Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (17 page)

“If I increase RPMs, the engines may be damaged,” Boris explains.

Potulniy contemplates Boris’s warning for just an instant before he nods. There is a bond between the two officers. Potulniy trusts his engineering officer, and Boris will go to the ends of the earth for his captain.

“If you want me to proceed, I’ll need your orders in writing, sir,” Boris tells the captain.

Potulniy nods. “Just do what you can for me, Boris. It’s all I ask.”

“Yes, sir,” Boris says. The captain’s signature is not necessary after all. Boris rushes back down to the machinery spaces, where he increases the speed of the engines by a scant few RPMs. “I can do no more than this,” he radios the bridge.

“Thanks, Boris,” Potulniy radios. “You are a good guy.”

Later Boris learns that the encounter with the Germans was a very close call, which could have created an international incident, but because of Boris’s steady and capable hand on the engines Potulniy had enough speed to outmaneuver the Germans and a disaster was narrowly averted. From that day on Poltulniy will ask only that Boris do his best and will not push his engineer any further.

The bond of trust between them has become like a hardened steel chain.

From time to time the
Storozhevoy
encounters American
avionosez,
aircraft carriers conducting their training missions. The Soviet navy is tasked with the job of watching such missions just to see how the other guys do things. Should it ever come to a shooting war, each side needs to know how the other operates.

“We Russian ships and submarines were far from our homes and our bases, right in the middle of the enemy,” Gindin says. “We had to be ready at a moment’s notice to strike back and defend the Rodina. We had no allies on our side in the middle of the ocean. We were on our own against the enemy, and every moment of every day we knew it.”

That was in the middle of the Atlantic, but tensions much closer to home, in the Mediterranean, were just as high, sometimes higher. It’s early afternoon, admiral’s hour, and Boris is off duty, on the deck smoking a cigarette, when the captain’s voice booms throughout the ship: “Battle stations! Man your battle stations!”

Before he can toss his cigarette overboard, before he can even move, Boris spots the periscope of a submarine just a couple hundred meters off their port side, practically within spitting distance. It’s not a Russian boat.

Such a thing is impossible. The
Storozhevoy’s
sonar equipment is state-of-the-art, for the Soviet navy, and should have easily detected the presence of an enemy submarine long before he could become the serious threat he is now. After all, the
Storozhevoy
is an ASW platform. He was designed to hunt, find, and kill submarines.

Potulniy is hopping mad, and he believes that turnabout is fair play, even though warships carrying full weapons loads operating practically on top of each other create an inherently dangerous situation. One error of judgment, one slip by a helmsman, one maneuver misjudged by the enemy ship, can have dire consequences. Wars have been started in just this way. Russians have a long naval history and even longer memories, but the captain will not be denied the chance to prove that his ship and his crew are up to the task they are charged with.

Boris races belowdecks to his engines, as the
Storozhevoy
turns sharply to port while accelerating like a scalded gazelle, his active sonar systems banging away loudly enough that half of Europe can practically hear the racket.

The submarine submerges and heads away at his flank speed,
never fast enough or crafty enough to escape the
Storozhevoy’s
electronic net, all the way back to Italian waters, where he is safe.

But Potulniy knows, as does his crew, that the enemy submarine would have been theirs had a state of war existed. The fact that the sub got so close to them without detection in the first place is something not discussed with the captain or among the crew. From the moment the
Storozhevoy
was called to action he performed magnificently.

Nobody has made a choice, the white backgammon piece or the black. It’s as if all the air has left the compartment. No one dares to breathe, let alone make a move one way or the other. Sablin stands there looking at them, a very odd, fixed expression on his face, in his eyes. He is a completely different person now from the one who hands out the materials for the political education classes that the officers have to teach every second Monday. At those times he is stern but friendly. He actually likes his job as
zampolit,
and everyone is sure that he believes with all his heart the Communist Party messages that he preaches.

