached in the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Allied Powers on the distribution of the transferred Italian ships between the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and other countries affected by the Italian aggression. For example, France was allocated four cruisers, four destroyers and two submarines, and Greece - one cruiser. The battleships became part of groups "A", "B" and "C", intended for the three main powers.

The Soviet side claimed one of the two new battleships, which in their power surpassed even the German ships of the Bismarck type. But since by this time a cold war had already begun between the recent allies, neither the United States nor England sought to strengthen the Soviet Navy with powerful ships. I had to throw lots, and the USSR received group "C". The new battleships went to the United States and England (later, these battleships were returned to Italy as part of the NATO partnership). By decision of the Tripartite Commission in 1948, the USSR received the battleship Giulio Cesare, the light cruiser Emmanuele Filiberto Duca D'Aosta, the destroyers Artilleri, Fuciliere, the destroyers Animoso, Ardimentoso, Fortunale and submarines. Marea" and "Nicelio".

December 9, 1948 "Giulio Cesare" left the port of Taranto and December 15 arrived in the Albanian port of Vlora. On February 3, 1949, the transfer of the battleship to Soviet sailors took place in this port. On February 6, the naval ensign of the USSR was hoisted over the ship.

On the battleship and submarines, all premises, boules were inspected, oil was pumped, oil storage facilities, ammunition cellars, storerooms and all auxiliary premises were inspected. Nothing suspicious was found. Moscow warned us that there were reports in the Italian newspapers that the Russians would not bring the reparation ships to Sevastopol, that they would explode at the crossing, and therefore the Italian team did not go with the Russians to Sevastopol. I don’t know what it was - a bluff, intimidation, but only on February 9 I received a message from Moscow that a special group of three sapper officers with mine detectors was flying to us to help us find the mines hidden on the battleship.

On February 10, army specialists arrived. But when we showed them the premises of the battleship, when they saw that a portable lamp could be easily lit from the ship's hull, the army men refused to search for mines. Their mine detectors were good in the field ... So they left with nothing. And then the whole trip from Vlora to Sevastopol seemed to us the ticking of the “hellish machine”.

... I looked through a lot of folders in the archive when my tired eyes did not stumble upon a telegram from the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs dated January 26, 1949. It was addressed to all the prefects of the Italian provinces.

It reported that, according to a reliable source, attacks were being prepared on ships leaving for Russia. These attacks will involve former submarine saboteurs from the 10th flotilla. They have all the means to carry out this military operation. Some of them are even ready to sacrifice their lives.

There was a leak of information about the routes of reparation ships from the Main Headquarters of the Navy. The point of attack was chosen outside Italian territorial waters, presumably 17 miles from the port of Vlore.

This telegram confirms the recent very loud testimony of Hugo D'Esposito, a veteran of the 10th Flotilla of the IAS, and strengthens our hypothesis about the real causes of the death of the Giulio Cesare. And if someone still does not believe in a conspiracy around the battleship, in the existence of an organized fighting force directed against it, then this telegram, as well as other documents from the archive folder I found, should dispel these doubts. From these police papers, it becomes clear that in Italy there was a very effective branched neo-fascist organization in the person of former underwater special forces. And government agencies knew about it. Why wasn't there a fundamental investigation into the activities of these people, whose social danger was evident? Indeed, in the naval department itself there were many officers who sympathized with them. Why did the Ministry of the Interior, being well aware of the relationship between Valerio Borghese and the CIA, of the interest of American intelligence in the reorganization of the 10th MAS flotilla, did not stop the Black Prince in time?

Who needed it and why?

So, the battleship "Giulio Cesare" safely arrived in Sevastopol on February 26. By order of the Black Sea Fleet dated March 5, 1949, the battleship was given the name "Novorossiysk". But he has not yet become a full-fledged warship. To bring it into line, repairs were needed, and modernization was also needed. And only by the mid-50s, when the reparation ship began to go to sea for live firing, did it become a real force in the Cold War, a force that threatened the interests of not Italy at all, but England.

