Post-World War II: To rebuild the 

 fishing fleet rapidly, the Fourth Soviet Five- 

 Year Plan provided for a standardized 

 construction of 150 side trawlers and over 

 13,000 smaller fishing craft. Despite these 

 apparently large numbers, only a small part of 

 the Soviet shipbuilding capacity was dedicated 

 to the construction of fishing vessels as the 

 main emphasis was on construction of ships 

 for the Red Navy. 



During the early post-World War II 

 years, most of the Soviet fishing vessels were 

 built in East Germany, where the Soviet Red 

 Army was the occupying force. They were 

 sent to the USSR as war reparations. Later 

 on, when the German Democratic Republic 

 (GDR) was organized under a communist 

 leadership, the GDR remained the largest 

 supplier of fishing and fishery-support vessels 

 to the Soviet fishermen. Between 1951 and 

 October 1990, when it ceased to exist, the 

 GDR provided over 382 fishery vessels with 

 a total gross registered tonnage (GRT) of 1.3 

 million tons to the Soviet Union. 



As the Soviet Union's economic activity 

 normalized somewhat in the late 1940s and 

 early 1950s, the USSR began to make large 

 purchases of fishery vessels abroad, 

 especially from the neighboring Communist- 

 ruled states (East Germany and Poland), 

 where the Soviet Union had considerable 

 political and economic leverage and could 

 request the building of such vessels for its 

 own fleet on a priority basis. (For additional 

 details, see Part B of Section III on vessel 

 construction in foreign countries.) 



Expansion Southward: Two important 

 developments promoted the rapid expansion 

 of the Soviet fishing fleet buildup. After the 

 death of Stalin in March 1953, the USSR 

 Government embarked on an increasingly 



aggressive push southward into the world's 

 oceans. For that, the fishing fleet needed 

 large seaworthy vessels. Two major 

 innovations have made this rapid expansion 

 possible: the construction of large stern 

 factory trawlers and the adoption of the 

 flotilla fishing operations. 



The first was the invention of a new 

 method of high-seas fishing whereby a vessel 

 brought its catch on board through a stern 

 ramp rather than across the side. These new 

 vessels, called stern factory trawlers (because 

 they had a fishmeal processing plant on 

 board), had greater stability and 

 seaworthiness. They could use much larger 

 nets hauling up to ten times the amount of 

 fish hauled by a side trawler. In addition, 

 these vessels could remain at sea for as long 

 as one year while the crews rotated to and 

 from homeports aboard fishery transports. 

 The first stern factory trawler (the famous 

 Fairtry) was developed by British naval 

 architects, but the British industry did not 

 immediately see its advantages and the idea 

 died on the vine. The Soviets, however, 

 bought the blueprint from a UK shipyard, and 

 because they themselves lacked the advanced 

 technology necessary for the construction of 

 these trawlers in their own shipyards, ordered 

 them from a shipyard in Kiel in the Federal 

 Republic of Germany. These 24 German- 

 built PUSHKIN-class stern trawlers (also 

 known as the BMRTs to the Russians^) were 

 the embryo of the future giant Soviet fishing 

 fleet. As soon as the PUSHKINs were 

 delivered, the Soviet naval architects copied 

 the blueprints and soon the Soviet shipyards 

 began to mass-produce them. In addition, the 

 Soviets induced the Polish and the East 

 German governments to follow suit. Before 

 the 1950s ended, these three countries mass- 

 produced BMRTs at a rate of 7-8 units a 

 month. 



95 



