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

1. RIGA

The morning of the mutiny the northern winter frost rides heavily on the stiff ocean breezes in the harbor. Not many people are up and about along Eksporta lela Krastmala Street, which runs along Riga’s waterfront on the Daugava River. Yesterday throngs of people lined up to see the ships of the great Soviet navy on parade to honor the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, but on this chilly predawn all of Riga, it seems, is sleeping.

Moored in the middle of the river are fourteen Soviet warships: submarines, destroyers, cruisers, tenders, and frigates, all in parade formation, all respectful of the law and order, peace and prosperity, that serving the Motherland—the Rodina—guarantees. It’s a brave new world over which lies a morning haze of wood and coal smoke from the chimneys of homes of people lucky enough to find fuel to waste in late fall merely for heat.

Aboard the frigate Storozhevoy, moored practically on top of an Alpha-class submarine, reveille has sounded. It is time for the two hundred men and officers to rise from their slumbers, dress in trousers and telnyaschka, the long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped undershirts that sailors wear no matter the time of year, and muster on deck for exercises. But yesterday was a holiday, and the mood this morning is almost universally one of indifference toward routine, yet there is a strange undercurrent of anticipation that has permeated the ship, though only two men know the reason.

The Storozhevoy is a low-slung, sleek warship that even tied up at his{Russians use he and his for ships.} moorings looks like a greyhound at the starting block, ready at a moments notice to charge forward, to do battle. At over four hundred feet on deck, he is a third longer than a football field, but with a narrow beam of only forty-six feet, flaring bows, a low-slung afterdeck, and midship masts bristling with radar and Electronic Surveillance Measures (ESM) detectors rising seventy-five feet above the water, the ship looks lean and mean. And dangerous.

Down two decks and aft through three sets of watertight doors, open now, and just forward of the engineering spaces, before the midshipmen’s mess, Ordinary Seaman Pavel Fomenko is sound asleep in his bunk while all around him in the cramped, smelly compartment, called a cubrick, his sixteen crewmates are bustling to get dressed and report on deck.

It is 0700, still pitch-black outside. Standing above Seaman Fomenko’s rack is his boss, chief of engineering, Senior Lieutenant Boris Gindin.

At twenty-four, Gindin is a well-trained officer aboard ship, but he’s young and relatively untested. The new men among the seventeen in his gas turbine section do not know him yet. He has a set of ground rules he learned at the academy and on his other postings, but he hasn’t explained himself. He hasn’t proven himself. He will stand up for them and defend them if the need should arise. But he wants to know that they will behave themselves, that they won’t get drunk, that their uniforms will be neat at all times, and, most important, that they will obey orders.

Riga is still asleep. But the crews aboard the other warships moored in the river are coming awake. From here the city’s most famous structure can be seen. It’s the wooden tower of St. Peter’s Church in Vecriga, the old city. Dating back to the fifteenth century, it used to be the tallest wooden building in the world. Even now, rising seventy-two meters above street level, it gives a view all the way out to the Baltic Sea to the northwest. Tourists climb to the top to see the sights, and lovers make the pilgrimage for luck. For the Soviet sailors the tower represents nothing more than another authority figure. It’s always something or someone, towers or officers, looking down on them, ordering them about, sometimes fostering a resentment in a man that can run deep.

Like today.

His crew needs to obey Gindin, but they do not have to know that he comes from nothing more than a middle-class family from Leningrad. Certainly not rich by any standards, certainly not well connected, certainly not favored by the Politburo or the Communist Party.

They don’t have to know he’s a Jew.

Every morning Gindin is up before his men, so that he can make sure they are ready for their mandatory exercises. In the academy, where he learned gas turbine engineering, he was on the weight-lifting team. He is five-feet-nine and stocky, with the round but pleasant face of a Great Russian, obsidian black hair, and blue eyes. It’s obvious that he’s in better physical shape than most of his men, especially Seaman Fomenko, in part because of the luck of the genetic draw but also because Gindin continues to work out and because officers aboard Soviet warships eat much better than enlisted sailors.

Gindin kicks the man’s bunk. “It’s time to get up.”

Fomenko opens one eye and gives his officer a baleful look. He cannot get up with the others. “My father is an alcoholic and I have a hangover, so you see I cannot get up.”

“I don’t appreciate your joke,” Gindin tells the man. “Get out of bed now.”

Several of the seaman’s crewmates have remained behind to watch from the open door. It is the officer against the new troublemaker.

“I have told you that my father is an alcoholic and I have a hangover. Now go away and let me alone.” Fomenko turns over in bed. He means to disobey a direct order.

Gindin glances at the men watching the unfolding drama. He is not a hard man. He does not have a bad temper, as some of the other officers do. He does not treat his men harshly. But he does expect his orders to be obeyed. This is important to him, and to the ship, and especially to the Soviet navy, to which he owes his entire future.

Gindin throws back the thin blanket, grabs Fomenko by the collar of his shirt, hauls him roughly out of bed, and slams him against the wall. “Do you feel better now?”

“No,” the seaman says. He is provoking Gindin to take the situation to the limit or leave him alone, in which case the men will have won a small battle against an officer.

Gindin smashes the seaman against the steel bulkhead again, this time with much greater force. “How do you feel now?” Gindin asks.

“Better but not good enough.”

Gindin lifts the man’s feet completely off the floor and smashes him against the wall again, his head bouncing off the steel. “How about now?”

“I feel much better, sir,” Fomenko says. He is ready to go on deck for morning exercises.

The seventeen men from the motor turbine division make their way topsides, where they join their comrades. Thirty minutes of exercise every morning, seven days per week, at anchor or at sea, rain or snow or shine. Curiously, despite the bland, monotonous food in the crew’s mess and despite the fact that no matter the weather the men dress only in trousers and cotton shirts, no one gets a cold or the flu. These boys are healthy, most of them from the farms or small towns across the Soviet Union, with iron constitutions.

Every morning after exercises the enlisted men are served kasha, which is a gruel made of hulled buckwheat, and a couple thin pieces of bread with a little butter, while the officers are served a special kasha made of processed oatmeal, cheese, kielbasa sausages, and as much good bread and butter as they can eat.

After making sure that his men show up for their exercises Gindin walks forward to the officers’ dining hall on an upper deck. It’s about twenty-five feet long and half that width, with three long tables and two big windows. It is a bright, airy room, something Gindin appreciates, since his duty station is belowdecks in the machinery spaces. The table to the left is for the skipper, Captain Second Rank Anatoly Potulniy; his starpom, executive officer, Captain Lieutenant Nikolay Novozilov; and the zampolit, political officer, Captain Third Rank Valery Sablin; plus any visiting VIPs.

This is the end of a six-month cruise, which has taken them as far around the world as Cuba, to show the flag, to show support for a friendly nation. Tomorrow the Storozhevoy, which in English translates very unsexily into “large patrol craft,” is scheduled to sail to the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad, where he will undergo two weeks of repairs, and then back to base at Baltiysk, fifty kilometers away.

Gindin’s family lives in Pushkin, about twenty-five kilometers south of Leningrad, and it’ll be good to get home on leave, because he’s just lost his father, Iosif, with whom he was very close. His dad’s death was a real blow, which he is having a hard time dealing with. He wants to be morose, but he can’t let himself slide into self-pity and still do his duties. But two weeks will not be soon enough for him to be with his mother, Yevgeniya, and sister, Ella, who need him.

Boris’s roommate, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov, is at the breakfast table when Gindin walks in and takes his place. The captain’s not here this morning, but Zampolit Sablin is, and it looks as if he has a fire in his belly.

“Good morning, Boris,” Sablin calls with a lot of bonhomie. “It’ll be a fine day, don’t you think?” He’s got dark hair, a good build, and the kind of face that is always smiling.

Gindin remembers an incident when the ship sailed down to East Germany for a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. A parade had just passed by, and everybody on the pier was happy. Gindin and Sablin and some of the other officers went down on the dock, and Sablin scooped up one of the children and held the kid high in the air with a big smile. Everyone was laughing and singing. Sablin was married and had a child of his own, and he liked all children. But Gindin wasn’t married, had no children, and didn’t understand. Except that Sablin has the same happy, excited look on his face this morning as he had in Germany that day.

“What’s with our good zampolit?” Firsov asks. He’s five-nine, with blond hair, a mustache, and a wicked kick on the soccer field. He’s a bright guy. He and Gindin have hit it off.

“He’s always like that,” Gindin says. “He thinks he’s here to save us.”

“From what?” Firsov asks. “Our crazy crew?”

Gindin looks sharply at him, thinking that he was the only one who’d noticed that something strange was going on. Things felt different somehow. It promised to be a bright, crisp weekend, and there was nothing to spoil it. Yet coming up a companionway from belowdecks he ran into some sailors who were in a huddle, having a serious conversation about something. When they spotted an officer coming their way, they broke off.

It was a holiday, when people normally smile and laugh and have happy faces. But this morning Gindin has not seen any smiling sailors; he’s heard no jokes, no laughter.

Only sullenness.

Except from Zampolit Sablin.

The mess steward comes with Gindin’s food. All the officers contribute an extra twenty-five rubles a month for good food, but Gindin has a special relationship with the cook because he controls the ship’s water. It’s the same on all Soviet warships. Some systems in the military seem to work better than others, and this is one of them.

Another involves a pure alcohol, called spirt, which Gindin uses to clean his equipment. It’s 96 proof and when distributed to a friend or to anyone you would like to curry favor with is part of another system that works well.

“After duty we’ll have some spirt,” Gindin suggests to his roommate. “Maybe we’ll figure out what bug Sablin has up his ass.”