In the early 1950s, England followed with great concern the events in Egypt, where in July 1952, after a military coup, Colonel Gamal Nasser came to power. It was a momentous event, and this sign foreshadowed the end of the undivided British rule in the Middle East. But London was not going to give up. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, commenting on the nationalization of the Suez Canal, said: "Nasser's thumb is pressed to our windpipe." By the mid-1950s, war was brewing in the area of ​​the Suez Strait - the second after Gibraltar "road of life" for Britain. Egypt had almost no navy. But Egypt had an ally with an impressive Black Sea Fleet - the Soviet Union.

And the combat core of the Black Sea Fleet consisted of two battleships - Novorossiysk, the flagship, and Sevastopol. To weaken this core, to decapitate it - the task for British intelligence was very urgent.

And quite feasible. But England, according to historians, has always dragged chestnuts out of the fire with the wrong hands. In this situation, alien and very convenient hands were Italian combat swimmers, who had both ship drawings and maps of all Sevastopol bays, since a unit of the 10th MAS flotilla - the Ursa Major division - was active during the war years off the coast of Crimea, in the Sevastopol harbor.

The big political game that was tied up around the Suez Canal zone was reminiscent of devilish chess. If England declares a “check” to Nasser, then Moscow can cover its ally with such a powerful figure as a “rook”, that is, the battleship Novorossiysk, which had the free right to pass the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and which could be transferred to Suez in a threatened period for two days. But the “rook” was under attack by an inconspicuous “pawn”. It was quite realistic to remove the “rook”, because, firstly, it was not protected by anything - the entrance to the Main Bay of Sevastopol was guarded very badly, and, secondly, the battleship carried its death in its womb - explosives planted by Borghese people in Taranto.

The problem was how to ignite the hidden charge. The most optimal is to cause its detonation with an auxiliary - external - explosion. To do this, combat swimmers transport the mine to the board and install it in the right place. How to deliver a sabotage group to the bay? In the same way that Borghese delivered his people during the war years in the Shire submarine - under water. But Italy no longer had a submarine fleet. But the private shipbuilding company Kosmos produced ultra-small submarines and sold them to different countries. Buying such a boat through a figurehead cost exactly as much as the SX-506 itself cost. The power reserve of the underwater "dwarf" is small. To transfer the transporter of combat swimmers to the area of ​​operation, a surface cargo ship is needed, from which two deck cranes would lower it into the water. This problem was solved by the private charter of this or that "merchant", which would not arouse suspicion in anyone. And such a "merchant" was found ...

The mystery of the flight "Acilia"

Military intelligence of the Black Sea Fleet after the death of "Novorossiysk" earned with redoubled activity. Of course, the "Italian version" was also worked out. But to please the authors of the main version of “an accidental explosion on an unexploded German mine,” intelligence reported that there were no or almost no Italian ships in the Black Sea in the period preceding the explosion of Novorossiysk, or there were almost none. Some foreign ship passed somewhere far away.

Ribustini's book, the facts published in it, tell a completely different story! Italian shipping in the Black Sea in October 1955 was very tense. At least 21 merchant ships under the Italian tricolor plowed the Black Sea, leaving the ports of southern Italy. “From the documents of the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which are classified as “secret”, it is clear that from the ports of Brindisi, Taranto, Naples, Palermo, merchant ships, tankers, having passed the Dardanelles, went to various Black Sea ports - and to Odessa, and to Sevastopol, and even in the heart of Ukraine - along the Dnieper to Kiev. These are Cassia, Cyclops, Camillo, Penelope, Massawa, Genzianella, Alcantara, Sicula, Frulio loaded and unloaded grain, citrus fruits, metals from their holds.

