The photograph depicts Nikolay Mokhov, commander of the submarine ‘SHCH-317’ and a recipient of the Order of Lenin.

Mokhov was born on February 1, 1912 in Barnaul, but soon after his birth his family moved to Anzhero-Sudzhensk. Here he completed nine grades of school and from the age of 19 worked as a mechanic in the mine. Young people at the mine knew Nikolay Mokhov well: he was a Komsomol activist and together with his friends held subbotniks (community clean-ups) and evening events for the miners.

When in 1937 the call of the Central Committee of the Komsomol ‘Youth — to military schools! ’ was sent, Mokhov decided to become a navy sailor and went to Leningrad. There, he studied at the Frunze Higher Navy School.

Mokhov met the Great Patriotic War with the rank of lieutenant-captain and commander of the submarine ‘SHCH-317’, which was also known as ‘Shchuka’ [‘Northern pike’]. The submarine spent all the blockade winter of 1941–1942 in Leningrad, and in June 1942, it went on a battle trip to the Baltic Sea. Since Mokhov had no experience sailing on the ‘Shchuka’, Captain 2nd Rank Vladimir Yegorov, commander of the 4th Submarine Division, was on board.

‘SHCH-317’ immediately attacked an enemy vessel carrying German tanks and soldiers. By radio communication the Germans announced:

For the period from June, 16 till July, 1, 1942, the submarine ‘SHCH-317’ sank five enemy ships with total weight of 46 thousand tons. However, the submarine never returned from the mission: the crew perished approximately on July 15–18 during transit through the Gulf of Finland. Captain of ‘Shchuka’ Nikolay Mokhov was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin in 1991.

For a long time, it was unknown what happened to Soviet submarine ‘SHCH-317’. There were many versions of how the sailors died — from an air strike in Swedish or Finnish waters, or from enemy depth bombs.

But on May 2, 2018, the expedition ‘Bow to the Ships of the Great Victory’ found and identified ‘Shchuka’ at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland at a depth of 78 meters. The submarine almost managed to pass the ‘Zeigel’ mine near the island of Bolshoy Tyuters, but on the very last line the vessel tried to surface and was blown up by a German EMC mine.