Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

AFTERWORD

With the book finished, Boris Gindin admitted that he’d experienced a mixed bag of emotions on the project, especially at the ending, when in Vladivostok he came across the rust bucket that the Storozhevoy had become.

“It was strange and unsettling to have to relive the incident,” Gindin said. “Sometimes I had nightmares about the KGB coming after me and my family for going public with the story.”

Even today he sometimes gets a cold feeling between his shoulder blades, and he stops a moment to look over his shoulder to make sure that no one is coming after him.

The death in London of the former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko weighs heavily on Gindin’s mind. The man was poisoned with a highly radioactive isotope of polonium, a method of assassination favored by the Soviet secret service. Russians have long memories and don’t treat people they consider traitors very kindly.

But it’s more than thirty years after the mutiny, and the real story that inspired Tom Clancy to write his first novel did not end on a sad note on the docks at Vladivostok. It was more involved than that, more complicated, with a happy ending.

After the KGB’s interrogation, during which one of the investigators even shared a bottle of vodka with Boris in the military prison where the crew was held, Gindin was demoted one rank and sent ashore to work at a fire department, as mentioned earlier. He hadn’t done enough to stop the mutiny. He was worthless. He was a traitor. He was a Jew.

Two years later he sent a letter to the Ministry of Defense requesting permission to resign his navy commission and return to civilian life. Such requests were rarely granted, and then it usually took a year or more for an answer to come from Moscow.

But within three weeks Gindin got his permission to resign and went to the only place he knew he’d be safe, home in Pushkin, to be with his mother.

It was only a one-bedroom apartment, and within a few weeks after Boris got home his sister, Ella, got a divorce and moved back with her two children, Vladik, ten, and Julia, three.

“The adjustment was tough,” Gindin remembers.

There was no privacy, no quiet time for him to figure out what to do next. And yet being surrounded by family, by a sense of normalcy in a world that, for him, had gone insane, was just the ticket to help him deal with the pain of a bright future that had gone up in smoke.

Ella worked as as Russian literature teacher at a trade school, where she got Gindin a job teaching auto mechanics. Their mother was receiving a pension of forty rubles a month from the state, which was impossible to live on, so Ella and Boris contributed most of their income to help run the household.

After a few months the shock of leaving the navy finally started to wear off and Gindin began to think about meeting a girl, getting married, and starting a family. But with almost no money left over at the end of each month and with no real prospects for any sort of a meaningful career ahead of him a marriage was not likely. It was the reality of living in Russia as a nobody.

“I had to deal with it, one day at a time, so that my wounds could heal.”

Nevertheless, three months later his uncle Boris on his mother’s side introduced him to Yana Shnaydman. Boris was twenty-eight and she was nineteen, in her second year studying economics and finance at the St. Petersburg State University of Economics and Finance.

“It was love at first sight for both of us,” Gindin says. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She was tall, and she had dark long curly hair and brown eyes. She had that lethal combination of beauty and brains. She was fun to be around, easygoing, always smiling. I wanted to impress her and give her a good life, which wasn’t so easy under the circumstances.”

He took a construction job in the evenings and taught during the day at the trade school, which left him and Yana only a couple of hours first thing in the mornings to go on dates. It wasn’t anything fancy. He would take a train to Leningrad, where they would walk through the busy streets until it was time for him to return to school in Pushkin.

They dated for only six weeks before they got married and moved into an apartment in Leningrad with another couple. A year later their son, Vladimir, was born, and shortly after that they finally got permission to get their own apartment, a tiny studio in the city, and they were in seventh heaven.

Yana took one year off from school to stay with the baby, while Boris moved from job to job, trying to find something decent enough so that they could live.

By the time Vladimir was three, Yana had graduated with her master’s in economics and got a full-time job—her parents helped with babysitting duties. Boris landed a position as maintenance supervisor at an elevator company, and they were able to move into a two-bedroom apartment and take an occasional vacation.