The breakthrough that opens the new scenario is related to the release of some documents from the offices of the police and the prefecture of the port of Brindisi. From this city, overlooking the Adriatic Sea, on January 26, 1955, the cargo ship Acilia, owned by the Neapolitan merchant Raffaele Romano, left. Of course, such intense traffic did not go unnoticed by SIFAR (Italian military intelligence). This is a worldwide practice - there are always people in the crews of civilian ships who monitor all the warships and other military installations encountered, and, if possible, also conduct electronic intelligence. However, SIFAR does not note "no traces of military activities in the framework of the movement of merchant ships in the direction of the Black Sea ports." It would be surprising if the Sifarovites confirmed the presence of such traces.

So, on board the Acilia, according to the crew list, there are 13 sailors plus six more.

Luca Ribustini: “Officially, the ship was supposed to come to the Soviet port to load zinc scrap, but its real mission, which continued for at least two more months, remains a mystery. Harbor Master of Brindisi sent to the Office public safety a report that six of the crew of the Acilia are freelance on board and that they all belong to the confidential service of the Italian Navy, i.e. the Naval Security Service (SIOS)."

The Italian researcher notes that among these supernumerary crew members were high-class radio specialists in the field of radio intelligence and encryption services, as well as the most modern equipment for intercepting Soviet radio messages.

The Harbor Master's document states that the steamship Acilia was being prepared for this voyage by naval officers. Similar information was transmitted on the same day to the prefecture of the city of Bari. In March 1956, Acilia made another flight to Odessa. But this is after the death of the battleship.

Of course, these documents, Ribustini comments, do not say anything about the fact that the Acilia flights were made to prepare a sabotage against Novorossiysk.

“However, we can safely say that at least two voyages made by the owner of the ship, the Neapolitan Raffaele Roman, pursued military intelligence purposes, with highly qualified Navy personnel on board. These flights were made a few months before and after the death of the battleship Novorossiysk. And these freelance specialists did not take part in loading operations on a par with other sailors of the ship, who filled the holds with wheat, oranges, and scrap metal. All this raises certain suspicions in the context of this story.

Not only the Acilia left the port of Brindisi for the Black Sea, but, probably, the ship that delivered the commandos of the 10th IAS flotilla to the port of Sevastopol.

Of the nineteen crew members, at least three were clearly from the Navy: the first mate, the second engineer officer, and the radio operator. The first two boarded the Alicia in Venice, while the third, a radio operator, arrived on the day of the ship's departure - January 26; left the ship in a month, while all ordinary seafarers sign a contract for at least three to six months. There were other suspicious circumstances: on the day of the departure, a new powerful radio equipment was installed in a hurry, which was immediately tested. An officer of the port of Civitavecchia, who assisted me in my investigation, said that at that time radio specialists of this class were very rare on merchant ships and that only the Navy had several non-commissioned officers in the RT specialty.

A crew list, a document that reflects all the data of the crew members and their functional duties, could shed light on a lot. But to Ribustini's request to get the crew list of the Acelia steamer from the archive, the port official politely refused: for sixty years this document has not been preserved.

Be that as it may, Luca Ribustini indisputably proves one thing: the military intelligence of Italy, and not only Italy, had a very keen interest in the main military base of the USSR Black Sea Fleet. No one can claim that there were no foreign intelligence agents in Sevastopol.

The same genevieses - the descendants of the ancient Genoese, who lived in the Crimea, in Sevastopol, could very much sympathize with their historical homeland. They sent their children to study in Genoa and other Italian cities. Could CIFAR miss out on such a wonderful recruiting contingent? And did all the students return after their studies to the Crimea completely sinless? Agents on the shore were required to inform the resident about the battleship's exits to the sea and about its return to the base, about the Novorossiysk parking lots. This simple and easily accessible information was very important for those who hunted for a ship from the sea.