Firsov is quick to laugh, and their zampolit, out of earshot, nods his approval. Sablin likes to see his men happy, especially his officers. He has a seemingly genuine interest not only in the crew’s comfort and morale but, curiously, in the ship’s systems as well. All the ship’s systems, mechanical and electrical.

But this morning his mood seems somehow contrived. Maybe false. As if he were afraid of something.

Of what? Gindin wonders.

2. THE ACADEMY

When Boris Gindin turned sixteen it was time for him to apply for his internal passport, which all Russians need to travel inside their country. It’s also a form of national identification and classification. His mother and father were both Jews. But under “Nationality” her passport was marked “Jewish,” while Iosif’s was marked “Russian.” It meant that Gindin had a choice—to declare himself a Jew or a Russian. His father told Boris to put down “Russian” because when it came time to make a career, life would be much easier for him as a Russian than as a Jew. He was rightfully afraid that the next year, when he was thinking about joining the Soviet navy, he would not be accepted because he was a Jew, unless he followed his father’s advice about the passport. Not that a religion would keep Boris out of the service; it’s just that he knew a Jew would never get into any of the prestigious academies that were necessary for advancement.

Go into the service as an enlisted man and any sort of a real career was impossible. It was a life he did not want to contemplate.

His father, a man whom Boris adored, was an engineer. Boris was going to follow in his father’s footsteps. But not as a civilian. Iosif was the sole breadwinner in the Gindin family, and even as an engineer he was barely making 160 rubles per month. That was scarcely enough to pay the rent on their small apartment and put food on the table. At first the Gindins shared a small apartment with several other people, the three of them living in one room. The Gindins never had good things; the furniture was shabby and primitive, their clothing hand-me-downs from relatives, they never had a vacation, and when Iosif had to go into the sanatorium for his failing health a difficult life got even tougher.

“You want to be an engineer, I can get you into the academy,” Boris’s brother-in-law, Vladimir Simchuk, said one evening over dinner.

“Gas turbines,” Boris said. He’d already been having the dreams.

The St. Petersburg Military Engineering Academy is in Pushkin, but the locals call it Tsarskoye Selo because the last tsar had his summer residence there. It’s a lovely little town whose palaces and gorgeous parks, which are especially spectacular with the changing leaves in the fall, were created in the eighteenth century by the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great.

Vladimir was in his fifth year at the academy and was doing very well. His grades were good, he was on the school’s weight-lifting team—a sport that Gindin had practically made a career of in high school—and, best of all, the head of Vladimir’s rota, or company, Captain Third Rank Spartak Svetlov, agreed to put in a good word for Boris.

The academy, which only dates back to a few years after the revolution, is located on a few acres of prime parkland near the Catherine Palace and was home in those days to fifteen hundred engineering students taking the five-year courses.

In order to be accepted out of high school, Boris had to take and pass five tests: verbal and written mathematics, verbal physics, literature, and sports fitness, plus an extensive physical exam. Dumb, sick students are not accepted. This is the elite school. He gets a decent mark in physics and does very well on the other four. His grades are good enough to ask for any five-year course of study he wants. Steam Turbines, Diesels, Submarines, or the newest, most glamorous, sexiest course of all, Gas Turbines. With gas turbines his advancement in the navy will be rapid, and once he retires his career as a civilian will also be all but guaranteed.

That was the easy part. The second, biggest hurdle was meeting with Admiral Nikolaev who was the head of the academy, and two of his officers: the faculty commander and the assistant for military training.

It was mid-August in Pushkin, pleasant, not too hot, the fall colors already beginning to show, when Gindin showed up for his interview in the school’s Administration Building. It was a big conference room with three large windows through which the sun streamed. Immediately to the left was a long table, behind which sat the three officers.

“You did well on your exams, Comrade Gindin,” Admiral Nikolaev complimented Boris. The admiral is an old man, in his mid-sixties, with a longtime active navy career behind him. The students think of him as a father, because he is stern but warm and friendly. If you have a problem, the admiral will listen.

The other officers on the interviewing commission weren’t so nice; in fact, the colonel who was Admiral Nikolaev’s assistant for military training had never served in the active navy and was a mean, condescending man. Everyone in the school knew that if you happened to meet him on the street, you’d better cross over to the other side before he noticed you, because he was sure to find some fault and send you to your rota captain for disciplinary action.

The main thing the admiral and his two officers want from Gindin is the promise that he is ready to dedicate his life to serving his country. That means dedicated to giving his life for the Rodina, Mother Russia. Shedding his blood for the Soviet Union if need be.

Gindin is young, just seventeen, the navy is the glamour service: prestige, an impeccable reputation. Its officers are considered to be a part of the Russian elite that got its start with Peter the Great, who established the navy and, therefore, Russia as a world power.

This moment is the very beginning of Gindin’s life.

“Da,” he enthusiastically responds. Yes, he will dedicate his life to the Rodina; he will shed his blood for the Motherland if called upon to do so. As a gas turbine engineer, taking care of the power plants aboard the newest, most modern ships anywhere on earth.

But he had not counted on one fatal flaw. Despite his Russian passport, the admiral and his officers know that Gindin is a Jew. It was his first, though not last, experience that being a Jew in the Soviet Union meant fewer choices. Here at the academy it meant that sometimes you had to step out of someone else’s way so that his career could advance.

“We have no room for you in Gas Turbines, Comrade Gindin,” the colonel says, with a smirk. “You will be joining the diesel facility.”

Gindin nods dumbly. No other choice is open for him, not really. The diesel curriculum is easier, but it has less prestige and less opportunitiy than gas turbines. And since the gas turbine major is tougher, only the guys who did the best on the exams get chosen. This knocks the wind out of Gindin’s sails, because he knows he did very well. But he keeps his mouth shut because no one here is interested in his side of the story. He figures that he should consider himself lucky that he was accepted at all. Lucky and grateful.

“Da,” he will faithfully serve and defend the Motherland as a diesel engineer.

But two weeks later someone has pulled some strings, probably Gindin’s brother-in-law, and without any explanation he is suddenly transferred to Gas Turbines. He never questions the change in orders, but for the first few days he floats a few centimeters above the ground.

3. COLD WAR CONSIDERATIONS

The period between the end of WWII and the early nineties, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, was called the Cold War because the USSR and the United States were not shooting at each other. But both sides were constantly on alert for the hot war to begin. That meant Soviet missile forces were drilled 24/7 to launch their ICBMs against targets in the West. It meant that Soviet pilots stood by their interceptors and nuclear bombers. It meant that the vast Soviet armies were poised to pour across the border into West Germany. And it meant that the navy was almost always training for the big day.

The idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, that in the event of a global thermonuclear war no one could survive, was all that prevented a third world war. The Soviets, like the Americans, depended on what was called the triad: nuclear weapons delivered by long-range bombers, nuclear weapons delivered via silo- or train-launched ICBMs, and nuclear weapons launched by submarines.

It was to this last leg of the triangle that the navy and its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) vessels, such as Gindin’s ship, the FFG Storozhevoy, were so important. A submarine could sneak to within spitting distance of the Russian coast and launch its missiles so that no warning would be possible. By the time the military defense forces knew that an attack had begun there would be absolutely nothing to be done. Innocent people would die. The Rodina would be wounded. Possibly mortally.

Sailors aboard ASW platforms, as they are called, were filled with a holy zeal. If submarine-launched missile attacks could not be defended against, then the submarines themselves would have to be detected and destroyed before they could launch.

Boris Gindin was especially filled with the Rodina. He had never been a devout Jew, but now out of the academy and in the fleet he’d fully replaced his Jewish religion with the religion of the state. He was on a holy mission, as were many Soviet officers. He wanted to do well so that he would be noticed. He wanted to have a life for himself. To get married, to have children, to have a nice apartment, maybe even a summer house, that most Russian of retreats, the dacha.

As a Soviet navy officer Gindin is allowed to shop in the Albatros or Bereska special stores that are stocked with imported goods.

As a Soviet navy officer he can smoke American cigarettes. Walking down the streets of Leningrad with a package of Marlboros in his pocket makes him feel nine feet tall. It sounds stupid, and maybe even foolish, but in ′75 people had nothing, so some little luxury gave you a sense of self-worth and an enormous satisfaction with the lifestyle you could afford.

Gindin will do anything to defend the Rodina and protect this life. He loves his father but won’t end up in the same boat, earning a lousy 160 rubles per month, when it costs more than 110 rubles a month just to keep food on the table for four people! Which means he’s going to do a good job in the academy, then go out into the fleet, where he will distinguish himself.

In exchange for a five-year education, the Soviet naval officer has one term of enlistment, and it is for twenty-five years. There’s no getting around it. But it’s not a hardship, because navy officers are privileged.

They stand among the high priests of the Communist regime.

In the summer of 1968, after his first year at the academy, Boris leaves from Kronshtadt aboard the T-58-class large patrol craft Kirov, a different vessel than the WWII heavy cruiser or the late eighties battle cruiser. But this ship, as old as he is, is good enough to train first-year students.

Except one night, sleeping on a hard cork mattress, Gindin is awakened to the screams of Jurij Kotovshhyk, one of the cadets in his cubrick. A gigantic rat is sitting on the boy’s chest, calmly grooming itself.

When the lights come on, dozens of rats scurry away into the dark corners. It’s Gindin’s first taste of the real navy with which Moscow expects to defend the Rodina against the soft Americans.

But it won’t be his last on this summer cruise in 1968.

One morning the captain announces over the ship’s intercom that the people of Czechoslovakia are about to start a revolution. They want to overthrow the Russian brand of Socialism. The Kirov’s crew is issued with Kalashnikov assault rifles and ammunition. They are to sail from their base at Kronshtadt to Czechoslovakia to put down the revolt.

