Ivan was born in Sevastopol into the family of a sailor of Russian Greek origin. In 1914 he was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Navy. He took part in the Russian Civil War on the Bolshevik side, fighting in Ukraine. In 1920 he was sent to the Crimea to organize a guerrilla movement against the forces of the White Movement leader General Baron Pyotr Wrangel. In November 1920, after the Bolshevik takeover of Crimea, Papanin was appointed prosecutor and commandant of the Crimean branch of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. Rosalia Zemlyachka, organizer of the Red Terror in Crimea, is reported to be his superior and friend. During the Red Terror in Crimea, thousands of soldiers were executed as members of the White Army.
As polar explorer
In 1923-1932 he worked for Narkomat of Communications. In 1931 he took part in the expedition of the icebreakerMalygin to Franz Josef Land. In 1932-1933 he was the head of a polar expedition on Tikhaya Bay on Franz Josef Land. In 1934-1935 he was in command of a polar station on Cape Chelyuskin. In 1937-1938 he was in charge of the famous expedition North Pole-1. Four researchers, Ivan Papanin, Ernst Krenkel, Yevgeny Fyodorov and Petr Shirshov, landed on the drifting ice-floes in an airplane flown by Mikhail Vodopyanov. For 234 days, Papanin's team carried out a wide range of scientific observations in the near-polar zone, until taken back by the two icebreakers Murman and Taimyr. It was the first expedition of its kind in the world. All members of the expedition received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, which was extremely rare before World War II. In 1939-1946 Papanin was the successor to Otto Schmidt as head of the Glavsevmorput' - an establishment that oversaw all commercial operations on the Northern Sea Route. In 1940 he received a second Hero of the Soviet Union title for organizing the expedition that saved the icebreaker Sedov. During World War II he was the representative of the State Defence Committee responsible for all transportation by the Northern Sea Route. In 1941-1952 he was a member of the Central Revision Commission of the Communist Party. In 1948-1951 he was the deputy director of Institute for Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences and from 1951 until his death in 1986 he was the Head of the Academy's Department of Maritime Expeditions. In 1956-1972 he was also the director of the Institute for the Biology of Inland Waters. Papanin's name has been given to a cape on the Taimyr Peninsula, a mountain in Antarctica, and an underwater mountain in the Pacific Ocean. Ivan Papanin's name was also given to an ice-class cargo and research ship built in 1990 that operates in both Arctic seas and the Antarctic. In October 2019, Russia unveiled the 8,500-tonne, 300-foot-long Ivan Papanin icebreaker at the Admiralty Shipyard in St Petersburg.
