From the early 1960s, the USSR began to develop active cooperation with socialist and developing countries. Thousands of Soviet specialists were sent abroad for work assignments. The government faced the question of how to “protect” them from foreign currency.
A practical need arose to create a system in which citizens would not receive foreign currency in hand and would spend the funds earned in foreign currency at home.
The most important parts of the new system were the Bank for Foreign Trade of the USSR (Vneshtorgbank of the USSR) and the all-Union association Vnesposyltorg. In the former, citizens were required to keep foreign currency in the form of “in-currency rubles,” and through the network of stores and firms of Vnesposyltorg, to spend it.
It is important to note that, unlike other socialist countries, “substitutes” for foreign currency in the USSR were issued not for foreigners, but for the country’s own citizens.
A detachable cruise check of the Vneshekonombank (Vneshtorgbank) of the USSR is a monetary obligation of the Vneshekonombank (Vneshtorgbank) of the USSR to pay the amount specified in the check. The checks were bound into checkbooks of the corresponding denomination. The detachable checks were intended for settlements by certain categories of citizens for goods and services on Soviet cruise ships operating on international routes. All checks were printed at GOZNAK.
The check depicts the motor ship “Shota Rustaveli.”
The history of the motor ship “Shota Rustaveli” began with its construction in 1968 at the Mathias Thesen Werft shipyard, Germany. On board the liner there was a splendid interior: paintings, tapestries, and ornamentation in the Georgian style, bright spacious cabins with shower stalls, most of which were equipped with safes.
For comfortable conditions, the vessel was equipped with roll stabilizers. For passengers’ leisure, the ship featured two swimming pools and saunas, a gym, a massage room, a sports площадка on the upper deck, a cinema hall, a disco, seven bars with menus for every taste (one of them a night bar), a casino, an arcade hall, a children’s club, shops, a hairdresser, and a medical station. The ship was built by order of the USSR Ministry of the Merchant Marine for the Black Sea region and was considered the fourth in a series of five sister ships.
From July 1968, the passenger liner “Shota Rustaveli” began making sea cruises between the ports of Odessa and Batumi, and two months later reached the shores of the United Kingdom. In the port of Southampton, the ship took tourists on board and set off on a three-month round-the-world cruise. The route passed through the ports of Las Palmas, Sydney, Auckland, Papeete, and Panama. Over such a long journey, the vessel left almost 26,000 nautical miles astern and crossed the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans, as well as the Tasman and Caribbean seas.
The passenger ship was chartered by various foreign companies—“Grandi Viaggi,” “Italnord,” “Orienturist,” “Transtur,” and others. Guests of the comfortable liner included tourists from the republics of the Soviet Union, including notable figures—on August 20, 1973, Vladimir Vysotsky, Marina Vlady, and her two sons, Pierre and Voldemar, traveled on the ship.
In 2002, after the completion of an extensive overhaul in the port of Sevastopol, the ship, under its new name “Assedo” (spelled in reverse, it means Odessa—the vessel’s home port), as the property of “Kaalbye Shipping Ltd Ukraine,” began operating cruise voyages in the Black, Mediterranean, and Caribbean seas, and also calling at ports in Western Europe.
Soon after long passages, the technical condition of the liner “Assedo” deteriorated and no longer met steadily increasing international requirements, and on November 28, 2003, the ship was sent to be scrapped in the Indian port of Alang.