“I was excited and scared all at the same time,” says Gindin. “I signed on to defend the Rodina with my life if need be. I’d promised the admiral. We’d all made the promise. But not one of us ever believed it would really come to this. Not like this. Not so soon.”

Gindin and the other cadets aboard are just eighteen, and as they steam out into the Baltic to head southwest, maintaining their shipboard routines as well as cleaning their weapons and going over military tactics with their division commanders, no one seems to take note that Czechoslovakia is a country that is completely landlocked.

But it becomes a moot point twenty-four hours later, when the captain announces that the revolt has already been put down by Special Forces (Spetsnaz), Russian Green Berets. Boris is there with Viktor Lugovoj, his best friend from the academy, and Sergei Strogonov who is the commander of their class, none of them certain whether they should cheer that the revolt has been put down, so they won’t have to fight after all, or be disappointed that they won’t get the chance this time of living up to their oaths to defend the Motherland. But the Kirov is ordered back to base. Boris Gindin has taken the first step to becoming an officer in what he fervently believes is the finest navy on the planet.

4. EN ROUTE TO HAVANA

Gindin is on his second rotation aboard the Storozhevoy, regular military duty in the Mediterranean Sea, in Februrary 1975 when the crew gets word that they will cruise south to Cuba, where they will spend one month. This is just eight months before the mutiny, and almost no one aboard has the least premonition that their lives are soon to be ended or altered forever. There isn’t an officer or jack-tar aboard who isn’t over the moon. Cuba, at the time, meant not only sunshine and warmth but also the possibility of visiting ashore for fabulous food and luxuries almost beyond imagination—the girls are said to be beautiful, even if they are out of reach. Whenever the men were allowed off the ship, it was always in a group; even so, visiting ashore was nothing short of wonderful.

The KGB doesn’t maintain a strong presence in Havana. In fact, the only KGB representative the officers and crew will have to contend with on the trip is Captain Lieutenant Sergey Drankov, the dour military intelligence officer assigned to the ship.

Among other things the Storozhevoy’s crew means to do in Havana, besides eat, drink, and sightsee, is provide a little entertainment for their Cuban allies. Gindin figures that it is some gesture of gratitude that the Soviets have a military base there and that the two governments are friends.

One of the plans is for the crews of the Storozhevoy and his brother ship the Silyni, also en route to Havana, to put on a concert of singing and dancing. Capain Potulniy orders the Storozhevoy to come to all stop to wait for the Silyni to rendezvous. They are in the middle of the unpredictable Mediterranean Sea, but the captain means to send a contingent of sailors across in a launch so that the two crews can practice. He wants everything to be just right when they get to Cuba. The USSR is like a big brother, there to show its allies how a world-class navy operates.

The transfer of crewmen goes without a hitch, the three-hour practice is a success, and the little entertainment is ready. The only problem is the weather, which has piped up to 30 knots of wind, with mounting seas rising well above four meters. The Storozhevoy’s crew must be retrieved, but operating a motor launch in those conditions is difficult. Potulniy orders his ship to come around to the windward side of the Silyni to temporarily block the wind and waves for long enough to put the launch over the side, retrieve the crewmen, and make it back across the hundred meters or so of troubled sea.

“The situation went all to hell almost immediately,” Gindin recalls. He is with his men in the engine spaces, taking increasingly desperate orders from the bridge. The two ships are drifting together at an alarming rate, and there simply isn’t enough sea room or enough engine power to stop the Storozhevoy from slamming into the side of the Silyni with a sickening, ship-wrenching crash. The Silyni’s massive anchor breaks loose, some of its enormous chain pays out, and the three tons of metal begin swinging wildly like a wrecking ball bent on destroying everything in its path.

The first damage is a hole three by six meters punched into the Storozhevoy’s hull, thankfully above the waterline. Stanchions and lifelines on deck are the next to go, along with a section of deck plating where the ship’s rockets were loaded aboard.

KGB captain Drankov, sitting at his desk, feels the tremendous crash. He jumps up, throws open the porthole in his cabin, and sticks his head outside, just as the huge anchor swings past, missing him by centimeters. The joke among the crew later is: Too bad he didn’t stick his head out a little farther.

Gindin is at the main board where the monitors and controls for the main engines as well as the fire and drain pumps are located. It is his normal posting. When the first collision occurs he is thrown violently across the compartment, where he smashes into a steel bulkhead.

This is a modern Soviet warship on his first rotation, but Potulniy and his officers know what they’re doing. They’ve trained for emergency situations. No one loses his head.

Gindin is back at the board, and between him and the captain they somehow manage to regain enough control to back away from the Silyni, get some sea room, and retrieve their crew, all without any serious injuries or loss of life.

For most of the crew the navy is a necessary evil of life in the Soviet Union. For many of the officers it’s just a rotten job that happens to pay well. But for Potulniy, who loves everything about the service and his position as captain, the accident is totally unacceptable. He has no one to blame except himself, and he knows that although sea duty aboard a Soviet warship, any warship, is by nature extremely hazardous, at times even deadly, Moscow does not reward failure of any kind, for any reason.

The Storozhevoy is ten days from Cuba, and Potulniy is in a tough spot. He can’t sail into Havana with a damaged ship. Nor can he call for help. His ship must be repaired. He must be repaired by the crew aboard with the materials at hand, no matter how impossible that might be, and he has to be repaired before they reach Cuba. So Potulniy turns to the one man aboard who shares his nearly holy zeal for the ship and the navy—Gindin.

“This is something I trained for,” Gindin says. He is in love with the navy and with his job and, most of all, with the Rodina. “I was going to fight capitalism if it got in our way. We were going to live better lives than our fathers and grandfathers, because they fought fearlessly to protect us and our country. It was up to us to continue the same traditions to make sure we continue to be the greatest, strongest, and most powerful country in the world. And I understood this almost from the beginning: Octebryata in first grade when we learned about Lenin; the Pioneers in grades four and five when we learned about the October Revolution and what it meant to the people; then the Komsomolez in the eighth grade where we learned more about Lenin and about Marx and Engels. Our education was neverending. Even now in the military it was up to our zampolits who made us understand what was expected of us.

“Serving our country was the most noble and honorable thing any Russian could do.”

So, when Captain Potulniy calls Gindin, his chief of the gas turbine section of BCH-5, to fix the damage, he naturally agrees. In fact, he completely agrees, because he well understands the fix that not only the captain is in but the entire ship.

Potulniy wants Gindin and his people to heat the deck plating at the rocket-loading hatch and pound it back into shape. Gindin has a hell of a time convincing the captain that such a fix is impossible at sea but has an idea that might work. The area of mangled deck is cut away with acetylene torches, the gaping wound is covered with plywood and canvas, and the entire patch is painted burgundy to match the rest of the deck.

But that’s the easy problem. The major damage done by the Silyni’s anchor is the huge gash on the starboard side of the hull, just aft of the bow but, thankfully, enough above the waterline that the pumps are taking care of the water that rushes in every time the ship plunges into a trough between waves.

Gindin is a packrat. Every time they are at home port at Baltisk or the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad he hounds the port masters for spare parts, anything he can get his hands on; he even uses his supplies of spirt to bribe anyone who can help. Parts for the engines and the pumps, electrical wires and parts to repair the motors, nuts, bolts, screws, piping and joints, grease and lubricants, wire and cabling, even plywood and metal plating. Anything, in short, that will allow the Storozhevoy to be repaired at sea without having to call for help. That’s a lot of extra weight for a warship to carry.

A few months before they head out on this rotation, they’re still tied to the dock at Yantar when Potulniy calls Gindin off the ship down to the pier. The Storozhevoy’s waterline is nowhere to be seen. “Look what you’ve done with all the junk you’ve brought aboard. We’re never going to get out of here, let alone get back to base.”

“Captain, I think we’re getting ready for another rotation, which means six months at sea,” Gindin points out respectfully.

“That’s right, Boris.”

“Do you want to make it back on your own? Without asking for help, no matter what happens?”

“Of course.”

“Or maybe get towed back to base in shame?”

“Out of the question,” Potulniy fumes.

“Then, sir, I don’t see why our missing waterline should be a problem.”

Gindin is allowed to keep his junk, and ten days out of Cuba the stuff comes in handy.

The first problem is the electrical cable runs, which have been severed and partially ripped away from the inner hull. It’s no good trying to get at them from inside the hull; too much equipment and too many bulkheads would have to be cut away, and there’s no time for it. Gindin’s roommate, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov, who’s in charge of BCH-5’s electrical systems, will have to go over the side and do the job himself. If his lifeline doesn’t break, sending him into the sea, where there is virtually no chance of ever getting him back aboard, if the towering waves and motion of the ship don’t dash him against the hull, crushing the life out of him, and if the edges of the jagged tear don’t rip his body apart, he’s faced with the almost impossible task of identifying and splicing as many as one hundred electrical cables. But he’s a Soviet navy officer, filled with nearly the same zeal as Potulniy and Gindin. Firsov does the job, and when he’s hauled aboard three hours later, drenched with seawater and sweat, his body battered and bruised, every single circuit that he had spliced works.

“I would call it an extreme situation, and one tough job to do,” Gindin says. “But it was our duty, and no one looked at us like we were some kind of heroes.”

The storm calmed down, but the waves are still very high when Seaman Semyon Zaytsev, the ship’s best welder, is sent overboard to patch the hole with metal plates. Another seaman is sent overboard after him with a bucket of gray paint. “By the time the whole thing was done the ship looked like new. We spent a month in Cuba and no one ever noticed that we ever had any damage,” Gindin says. But this is the typical bond between Soviet sailors. You get into a tough situation, and you pull through, no matter what. “As simple as that,” Gindin says. “I’m still very proud of my crew for what they did that day, and how they did it.”

