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

14. DOUBLESPEAK

Russians have been ruled by lousy systems for most of their history. The tsars with their absolute authority listened to no one but their own caste of nobility. After all, they had God on their side. Who was in the kulaks’ corner? Indeed, what could a rabble of uneducated farmers or street sweepers or factory workers or even merchants understand about governing a country as vast as Russia? That arrogance cost the tsars their nation when in February of 1917 Nicholas II abdicated his power because he refused to take Russia out of the war with the Germans and his loyal subjects objected. Loudly.

The nobility tried to hold on when Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich and then Aleksandr Kerensky formed a provisional government, but neither of them pulled Russia out of the ruinous war, nor would they change the system that denied the peasant-farmers ownership of their own land. This was a dumb move by Moscow, because the peasants constituted 80 percent of the population.

Adding to Yevgenyevich’s and Kerensky’s woes were the Russian intellectuals as a class who disagreed with nearly everything. Poverty was rampant; most of the population was hungry most of the time. The generals and admirals were on the verge of a junta. And mutinies and desertions were widespread, especially among the soldiers and sailors who’d been drafted into the service. When they got back to their hometowns, they gave their weapons to the angry Socialist factory workers who were ready to move on the government.

One faction of these new revolutionaries, who called themselves the Bolsheviks, which was just another word for the most radical of the Socialists, came up with a slogan—Land, peace, and bread—and the concept of a system of what they called soviets that ignited the entire country into an all-out civil war.

A soviet was a council of delegates elected by factory workers or employees of other businesses. The soviets had no official status in the provisional government at that time, but theirs were the voices of the people, and Moscow did listen as best it could. Actually, it was a more up close and personal form of democracy than existed in the United States.

But once the October Revolution was over with and the government had been toppled and a constitution had been drafted, all the soviets across the country got organized and started reporting to what was called the Supreme Soviet in Moscow. It was the highest legislative body in the country, akin to the Congress in Washington. The highest executive branch of the new government was the Politburo. And the first leader of the new Soviet Union was none other than Vladimir Lenin, who was the Bolshevik leader of the Communist Party.

Lenin’s first act was to withdraw from WWI, turning over most of Belarus and Ukraine to Germany.

But his second, even more important, task was to fight a civil war that threatened to unravel everything that the soviet system had accomplished and destroy the country. But at least they had the peasants, the workers, and the conscript soldiers and sailors behind them.

This is where the hard feelings against the Western powers, especially the United States, got a start.

The supporters of the tsars and the old regime formed a resistance army called the Whites to fight against the Communists, called the Reds. Had it merely remained an internal struggle it’s possible that the Cold War would never have occurred. But a coalition of allies led by the United Kingdom, France, and mostly the United States, attempted to invade the new Russia to put down the Communists and restore the old royal regime to power.

It didn’t work, of course, though it took the Reds until 1922 to prevail. And besides the future Cold War, it spawned a whole new way of thinking about governing a people.

Before the revolution, Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued that it would take a tight-knit and secretive organization to overthrow the government. And, they argued, because of the civil war aided by Western powers it was going to take the same sort of tight-knit, secretive organization to run the government. Lenin and his pals saw such a government as their only way out. After all, the three most powerful nations on earth were lined up against the Communists.

But Lenin went a step further by doing something no one in the West could fully understand or appreciate. To begin with, he banned all other factions or political parties. The new Soviet Union was to be a one-trick pony. Most important, he argued that the Party should consist of an elite, highly trained cadre of professional and dedicated revolutionaries who would be willing to devote their lives to the cause.

Only Party activists were put in charge of the bureaucracy, factories, hospitals, food suppliers, universities, and the military.

Loyalty and iron discipline were the new watchwords. It was called the nomenklatura system. It was the standard practice, if not the law of the land, in full force that early November 1975 in Riga.

This was supposed to be Russia’s answer to democracy. The elections started at the bottom and worked up, but the orders and policy decisions started at the top and worked their way down. Before long it became tantamount to treason to question the top-down orders. And in order to protect the elite from challenge by the majority of the population, who were, after all, only kulaks, to rule meant you had to be a member of the Party. And in order to be a member of the Party you were required to take special courses, attend special political indoctrination camps and schools, pass a series of tough exams, and finally be nominated by three members of the Party who were in good standing.

It soon became an elite club. If you weren’t a member of the Communist Party you were one of the little people. And little people got nothing!

Actually, it was even more complicated than that, as most things usually are. The revolution began in October 1917, and two months later the Bolsheviks created what was called the Cheka, or secret police, which several years later finally changed its name, if not its method of operations, to the KGB. The Cheka’s first task was to ferret out the counterrevolutionaries and kick them out of the Party or bring them to trial. Less than one year later the secret police was charged with targeting all the old tsarists, plus any party or person opposing the revolution, including the Cossacks, who’d been around a lot longer than the Communists.

