530 
ment available in this country. Exerpts from the historical introduction 
to his most recent report are worthy of quotations: 
“If one requires a point in time to which to attribute the 
official beginning of Soviet submersible development, then 
December 17, 1923 stands out as the best date. On that date, 
Lenin signed into law a decree founding the EPRON* diving 
and salvage organization, with F. I. Krylov appointed its first 
director. The first project undertaken by EPRON was the con- 
struction of the Danilenko diving chamber to be used in an at- 
tempt to salvage $2 million in gold rumored to be lying on the 
bottom of Balaklava Bay. No gold was found, but Soviet submersi- 
ble development was underway. 
From 1923 to 1941, EPRON flourished as an organization and 
published a very respectable journal entitled ‘“Epron.” During 
the war, EPRON was renamed the Main Military River Adminis- 
tration, and was responsible for explosive ordnance disposal and 
salvage in the U.S.S.R.’s extensive system of rivers. After the 
war, this organization was absorbed by the Podvodrechstroy ® or- 
ganization of the Ministry of the River Fleet to work on recon- 
struction of the war-damaged inland navigation system. 
In the 1930’s, Soviet interest in deep submergence seemed to 
increase. More and more articles on medical research involved 
in increasing the depth limits for hard-hat divers began appearing 
in Epron. An interesting sidelight in this respect was that the 
last article written by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, the father of Soviet 
astronautics, was on the calculation of the depth limit of a deep 
submersible. Tsiolkovskiy died before he had a chance to approve 
the final edit of his article. 
Later, in 1937, Yu. A. Shimanskiy, a full professor, a Cor- 
responding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and a 
member of the editorial staff of Epron, published an article on 
the design on an untethered submersible intended for depths to 
2,500 meters. The seriousness of the Shimanskiy project can be 
attested to in part by the fact that Academician A. N. Krylov 
was project consultant. It is not fully known why Shimanskiy’s 
submersible was not built; however, the impending war was 
probably the determining factor. Shimanskiy eventually went on 
to become one of the foremost specialists in the theory and 
methods of calculating the strength of hull structures. 
Historically speaking, the failure to build the Shimanskiy sub- 
mersible either before or after the war could be considered the 
turning point in Soviet submersible development. Had this submer- 
sible been built, the Soviets would have had an impressive early 
lead in deep submergence and, influenced by the heady wine 
of success, Soviet submersible development could well have taken 
on different proportions than those to be reviewed below. 
While the Shimanskiy submersible was not built, the concept 
lived on and was eventually embodied in a low-mobility vehicle 
called Gvidon, which made its appearance in 1970-71. 
* Ekspeditsiya podvodnykh rabot osobogo naznacheniya—Expedition for special-purpose un- 
derwater operations. 
5 Probably, Podvodnoye rechnoye stroitel’stvo—(Administration for) Underwater Construction in 
Rivers 
