This month ShipParade’s Bart de Boer takes a look at a ship after my own heart: Phoenix Reisen’s 24,220 GT, 650-passenger Maxim Gorkiy. Originally built in 1969 as Deutsche Atlantik Linie’s Hamburg and dubbed “The Space Ship” both for her distinctive flying-saucer styled funnel as well as her exceptionally spacious interiors, the ship took on her current name all the way back in 1974 when she was sold to the then-Soviet state-owned shipping company Morflot, mostly chartered to Western tour operators.
In 1989 she became doubly famous: first, in June, the ship collided with ice floes off Svalbard and nearly sank. Then, in December, she became one of the world’s most famous passenger ships when she hosted the Malta Summit between Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush. (Read current US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s memories of the summit here: “The weather was really awful, and I wasn’t seasick because I had taken a patch to keep seasickness… and the Gorky [sic] was pretty stable, because it was a big cruise ship and it was anchored in port.”)
Today she is owned by the massive Russian shipowner Sovcomflot, its only passenger ship as it has sold the newer Astoria and Astor (both chartered to Phoenix competitor Transocean Tours) to Club Cruise and Premicon respectively. She is one of the grandes dames of the German-speaking cruise market, but the ship will retire in 2010 due to new SOLAS standards to which it would be uneconomic to bring her up. In the meantime she is truly, as Bart says, a piece of living history – the host to arguably the most important world event ever to take place on a passenger ship, as well as a magnificently preserved example of late 1960s Modernist design.
Click here to read Bart’s copiously illustrated article about this wonderful ship.
