Kirov (2 page)

But
Mother Russia was a sick old woman now, and could not afford the blue water
navy she had always dreamed of. In the year 2021, the country was a strange patchwork
of conflicting influences. In the big cities, there was still wealth,
consumerism, along with all the ills of modernity—advertising, financial crime,
corruption in government and politics. The country had opened itself to Western
commerce and culture, but was still harried by a lingering state of mind that
could only be described as paranoid suspicion. The Kremlin too often found
foreign fingerprints on any crisis, and in a country where political and
historical reality was a construct of words more than deeds, it was too easy to
foist off the failures of government and Russian society as a whole on
unfriendly outside influences.

When
the great financial crisis fell on the world between 2008 and 2015, it was said
that the Americans created the crisis as a means of destroying Russia, and
America was to blame for every ill that now beset the nation. It was almost a
reflexive reaction to adversity at times, this propensity to blame anyone other
than one’s self, and it extended right up through the whole system to the highest
levels of government.

When
a TU-134 jet went down near Petrozavodsk, killing 47 passengers, the incident
was first blamed on Chechen terrorists, then on faulty aircraft parts obtained
from a foreign manufacturer. Nothing was said of the pilot, Anton Atayev, who
was drunk as he piloted the plane that day. Later it was whispered that Anton
had only turned to vodka to soothe the pain of his divorce, and that his wife
had betrayed him—again foisting the real problem off on someone else. Too many
Russian men were still like Gogol’s “lost souls,” mired in their own
self-indulgent and complacent mediocrity, a condition described by the
untranslatable Russian word
poshlost
. They muted the pain of their lives
with vodka, and took out their simmering frustrations on their women, who were
often the victims of abuse. Excuses were easy to come by in Russia—reasons, justifications,
stories put forward to rationalize any ill. Anton was just a victim of an
unfaithful wife, that was all, it was whispered. She should be beaten, or
worse, and reminded of her place.

The
words became a balm, and a means of dismissing the crushing problems of daily
life, whether they were true or not. Yet in spite of their sad and degrading
lot, deep down, Russians still took great pride in their heritage and roots,
just as Moscow still clung to the vestige of its history in the aging
architecture of earlier times, the gold domes and minarets of the Kremlin still
gleaming in the wan light on the cold winter days. Now the city again had a
brooding military hue at times, and the winters there were no less cold and
harsh in spite of the brief warmth of
Glasnost
with the West that had
brought capitalism to the heart of the nation.

The
farther you went from the big cities, however, the more you came to feel you
were still trapped in that older world, in the old fallen Soviet state where
nothing of value had ever been born. Volsky remembered that last long train
ride he had taken from Moscow to his base at Severomorsk. The small villages
and towns were still struggling to make the transition away from communism and
define a new way of life. The rusting infrastructure of the old Soviet regime
was still there. Old manufacturing towns that were once centered on a worker’s
kollectiv
,
a state farm, a factory, a shipyard, were now like failed industrial ghost
towns. People struggled for the barest necessities of life and to simply secure
those few things that could provide a little comfort, safety and stability for
their family—food and shelter.

Thankfully,
he no longer had to concern himself with those struggles. His position as
Admiral of the Fleet came with certain privileges, and enough for him to keep
his family and aging parents comfortable enough in St. Petersburg. He had
secured his post through long years of service and hard work, however, and a
stoic acceptance of the creaking machinations of the system the navy had
become—a clear reflection of the decrepit state of the nation as a whole.

Politically,
Russia was still fundamentally irrational at heart. It had moved from
autocracy, to revolution, to empire and then into rapid decline, a fall so dark
and bleak that the nation struggled to hold onto the barest hint of its old
glory, prompting many to long for the old days of Soviet discipline and power.
Corruption in government was everywhere apparent, yet never really challenged
by any countervailing authority. A new lie was broadcast each day to justify
all those that came before it, and this aching nostalgia for a time when Russia
had once been a great and mighty world power was a way to forget the lies, and
turn a blind eye on the corruption.