5. THE FINEST NAVY ON THE PLANET

In 1984 Tom Clancy published his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, very loosely based on an article about the Storozhevoy mutiny that appeared in Seapower Magazine and the master’s thesis of an officer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. The Storozhevoy was an ASW frigate, while Red October was a new Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine with a nearly silent propulsion system. Aboard the Storozhevoy a few of the officers and crew arrest the captain and stage a mutiny because they believe the Soviet system under Brezhnev is rotten. Aboard the Red October the captain and a few of his officers fool the crew into trying to defect to the West with the submarine because they believe that the Soviet system under Brezhnev is rotten and that with boats such as the Red October a global thermonuclear war is not only possible but likely. Clancy starts his story with the Red October sailing out of the submarine base at Polyarnyy, in the Arctic north, under the command of Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, on the sub’s maiden voyage. They are to test the sub’s silent drive against submarines of his own fleet and then return to base for an evaluation. If the submarine is as silent as his designers hope him to be, he will be able to sneak to within spitting distance of the U.S. coast and fire his nuclear missiles anytime he wants and there would be no warning. Millions of Americans would die, and a World War Three from which no one on the planet could survive would begin.

But soon after they submerge, Ramius murders their zampolit, Captain Second Rank Ivan Putin, because he is the one man aboard who could stop the mutiny in its tracks. Ramius makes it look as if the zampolit’s death was an accident so that the part of the crew not in on the plan will not become suspicious. It’s Ramius’s intention to sail his boat out into the open Atlantic, eluding detection by his own navy until he can somehow make contact with the U.S. Navy, ask for asylum for him and his crew, and offer his boat as a prize. The story hinges on a letter Ramius posted to his uncle Admiral Yuri Pedorin back in Moscow before Red October sailed, stating his intention to defect to the West. This, of course, leads to the massive hunt for Red October by Russian as well as U.S. and British military forces.

But as all good stories must, Clancy’s hinges on the personalities of the crew. Among them are the first officer Gregoriy Kamarov, who would like to marry a round American woman, live in Montana, and raise rabbits; his chief engineer, who is a chain-smoker and a mechanical genius; the ship’s surgeon, the timid Dr. Petrov, who believes they should turn back; and a KGB ringer who works undercover as an assistant in the galley.

So it begins, Ramius thinks to himself, as must the mutineer aboard the Storozhevoy that morning after the parade in Riga, because this story also hinges on a message sent to Moscow and on the personalities of the crew. Every Russian warship has its zampolits, its chief engineers and first officers and captains and ordinary seamen, each with his own story, which, taken as a whole, as Gindin maintains, are the links that forge the bonds among them.

Even under a rotten system that nearly everyone in the Soviet Union hates, guys like Captain Potulniy and Firsov and Gindin, who love the Rodina and are perfectly willing to give their lives in her defense, are not uncommon. And that’s a double-edged sword, a crying shame, because the Communist government is an omnivorous psychological monster that not only depends on this nearly religious devotion but also feeds off it, even nurtures it. Russians place great faith in their families, because for most of them little else is of constant value in their lives. They can depend on almost nothing. Most of the officers get married right out of the academy, because they want the comfort of their own family, but this usually is a mistake, because Soviet sailors go to sea on six-month rotations and when they’re in port they’re humping their butts working on base. Junior officers have very little time for their families, so the divorce rate is very high. This leads to widespread alcoholism, low morale, and wholesale cheating at every turn. Hell, the system is cheating them; why not cheat back? Nothing else makes much sense.

Because of this, Soviet officers are just about like officers everywhere, always thinking about getting drunk and getting laid, both at the same time, if possible. The big difference is that Soviet officers, probably more than officers of any other country, also think about their families and Mother Russia, both at the same time.

Gindin remembers that in the summertime he and his father used to go mushroom picking. Boris was nine or ten years old the first time. The factory where his father worked would pick up its employees around four in the morning to take them a couple hours outside of Pushkin into the woods. Boris’s mom packed their lunches and sent them each off with a kiss, because they would be gone the entire day.

“I remember the feeling when we broke for lunch, dead tired from getting up so early and spending four hours looking for good mushrooms, opened our bags, and found boiled eggs, bread, kielbasa, tomatoes. It tasted so unbelievably good, even with our hands dirty from mushrooms.”

Those days were the happiest of his life, and standing at the rail on the Storozhevoy’s deck in Riga the morning of the mutiny he can’t help but remember. Unlike most of his academy classmates, he hasn’t gotten married yet, so he’s not pining for a wife and children, only for his father, Iosif, who died four months ago.

“When we came back home, I would go to bed exhausted, but my mom would stay up most of the night sorting the mushrooms, getting them ready to cook and pickle and marinate and dehydrate to make into soup later.” It makes Gindin melancholy that he’ll never see his father again. “We would bring back several buckets of mushrooms in those days. My mom used to fry them with potatoes for us. I loved those trips with my dad. I loved being with him. It was fun.”

Scratch a Russian, so the proverb goes, and you’ll find the dark, rich soil of the land just beneath his skin and flowing in his veins.

The Gindins had a small piece of land not far from where they lived, which was given to them by Iosif’s employer, where they planted potatoes and some other vegetables. In the middle of September they would harvest several bags, each about thirty kilograms, which lasted them at least through the winter until spring. There wasn’t much meat, so suppers of herring and boiled potatoes were the norm, but no one complained.

It was the Russian way.

This was in the sixties, when in the West the Beatles were coming to America, Detroit was turning out millions of big-finned, massive, gas-guzzling cars, McDonald’s was going head-to-head with A&W, and JFK and Jacqueline were creating a Camelot in which the young president told his fellow Americans not to ask what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.

In the meantime, life in the Soviet Union was a harsh reality. What’s truly sad for Boris is that his father had worked hard all his life but had practically nothing. A small apartment, outdated furniture, hand-me-downs, and even if he had worked for ten lifetimes, he would never have been able to buy a car.

But Boris is basically a happy person. Nobody else had anything, so the Gindins never worried about it. In those days they couldn’t know that a lot of teenagers in the United States had cars, but even if they did it wouldn’t have mattered. It was all propaganda anyway. Soviet sailors were the best sailors on earth. Their navy was the best equipped, the best-run military service on the planet, with the finest officers, the most dedicated men, and therefore the highest morale.

“Besides, we were defending the Rodina.”

Despite all that, Boris is not a stupid man. Even as a kid he understood that his only path out of the grinding poverty in which he was raised was to get accepted in a military academy and become an officer. The pay was very good, and the privileges were fantastic. As a civilian, no matter his profession, his pay right out of college would only be 100 to 120 rubles per month. It didn’t matter if he became an engineer or a doctor; the pay was all the same. But Gindin’s pay in the service is 300 rubles per month, plus free meals aboard ship, free uniforms, and when the ship visits any international port the officers are paid in hard currencies.

Nor were Soviet women stupid. They knew that if they married an officer, they could have lives of luxury beyond the reach of most civilians.

At the academy where Boris studied engineering for five years, girls paid to get into dances on campus, trying to snag a young cadet. Some of the girls weren’t so good-looking. It was sad to see the same ones year after year not able to convince a cadet to marry them. But the prize was worth the effort.

He and his friends went over the fence from the academy whenever they got the chance, risking a lot of trouble by going samovolka, or AWOL, because the girls in town would do literally anything to get officer candidates to marry them. If you wanted to get laid you went samovolka, because the dances on school grounds were closely supervised. No alcohol, no hanky-panky, everything aboveboard. No fun whatsoever.

Boris is in his fifth year at the academy and will be graduating as a lieutenant in a few months. A dance is going on over at the club, but he’s not interested. It’s just the same old shuffling around. He wants sex right now, not marriage, which will come when his career is well established. He’d been caught going samovolka and is confined to academy grounds for a whole month, so he’s in the dayroom watching television when one of his classmates comes running in all out of breath. Something interesting is going on over at the club. The power is down, and everybody is in the dark with the girls.

“I was bored to death, so I decided it might be fun. Better than sitting alone watching TV,” Gindin says. When he gets over to the club the place is almost pitch-black. Only a few cadets on patrol are walking around with candles, trying to keep the order until the lights come back on. The whole place smells like sweat and cheap perfume. It’s hot and the air is stifling, but no one is complaining. The dancers can plaster their bodies against each other and nobody is going to stop them.

Boris is standing near the door, wondering what’s going to happen next, when someone or something brushes up against his arm. At first he thinks he must be mistaken, but then someone is there in the dark beside him, touching his uniform sleeve. He grabs an arm and pulls the person close enough so that even in the dark he can tell she’s a girl.

“What are you doing?” he wants to know.

She’s feeling for the hash marks on his sleeve to find out what year he’s in, and she’s not embarrassed to admit that she doesn’t want to dance with a second- or third-year cadet because they’re stuck at the academy most of time. But if she gets a senior she knows that he can get time off to come into town and spend the night with her.

If Boris wants some steady sex, clearly this is the girl for him. But her honesty turns him off. Maybe it’s because the hunt itself is sometimes more exciting than the conquest. Or maybe it’s because now that he’s so close to graduating and going out into the fleet, he’s that much closer to meeting the right girl and settling down.

“I told her that I’m not interested,” Boris says. “‘Don’t waste your time on me.’“

Looking across the river at the city of Riga and all the ships lined up at their moorings, Boris is finally just about ready to settle down. Once they get back to base at Baltiysk, Captain Potulniy has promised to write him a letter of recommendation for a shoreside job working as military liaison and inspector at a shipyard. There’ll be no more six months of sea duty separating him from his family. Just a few more weeks and he’ll visit his mother and sister and then start looking for a wife.

But something is pulling his thoughts back to the academy and that girl in the dark, so desperate to find a fifth-year student to marry.

