Dominia (cable ship)

[john sefton]

Built 1926, Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd

Length 488.9 ft Breadth 59.0 ft Depth 37.4 ft Gross tonnage 9273

Built for the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company specifically to lay the loaded cable from Canada to Fanning Island for the Pacific Cable Board. On the merger with Siemens Bros in 1935 only one cable ship was needed so DOMINIA was sold to the Russian government in 1937and renamed NICKOLAI EJOV.

CABLE WORK

1926    Bamfield, British Colombia - Fanning Island
1929    Algericas - Ceuta
    Tenerife - Gran Canaria
    Vigo - Carcavelos
1930    Willemstad - La Guayra
    Willemstad - Aruba
    Aruba - Maracaibo
    Maracaibo - Barraquilla
    Belgium - Portugal
The Dominia was sold to the Soviet Union with the handover taking place in Amsterdam on 1 January 1937. But the story gets more interesting.
The USSR was represented personally at the handover by Eduard Berzin, the Soviet authority who had arranged its purchase. Berzin was not just any Soviet manager -- he was the founder and director of the powerful Dal'stroi organization, responsible for the operation of the infamous Kolyma Gulag system in eastern Siberia, in some of the coldest and remote parts of the world. Ultimately a million or more prisoners served in these slave labor camps and hundreds of thousands died.
The Dominia was purchased to serve as the flagship of a specialized fleet of prisoner transports, taking slave laborers from Vladivostok to Magadan. The ship was initially named Nikolai Yezhov, after the head of the NKVD (KGB). Yezhov was promptly arrested and shot, so the ship was renamed after a already-dead leader of the NKVD, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The Felix Dzerzhinsky served in the Dal'stroi Gulag fleet for several decades and likely took a hundred thousand or more prisoners to the slave labor camps. During World War II it was deployed on Lend Lease duties across the Pacific and entered U.S. port numerous times. (I have photos of the ship at sea off the Oregon coast and in San Francisco harbor in 1942 and 1944. It was extensively upgraded and overhauled in the U.S. during the war.)
The Felix Dzerzhinsky was returned to Gulag service after the war and is one of the ships mentioned in recent joint Russia/US investigations into America POW/MIAs: there are witnesses who claim the Felix Dzerzhinsky took U.S. military personal -- imprisoned by the Soviets -- into the Gulag camps in Kolyma. The ship is also confirmed to have picked up ex Russian POWs from Germany from the US and then promptly deposited them in the labor camps. The U.S. authorities had believed the Soviets authorities were going to repatriate their freed POWs.
The final disposition of the ship is unclear, but it was removed from the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping in 1978. It may have been scrapped as early as 1968.
"Bill Glover/Atlantic-Cable.com Website"
http://atlantic-cable.com/stamps/index.htm
Liberia SG1280