SS Dzhurma (Russian: «Джу́рма», IPA: [ˈdʑurmə]) [a] was converted to a Soviet steamship in 1935 and occasionally used for transporting prisoners within the Gulag system.
[1] The ship was operated by Verenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij (VNS), founded by a Dutch consortium (that included KNSM) after the end of World War I.
[7][11][12] Author Martin Bollinger reports that during the ship's Soviet career there is ample evidence that Dzhurma was used on Gulag routes between 1936 and 1950.
A column of ragged, hungry, wearied people, who had undergone night interrogations, were led from the shore to the "transitka" (the local name of transit camp), under the escort of submachine gunners with dogs.
[15] On August 27, 1939, a fire occurred in hold No 2 of the steamer Dzhurma, which proceeded from Vladivostok to Nagayev Bay with a stage of prisoners.
According to some sources, the burning of fuels and lubricants was caused by the prisoners, who wanted the ship to be diverted to the nearest port for repairs, and to escape from there.
[16] With the entry of the United States into World War II, the ship arrived for repairs at Seattle on January 31, 1942, under the Lend-Lease program.
[19] In addition to prisoner transport, it was also used to haul matériel across the Pacific, calling at the U.S. ports of San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon about a dozen times.
[2] As per Josef Stalin's order and the resolution of SNK number 2358 dated September 14, 1945, the 126th light infantry corps, which was included in the Far Eastern Military District, received the task "to build on the Chukotka Peninsula defensive outposts to cover the main naval bases on the coast of the Gulf of Anadyr and Provideniya Bay, to provide land their antilanding defense."
On September 2, 1945, 12 days after the surrender of Japan, Josef Stalin made his most important strategic decision: to strengthen the foothold in Chukotka, where recently the Soviet Union had friendly contacts with the United States under the lend-lease agreement.
[1] 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, got trapped in the Arctic ice and was unable to move on until the spring.
In his book Stalin's Slave Ships, Martin 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.
He suggested this could possibly be the case of a mistaken identity involving the cargo ship Khabarovsk that, if it had been carrying passengers, had already deposited them at Ambarchik when it was trapped by ice during the 1933–34 winter.