“I suppose that living in the academy did some mental damage to most of us,” Boris says. “We lived in a very strict environment. Everything was regulated; every minute of our days and nights was monitored. We felt deprived of the love and affection that our parents and relatives gave us when we lived at home. Remember that we were only seventeen or eighteen when we enlisted, and five years is a very long time for a kid that age. This was why lot of students got married as soon as they graduated, and why eighty to ninety percent of all those marriages didn’t work out.”

Boris never wanted to suffer that same fate. He wants to follow in his father’s footsteps as an engineer with a loving wife and children. Only Boris wants to do it as a naval officer and not a poor civilian. But for reasons he cannot know at this moment, he’s already developing a bad feeling, an itch between his shoulder blades as if a sniper is pointing a high-power rifle at him from some great distance and nothing he can do will change it. Some of the other officers feel the same way as he does, and that fact is even more unsettling to him this morning than his own misgivings.

It’s their zampolit, Valery Sablin; not only was he in an odd mood this morning at breakfast, but he had been even stranger yesterday morning when he came down to the mechanical room, where Gindin was checking the gas turbines and every other piece of machinery that he’s responsible for.

“Good morning, Boris,” Sablin said. He was more than full of his usual good cheer. “How is everything going in Gas Turbines?”

“Good, Comrade Captain,” Gindin replied. He was a little busy just then, but Sablin was the zampolit.

Sablin took Gindin aside, out of earshot of the other men. “Are you happy down here, Boris?” he asked.

The question just then struck Gindin as odd. But he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Tell me, are you satisfied with the seventeen sailors in your section? Do they know their jobs?”

Again Gindin nodded, but this time he was a little wary. What the hell was the zampolit looking for? “They’re good boys. They know their jobs.”

“Good. That’s very good.” Sablin started to leave, but then he turned back all of a sudden, as if he’d forgotten something important. “I have some extra time now in case you would like a little help with your political lectures. You know, I could fill in. Give you a little extra time off.”

“Sure,” Gindin readily agreed.

Sablin ranks just below the captain, so he’s important aboard the Storozhevoy. He almost always has a smile plastered on his face that sometimes seems just a little forced, like now. He is married and has one son, but more important, Sablin comes from an important, well-to-do family and attended the Frunze Military Academy, the most prestigious military school in all of Russia. You’ll never make it to the top in the navy unless you’ve graduated from Frunze. This is where all the officers of the line went to school, but instead of opting for a command position, Sablin chose to become a political officer. Ideologues, these guys are sometimes called. They’re almost always the ones with the cobs up their asses, who’ve swallowed the Party line and whose one mission in life is to shove it down everyone else’s throats.

“But he’s a very social guy,” Gindin says. “Always talking to the sailors and officers about their families.” Once, when Gindin comes back from a vacation to Leningrad, Sablin wants to know how people are getting along in the city, what their mood is, what they’re talking about, and whether they are generally happy with the way things are or seem to be dissatisfied. Those are strange questions to be asking a young officer, but even stranger this morning is Sablin wanting to know the procedures for the emergency start-up of the gas turbines. Normally it takes a full hour to go through the necessary steps to safely bring the engines on line from a cold start. But if the captain is in a big hurry the engines can be started and brought up to full speed in as little as fifteen minutes. It’s a dangerous procedure and has to be done just right to avoid any sort of problem. Sablin also wanted to know if Gindin’s sailors knew these procedures. In a real emergency, if Gindin was injured or unable to reach his duty station, could his men do the job? Of course they could; Gindin has trained them well.

That strange conversation sticks in Gindin’s mind this morning. From the day Sablin was assigned to the Storozhevoy he took a great interest not only in the men and their personal lives but also in the operations of the ship: the electronics and navigation systems, the weapons and their computers, even the pumps and mechanical equipment. So it should come as no surprise that he is interested in the gas turbines.

But later that same morning, after the parade in town, Sablin is even more animated than usual, Gindin recalls. “Asking me how I liked the parade and how everything went. He also asked me if everything was okay on the ship, the engines, the mechanical systems. I got the feeling he was putting so much emphasis on this day that something personal and significant must have happened in his life. Or was about to happen. But he was kind enough to ask about my mother’s health and her condition after my father’s death.” It touches Gindin deeply that someone cares.

Still, as Gindin is standing at the rail, everything that’s happened in the couple of days since they came up from Baltiysk adds up to an odd foreboding.

6. DEFENDING THE RODINA

The Russian navy has been continuously at war for nearly its entire history and, since the end of WWII, preparing for the mother of all wars with the United States. A lot of ships have gone to the bottom since the late 1500s and early 1600s, and with them tens of thousands of sailors.

The Russians have fought the Swedes, the Danes, the Finns, the Italians, the English, the French, the Chinese, and the Japanese, but mostly the Turks, with whom they battled from 1575 until the end of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s new government ended the war, dissolved the Russian navy, and created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet.

In the early days the Slavic Cossacks sailed in tiny ships called chaikas, which meant “seagulls,” because they could fly across the water so fast. Scarcely fifty feet at the waterline, the open boats could hold as many as seventy warriors, who would crouch down beneath the gunwales, which were bordered with twisted cane for extra buoyancy and protection. These were ships completely open to the weather, and the Cossacks terrorized the Ottoman Turks and Crimean Tatars no matter the season. Slavs and Russian sailors, then and now, were a tough lot not to be taken lightly.

An old Russian proverb sums up the three hundred plus years of war until the Bolsheviks took over: In Moscow they ring the bells often, but not for dinner.

But it wasn’t until the mid-1600s that the situation for the Russians really began to heat up. In fact, historians call those years the Time of Trouble, just before the Romanovs took over and imposed the death penalty against the sailors aboard any foreign ships caught off their northwestern Arctic coast in the White Sea, especially Dutch and British merchantmen hunting fur seals up there.

When Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich commissioned the first real warship to be built inside Russia, christened the Frederick, the floodgates were opened and Russian sailors began losing their lives in droves. On the ship’s very first voyage on the Caspian Sea, the three-masted Frederick, with 247 hands on board, was overcome by a fierce storm and the ship went down with all hands. They rang the bells in Moscow.

Of course that didn’t stop the Russians from building ships and sending men and boys to sea to make war on their neighbors.

In 1656 the Russian military attacked and took over a couple of Swedish forts and immediately started building ships on the spot to make war in the Baltic. But the Swedes were just too tough, and in 1661 Russia was forced to sign a peace treaty and give back the forts they had taken, plus all the ships they had built. This was at the cost of a few hundred more good Russian men and boys. Once again the bells in Moscow were rung.

Even that couldn’t hold the Russians back. They had the bit in their teeth, and the tsar concentrated next on the Volga River and Caspian Sea, where in two years four ships were built, including the twenty-two-gun galley Oryol, which means “Eagle,” only this time it was the Cossacks who turned rebellious, grabbed the ship, ransacked it, and sank it in the Volga.

It was about this time, near the end of the 1600s, when Peter Alekseevich became Tsar Peter I at age ten. Even at that tender age the new tsar was fascinated with ships, shipbuilding, navigation, and naval warfare, so a miniature shipyard, for which tiny replicas of famous Western warships were constructed, was set aside for him and his pals to stage their mock battles.

Peter I was hooked. As soon as he was old enough, he ordered a real shipyard be built in the White Sea, which almost immediately began cranking out warships. Next he turned his attention to the Baltic and the Black Sea in the south, built a couple of shipyards, and by the spring of 1696 two warships, twenty-three galleys, four fireships, and more than thirteen hundred small vessels were crewed and got ready to do battle against the Russians’ old friends, the Turks.

It’s not that the Russians or the Cossacks had anything against the Turks, except for Turkey’s strategic location in control of the very narrow Bosporus and even narrower Dardenelles. Beat the Turks, and Russia was free to break out into the Mediterranean Sea and, from there, the open Atlantic. The entire world would be theirs, something that was difficult to achieve from Arkhangel’sk, up in the Arctic, which at the time was their only port.

The first step was to take control of the Azov Sea, from which Russian ships would have access to the Black Sea. This was done by June of that year, with the help of forty Cossack boats. The bells were rung in Constantinople as well as in Moscow.

But in October the tsar ordered that a permanent well-stocked and well-funded Russian navy be created in the Sea of Azov. Peter I went down there and lived in a tent to be in command of the Russian navy, while Chief of the Admiralty Alexanter Protasyev oversaw the construction of the base and the ships, which was done by several thousand serfs under the direction of hundreds of shipwrights and officers imported from Western Europe.

In 1697 Peter I sent sixty of Russia’s young noblemen to Europe to study shipbuilding and navigation and went himself to Holland to study advanced nautical sciences while working as a common ship’s carpenter.

When he returned to Russia he was a certified shipwright, and he’d brought back hundreds of books, charts, tools, and even ship models from which the new Russian navy would be designed and built.

In 1698 he opened the Nautical School and Maritime Academy for future seamen and the Nautical School of Mathematics and Navigational Sciences in Moscow.

The very next year, a Russian fleet of ten ships of the line, armed with 366 guns and a crew of more than two thousand officers and men, plus two galleys and sixteen smaller boats, broke out into the Black Sea and headed toward Constantinople. The Turks were so impressed they surrendered without a shot ever being fired. It was one of the very few times that the bells did not ring in Moscow.

With the northern fleet set at Arkhangel’sk to take care of business on Russia’s Arctic coast and the southern fleet in the Black Sea to mostly keep the Turks at bay, Peter I turned his attention next to his second most hated enemy, Sweden.

Although the northern fleet had successfully defended the realm against the Swedes trying to attack over the Northern Route, the tsar figured the only way to beat them was to have a Baltic fleet. If he could pull that off, Russia would not only present a serious threat to Sweden but could also take a run at Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, not to mention Finland and even Denmark. The only problem was that Sweden had thirty-nine ships in the Baltic and Russia didn’t have one. Nor were the Swedes about to leave the Russians alone long enough to build such a fleet.