The first spymaster, Felix Dzerzhinsky, for whom a square was named in downtown Moscow, called what he was doing the Red Terror:

“We represent in ourselves organized terror. This must be said very clearly. Such terror is now very necessary in the conditions we are living through in a time of revolution.”

Which was a very understandable sentiment at such a difficult time in a new government’s existence. Except that after the revolution was over with and after the civil war had been waged and won, the Cheka and its descendant organizations never changed their tune. From December 1917 until this early evening aboard the Storozhevoy it was operations as usual.

Although technically Russia didn’t become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until the end of 1922, when Belarus and Ukraine joined the main body of Lenin’s Moscow government, by then the first serious seeds of discontent were already beginning to be sown, starting with the navy.

More than one year earlier, in March 1921, a group of sailor conscripts in Kronshtadt, the same guys who had initially supported the Bolsheviks, went on strike against the new regime. It took no less than Leon Trotsky to lead a unit of the Red Army across the frozen Baltic to put down the rebellion. The handwriting was on the wall. The people, mostly peasants, were dissatisfied with their government that was supposed to represent them. Lenin, almost always a savvy Bolshevik, instituted a new policy according to which small businesses could be privately owned, and he eased up on the restrictions against some political activities. The average citizen could then criticize the government, on occasion, and farmers could also market their own produce.

Immediately social unrest dropped off and farmers prospered.

Because peasants had more money, they could purchase manufactured goods. Factories increased production; factory workers bought more food. The Soviet Union, for a time, became the largest producer of grain on the planet, outstripping even the United States.

When Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky’s Left Opposition condemned the new economic policies for inflating currency, displacing workers, and enriching the upper classes.

Soviet history then took an almost surreal turn. Trotsky and his supporters wanted to end economic freedoms. Nikolay Bukharin’s faction favored the status quo. Stalin played them all, first supporting Trotsky to get rid of Bukharin. Stalin then helped the Soviet moderates who sought to jettison Trotsky.

By 1927 Stalin was Lenin’s heir apparent, even though Lenin had written that he was “rude, intolerant, and capricious” and should never be given power. Stalin told the Communist Party Congress that the world’s capitalists were encircling them. Soviet industry alone could ensure the Rodina’s survival. They were fifty to one hundred years behind Western Europe and the United States.

Stalin created a new bureaucracy called Gosplan, the State Committee for Planning, which would guide the Soviet Union’s economic development—especially its industrialization.

Stalin’s bloody and brutal five-year plans dragged the Soviet Union into the twentieth century, transforming an agricultural basket case into a military-industrial giant.

Modernization came at an extremely heavy price. During the first five-year plan, miners and factory workers were forced to put in sixteen- to eighteen-hour workdays or face charges of treason. Most estimates put the death toll at more than 130,000 workers in the first years, a number that doesn’t include forced-labor deaths in the gulags. In the twenty-seven years from 1927 to 1954 when Gosplan was in charge, nearly 4 million workers were sent to prisons or gulags for crimes against the revolution. Of those more than a half million were executed and another half million or so were kicked out of the country. That’s not counting the estimated 22 million Russians killed during WWII, or about the same number of peasants killed, their deaths also bringing the Soviet Union into the twentieth century. All in all, nearly 50 million people were killed in the Soviet Union in its first fifty years of existence.

By some accounts those numbers are conservative, some of them by a large factor. But what all historians agree on is that a great many people died.

Under collectivism agricultural production plummeted. Widespread famine and starvation led to cannibalism, which led to a general spiritual malaise. Moscow said things were looking up, and the population tightened its collective belt. Moscow said the new Soviets lived longer and were more prosperous than any other people on earth, and the population carried their dead to the cemeteries with heads held low. Moscow said true happiness and prosperity were just around the corner, and people like Gindin’s family planted gardens and hunted mushrooms in the woods so that they could eke out a bare existence.

It was called doublespeak, a term invented by George Orwell in his novel 1984 but one that most Russins understood at least on a visceral level.

For their whole lives the Soviet system had concealed the truth from its citizens—from people like Gindin and Captain Potulniy. Had it not been for Zampolit Sablin, both men might have lived out their lives ignoring the brutal, remorseless, and relentless lies they had been systematically fed.

After Sablin’s revolt, however, they would never be so naive again When Gindin and his fellow officers contemplated the white and black backgammon pieces that Sablin had placed in front of them, they were looking down the barrel of nearly sixty years of doublespeak, even though they weren’t completely aware of why. But they were afraid. At this point they knew there was no going back for any of them.

15. THE CAPTAIN AND THE ENGINEER

Being on rotation aboard the Storozhevoy or just about any other warship in the Soviet navy means spending six months at sea. Usually in neutral waters such as the Mediterranean or the open Atlantic. But the real problem is that warships from just about every other interested nation are out there, too. French ships, Italian ships, Dutch ships, German ships, and of course U.S. naval vessels, the enemy.

