The ship's components were fabricated in one country, assembled in another, served a third, and now sit as a museum in a fourth. Reshitelny began life as hull number 324 at a shipyard on the Black Sea, was disassembled and transported by rail across the breadth of Siberia, reassembled at Komsomolsk-on-Amur on the Pacific, sold to China a decade later, and today rests in the coastal city of Rushan, Shandong. Few warships have traveled so far without ever firing a shot in anger.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Navy wanted cheaper, smaller destroyers to complement its expensive flotilla leaders. Unable to design them domestically, the navy turned to Italy and licensed the plans for an existing Italian destroyer class. Soviet engineers then modified the design for their own purposes, inadvertently overloading a hull that was already marginally stable. The resulting Gnevny class displaced 1,612 metric tons at standard load -- almost 200 tons heavier than intended. At 112.8 meters long with a 10.2-meter beam, the ships were powered by paired steam turbines producing 48,000 shaft horsepower, theoretically capable of 37 knots. In practice, some ships exceeded that speed during sea trials while others fell well short.
Major components for Reshitelny were laid down at Shipyard No. 198 in Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine) on August 23, 1936. But the Pacific Fleet needed ships, so the parts were loaded onto railcars and sent east across the entire Soviet Union to Shipyard No. 199 at Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Siberia. There the ship was laid down again on August 23, 1937, under the name Pospeshny. She was launched on April 30, 1940, renamed Reshitelny that August, and commissioned on September 5, 1941 -- just months after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union shifted the war's gravity to the western front.
The Gnevny-class ships carried serious firepower for their size. Four 130-millimeter B-13 guns were arranged in superfiring pairs fore and aft. Anti-aircraft defense relied on two 76.2-millimeter guns, two 45-millimeter guns, and a pair of 12.7-millimeter DShK machine guns. Six torpedo tubes in two rotating triple mounts -- each tube with a reload -- gave the ship a substantial anti-ship capability. She could carry up to 95 mines or 25 depth charges, and was fitted with Mars hydrophones for submarine detection, though these proved useless above three knots. The ship's complement numbered 197 in peacetime and 236 during wartime.
Reshitelny spent her Soviet career with the Pacific Fleet without seeing major combat. In 1955, as part of a broader transfer of military equipment from the Soviet Union to the People's Republic of China, she was sold to the People's Liberation Army Navy and renamed Changchun. She served the Chinese navy for decades before being decommissioned in the 1990s. Rather than being scrapped, the former destroyer found a final berth as a museum ship in Rushan, Shandong -- a city on the same peninsula where many of the naval battles she was built to fight once raged. The Italian-designed, Ukrainian-fabricated, Siberian-assembled, Soviet-commissioned, Chinese-renamed vessel now sits quietly at dock, a physical record of Cold War alliances and the improbable logistics of 20th-century shipbuilding.
The museum ship is located in Rushan, Shandong at approximately 36.81N, 121.63E, on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula. Nearest major airport is Weihai Dashuibo (ZSWH) to the east. Yantai Penglai International (ZSYT) lies to the northwest. The Shandong coastline and the Yellow Sea are prominent visual references from altitude.