When the slipway period for the construction of order 105 - the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Leonid Brezhnev - came to an end, several assembled blocks of the next ship, order 106, were already on the slab of the Black Sea Shipyard. The main turbo-gear units and boilers were already installed in them.
"Varyag" at ChSZ, 90s
In 1985, no one in the plant, and in all then, it seemed, the indestructible Soviet Union, could not have imagined that the future aircraft carrier would become an excellent replenishment not of the Soviet, but of the Chinese navy. But that will happen later. In the meantime, full of labor enthusiasm, the workers of one of the country's largest shipbuilding center were preparing for the launch of the Leonid Brezhnev in order to continue the baton of building aircraft-carrying ships at a new stage.
And again "Riga" …
The decision to build a second ship under Project 1143.5 was made in 1983. From the lead ship (renamed shortly after the laying in honor of the deceased General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee to Leonid Brezhnev), the new cruiser inherited the name Riga. The construction of "Riga" began immediately after the release of slipway number "0", when the lead ship of Project 1143.5 was towed to the outfitting embankment of the Chernomorsky plant.
Since the plant received an order for the construction of another aircraft-carrying cruiser two years before the launch of Leonid Brezhnev, 106 had time to thoroughly prepare for the start of construction of the order. The main turbo-gear units of the Kirov plant were delivered to the enterprise on time. Using our own capacities, 8 boilers were manufactured in advance. Other materials and equipment were prepared in advance. All these measures made it possible to mount turbines and boilers on embedded bottom sections, which were waiting in the wings on the pre-drip plate.
The heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Riga was officially laid down on the slipway number 0 of the Black Sea Shipyard on December 8, 1985. The bottom sections of the bow engine-boiler room with two turbo-gear units and four boilers were installed as embedded parts. During the construction of order 106, in contrast to order 105, not a single technological cut-out was made in the housing for loading mechanisms - everything was mounted directly in blocks.
It was assumed that "Riga" would be identical to "Leonid Brezhnev", but in the summer of 1986 the USSR Council of Ministers issued a decree on changing a number of tactical and technical characteristics of the ship. First of all, this concerned radio-electronic equipment and means of electronic warfare. Instead of the Mars-Passat radar complex, the cruiser was supposed to receive a more advanced Forum. It was decided to replace the electronic countermeasures system "Cantata-11435" with the new TK-146 "Constellation-BR". Such castling required redevelopment and alteration of more than 150 ship premises. This mainly concerned the island superstructure.
Forced alterations delayed the building slipway phase of the construction of "Riga" by 9 months. The ship was ready for descent with the main cables pulled into the hull - several hundred workers of the Nikolaev plant "Era" were engaged in these works.
During the construction of the hull of a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser, the Chernomorsky Plant for the first time faced a lack of lifting capacity of two Finnish-made cranes, which together could lift a structure weighing up to 1400 tons. Power compartments No. 3 and No. 4 with the equipment installed in them exceeded this value, and therefore they had to be formed directly on the slipway.
The ship as a whole was ready for launch by November 1988. The day of the ceremony was set for November 25th. The solemn event was to be attended not only by high naval ranks, but also by representatives of numerous design bureaus, primarily Nevsky, Mikoyan and Sukhoi. Pilots Heroes of the Soviet Union Viktor Pugachev and Toktar Aubakirov were invited as guests.
The delegation of the city of Riga also arrived. According to the recollections of the chief builder of order 106, Alexei Ivanovich Seredin, guests from the Baltic States could not understand why such a large and powerful warship received the name of their city. I had to explain to them that such a fact is a long-standing naval tradition: to assign the names of large settlements to large ships. Most likely, the bewilderment of the Latvian guests was caused not so much by ignorance of naval traditions, but by the growing process of destabilization of the country, called "perestroika".
TAKR "Riga" (future "Varyag") leaves the slipway
The descent of the "Riga" was carried out normally. The launch mass of the ship reached 40 thousand tons - one thousand tons more than the previous order, 105. After launching, the cruiser was towed to the outfitting wall, where it was connected to shore power supplies.
The completion of the ship was progressing not without difficulties. Despite the timely delivery of equipment and materials for the most part, there was a shortage of labor. The primary task for the plant was the speedy completion of work on order 105, which was being prepared for testing. The delivery of the "Riga" to the fleet was planned for 1993, however, unfortunately, these plans were not destined to come true.
Political processes of varying degrees of destructiveness, but destructive in their numerous totality, were already developing in full force in the country. Once one of the most economically prosperous regions of the USSR, the Baltic states, passions of an increasingly distinct nationalist shade were feverish. On the night of March 11, 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Latvia proclaims the republic's state independence and its secession from the USSR. So far, of course, unilaterally. This fact was reflected in the renaming of the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser under construction in Nikolaev. On June 19, 1990, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy, it was renamed from Riga to Varyag.
The economic situation in the Soviet Union deteriorated rapidly - inflation began and an increasingly less controlled rise in prices. The initial cost of the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser of 500 million rubles reached 1 billion in 1990 prices and steadily stepped over it. Some difficulties began with financing, nevertheless, the work continued quite intensively.
In the summer of 1991, sovereign winds blew in Kiev. In August 1991, Ukraine declared its independence. In the autumn of the same year, on the eve of the presidential elections, the main contender for this post, and in the recent past, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk, visited the Black Sea Shipyard. The industrial power seen "impressed" the Kiev officials - Kravchuk called the ChSZ a real gem. Kravchuk also promised the factory workers that the construction of aircraft carriers would be continued: in addition to the being completed Varyag, the corps of order 107 was being formed on the slipway with might and main, and the failed nuclear-powered heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Ulyanovsk.
