Submarine S-189

Submarine S-189 is a former Soviet Project 613 vessel that served with the Baltic Fleet and has now been turned into a floating museum on Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment in St Petersburg. The submarine was laid down at the Baltic Shipyard in the spring of 1954 and launched in the autumn of the same year. It spent its entire service on the Baltic, regularly sailing to the testing range on Lake Ladoga to trial new types of weaponry — the first such voyage took place in the late 1950s.

One of the most spectacular episodes in its history is linked to the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet navy: the crew carried out a demonstration dive right along the channel of the Neva opposite the Mining Institute building, then surfaced beside the cruiser Kirov, moored near the Liteiny Bridge, firing signal flares. In the early 1970s the vessel was three times awarded the honorary title of Excellent Ship of the Formation, and a few years later it represented its unit at the Navy Day celebrations in Moscow. On several further occasions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the crew was recognised as the best in the formation.

From the mid-1980s the submarine was placed in reserve and based in Kronstadt. Having served for almost thirty-five years in total, S-189 was officially struck from the fleet's roster in 1990. The subsequent fate of the hull proved a sad one: in 1999 the submarine lost buoyancy and settled on the bottom right at its berth in the Merchant Harbour of the port of Kronstadt, where it spent the following several years underwater.

The rescue effort was undertaken by the businessman Andrei Artyushin, himself a former submariner: with his funding the hull was raised from the bottom in January 2006 and placed in dry dock at the Kanonersky Shipyard. A year later the restored submarine was towed to Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment for permanent mooring. After the interior compartments were restored, a private museum opened aboard the vessel — the opening ceremony took place in March 2010, and one of the first events held there was the special cancellation of a postcard reproducing a painting by the marine artist Zaikin. Today the submarine's image appears in computer games about naval battles, and the vessel itself is mentioned in Shimun Vrochek's novel Piter, part of the Metro 2033 series, in which the characters sail aboard it to the nuclear power station at Sosnovy Bor.