On April 13, the pilots who took part in rescuing the passengers and crew of the steamship “Chelyuskin” were, for the first time in the USSR, awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
An attempt to traverse the Northern Sea Route in a single navigation season on a standard (non-icebreaking) ocean-going vessel, the “Chelyuskin,” newly built in Denmark (Captain V. I. Voronin), began under the leadership of O. Yu. Schmidt in August 1933 from the port of Murmansk. About 200 people were aboard the ship. In the Chukchi Sea, the steamer was beset by ice; however, in accordance with the plan, it drifted into the Bering Strait, but then a powerful storm turned the ice fields around and carried them back into the Chukchi Sea. On November 13, the “Chelyuskin,” in the area of Wrangel Island, was crushed by the ice and sank, but the crew, under O. Yu. Schmidt’s leadership, managed to organize the evacuation of people (one person died) and the landing of essential survival equipment onto the surrounding ice. Radio contact with the mainland was established, and a rescue operation began, dubbed in the press the “heroic Chelyuskin epic.” To organize the rescue, a Government Commission was established under the deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, V. V. Kuibyshev, and the entire then extremely small polar aviation force, based in the Soviet Far Northeast, was mobilized. As a result of the heroic efforts of the crews of seven aircraft and of the “Chelyuskinites” themselves, who prepared landing strips on the ice, shuttle flights to “Schmidt’s camp” began on March 5 and ended on April 13; not a single person was injured.
December 1 entered the country’s history as the day Sergey Mironovich Kirov was assassinated. The crime was solved almost immediately, and the killers were shot in less than a month.
On October 9 in Marseille, the Bulgarian terrorist Velichko Georgiev carried out a double political assassination. The main victims were King Alexander I Karađorđević of Yugoslavia and France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Louis Barthou. In addition, Chernozemsky mortally wounded four more people. The incident became one of the most high-profile assassinations of the 20th century.