Her keel was laid at a shipyard on the Black Sea, her hull was then railed across the width of Russia to Vladivostok on the Pacific, and she eventually came to rest at a naval museum in Qingdao, China, under a name she did not carry for the first half of her life. The Soviet destroyer Rekordny -- renamed Anshan after her sale to China in 1954 -- traces the arc of Cold War alliance and rupture in the career of a single warship. She served the Soviet Pacific Fleet for thirteen years, the People's Liberation Army Navy for thirty-eight, and now floats permanently at anchor, pennant number 101, a monument to the brief era when Moscow and Beijing were allies.
The Gnevny-class destroyers, of which Rekordny was one of twenty-nine, had an unusual pedigree. The Soviet Navy, unable to design competitive destroyers on its own in the mid-1930s, licensed the plans for an Italian destroyer and then modified them -- overloading a design that was already marginally stable. The result was a class of ships displacing over 2,000 tons at full load, significantly heavier than intended, with a crew of nearly 200 in peacetime. They were fast on paper, rated for 37 knots, though individual ships varied wildly in performance. Their armament was formidable for their size: four 130-millimeter guns, anti-aircraft weapons, six torpedo tubes with reloads, and the capacity to carry up to 95 mines.
Rekordny's construction was a feat of Soviet logistics. Her major components were laid down at Shipyard No. 198 in Nikolayev (today's Mykolaiv, Ukraine) on the Black Sea in September 1936, then transported by rail across thousands of kilometers to Vladivostok, where Shipyard No. 202 completed the assembly. She was launched in April 1939 and commissioned in January 1941 -- just months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Assigned to the Pacific Fleet, she spent World War II in the relative quiet of the Far East, where the Soviet Union maintained an uneasy neutrality with Japan until August 1945.
In October 1954, Rekordny was transferred to the People's Liberation Army Navy as part of a larger deal that included submarines, minesweepers, and torpedo boats -- the military hardware of a new alliance. Commissioned into Chinese service in 1955 and renamed Anshan after the industrial city in Liaoning province, she was assigned pennant number 101, making her effectively the flagship of China's nascent modern navy. During thirty-eight years of Chinese service, she was visited by nine foreign dignitaries and two of China's most consequential leaders: Premier Zhou Enlai and reformer Deng Xiaoping. For a navy that was still building its identity, Anshan was both a working warship and a symbol of what China aspired to become at sea.
Anshan was decommissioned in April 1992 and towed to the Naval Museum at Qingdao, where she is now permanently anchored as an exhibit. The irony of her resting place is worth noting: Qingdao's harbor had seen the scuttling of four German gunboats in 1914, the city having passed from German to Japanese to Chinese hands over the course of the twentieth century. Rekordny-turned-Anshan adds another layer to that history -- a Soviet-built, Italian-designed warship anchored in a former German colony, displayed by the Chinese navy. She embodies, perhaps better than any monument could, the tangled alliances and ideological shifts that defined the Cold War in East Asia.
The former Rekordny (Anshan) is moored at the Naval Museum in Qingdao at approximately 36.054N, 120.321E, along the waterfront. The warship is visible from low altitude as a distinctive grey vessel near the coastline. Nearest airport: ZSQD (Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport). The naval museum sits east of Zhanqiao Pier in the Shinan District.