Thus in 1700 began the navy’s part in the twenty-year Great Northern War, when a fleet of seven Swedish ships attacked the Arctic port at Arkhangel’sk. The Russians not only beat them back but also followed them, capturing strategic Swedish territory and even a couple of Swedish ships that had tried to come up the mouth of the Neva River to St. Petersburg. The bells in Moscow rang again, but everyone who survived got a medal with the inscription: The unprecedented has happened. The Order of St. Andrew the Summoned was created.

Even more important, on May 16, 1703, Peter I ordered the building of St. Petersburg Fortress at the mouth of the Neva and Fort Kronshlot in the Gulf of Finland to protect a new admiralty on the left bank of the Neva where the Baltic fleet would be built.

One year later a second Swedish attack against St. Petersburg was beaten back, and in the summer of 1705 a much smaller Russian fleet sent the Swedes packing after a fierce sea battle that lasted several days. The Russians didn’t have a modern navy yet, but they were sure heading that way. And no one could fault the Russian sailors, officers, and crewmen alike for lacking courage and sheer tenacity. As a result the Moscow bells never seemed to stop ringing.

The great northern struggle finally came to an end. Peter I died in 1725, and for a couple of decades the Russian navy fired no shots in anger. Waging war was an expensive business, and Russia needed to refresh its coffers.

The Nautical School and Maritime Academy continued to crank out midshipmen who went on voyages of exploration and mapping along the Arctic Circle in the Pacific, looking for a passage to India and China. Among the Russian navigators were Ivan Fyodorov and Mikhail Gvozdev, who accurately charted the route of Captain-Commodore Vitus Bering, who discovered the narrow passage that was named after him, between the Asian and North American continents, at the top of present-day Alaska. In fact, many of the seas and gulfs above the Arctic Circle are named after Russian naval explorers of the era: the Kara, Laptev, and Chuckhi seas and even the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan. Russian explorers made it all the way south to Japan, thus finally circumnavigating, and therefore mapping, the entire Russian empire. Not only that, but the Russian Alexey Chirikov, along with Captain-Commodore Vitus Bering, explored well down the west coast of the North American continent.

But the peace for Russian sailors did not last long, and in the fall of 1769 the bells in Moscow began ringing in earnest, when the sixty-six-gun Yevstafy broke out into the Mediterranean Sea to help the Greeks whip the Turks.

In July 1773 Russian ships attacked Beirut, in present-day Lebanon, because the territory had for a long time helped fund the Turkish military.

In 1783 the Russian naval presence on the Black Sea was strong enough that the Crimean Peninsula, along with most of the coastal territory around the entire sea, was annexed and the city of Sevastapol was founded.

By 1788, with another war against Sweden looming on the horizon, Russian ships of the line were being refitted with new, more powerful guns that fired shells instead of cannonballs, copper sheathing was installed to help protect hulls from damage and increase speed, and each year one hundred new officers graduated from the Naval Academy, now called the Naval Cadet Corps.

In 1798 just about everybody became allies, including Russia and her old adversary Turkey, to fight Napoléon. But by 1826 Tsar Nicholas I ordered his navy to switch sides, this time becoming allies of the French and English, to help the Greeks fight the Turks. Of course the Turks hired as their chief naval adviser a Frenchman by the name of Letellieu, which in due course led to the Russian-Turkish War of 1828-29, and this time plenty of bells were rung in Moscow.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Russian warships under sail were among the best in any ocean, but then, with the invention of the steam engine, the entire world was turned upside down. The Russians managed to build four steam frigates and a twenty-three-gun screw-propeller frigate, the Archimede, by 1849. And they managed to successfully wage war against Egypt, which was trying to invade Turkey, and against Prussia, which was trying to grab as much territory from Denmark as it possibly could.

Even more bells were rung in Moscow, but it was nothing compared to what was on the horizon with the start of the Crimean War, in which Great Britain and France as allies came to the aid of Turkey. That was in 1853, and that fall the allies began a siege of the Russian town of Sevastopol that would last six long, bloody months, which most historians regard as one of the most distinguished events in Russia’s military history, even though the Russians lost. The entire Black Sea fleet was destroyed; three admirals, more than one hundred officers, and nearly four thousand sailors were killed defending the town. And more than fourteen thousand were wounded.

Eventually the Russians lost not only the battle for Sevastopol but the entire war. A treaty was signed on March 18, 1856, by the new tsar, Alexander II. Russia’s Black Sea fleet and coastal fortifications were taken away, but in exchange the shattered remains of Sevastopol were returned to Russian control.

Every bell in Moscow rang continuously for the entire two years. Medals were awarded, new naval academy midshipmen were graduated, and Russia, as did the rest of the world, entered the age of the ironclads, starting with eighteen steam-powered ships of the line and ten frigates as a new, modern Baltic fleet.

The fight was not over.

By 1876 the Russian navy was ranked number three in the entire world, and one year later Russia began another war with Turkey using torpedo boats, a brand-new innovation so effective that the Turks pulled almost all of their forces from the Black Sea.

Disaster loomed just on the horizon for Russia’s Pacific Fleet, which responded to a growing threat from Japan. But the path to that war was complicated by alliances that seemed to ebb and flow with the tides. First Russians and Chinese moved to the verge of war, before the Chinese backed off. Next the Japanese were building a powerful army and navy because they wanted a foothold on the Asian mainland. Russia, now allied with France and Germany to help China resist the Japanese, sent its Pacific squadron to the region, and Japan backed off. For the moment.

But war was coming, and everybody knew it, so the Russians started building ships at a breakneck pace, which they based on the Kwantung Peninsula, which they leased from the Chinese. That included a fortress at Port Arthur.

On the morning of January 27, 1904, the main body of Japan’s naval forces, under the command of Vice-Admiral Togo Heihachiro, appeared like an apparition out of the darkness off Port Arthur, very much like their surprise attack against another enemy less than forty years in the future. Nineteen months later the war was over, with Russia the loser in more than one way. More than five thousand Russian sailors were killed and six thousand taken prisoner.

And so it continued right up through World War I, with more good Russian men and boys going to the bottom of the sea, until the new Bolshevik regime declared peace with Germany, and for a brief period the bells of Moscow were silent.

But in the years that followed, under the Communists, babushkas and mothers and wives and sweethearts who had marched off to church to weep and pray for their sailors lost at sea could only cry silently and pray in their hearts, because God and churches were no longer permitted. A darkness began to settle over the land. Maybe the sailors who had given their lives for the Rodina were the lucky ones after all.

7. AT THE READY

Standing at the rail, Gindin finishes the last of his cigarette and flicks it in a long arc down toward the dirty water between the Storozhevoy and the Alpha sub moored just below them. He’s having some trouble shaking off the sense of foreboding he’s been getting all morning, with Seaman Fomenko’s defiance in the cubrick, with the group of sullen sailors huddling in the corridor, and with Sablin’s strangely animated mood in the officers’ dining hall.

Gindin hesitates a moment longer in the crisp morning air before turning and heading belowdecks and aft to his machinery spaces. It’s his day off, but he’s restless. Anyway, there’s not a day goes by that he doesn’t check in with his engineering crew and machinery. He helped build the ship and, like Captain Potulniy, feels a sense of, if not ownership, at least pride.

Gindin has also been working on a maintenance and repair plan for when they get to the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad tomorrow. They’ll have a couple of weeks there to get the Storozhevoy ready for his next six-month rotation, and Gindin wants to make sure not only that everything in engineering that needs to be fixed, rebuilt, or replaced is done, but also that he can get all the spare parts he needs. This time he doesn’t think Potulniy will offer any serious objections if the ship rides below his waterline.

After those two weeks they’ll dock at Baltiysk, their home base, for regular shoreside duty until it’s time to head to sea again. Gindin will get some time off so that he can see his mother and sister and try to put his father’s death in some kind of perspective. But that will be tough, and the more Boris thinks about never seeing his dad again, the tougher it gets for him.

Gindin comes around a corner belowdecks and practically runs headlong into Sergey, who is one of his crewmen. He’s a tall, dark guy with a mustache who usually kept everything to himself. If Boris needed something, Sergey would never volunteer, even though he had good mechanical skills. He was a loner and didn’t talk much. And this morning, when Gindin comes around the corner, Sergey looks up like a frightened animal caught in headlights, hesitates for just a second, and then turns on his heel and tries to get away, but Gindin stops him.

Sergey is supposedly on duty right now, so Gindin is more than a little concerned. “What’s going on?” he asks.

Sergey doesn’t want to look up, let alone answer any stupid questions. He is clutching something in his left hand, and it looks as if he is on the verge of tears.

“Look, I’m your superior officer,” Gindin says mildly. “I want to know what’s wrong, and that’s an order.”

“I just got a letter from my mother,” Sergey says. He’s having real trouble not bursting into tears. “She says Larissa is going around town with some other guy.” His eyes are wide. “We’re engaged to be married, Senior Lieutenant.”

It’s the next thing to a Dear John letter, the kind that half the sailors in the fleet either have gotten or will get at some time or another. The normally tough, antisocial Sergey can hardly hold his emotions in check. Gindin feels sorry for him, because he didn’t deserve something like this. He was just a young kid, far away from his family, carrying out his duties, maybe getting only four hours’ sleep a day, working like a dog, and then he gets this letter. He is grief stricken, and the more Gindin talks to him the worse it gets. Maybe he’ll actually do harm to himself; it’s happened before.

“You’re young,” Gindin tells him. “You have your entire life ahead of you. This girl doesn’t deserve a guy like you, out here serving his country.”