The financial settlement system of the navy still continued to operate in an already moribund state, and in 1991 all work on the Varyag was paid for. The overfulfillment of the plan was paid in full and compensation was additionally transferred in connection with the rise in prices - about 100 million rubles.
Restless
The year 1992 has come. By this time, after the Belovezhsky Agreement, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The politicians who considered themselves victors set about dividing the colossal legacy of the disintegrated power. The flywheels and gears of quite recently of a single economic organism were still spinning, but their rotation was steadily slowing down. In January 1992, Yuri Ivanovich Makarov, director of the Black Sea shipyard, began sending cipher telegrams to Kiev and Moscow for the renegotiation of an agreement on financing further work on the Varyag, which by that time was in a fairly high degree of readiness - about 67%.
"Varyag" at ChSZ, 1995
Neither the heads of government, nor both presidents, nor the defense ministries gave a clear answer. Or they didn’t deign to answer at all. Of course, it was beyond the power of the Black Sea Shipyard to independently finish building such a large and complex ship, in the creation of which many hundreds of enterprises and institutions of the entire Soviet Union took part. Director Yuri Ivanovich Makarov was forced to make a difficult decision to stop work on order 106 and temporary, as it seemed then, conservation.
The plant made conservation exclusively at its own expense: first of all, the appropriate procedures were carried out with boilers and main mechanisms. We also took care of the protection of the hull. The fact is that before the state tests the previous ship "Admiral Kuznetsov" was docked for inspection and cleaning of the bottom. During this procedure, corrosion of the underwater part of the hull was noted, especially in the rear part of it. To avoid this, a special protection was mounted on the Varyag - the entire cruiser was edged with a belt of cables, to which zinc protectors were suspended.
Subsequently, already in China, the good preservation of the Varyag's hull was noted, despite the many years of parking at the plant's wall and the absence of docking. The fate of the ship turned out to be a big question, the decision of which, over the years, caused more and more doubts. The economic situation in the expanses of the former USSR was deteriorating - which became independent, but did not manage to get rich, its republics were concerned about their own survival more than projects to create an aircraft carrier fleet.
Still remaining a huge shipbuilding center, the Black Sea plant was forced to find funds to support its own existence - instead of warships, the construction of tankers for a Greek customer began. Order 107, which never came to fruition, "Ulyanovsk", was hastily cut into scrap metal, and piles of cut high-quality ship steel lay for a long time in the open air throughout the entire territory of the enterprise.
Standing at the outfitting wall "Varyag" was awaiting its fate. In 1993, Russia finally takes some steps in an attempt to definitely decide the fate of the ship. An idea arises to create a kind of interstate coordination center for the completion of a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser. In order to assess the situation on the spot, Prime Ministers of Russia and Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin and Leonid Kuchma arrived in Nikolaev. They were accompanied by a whole delegation of representatives of the presidents: Sergei Shakhrai and Ivan Plyushch, numerous ministers and their assistants. Among the arrivals was the then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Felix Nikolayevich Gromov. The heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser "Varyag" belonged to the number of ships that did not leave anyone indifferent who saw it. And the arrived guests from the capital were no exception.
After inspecting the plant and the unfinished ship, a joint meeting began, at which the conditions for the transfer of the Varyag to Russia began. At first, the then director of the Black Sea shipyard, Yuri Ivanovich Makarov, spoke to the high and not very international bosses. He reported that the technical readiness of the cruiser reaches almost 70%. Moreover, all this interest had already been paid by the Soviet navy, and the plant received the money. Consequently, the issue of the sale of the cruiser to Russia by Ukraine was limited by the financing of the remaining unfinished 30%.
"High" delegation on the "Varyag"
However, the Ukrainian side had its own opinion on this matter. She believed that the Russian Federation should pay the full cost of the ship - the winds of the market economy, so persistently blown up by Gorbachev, by that time no longer needed outside help. The negotiation process has reached an impasse, the situation has become tense. Viktor Chernomyrdin asked Makarov: what is needed to complete a ship of this class? Hot-tempered and not inclined to go into his pocket for a strong word, the director of the Black Sea plant answered the Prime Minister that such an operation needed a military-industrial complex, the State Planning Committee, nine ministries and the Soviet Union.
Leonid Kuchma was dissatisfied with the answer, and Chernomyrdin praised Makarov for his sincerity. Some, in particular, the representative of the President of Ukraine Ivan Plyushch, in the past the director of the state farm, and in the recent past - the first deputy chairman of the Kiev Regional Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, began to teach Makarov, under whose leadership a total of about 500 ships and vessels were built, how to properly finish building aircraft carrier. At the same time, Ivy did not fail to point out that the factories of the military-industrial complex generally lived easily and had forgotten how to work.
It was too much. Makarov, whose state from such nonsense was already approaching the temperature of intranuclear processes, was forced to interrupt the strategic reflections of Mr. Ivy about the role of the military-industrial complex with the threat of physical measures. The negotiations are at an impasse. It was not only a matter of fundamentally different views on the sale price of the ship - it was clear that in the conditions of total collapse, the disastrous consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would not be possible to finish building a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser. Alone, it was then beyond the power of either Russia, let alone Ukraine. The ship's fate was still uncertain.
