Shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moskva was decommissioned after a long and successful career along the Northern Sea Route and sold for scrap in 1992.

In February 1985, Moskva became the center of international attention when a pod of beluga whales was trapped by ice near the Chukchi Peninsula in the Soviet Far East.

In 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to increase the importance and capacity of the Northern Sea Route.

[3] Once when the Soviet minister of commerce Anastas Mikoyan met the Wärtsilä manager Wilhelm Wahlforss, he expressed his satisfaction on quality and performance of Kapitan-class, and casually mentioned, that there is a need for even stronger icebreakers for the polar waters.

Wahlforss called the Hietalahti shipyard manager Eric Holmström and the company's icebreaker specialist Ernst Bäckström to a meeting asking: "Are we able to construct such a ship?"

[3] The Soviet negotiators had additional requirements for deep draught and fuel consumption, which Wahlforss promised Wärtsilä to reach.

In addition, a special steel pontoon had to be constructed and welded to the stern of the icebreaker in order to reduce stresses and allow safe launching of the heavy ice-strengthened hull.

[3] In October 1961, after assisting more than a hundred cargo ships in the Russian Arctic during the autumn navigating season, Moskva completed an eastbound transit of the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok in only 10 days.

The ice pressure caused severe damage to Vitimles and the ship, which had been built in Poland only a year before, sank with no loss of life on 24 October.

[7] While new and more powerful icebreakers were built in the 1970s and 1980s, Moskva continued to escort merchant ships in the eastern part of the Northern Sea Route.

[1] Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the traffic volumes along the Northern Sea Route declined drastically in the early 1990s due to the slowdown of the Russian economy.

However, when the crew began playing classical music through the ship's loudspeakers, the whales finally followed Moskva to the unfrozen sea.

[14][15] In 1988, a similar rescue operation was attempted to free three gray whales from pack ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow, Alaska.

Designed to withstand the compression of the polar pack ice, the fully welded steel hull of Moskva was very strong.

In addition to vessel crew and aviation detachment, accommodation and laboratories were reserved for scientists when the icebreaker carried out research expeditions in the polar waters.

[3] Moskva was a diesel-electric icebreaker with a power plant consisting of eight 9-cylinder Wärtsilä-Sulzer 9MH51 single-acting two-stroke diesel engines, each of which was rated at 3,250 hp in continuous operation but capable of 10% overload for one hour at a time.