Sergey isn’t buying it.

Gindin is trying to convince his sailor that all the men in the turbo/motor division are friends and crewmates who respect him. He doesn’t need to be treated this way by any girl.

Being away from home puts a lot of emotional stress on the crew, especially the sailors who are just kids, mostly eighteen or nineteen and from small towns or farms out in the country. They’re capable of doing some really stupid things, and it’s up to the officers to make sure nothing bad happens. Gindin spends fifteen or twenty minutes talking with Sergey, trying to put some good perspective in his head and make sure the kid will be okay. But watching Sergey head back to work, Gindin isn’t so sure that he’s helped very much. The sailor mumbled his thanks, but that was it. The mask was back, leaving an unreadable expression. They could have been discussing the weather.

Standing alone for a moment, listening to the sounds of the ship tied to a mooring, engines off, Gindin thinks that already this day is dragging when it’s supposed to be relaxing. He and Firsov agreed at breakfast that this evening they would get together with some of the other officers for a few drinks, maybe swap some jokes. Tomorrow it would be back to work for all of them, so this was their last day to relax. But for some reason the day seems to stretch; every minute seems like an hour. No one aboard ship is having any fun; everyone is long faced, down in the dumps.

Just forward of the machinery rooms, Gindin runs into Firsov and Sergey Bogonets, who is a senior lieutenant of the BCH-3 torpedo systems section. The two of them have hatched a practical joke on Senior Lieutenant Nikolay Bogomolov, in charge of the BCH-3 rocket systems section. He and Bogonets are roommates, and practically no one aboard ship likes Bogomolov. He’s sneaky, and whenever he sees somebody doing something wrong—officer or crewman—he immediately runs to tell the captain. Bogomolov has tried to build a friendship with Gindin and Firsov, but it can’t work because they think he’s a stukach, a snitch.

It’s less than ten hours before the mutiny, and there’s a growing edginess throughout the ship. Ordinary military discipline isn’t exactly flowing out the hatches, but nothing seems right. Just after breakfast Gindin spots one of his sailors lugging a heavy wrench, about the length of an umbrella, forward as if he were on an urgent repair job. A half hour later the same sailor is scurrying aft with the same wrench and the same determined expression on his face. And just a few minutes later the sailor is heading forward again, the wrench over his shoulder. The boy isn’t on any repair mission; he’s trying to look as if he were busy to avoid any real work. But the wrench was really heavy, and the last Gindin saw of the boy, sweat was pouring off his forehead. The kid was doing more work trying to get out of work.

The same look of determination is on Firsov’s and Bogonets’s faces. They want to play a practical joke on Bogomolov. Unless the Storozhevoy is tied up at a dock and connected to shoreside utilities, water is so scarce aboard ship that the men are allowed to take very few showers. Many of them go weeks or even a month without a shower. That includes the officers. Part of Gindin’s job is control of the water pumps and steam heat. In other words, anyone who wants to take a shower needs Gindin’s cooperation.

“Let’s give Nikolay a shower he’ll never forget,” Bogonets suggests, his face lit up, and Gindin immediately understands just what kind of a shower these guys have in mind.

Topsides, in officers’ territory, Sergey and Vladimir hold back out of sight as Gindin offers to let Bogomolov take a shower. It’s a gesture of real friendship that Nikolay appreciates. He rushes back to his room for his soap, towel, and clean clothes and hops into the shower room, giving Gindin a big grin.

Of course, Gindin turns off the steam right in the middle of Bogomolov’s shower, so that the water immediately switches from hot to ice cold. Nikolay lets out an ear-piercing screech and scrambles out of the shower, his body covered in soapsuds, a towel hastily wrapped around his waist. Gindin, Firsov, and Bogonets are all standing in the passageway laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their cheeks. But this is the kind of stuff that happens at the end of a six-month rotation at sea. The only problem is that the crew will have just time enough to get the Storozhevoy back in shape, take a short leave to see families, and it’ll all start over again.

It’s the Cold War, against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and especially the Russians’ main adversary, the United States, that could turn hot at a moment’s notice. They’ll be ready. Gindin and other officers just like him will make sure of that. At least that’s what most of them believe in their hearts this mid-morning, moored in the middle of the Daugava River, near downtown Riga.

8. THE STOROZHEVOY IN CUBA

NATO war planners describe the Storozhevoy as a Krivak-class frigate, which means his size is somewhere between two thousand and six thousand tons, and his main job should be as an offensive surface warship. But the Russians designed the Krivaks as defensive ASW ships. That’s a big difference in how each side sees the class. In the West the ships were viewed as just another example of the Soviet Union’s aggressive military posture, while Gindin and his fellow officers thought of their ship as a last-ditch stand against Allied submarines.

The Storozhevoy is 405 feet long on deck, carries two hundred men and officers, and can cruise forty-five hundred nautical miles at 20 knots or, if he’s in a hurry, less than seven hundred nautical miles at 32 knots. He was built in 1972-74 in the Yantar Zavod 820 shipyard in Kaliningrad and was outfitted with an impressive number of weapons systems. In addition to quadruple torpedo tubes amidships port and starboard, his most effective ASW platform is a four-tube launcher for the SS-N-14, which is backed up by missile launchers for the radar-guided SA-N-4 SAMs, plus a variety of 30mm Gatling and three-inch guns, the usual complements of mines, and a pair of twelve-barrel RBU-6000 ASW mortars forward of the bridge. This last weapons system is deadly effective out to 3.3 nautical miles and is automatically loaded. As fast as the weapons officer, who happens to be Senior Lieutenant Bogomolov, pushes the button, the RBUs will fire until they run out of missiles.

The ships are equipped with state-of-the-art electronics including the Head Net C search radar, a pair of Eye Bowl radar systems to control the SS-N-14 missiles, Pop Group radars for the SA-N-4 missiles, plus Owl Screech radar for the guns, Don Kay, Palm Frond Surface Search Radars, and the usual array of VHF and IFF radio communications systems, and a complete suite of ESMs equipment to detect any sort of electronic noise from a submarine or any other ship.

In Gindin’s mind, and in the minds of Captain Potulniy and most of the other officers, the Storozhevoy epitomizes what a modern navy warship should be. He and his brother Krivaks are the largest ASW ships in the Baltic and provide the last line of defense against any NATO submarine attack on the Rodina.

There may have been better captains in the Soviet navy, but none could have been so proud of his position as was Potulniy. He was assigned to take command while the ship was still under construction in 1973, so he could help supervise the building. He’d been executive officer on the Bditelny, the first of the Krivaks, so he knew how the ship was supposed to be put together. He was only thirty-seven at the time, and although he called all of his officers by their first names, he was generally more preoccupied with the needs of his ship than the needs of his men. He practically lived on the bridge, and while at sea he was always on duty, day and night, leaving the care of his crew to his zampolit, Captain Third Rank Sablin. It was an arrangement that both men felt comfortable with but one that Potulniy would regret for the rest of his life.

The two men couldn’t have been more different. Although they both graduated from the prestigious Frunze Military Academy, which put them on a fast track to command positions, Sablin opted to become a political officer. That in some ways is professional suicide, because zampolits never become ship captains and therefore promotions are few and far between. Also, political officers are generally not liked very much by the officers or the crew. They’re the ones whose job it is not only to force-feed the standard Marxist-Leninist doctrine down everybody’s throats but also to sugarcoat the latest Party orders no matter how stupid they are. The captain is the absolute ruler aboard his ship, while the political officer is the Party hack. Every sailor must attend political classes every two weeks. Normally the zampolit supplies the lesson materials and the officers teach the sailors in their sections.

On the one hand the captain should be close to his crew, know their names and backgrounds, know who can be trusted to come through in a tight situation and who will probably fold. After all, the safety of the ship depends on his men. On the other hand, the zampolit is just the guy who dishes out the propaganda that no one ever wants to hear.

But the situation on the Storozhevoy, this crisp November day in Riga, is different. Potulniy really does seem to care more about his ship than he does about his officers and men. He is an aloof man who goes strictly by the book. He is young, and he has a lot to prove. Being the captain of an ASW ship is just the start; it’s a stepping-stone to much bigger and better things. But Sablin is everybody’s friend—officer, midshipman, and ordinary sailor alike. He takes time to talk to the men, find out about their towns and their families, about their fears and ambitions. He’s not afraid to talk about a sailor’s dreams and what they might mean or help a sailor figure out his love life, or lack of love life. Sablin is there to be a friend and to act as the father figure, a role that the captain should be playing. But the zampolit is kind to the other officers as well, offering to take over their political classes when they are too tired or bored. And he’s always cheerful, always ready with a pat on the back, ready to lend a hand, and always genuinely interested in what a man’s job is and how he does it.

Like this morning at breakfast.

Gindin has some vague premonitions this morning, but he does not connect them to the captain or to Sablin or to the marked differences between the two officers. He just has this unsettling feeling of unrest, and he thinks that most everyone else aboard feels the same way to one degree or another. But he can’t put his finger on it.

When he tried to talk to Potulniy about his fears a couple hours ago, the captain dismissed him out of hand.

“Stick to your duties, Boris,” the captain said. “Do your job correctly, supervise your crew, make sure that they’re physically and mentally fit, and everything else will take care of itself.”

It’s as if the captain is so distant from his crew that he doesn’t know what’s really going on aboard his own ship. But that’s not true, either.

They were on their way down to Cuba, and Gindin, like every other officer aboard, did normal duty rotations, which were four hours on, four hours on standby, and four hours off. The rotations were changed each month, so you didn’t always get the same shifts.

On this night, Gindin had the midnight to 4:00 A.M. rotation with two gas turbine specialists, two motor/diesel men, one steam/fuel sailor, and one electrician. These were all young kids, and with nothing much happening on the graveyard shift and their last meal at nine in the evening, they would get hungry. And as stomachs growl, ingenuity increases.