Fraud
and bribery were old and familiar habits in the system. Enforcement of laws was
arbitrary, and often rested on a network of complex relationships—in groups,
out groups, favored sons—the
blat
that held the system together. Anything
that got done was usually done
poblatu
, using
blot
to grease the
way.

Prestige
was just as important as power, and pride that had become a tainted hubris was
still at the heart of the Russian psyche as well. The people endured, for if they
could not easily expect a time when things might be better, they could almost
always remember a time when they were worse. People lived with their broken
system, lived in it, worked in it, struggled on in spite of it, and this fear
that everything might again get so much worse was always at the heart of the
fear in every Russian’s soul.

Getting
anything done in this environment required guile,
blat
, and more than a
little
babki
in the right palms, the monetary bribes that would seal
deals and open doors. Vodka was a second currency in the country, and people
literally traveled with cases of the stuff in the trunks of their cars—those
lucky enough to even have a personal vehicle. Thankfully, Volsky had avoided
the blight of vodka in his own life. He drank, as virtually all Russian men
did, but was able to impose his basic rule of thumb in life on those
habits—moderation in all things. Yet, vodka could be traded for gasoline, food,
a night’s lodging, or special favors that might untangle the Gordian knots of
local administrative districts, or bypass overly curious authority figures, and
the Admiral was fond of giving it as a gift when appropriate. The system was
long entrenched, a way of life, and no one avoided the necessities of
blat
and
babki
in Russia, no matter how high they had climbed.

In
many ways, the
blat
provided by friends and favors was often more
important than cash. Rubles could buy you a meal today, but friends and the
right connections could feed you for a lifetime, so it was said that it was
better to have a hundred friends than a hundred rubles. Yet this system of
installing people in key posts due to affiliation had a blowback in the sad
fact that many positions soon became filled by people who were simply
incompetent. And once there, they held on to jobs stubbornly because they never
knew if they would ever find another one. They were stuck to their chairs with
blat
,
not because of any particular merit or skill they possessed.

Rudnikov,
the Captain of the
Orel
, was a perfect example, thought Volsky. He was
old, and tired, and rusty like his submarine. He should have been replaced by a
younger man years ago. There were enough of them out there in the ranks, eager
for promotion and a way up the gangways to a more comfortable place of power
and privilege. Rudnikov was stuck in his post just as Russia itself seemed
mired in its own systemic incompetency.

As
she completed the second decade of the twenty-first century, Russia was still a
nation still struggling up off her knees, a population deeply distrustful of
authority, but who nonetheless submitted to it for fear of change and the uncertainty
that is at the very heart of that process. Change was uncomfortable, except for
the very young, and always went hand in hand with the notion of threat and
instability. So the Russians adapted, and they endured the hard change of
recent years, always hoping for better times, but always expecting things to
get worse.

Volsky
shook these sad thoughts from his mind, glad at least that
Kirov
was
here beneath him in spite of these difficulties. It took all the nation’s
technical resources, and the cannibalization of several older vessels, to build
the ship the Admiral was standing upon now. As for
Orel,
he thought,
that old submarine should have been mothballed years ago. The day of the Oscar
had come and was long since gone. Construction had been halted on the last
three in her class, and there would be no further development.

The
same could be said for the submarine’s crew, he thought. Mounting the wrong
ordnance was sheer stupidity. Such a misstep would be unthinkable in time of
crisis, which was exactly what this exercise was supposed to be simulating. It
spoke of gross incompetence, disorderly procedures, and poor leadership. He had
seen all too much of that in his time in the navy, and was tireless in trying
to root it out. If he had been aboard that boat, he would have the Captain in a
pot for soup. But instead it was the Admiral who was stewing, shifting
restlessly in his chair, his eyes ever on the barometer at the far wall of the bridge
citadel, dark flashing glances that spoke volumes. Leonid Volsky was worried
about something.