“Though our lives started to become financially steady, it was still a constant struggle to get basic stuff like groceries. Store shelves were almost always empty. Everyone was looking to make friends with someone in the grocery or clothing business, so that they could trade favors for a piece of meat or cheese or something imported to wear. Whatever was manufactured in Russia at the time was ugly and disgusting.

“People drank a lot. Liquor stores opened at eleven in the morning and long lines of people were waiting every morning to get in. People dealt with the pain of hopelessness by drinking vodka, which was cheap and plentiful.

“Russia was the perfect place in which to rot until you died.”

But not everything was so black-and-white. Leningrad was a major cultural center. Boris and Yana went to the theaters, took long walks down the streets and boulevards during the White Nights, and visited the beautiful parks scattered throughout the city’s suburbs. As their son, Vladimir, was growing up they were able to show him the beauty of Russia’s most European city.

“These were the greatest moments of our lives, when we could escape from our reality,” Gindin recalls.

But then they began to hear about the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. At first it was mostly rumors, which seemed unreal. But after a while even the rumors couldn’t be ignored. A new mood of a kind was spreading across the country, as Jews were being blamed for everything from the lousy food to the acute shortage of decent jobs. Kids who heard their parents talk about being a Jew as if it were some sort of disease brought their hatreds to the schoolyards.

“Why don’t you go to Israel, you hebes, and leave the good jobs for us?”

“Why don’t you get out of here, you bastards, and stop taking the apartments we need?”

“Stop eating our food!”

“Stop poisoning our vodka!”

“Die!”

Boris and Yana decided that it was time to leave. But there was a serious problem. He had resigned his commission in 1978, and by law he would not be allowed to leave the country for ten years. There was no way around it. They would have to tough it out for another five years, with the odds against them and Jews getting out every month. The Soviet Union was sliding into chaos, and the Jews, not Moscow, were being blamed.

On top of that, Gindin wasn’t at all sure what sort of a firestorm the KGB might bring down on him if he applied for emigration papers.

And there were even more roadblocks against getting out of the country. Leaving the Soviet Union has never been easy, especially not for Jews—even though they were never wanted in the first place. The Soviets would rather have exterminated them all than admit that anyone would actually want to leave the country.

The Gindins stuck it out until Boris could legally apply to leave the country, but that’s when the real difficulties began.

First he and Yana had to quit working. No one with a job could even ask for an exit visa. And the application process to OV&R, the Department for Visas and Registrations, took at least five or six months, which meant they had to survive that long without an income.

When they were given the green light they had to pack everything they could take with them and sell everything else, then fly to Moscow to pick up the visas, which in their case turned out to be handwritten, not typed, documents, which would later cause them a lot of trouble on the outside.

“Of course during the three months while we waited for our approvals to come from Moscow, Yanawas kicked out of Komsomol; our neighbors and co-workers turned against us, calling us traitors and other names,” Gindin recalls. “Even our friends disapproved, and in some ways worst of all was the condemnation we got from other Jews who still weren’t ready to leave.”

The Gindins decided to go to the United States, not Israel, because of the stories they were beginning to hear about opportunities. It was a bit of irony that a man who’d pledged himself to fight the evil capitalists by becoming a naval officer ended up taking his family to America. But their eyes were fully open by then to the harsh realities of life in the Soviet Union.

On top of that, Russia was becoming a dangerous place for Jews. By the summer of 1988 a lot of them were leaving for the United States, so an ultranationalist group calling itself Pamyat (Remembrance) rose up with the purpose of eliminating all Jews. Not by deportation, but by extermination. It was the old pogroms all over again, which seemed to be a part of the Russian soul.

It was right after that difficult summer that the Gindins finally got their exit visas and in October booked a flight to Vienna, as a waypoint to the United States. Boris’s uncle Vladimir, who had emigrated to the States in 1979, offered to help get them settled once they arrived. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA), and the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sohnut, also pitched in to help, because by Western standards the Gindins were poor to the point of destitution.