Gindin’s crew wants to know if he’d like something to eat. Of course he says yes, and he’s led aft to the machinery room, where two of the gas turbine engines are turning over. Somehow the men have gotten some potatoes from the galley, some oil, and a frying pan. Each turbine develops a hot spot on its upper casing and they are using one of them to fry up the potatoes. Gindin knows he’s supposed to put a stop to this business, and his sailors know it, too. They’re all standing there, looking at him expectantly, waiting for the shoe to drop, but the smell of the frying potatoes is almost too much to bear.

Anyway, Gindin is not much older than his men, it’s the middle of the night, there is no safety issue to worry about, the engines are running normally and he’s hungry, too. So he says, “Sure,” and the meal is nothing short of fantastic, almost as good as the kinds of snacks he’d had with his dad, picking mushrooms in the woods.

A couple of days later Gindin is called up to the bridge. “We have a small problem, Boris,” the captain starts out pleasantly enough, but Gindin’s stomach does a slow roll. He has a pretty good idea what’s coming next. The cook has been complaining to Potulniy that potatoes keep disappearing and he doesn’t know where. Every night Gindin’s inventive sailors sneak up to the pantry area where the potatoes are kept under lock and key. These are the engineering crew, so it’s no trouble for them to break into the locked boxes, steal some potatoes, and then fix the locks so no one can tell what’s happened.

The only bad luck was that the captain was wandering around the ship in the middle of the night and passing the machinery room smelled the frying potatoes.

“They’re young boys and they were hungry,” Gindin admits. “And I had some, too, sir.”

Potulniy barely smiles. “It will not happen again, Boris. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, Captain,” Gindin replies.

So the captain was aware of what was going on aboard his ship, but the difference between him and Sablin was that the zampolit would have understood and probably would have joined the men for an early-morning snack of fried potatoes if for no other reason than to find out how the crew was doing.

But there’s something about Russians that’s fairly well universal, if not practically eternal: They’re usually more complicated than they seem at first glance. Certainly after four and a half centuries of hardships and deaths, naval officers may be the most complex of Russians. All along they’ve had to balance their jobs of protecting the Rodina, whether it be from Turkey or Sweden or Germany or the United States and NATO, with protecting themselves from their own government, whether it be run by a tsar or a Communist Party Secretary.

Potulniy is no exception. On the one hand, he is aloof from his men, while on the other, he understands they are all his responsiblity. The Storozhevoy, his ship, includes his men, and he’ll never blame his crew for his own mistakes.

It was 1974 when the Storozhevoy was ordered out of his base at Baltiysk for a short training cruise of just a few hours. It was a fairly common occurrence between deployments, mostly to maintain crew efficiency and check on repairs and new equipment. The Storozhevoy is fitted with four gas turbine engines. Two of them, called marching engines, produce 18,000 horsepower and are used for normal cruising. The other two are boost engines developing 36,000 horsepower and are used for battle conditions when more speed is needed.

One of the boost engines was down, and the mechanical crew was having trouble finding the problem. At the time, Captain Lieutenant Alexander Ivanov was in control of all BCH-5, but the engines were Gindin’s responsiblity. Ivanov reported the downed gas turbine to Potulniy and, according to regulations, to the assistant division commander on shore, who gave the go-ahead for the brief mission anyway.

The shakedown cruise goes without a hitch until they head back and are about fifteen minutes from the dock, when both marching engines break down and neither will restart.

It’s Gindin’s rotation and as the ship loses control he reports the situation to the captain, who orders the anchor to be immediately lowered. They are in the narrow cut leading to the base, and the wind is shoving them toward the land. When the anchor bites, the Storozhevoy turns broadside, completely blocking the ship channel.

Gindin starts the boost turbine, which is the only operational engine left, so that they will have power, and he and his crew attack the problem with the stalled marching engines. Twenty minutes later they get one of the engines started, and shortly after that the second, which puts them where they began—with two marching engines but with only one boost turbine.

He radios Potulniy on the bridge. “Captain, I have the two marching engines on line again.”

“What about the boost engines?” Potulniy demands, and Gindin can hear the strain in his voice.

“Only one of them is working. The other one is still down.”

“How soon will it be operational, Boris?”

“I don’t know,” Gindin has to admit.

In this instant Potulniy’s career is on the line. The Soviet navy high command is not forgiving of its officers who make embarrassing mistakes. Of course the problem with the boost engine could be blamed on the gas turbine crew, and the problem returning home from the short cruise could be blamed on the assistant division officer. In any navy it’s called covering your ass, prekrit cvoju zadnicu, and Russian ship captains know how it’s done.

But right now Potulniy is faced with staying where he is and blocking the narrow ship channel or getting under way in the hopes that the marching engines won’t quit again.

He opts to stay put and call for the gas turbine manufacturer’s rep on base to be brought out to the ship to fix the problem. It takes the expert all night to resolve the issue, and in the morning the Storozhevoy makes his way into base with all his engines up and running. And there were no repercussions from Division Headquarters. In this instance Potulniy acted as a man of steel, taking complete responsibility for everything and everyone aboard his ship.

Yet six months later, on their cruise to Cuba, Potulniy shows a completely different side. More a man of cotton than steel, Gindin thinks. The Cubans expect a representative from the ship. This is a social occasion with everyone in dress uniforms, and it’s a holiday—International Women’s Day—and on the list of dignitaries the Russian representative will have to meet is the wife of Fidel Castro, the wife of the commander of the Cuban Fleet, and the wife of the minister of defense. It’s a big job, one that the captain should take responsibility for. But this time Potulniy shrugs it off. Maybe he’s too shy.

He calls Gindin up to the bridge first thing in the morning after exercises and breakfast. “I have a big job for you, Boris,” he says. “An important one, representing our ship.”

“Sir?”

“Take it easy; you’ll do just fine,” Potulniy assures a totally mystified Gindin. “The Cuban government is sending a car for you at eleven hundred sharp. Dress in your holiday uniform and get something to take to the ladies.”

By now Gindin’s palms are cold and sweaty and his heart rate is up. Fixing a ship in mid-ocean after a collision is one thing, but what the captain is asking him to do now is downright nerve-racking. “Something for the ladies, sir?”

Potulniy waves it aside. “Go see our zampolit; he’ll know what you should bring.”

Gindin wants to ask the captain why Sablin shouldn’t be the one to go, but by now Potulniy has turned away to deal with some minor problem with his ship. Who knows? Maybe the captain’s palms are even wetter than Gindin’s. And maybe the captain figures that Gindin isn’t shy and his easygoing, social personality makes him the best man aboard ship for the job.

Of course Sablin knows exactly what to do, and when the car comes for Gindin at precisely 11:00 A.M. he’s carrying flowers for the wives, as well as Russian nesting dolls, chocolates, Russian champagne, and vodka.

It was ninety-eight in the shade that day, the car was not air-conditioned, and although Gindin does not have to wear a uniform coat he does have to wear a tie with his white shirt and a jacket showing the three stars of his rank, black trousers, and a cap with gold embroidery. And he’s a Russian. What does he know about this kind of weather? Besides that, he’s very nervous and the translator, sent along to make sure he pronounces names correctly, is relentless.

Their first stop is the villa of Castro himself. He’s not at home, but his wife, Dalia Soto del Ualle Castro, greets them at the door with a big smile. She is young and beautiful and charming, and Gindin is speechless at first.

The Cuban translator smooths over the first few minutes until Dalia Castro offers them something to drink. Turns out she doesn’t care for wine, she only drinks straight whiskey or rum, and the only food she serves is some nuts and crackers on a tray. With the translator’s help, Gindin and Mrs. Castro chat about Russia and Cuba and their warm relations and even about Gindin’s family, all the while drinking straight whiskey. By the end of the visit, Dalia Castro is inviting Gindin to stay with her and her husband in the big house the next time he comes to Cuba.

“We have plenty of room for you. You’ll see.”

Gindin remembers later that he felt as if he were in some kind of a wonderland. He’d never seen such a magnificent place in his life, beautifully furnished and decorated with impeccable landscaping; flowers, trees, lawns, everything so perfect.

His next two stops are at the houses of the commander of the Cuban fleet and the minister of defense. The husbands were gone, but the wives give Gindin and his translator the same warm welcome that Castro’s wife had given them. And, like Dalia Castro, they drank only straight whiskey or rum. Gindin is given a few shots at each house, to celebrate the holiday, and how can a mere senior lieutenant refuse such offers?

After Gindin has handed out the gifts and visited the three wives and drunk their whiskey, it’s about three in the afternoon before he gets back to the ship. The translator, who was drinking shots right along with Gindin and is half-drunk by now, grins and says the trip was a smash hit, Gindin is a swell Russian, and the translator hopes he will come again soon.

When Gindin makes his way up to the bridge to report to the captain, he is about ready to go to bed, which is just what Potulniy suggests. Later, in the sober light of day, Gindin realizes that maybe the captain hadn’t been shy after all. Maybe he knew what was in store for the officer who visited the important wives, and if someone were to drink a little too much and make a fool of himself, it would be better if it were a junior officer rather than the captain.

But that afternoon is just a memory now, as Gindin heads back to his cabin to write a letter to his mother. He’s also getting flashbacks from his father’s funeral. The entire workforce of the factory where Iosif worked showed up to pay their last respects, telling Boris and his mother how much they respected and would miss their friend. Boris desperately wants to be with his family today—even more so today than other days, for some reason—so he hopes that the letter will put his mind at ease. In any event, they will head to the shipyard tomorrow and after that it’ll only be a couple of weeks until he is on leave with his family.

Or so he thinks.