Moscow, May 18 (IANS): Russia will build a cruise liner, the first in six decades, a media report said on Wednesday.

"The country's first cruise liner is planned to be built this year since the 1950s," Aleksey Rakhmanov, president of the United Shipbuilding Corporation, said on Tuesday.

"Our company will also continue to construct vessels and various marine engineering for the oil and gas industries," he said at the opening of an international forum on Russia's marine industry.

The project, code-named PV300VD, could start this year, he said, adding that the construction of a vessel will take up to three years and cost approximately 2.5 billion rubles ($40 million).

The cruise liner will be 141 metres in length and 17 metres in width, with a transporting capacity of about 306 passengers.

Earlier, the Soviet Union had a fleet of ocean liners that made cruises on the Black and Baltic Seas, RT news reported.

These ships were mostly built in East Germany, Finland and Yugoslavia. The vast majority of these vessels, operated in the Soviet era, have now been written off for scrap.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had troubles with local shipbuilding, as many technologies were lost in the 1990s.

According to Rakhmanov, USC is now trying to catch up with something that has not been done in the last 20 to 25 years.