Sablin comes aboard with boxes of magazines and articles put out by the Political Military Publishing companies. The routine is for him to go over the magazines page-by-page looking for the themes of each three-hour political lecture. One time it might be Lenin’s ideas on collectivism applied to the Cold War. Another time might be the navy’s role in defending the Rodina or the political part every man in the military has to play.

Sablin hands out the material that each officer uses to prepare
extensive notes for the three-hour class he has to teach before giving the notes to Sablin for approval. Everyone hates this job, the officers as much as the sailors. But it’s part of life in the Soviet navy, and during the lectures no one really pays any attention, but neither does anyone put up a fuss or crack jokes. This is deadly serious business.

Sablin might scribble a few comments in the margins and make a suggestion or two, but what he does not want to see happen is officers merely standing in front of their sailors and reading the notes.

This is the heart and soul of Communism. The Soviet people not only depend on the sailors to defend the Motherland with their lives but also expect the sailors to understand what they are fighting for and believe in it.

The Rodina believes in you; she only asks, dear Comrades, that you believe in her.

Pure Communism, and with it prosperity is just around the corner. Each five-year plan sees huge progress on all fronts, in manufacturing, in agriculture, in the glorious strides that the scientists have made in space, and in the magnificent sacrifices that the men in uniform have made and continue to make.

The ideals of Marx and Lenin are just as much alive today as they have ever been. Capitalism is the religion of greed and of the self and will fall under its own weight.

Sablin wants to believe the Party line with all his heart and soul. But like just about everybody aboard the
Storozhevoy,
and every other warship in the fleet, he knows that this is just a bunch of bullshit. All the bigwigs across the Soviet Union meet once every five to seven years in Moscow to tell the nation that progress is being made. Ministers of agriculture, transportation, buildings, defense, and culture all come to the podium and tell outright lies about increased farm yields when food is scarce, about new roads when streets even in Moscow are so filled with potholes that most cars are driving around with missing hubcabs and broken shocks, about new apartment buildings, which are crumbling even as they are being built, about improved defense,
which is draining the national treasury, leaving little or nothing for the people, and about culture, which is actually the one boast that is not entirely a lie. The Bolshoi Ballet Company continues to be the best in the world, and Soviet symphony orchestras are nothing less than stunning.

“They were traitors in the pure meaning of the word,” Gindin says. “All these ministers and the entire government were corrupt and totally dishonest with the people. They were enjoying the benefits of a luxurious life that we would never see or even dream of. They were telling us lies about the bright future while selling the people down the river.”

It’s the
zampolit’s
job to convince the officers of the
truths
of these lies and to make sure that the officers, in turn, convince the sailors. And until this early evening Sablin has done nothing short of a stellar job.

He’s standing in front of the officers waiting for them to make their choice, white or black, with him or against him. But this is mutiny, and the fact that he’s been such a terrific
zampolit
makes the situation all the more unbelievable. Maybe he is testing them.

Boris Gindin is only a couple of weeks from a much-needed leave to be with his mother and sister after his father’s death. Following Boris’s leave he would normally be reporting back to his ship for the next six-month rotation at sea. But that’s not supposed to be the way it’ll happen. Potulniy has agreed that if Boris sticks it out at the shipyard in Kaliningrad and gets the
Storozhevoy
in shape for his next rotation, the captain will write a letter of recommendation that will almost guarantee the shore job Boris wants.

Now this is an emotionally complicated situation for Gindin. On the one hand, he loves his job aboard ship, in charge of the gas turbine engines and other mechanical equipment. He has friends, he has a good crew who follow his orders without question, he has the respect of a man he considers to be one of the best captains in the Soviet navy, and despite his understanding of the propaganda coming out of Moscow, he is proud that he is making sacrifices protecting the Rodina. On the other hand, he is getting lonely and he’s getting tired of it. He wants to find a girl he can marry so he can settle down and raise a family. He
doesn’t want to be like a lot of other young officers he knows, married and divorced already because six-month rotations at sea are almost impossibly hard on a new marriage. In his mind, he needs a shore job in order to find a wife.