But before they could actually board the aircraft, the Soviet system took one last swipe at them. All their luggage was searched for contraband, they were patted down to make sure they weren’t hiding something illegal beneath their clothing, and Yana’s engagement ring was confiscated because it was worth more than the 250 rubles allowed to be taken out of the country.

In Vienna they were housed in a big building with ten or fifteen other families who’d left the Soviet Union and were heading either to the United States or to Israel.

“We stayed there for eighteen days, and the city was shocking to us, to see the luxuries in every shop window. It was clean, beautiful, and charming.

“We were free. A huge load had been taken off our shoulders, even though we knew that we’d be facing a lot of new challenges.”

At that point Boris didn’t even speak English.

The Sohnut representative gave them a small amount of money so that they could live until they reached the next stage of their journey in Rome. But their trip almost ended right there, when they showed their handwritten exit visas. No one wanted to believe the documents were real. They had to be forgeries. It was possible that the Gindins were smugglers or thieves or perhaps even wanted for murder back in Russia.

“It took us sixteen hours that day to convince our interrogators that the visas were real, and that it wasn’t our fault they were handwritten.”

The Gindins were finally placed on a train that was to take them to Rome by the next morning, but in the middle of the night the train was stopped out in the countryside, in the middle of nowhere, and all Jews were told to get out with all their belongings.

Terrorists were planning on attacking the train and killing all the Jews.

“Armed soldiers were everywhere,” Gindin says. “We did what we were told to do, and we were taken by bus to a small hotel in Rome where would we have to stay for the first week until we could find an apartment. It would be several months before our U.S. visas arrived, and in the meantime we had to somehow make a life for ourselves.”

In the hotel the HIAS organization fed all the immigrants. It wasn’t much: bread, oatmeal, soup, a small pat of butter, and one piece of fruit three times a day, but it was better than nothing.

The Gindins were interviewed again, and the same question came up: Why are you leaving Russia? This time Gindin hinted that his reasons for getting out had to do with his service in the navy.

It got the attention of the CIA. Gindin wasn’t exactly a superstar, but he was what the Company called a person of interest. Field officers interviewed him several times in Rome and then again in the United States, piecing together not only his military knowledge but also the story of the mutiny.

Rome was a tough three months. The Gindins found a small apartment in the suburb of Santa Marinella, but there was no heat, so at night they slept with all their clothes on.

Among the few things they’d taken out of Russia were some souvenirs, nesting dolls, caviar, and silk and linen sheets, which they’d planned on selling or bartering for food. They took to the streets in Rome’s largest bazaar to peddle their goods so that they could have money for food. What they were doing was illegal without a license, which they couldn’t afford, so they kept on the move from spot to spot, always trying to keep from being noticed by the police.

The biggest worry was their visas. It was at this time that the United States started clamping down on allowing Russian Jews into the country. Every day the Gindins heard stories about other families who’d come out of Russia and been denied entry to the United States. For them the prospects of a bright future was gone.

But in February the long wait was over; the Gindins got their visas and flew to New York, where Uncle Vladimir met them at the airport.

“This is how we started our lives in America,” Gindin remembers, smiling. “I spoke almost no English, and we had only three suitcases of belongings and five hundred dollars in cash.”

He got a job as a mechanic at an elevator company, earning eight bucks an hour. Yana went to school to learn English and another school where she learned bookkeeping, and she got a job.

Eventually they landed nice positions with big companies and bought a small house in Connecticut, a short train ride from Manhattan, and their only child, Vladimir, graduated with a master’s degree in finance.

Only now and again will Boris stop to cock his head and listen for sounds from across the fog-bound Daugava River, smell the chill, damp air that night before the mutiny. Only now and again will he think of the base at Baltiysk and the Storozhevoy and his crewmates, especially Captain Potulniy and Sablin and Firsov and the seamen in his gas turbine section. Only now and again will he relive the mutiny, but then he grins; it’s time to get on with his new life in America.