For
two days now he had been bothered with an ache in a tooth that always seemed to
signal bad weather. Now the sallow grey skies, rising winds, and slowly surging
seas also spoke the same to him. He could ask Rodenko about it, his able radar
man, but he would learn nothing more than he already knew. The Arctic seas were
vast and fickle, dangerous and temperamental. They could lull you with a sea of
glass under a thick icy fog one minute, and then blow with a force nine gale
the next. The current situation had all the hallmarks of big storm brewing on
the horizon. Rodenko would tell him the front was 60 miles out and moving at 30
knots, leaving him plenty of time to complete this exercise and batten down for
rougher seas, but the smell of the air, that dull, empty, icy cold Arctic air,
told him everything he needed to know. He could sense the storm, taste it, feel
it as the pressure slowly dropped. His ears would ring, his eyes begin to water
from the chill, his sinuses dry and irritated.

And
the Admiral was irritated as well. It was something more that was bothering him
now, a vague unrest, a veiled inner thrum of anxiety, an off sense of
foreboding that he could not quite localize in his mind. Yes, he had good
reason to worry now with tensions on the rise and war games in the offing
again. The frost of a new cold war was blowing in like that distant threatening
weather front. Yet this was something more. He could feel the unease in his
bridge crew as well, sense their quiet apprehension. Karpov was, of course, the
worst of the lot. The Captain was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back,
his face hard beneath the thick wool fringed Ushanka that he always wore when
on duty.

Then,
like a pot that had finally reached its boiling point, the Admiral launched
himself into a long, unhappy discourse.

“What
does Rudnikov have to say now?” Volsky said to his radioman Nikolin. “Tell them
we are fifteen minutes behind schedule. In that much time an American task
force could have twenty Tomahawk cruise missiles bearing down on us, or worse.
We would have lost the element of surprise, completely mishandled our approach
to the target, and we would most likely be sitting at the bottom of the sea to
contemplate the error of our ways. The man who fails to think ahead of time
will have a very long time to think afterwards when his fat, ugly boat is berthed
up in Murmansk with all the rest, waiting to be broken up for scrap and hauled
away by the salvage teams. Perhaps then he will have learned the value of proper
timing in a naval exercise.”

Members
of the bridge crew smiled to themselves as they listened, accustomed to the
Admiral's long diatribe on most any subject that did not meet with his
approval. To them he was old “Papa Volsky,” Grand Admiral, Godfather, King of
the Northern Seas. And they were his well favored and trusted retainers, many
of them hand-picked and promoted up through the ranks by this very man. He was
a shining example of naval professionalism, a consummate strategist, strict
disciplinarian, yet an amiable father to a crew he regarded as his own private
family. His strength, willpower, decisiveness, and quiet dignity had been an example
to them all for years now, even as his wrath would be their bane. Just the
sight of him, sitting thoughtfully in his command seat, his hand toying with
the wood of his pipe, was a comfort to them. His deep set eyes would flash
beneath graying brows when he spoke, his voice a strong baritone suited to his
ample frame.

They
would do anything for him, go anywhere with him, and he returned their loyalty
with the generosity that sometimes seemed out of place on a naval warship where
Spartan asceticism was the rule the day. Yet no one was surprised when a box of
fine Cuban cigars would turn up in the wardroom, a gift from the Admiral to all
his ranking officers and chiefs.

On
the other hand, like the sea around him, he could be temperamental at times,
quick to anger one moment, stoic and quiet at other times when a brooding inner
vision seem to haunt him, a quiet darkness that hid within his soul in a place
no man could sit with him for tea. At such times he expressed his frustrations
in these long monologues, lecturing, as any father would do with wayward sons.
He was firm in handling any perceived breach of procedure, but never cruel or
heartless. When he criticized, he could drain the blood from a man's face in
ten seconds. Yet when he praised a man, you could see the lucky soul swell
right there before him. It was not mere bluster and the bludgeon of authority
that gave the man his rank. His mere presence radiated command, from the cut of
his uniform, to the tilt of his cap, Leonid Volsky was an admiral in every
sense of the word.