In September Boris got a two-week assignment to the Zhdanov Shipbuilding Yard in Leningrad. Potulniy was ordered to send his gas turbine senior lieutenant to the yard because Gindin had been involved in the construction of the
Storozhevoy
and he had an intimate knowledge not only of the engines but also of how they should be installed in the first place.

Pushkin was Gindin’s hometown, but it was close enough to Leningrad that he had
a propiska,
which is a document giving a Soviet citizen permission to live somewhere. It’s often a major stumbling block to changing jobs. The employer might be willing, but unless the prospective employee has
a propiska,
taking the new job can be a moot point.

Shipyards building or repairing warships are required to have navy representatives to oversee the work, inspect the finished products, and sign off that the jobs have been done to specs. The gas turbine guy at the yard was gone, so Boris was sent to fill in.

From the day Boris arrived in Zhdanov he realized that this was a dream come true. It would be a perfect place for him to work and to continue with his career. Navy officers don’t have to serve aboard ship to get paid and to get promoted. There are important jobs ashore, such as that of a ship inspector.

Not only that, but Gindin figured that if he could land a job in Zhdanov, he would no longer have to spend six months at a stretch at sea, which meant he could find a girl, get married, and raise the family he wanted. He would be a naval officer, earning good money, getting the respect of the people around him, and yet almost every night he would be able to get aboard the train to Pushkin and go home.

It couldn’t get any better than that. The problem was how to do it.

Gindin scheduled an appointment with Captain First Rank Anatoli
Goroxov, the man at the shipyard who was responsible for filling all the navy specialty positions—mechanics, electrical, acoustics, rocket systems, guns, and torpedoes. Gindin was filling in as a gas turbine specialist and he wanted to know whether the position was only temporarily vacant or Goroxov needed someone permanent.

As soon as Goroxov saw Gindin’s résumé and found out that he had a
propiska
for Leningrad and the area, the captain was over the moon. The
Storozhevoy’s
young gas turbine engineer was an answer to a prayer.

The only hitch was that since Goroxov had no real idea who or what Gindin was, he would need a reference. A letter from Captain Potulniy would do nicely.

Boris did his work at the yard without a hitch, and as soon as he reported back to the
Storozhevoy
he laid out his request to the captain. Potulniy was a good man. He didn’t want to lose Boris, whom he had come to trust and to rely upon, but by the same token he was a fair man who did not want to stand in the way of an officer’s advancement. So Potulniy said yes. He would write the letter of reference if Gindin would first go with the ship to the parade and celebration in Riga, then spend the two weeks at the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad and finally help take the ship back to base at Baltiysk.

The main reason Potulniy laid those conditions on Gindin was because Captain Lieutenant Alexander Ivanov, who was commander of BCH-5, Gindin’s boss, would be on leave. The job then of running the entire mechanical, electrical, and steam boiler/fuel group would fall on Gindin’s shoulders.

Of course Gindin jumps at the captain’s kind offer. It’s a chance of a lifetime, a dream come true.

It’s another gun barrel Gindin is looking down as Sablin waits for the officers to make their decisions. In the blink of an eye Gindin can not only see his career going by the wayside, he can also practically see and feel and taste the past seven years as if they were happening at this instant. Especially when the
Storozhevoy
was being built.

It takes two years to build a warship that size. The
Storozhevoy’s
keel is laid down at the boatyard called Yantar Zavod 820 in Kaliningrad, which is a little less than fifty kilometers farther up the inlet from his eventual home port of Baltiysk, in 1972, and the ship is finished in early 1974.

Boris joins the building crew about five months before the ship is ready for sea. At that time they have a different
zampolit,
a pinch-faced little man who does everything strictly by the book and never cracks a smile. He’d transferred from a submarine and shortly after Boris arrives is transferred to still another ship. His replacement is Sablin, who is like a breath of fresh air by comparison.