Kursk recovery may salvage Russian shipyard, too

The world's largest building, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is workshop no. 55 here at Sevmash, an off-limits shipyard in Russia's far north that built some of the biggest submarines, including the ill-fated Kursk.

Everything about this sprawling city-within-a-city, with 25,000 workers and dozens of huge workshops and floating docks, seems vastly outsized. It is a classic example of the former Soviet Union's fixation with gigantism, demonstrating national power by making the biggest examples of everything. In its time, the USSR constructed the most enormous hydro-electric dam, the roomiest hotel, the tallest TV tower, the largest transport plane, the heaviest battle tank, and the mightiest particle accelerator. A popular joke from the 1980s went that the Soviet computer industry produced "the world's biggest microchip."

But managers here at Sevmash aren't laughing. They say their experience at constructing on a vast scale is key to the forthcoming operation to salvage the Kursk, which sank during Arctic war games a year ago with the loss of all 118 crew members. They hope publicity surrounding the effort will help save the shipyard from bankruptcy by showing the world that Sevmash can do much more than just build warships and atomic subs.

Inside the cavernous, hangarlike shop 55 - on the same slipway where the Kursk was launched six years ago - a giant steel pontoon is being built in what engineers here say is record time. Along with a sister pontoon taking shape in a nearby building, it will be strapped to a lifting barge in September and deployed to raise the Kursk from its resting place on the sea bed a few hundred miles to the north.

"No other shipyard could have built these pontoons to this huge scale on such a tight schedule," says Sevmash director David Pashayev. "This should play a major role in changing Sevmash's reputation."

More than half the 250 nuclear-powered submarines launched by the USSR during three cold war decades came from Sevmash. But the facility fell on cruel times after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Military orders plunged to near zero, though at least one late-generation atomic sub is still under construction here. The company's main work over the past decade has been dismantling the atomic warships it built in the past and chopping them up according to specifications laid down by Russian-US arms control agreements. Managers here concede the US had to supply the precision cutting equipment for that job since, they joke, Sevmash isn't much good at making things smaller. "We have great capabilities, but not enough work," says deputy director Oleg Korotkov. "We need more opportunities to show what we can do."

Sevmash and a smaller shipyard are the only industrial plants supporting Severodvinsk, a city of 250,000 that was built in the 1930s on the shore of the remote White Sea to service the Soviet Navy's northern fleet. The entire area is still an officially closed military zone, and foreigners require special permission to visit. That secret status has hampered the shipyard's attempts to broaden its production and reach out to world markets.

"Things are getting a little bit better in Severodvinsk now, but it's still hard going," says Anatoly Yefremov, governor of the surrounding Archangel region. "Back in 1998, workers at Sevmash were owed 18 months back pay, and they were living on the potatoes they grew in their kitchen gardens."

Since Vladimir Putin became president last year, wage arrears have been paid and military orders have increased. Sevmash also has landed a few commercial contracts that include construction of giant floating fish farms for a Norwegian company, huge high-speed aluminum ferries for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and a couple of oil tankers.

But managers say they could do much more. For instance, they are masters at building colossal floating docks, which could be used in any part of the world.

Another area Sevmash is itching to get into is production of oil-drilling platforms. "There is an Arctic oil boom coming, and companies will need really big, strong rigs to withstand the weather and ice pressure," says Vyacheslav Popov, the company's deputy head of international contacts. "Sevmash is right here, on the edge of the Arctic, with the right experience and equipment to provide everything that will be needed."

Of course, Sevmash's high hopes may ride to some extent on the success of the Kursk operation, which is reportedly falling far behind schedule. In the latest delay, the vice admiral in charge of the recovery said this week that plans to use remote-controlled robots to cut holes for lifting cables in the sub's thick steel hull were being scrapped. Instead, divers would have to perform the difficult and risky operation by hand.

"Building the means to recover the Kursk is a sorrowful responsibility for us," says Sergei Kolovangin, manager of workshop 55. "That submarine was a child of our shipyard, and it does not feel strange that its destiny has become entangled with ours."