Today it is not so important how the combat swimmers entered the main harbor of Sevastopol. There are many versions of this. If we derive something “arithmetic mean” from them, then we get such a picture. An ultra-small SF submarine, launched at night from a chartered dry cargo ship abeam Sevastopol, enters the harbor through open boom gates and releases saboteurs through a special lock. They deliver the mine to the battleship's parking lot, and attach it to the board in the right place, set the time of the explosion and return via the acoustic beacon to the mini-submarine waiting for them. Then she leaves the territorial waters to the meeting point with the transport vessel. After the explosion - no trace. And let this option not seem like an episode from " star wars". Borghese people did similar things more than once in even more difficult conditions ...

Here is how the magazine of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation "Security Service" (No. 3–4, 1996) comments on this version:

The "10th Assault Flotilla" took part in the siege of Sevastopol, based in the ports of Crimea. Theoretically, a foreign submarine cruiser could deliver combat swimmers as close as possible to Sevastopol so that they carried out sabotage. Taking into account the combat potential of first-class Italian scuba divers, pilots of small submarines and guided torpedoes, and also taking into account the sloppiness in matters of protecting the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, the version of underwater saboteurs looks convincing. Recall once again - this is a magazine of a very serious department, which is not fond of science fiction and detective stories.

The explosion of a German bottom mine and the Italian trail were the main versions. Until suddenly, in August 2014, Hugo D'Esposito, a veteran of the sabotage group of the Italian combat group 10 MAC, spoke up. He gave an interview to the Roman journalist Luca Ribustini, in which he very evasively answers the correspondent's question whether he shares the opinion that the former Italian battleship Giulio Cesare was sunk by Italian special forces on the anniversary of the so-called March on Rome by Benito Mussolini. D'Esposito replied: "Some of the IAS flotilla did not want this ship to be handed over to the Russians, they wanted to destroy it. They did everything possible to sink it."

He would be a bad commando if he answered the question directly: "Yes, we did it." But even if he said so, they would still not believe him - you never know what a 90-year-old old man can say ?! And even if Valerio Borghese himself had risen and said: “Yes, my people did it,” then they would not have believed him either! They would say that he appropriates other people's laurels - the laurels of His Majesty Chance: he turned the explosion of an unexploded German bottom mine to his greater glory.

However, Russian sources have other evidence of the 10th Flotilla fighters. For example, sea captain Mikhail Lander cites the words of an Italian officer, Nikolo, allegedly one of the perpetrators of the explosion of the Soviet battleship. According to Nikolo, the sabotage involved eight combat swimmers who arrived with a mini-submarine aboard a cargo steamer.

From there, "Picollo" (the name of the boat) went to the area of ​​​​Omega Bay, where the saboteurs set up an underwater base - they unloaded breathing tanks, explosives, hydrotugs, etc. Then during the night they mined Novorossiysk and blew it up, the newspaper "Sovershenno" wrote in 2008 secret", very close to the circles of "competent authorities".

You can be ironic about Nikolo-Picollo, but Omega Bay in 1955 was located outside the city, and its shores were very deserted. A few years ago, the head of the underwater sabotage center of the Black Sea Fleet and I studied maps of the Sevastopol bays: where, in fact, the operational base of combat swimmers could be located. Several such places were found in the Novorossiysk parking area: a ship cemetery on the Black River, where decommissioned destroyers, minesweepers, and submarines were waiting for their turn to cut metal. The attack could have come from there. And the saboteurs could leave through the territory of the Naval Hospital, opposite which the battleship stood. The hospital is not an arsenal, and it was guarded very frivolously. In general, if an attack on the move, from the sea, could choke, the saboteurs had quite real opportunities to arrange temporary shelters in the Sevastopol bays to wait for a favorable situation.

Critics' Criticism

The positions of the supporters of the random-mine version are quite shaken today. But they don't give up. They ask questions.

