SS Dzhurma was a Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 steamship of the Gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

 system that transported prison

Prison

A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

ers. Because of an alleged 1933–34 incident, it became the most famous ship of the prison fleet of the Dalstroi. The ship was built in the Netherlands in 1921 as SS Brielle. When the ship was sold to the Soviet Union in 1935, it was registered under the spelling Djurma, in accordance with the most common transliteration protocols of the time, but is now most commonly transliterated as Dzhurma.

Career

SS Brielle was launched on 31 December 1920 at the New Waterway shipyard in Schiedam

Schiedam

Schiedam is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. It is part of the Rotterdam metropolitan area. The city is located west of Rotterdam, east of Vlaardingen and south of Delft...

 in the Netherlands. The bulk carrier

Bulk carrier

A bulk carrier, bulk freighter, or bulker is a merchant ship specially designed to transport unpackaged bulk cargo, such as grains, coal, ore, and cement in its cargo holds. Since the first specialized bulk carrier was built in 1852, economic forces have fueled the development of these ships,...

 was 122.7 metre long (pp) and was 17.8 metre abeam

Beam (nautical)

The beam of a ship is its width at the widest point. Generally speaking, the wider the beam of a ship , the more initial stability it has, at expense of reserve stability in the event of a capsize, where more energy is required to right the vessel from its inverted position...

. The 6,908-gross-register-ton

Gross Register Tonnage

Gross register tonnage a ship's total internal volume expressed in "register tons", one of which equals to a volume of . It is calculated from the total permanently enclosed capacity of the vessel. The ship's net register tonnage is obtained by reducing the volume of non-revenue-earning spaces i.e...

 ship was powered by a single triple-expansion steam engine that could move it at speeds up to 10.5 knots. After its completion in April 1921, it was delivered to the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company . The ship was operated by Verenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij (VNS), founded by a Dutch consortium (that included KNSM) after the end of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. The ship was eventually absorbed into the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company, one of the consortium members. The ship sailed under the Dutch flag out of Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

 for most of the next 14 years.

During the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, the ship was taken out of service and laid up. When its owners faced financial pressures to sell the ship, it was purchased by the Dalstroi in 1935. The ship was transferred to the Soviet flag under the name Djurma and registered with a home port of Nogaevo

Magadan

Magadan is a port town on the Sea of Okhotsk and gateway to the Kolyma region. It is the administrative center of Magadan Oblast , in the Russian Far East. Founded in 1929 on the site of an earlier settlement from the 1920s, it was granted the status of town in 1939...

. Djurma or Dzhurma translates as "shining path” in the language of the Evenks

Evenks

The Evenks are a Tungusic people of Northern Asia. In Russia, the Evenks are recognized as one of the Indigenous peoples of the Russian North, with a population of 35,527...

 from the Kolyma region.

Author Martin Bollinger reports that, during the ship's Soviet career, there is ample evidence that Dzhurma was used on Gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

 routes between 1936 and 1950. As a part of the Dalstroi fleet, it transported prisoners from Vladivostok

Vladivostok

The city is located in the southern extremity of Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula, which is about 30 km long and approximately 12 km wide.The highest point is Mount Kholodilnik, the height of which is 257 m...

, endpoint of the Transsiberian railway, across the Sea of Okhotsk

Sea of Okhotsk

The Sea of Okhotsk is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, lying between the Kamchatka Peninsula on the east, the Kuril Islands on the southeast, the island of Hokkaidō to the far south, the island of Sakhalin along the west, and a long stretch of eastern Siberian coast along the west and...

 to Kolyma

Kolyma

The Kolyma region is located in the far north-eastern area of Russia in what is commonly known as Siberia but is actually part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south...

 via the port of Magadan

Magadan

Magadan is a port town on the Sea of Okhotsk and gateway to the Kolyma region. It is the administrative center of Magadan Oblast , in the Russian Far East. Founded in 1929 on the site of an earlier settlement from the 1920s, it was granted the status of town in 1939...

. Travel time was about six to 14 days to Magadan; trips to the Arctic were seasonal as during the winter the sea froze over. A steamer would make about ten trips a year. Conditions were horrendous and many people did not survive the trip.

With the entry of the United States in World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, the ship arrived for repairs at Seattle on January 31, 1942 under the Lend-Lease

Lend-Lease

Lend-Lease was the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945. It was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of war in Europe in...

 program. In addition to prisoner transport, it was also used to haul matériel

Materiel

Materiel is a term used in English to refer to the equipment and supplies in military and commercial supply chain management....

 across the Pacific, calling at the U.S. ports of San Francisco

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

, Seattle

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

 and Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

 about a dozen times. After 1950, the ship appears to have been used only for the carrying of cargo. It was removed from Lloyd's Register of Shipping in 1968 to allow a Polish ship of the same name to be built. The ship was scrapped in 1970.

Alleged 1933–34 incident

In an account by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky in their 1947 book Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, it was suggested that in the winter of 1933–34 the Dzhurma, ferrying 12,000 prisoners to Ambarchik

Ambarchik

Ambarchik is a rural locality and a port in Nizhnekolymsky District of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located from Chersky, the administrative center of the district. It is located on the shores of Ambarchik Bay, part of the East Siberian Sea in the Arctic Ocean...

, got trapped in the Arctic

Arctic

The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...

 ice and was unable to move on until the spring. The story alleged that all prisoners died from frost and starvation with later versions indicating that surviving crew members may have resorted to cannibalism to survive. The story was propagated and widely accepted. If true, this would have been among the worst ship disasters of all time.

In his book Stalin’s Slave Ships, Bollinger examined the evidence and found that the Dzhurma did not enter service in the Dalstroi until 1935 and was not big enough to hold 12,000 prisoners. Bollinger estimated that the ship, if overcrowded, would be able to hold up to 6,500 prisoners. In addition, there are no accounts that this ship, which was not strengthened for Arctic travel, made the journey north through the Bering Strait to Ambarchik. Thus the alleged event has been proven not to be true. He suggested this could possibly be the case of a mistaken identity

Mistaken identity

Mistaken identity is a defense in criminal law which claims the actual innocence of the criminal defendant, and attempts to undermine evidence of guilt by asserting that any eyewitness to the crime incorrectly thought that they saw the defendant, when in fact the person seen by the witness was...

involving the cargo ship Khabarovsk that, if it had been carrying passengers had already had opportunity to deposit them at Ambarchik, and was trapped by ice when returning from Ambarchik in the 1933–34 winter.