ABSTRACT
Two ships were moored to the ship dock in Helsinki in 1988, the nuclear icebreaker Vaygach and the cruise ship Fantasy. The former was preparing for service among the Arctic ice along the Soviet Northern Coast, the latter was going to take off westwards under the Caribbean sun. One of the ships was ordered by a state organisation in a socialist country and the other was bought by a private-owned company in the leader of capitalist world; one had been paid through the bilateral clearing trade and payment system and the other had been financed by commercial banks and state export credit organisations. The nuclear icebreaker had been on the agenda of multiple intergovernmental discussions as the flagship of the Finnish–Soviet scientific- technical cooperation, the large cruise ship had been an object of Finland’s negotiations with the EC for shipbuilding policy. Vaygach remained the last profitable order from the Soviet Union, Fantasy’s construction process went through the biggest bankruptcy in the Finnish shipbuilding history.
