High Seas Sos

For more than a week, the 576 passengers aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim % Gorky had been sailing through the North Atlantic near Iceland, marveling at the dramatic Arctic scenery. Just after midnight on their ninth day out -- it was foggy, yet still light in the land of the midnight sun -- the 25,000-ton ship struck a partly submerged ice floe. Three gashes opened in the starboard forward hull below the waterline, one of them 18 ft. long.

At impact there was a thundering shudder, followed by the wail of the ship's siren. In one of the Maxim Gorky's restaurants, as the pianist was playing The Green, Green Grass of Home, a heavy loudspeaker crashed down on the instrument. The passengers, almost all West German pensioners who had boarded in Bremerhaven, stumbled on deck into freezing air.

As the ship's bow dipped ever deeper into the ice-packed sea, members of the 377-man crew passed out blankets and vodka and helped people into lifeboats. When launched, they were soon surrounded by giant ice floes. "While we were sitting in the boats, we thought this was going to be another Titanic," said Harry Delor, 72, of Dusseldorf. "Some panicked, some prayed. We thought the end was near."

A quick and masterful rescue operation helped avert catastrophe. Within hours, four Norwegian and two Soviet helicopters began plucking passengers and crewmen out of the boats and carrying them to safety aboard the Norwegian vessel Senja, which reached the accident site after plowing through ice up to 6 ft. thick.

Eventually the passengers, many still clad in pajamas, were taken to Spitsbergen, in Norway's polar Svalbard archipelago, and then flown back to West Germany. Emergency teams kept the Maxim Gorky from sinking by pumping water out of the vessel and plugging the gashes with cement brought out to them by a Russian freighter.

How could the Maxim Gorky, which was equipped with radar and other modern navigational aids, encounter so serious a mishap? Norwegian experts suggested that the ship, commanded by Captain Marat Galimov, who apparently was on his first voyage in the Arctic seas, may have been cruising at excessive speed. When it struck the ice, according to Senja captain Sigurd Kleiven, the Soviet ship was steaming at about 18 knots in an area where Norwegian maritime officials say no more than 3 to 5 knots is advisable at this time of year. Said Bjorn Sorensen, a Lutheran parish priest on Spitsbergen, who led a church service for some passengers immediately after their rescue: "Nobody who prayed today can accuse God of having neglected his prayer."