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

PREFACE ^{DAVID HAGBERG}

In the fall of 1975 most of the crewmen of the Soviet antisubmarine warfare ship FFG Storozhevoy mutinied. The captain was seized and confined belowdecks, and those officers and men who did not want to participate were placed under house arrest.

The dangerously idealistic ringleader of the mutiny sent a message to Moscow telling the Brezhnev government that he was taking the ship in order to give a message to the Soviet people, that their government was corrupt and needed to be changed.

The officer thought it would be a wake-up call not only for Russia but for the entire world that the Cold War was spinning dangerously out of control toward global thermonuclear war.

Within hours after the Storozhevoy left the port of Riga, which at the time was part of the USSR, and sailed into the Baltic Sea, Moscow ordered that he be hunted down and killed. The ship, the officers, and the men were all to be destroyed and the entire incident be covered up.

Which very nearly happened, but for the heroic efforts of a few of the officers and crew who saved the lives of everyone.

And the cover-up was complete except for an obscure report of the incident written by a U.S. Navy officer studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who managed to piece together the various bits and pieces of the story.

A couple years later Tom Clancy came across the report, which inspired him to write The Hunt for Red October, an edge-of-the-chair thriller that was exciting, entertaining, and highly successful.

Writing a nonfiction account of the mutiny through the eyes of one of the officers was supposed to be a natural extension of a career I’ve made chronicling the Cold War in several dozen novels. I have spent three decades studying the Soviet Union, its government, its military organizations, and its secret intelligence services, including the KGB, as well as its people and places.

I had the real-life, up close and personal story of a key player in the drama. Nothing could have been easier. The book would practically write itself. Boris Gindin would tell me the story, and I would fix up his grammar.

But this was, after all, the stuff of real life.

Which meant that if I came across something I didn’t like I couldn’t change it for the sake of the story. If some of the facts were messy and not pleasant, I couldn’t doctor them up to suit the narrative flow.

I might be able to invent some dialogue and interior monologue that, according to Boris Gindin and my own research, was likely to have happened. But I couldn’t change the facts.

Rather than relying on poetic license and clever plotting, the story of the Storozhevoy told itself because it is an edge-of-the-chair thriller.

If truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction, then certainly truth can and most often is even more exciting.