1. Firstly, an action of this magnitude is possible only with the participation of the state. And it would be very difficult to hide preparations for it, given the activity of Soviet intelligence on the Apennine Peninsula and the influence of the Italian Communist Party. It would be impossible for private individuals to organize such an action - too large resources would be needed to ensure it, starting with several tons of explosives and ending with means of transportation (again, let's not forget about secrecy).

Counter argument . It is difficult, but possible, to hide preparations for a subversive and terrorist action. Otherwise, the world would not be disturbed by terrorist explosions on all continents. “The activity of Soviet intelligence on the Apeninnesian Peninsula” is beyond doubt, but intelligence is not omniscient, much less the Italian Communist Party. We can agree that such a large-scale operation is not up to private individuals, but after all, it was originally about the patronage of the people of Borghese by British intelligence, which means that in cash they were not constrained.

2. As the former Italian combat swimmers themselves admitted, their life after the war was tightly controlled by the state, and any attempt to "amateur" would have been stopped.

Counter argument. It would be strange if the former Italian combat swimmers began to boast of their freedom and impunity. Yes, they were controlled to a certain extent. But not to such an extent as to interfere with their contacts with the same British intelligence. The state could not control the participation of Prince Borghese in an attempted anti-state coup and his secret departure to Spain. The Italian state, as noted by Luca Ribustini, is directly responsible for the organizational preservation of the 10th IAS flotilla in post-war years. The control of the Italian state is a very illusory matter. Suffice it to recall how successfully it "controls" the activities of the Sicilian mafia.

3. Preparations for such an operation should have been kept secret from the allies, primarily from the United States. If the Americans had learned about the impending sabotage of the Italian or British navies, they would certainly have prevented this: in case of failure, the United States would not have been able to wash off the accusations of inciting war for a long time. It would have been insane to launch such a sally against a nuclear-armed country in the midst of the Cold War.

Counter argument. The US has nothing to do with it. 1955-56 is last years when Britain tried to solve international problems on its own. But after the Egyptian tripartite adventure, which London carried out contrary to the opinion of Washington, Britain finally entered the wake of America. Therefore, it was not necessary for the British to coordinate a sabotage operation with the CIA in 1955. With a mustache. At the height of the Cold War, the Americans made a variety of sorties "against a country with nuclear weapons." Suffice it to recall the infamous flight of the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.

4. Finally, in order to mine a ship of this class in a protected harbor, it was necessary to collect complete information about the security regime, parking places, ship exits to the sea, and so on. It is impossible to do this without a resident with a radio station in Sevastopol itself or somewhere nearby. All operations of Italian saboteurs during the war were carried out only after careful reconnaissance and never "blindly". But even after half a century, there is not a single evidence that in one of the most protected cities of the USSR, filtered through by the KGB and counterintelligence, there was an English or Italian resident who regularly supplied information not only to Rome or London, but personally to Prince Borghese.

Counter argument . With regard to foreign agents, in particular among the genevieves, this was discussed above.

In Sevastopol, “filtered through and through by the KGB and counterintelligence”, alas, even the remnants of the Abwehr agent network remained, which was shown by the trials of the 60s. There is nothing to say about the recruiting activities of such the strongest intelligence in the world as Mi-6.

Even if the saboteurs were discovered and arrested, they would stand on the fact that their action is not a state initiative at all, but a private one (and Italy would confirm this at any level), that it was done by volunteers - veterans of the Second World War, who value honor flag of the native fleet.

"We are the last romantics, surviving witnesses of a period erased from history, because history remembers only the winners! No one has ever forced us: we were and remain volunteers. We are "non-partisan", but not "apolitical", and we will never support and never let us give our vote to those who despises our ideals, offends our honor, forgets our victims.The 10th MAS flotilla was never royal, republican, fascist or Badoglio (Pietro Badoglio - participant in the removal of B. Mussolini in July 1943 .- LF.). But always only and purely Italian!" - proclaims today the website of the Association of Fighters and Veterans of the 10th IAS Flotilla.

Moscow–Sevastopol

Special for the Centenary