The officers and crew aboard all these warships conduct day-today training just about the whole time they’re out there. It means everyone is usually busy. Sometimes even too busy to really notice what’s going on, because in addition to the training, the biggest job assigned to each warship is to spy on all the other warships. It’s a very important and potentially very deadly game. But for each of these countries’ navies what’s ultimately at stake is the very safety of their own nations.

In 1975 the Soviet Union and United States are lined up against each other for domination of the entire world, against the threat of global thermonuclear war. For the first time in history two nations have, between them, the absolute ability to destroy all life as we know it on the entire planet.

The United States has allied with it the countries of NATO, among others. And the Soviet Union has as its partners the Warsaw Pact, mostly Eastern European satellite nations under the Soviet sphere of influence.

But for guys like Captain Potulniy and his officers, including Boris Gindin, the Cold War is more than just a philosophical issue. Out in the Med or the Atlantic the Cold War is a real thing, up close and personal.

It’s early April 1974; the Storozhevoy is on rotation in the mid-Atlantic. It’s stormy weather with high winds, low clouds scudding across the sky horizon to horizon, and monstrous seas. Gindin is in the mechanical spaces when Potulniy gets on the radio from the bridge.

“Boris, I need more speed,” the captain orders. There is a strain in his voice. “More RPMs, Boris.”

Boris follows the captain’s orders, naturally, and increases the RPMs on all four power plants: the two marching engines and the two boost engines. The Storozhevoy shivers, as if he’s a racehorse given the green light to stretch his legs, and takes off.

Twenty minutes later Potulniy is back on the comms: “Boris, more speed! Increase RPMs.”

Boris does this. Whatever is happening on the bridge must be very urgent, because the gas turbines are putting out just about as much power as they are capable of producing. The gauges are nearly redlined.

Five minutes later Potulniy is back. “I need more speed.”

“I cannot do that, Captain,” Boris radios back. “The engines will be damaged.”

“What do you mean?” Potulniy shouts. “Do as you’re told!”

Boris is in a tight spot. He is between a rock and a hard place. He either disobeys a direct order or damages his engines. He radios Potulniy. “Captain, may I speak to you in private?”

After a beat, the captain is back. “Come to the bridge.”

Topsides, Gindin sees that the chaotic seas are nothing short of monstrous. Close to their starboard beam is a German naval destroyer. So close that Gindin can actually see the officers on the bridge staring back at them. The German ship means to crowd the Storozhevoy, just to show that Germans won’t take any shit from Russians. This is what Potulniy has been faced with. He needs as much speed as possible in order to outmaneuver the Germans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. THE ZAMPOLIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17. MOVING ASHORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. BUILDING THE STOROZHEVOY

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

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

Sablin is approachable, friendly, cracks jokes, even smiles. But he is the zampolit, and he believes in the Party line and does his job well, so the officers and sailors must still attend political indoctrination classes, but somehow with Sablin the mumbo jumbo isn’t quite as boring. Things start to look up.

The officers and crew lived in housing outside of Kaliningrad, about twenty minutes by tram from the shipyards and thirty from downtown.

It wasn’t a very large area, and it was protected by a tall fence. Guards were stationed around the clock at the front gate, and anyone wanting to get inside had to show his papers. In the middle of the compound was a three-story redbrick building that housed all two hundred of the officers and men, plus some classrooms where everyone took their political training, just like aboard ship.

The place was something like a cross between the ship and a military jail, although there was a small general store where you could buy a few things if you had the money. Canned food, candy, cookies, milk, cigarettes. The store also sold navy uniforms and insignia, so everyone was expected to look his best at all times. They had a basketball court to use in their spare time, whenever there was spare time, and a park where they could relax.

Captain Potulniy, his zampolit, and his starpom, the three senior officers, had rooms of their own. The other officers all bunked in the same room, and the rest of the crew lived in one big cubrick.

When a ship was built in the yard, his crew was assembled from throughout the fleet and was housed in this compound until it was time to move aboard. Then, when the next ship started construction, the new crew would take over the redbrick building until it was their time to move aboard their ship.

Gindin’s typical routine during these months was morning exercise and breakfast, political training, and then down to the ship with the sailors in his section. There he would continue their training while overseeing the installation of his gas turbines, diesels, and other mechanical equipment. They ate lunch at the compound and then in the afternoon would return from the ship for more training and dinner.

Gindin was off duty the evening of every third day, which meant he could take the tram into the city and perhaps see a movie or eat at a nice restaurant. In his estimation Kaliningrad wasn’t much of a city, plain and a little drab compared to his hometown of Pushkin with its trees and flowers and parks and palaces, but it was better than the compound.

The shipyard, which was also surrounded by a fence and patrolled by guards, was like a small city of long one-story buildings, called cekhs, in which were produced the equipment and parts that went into building a warship.

Hundreds of machinists, welders, lathe operators, and engineers worked around the clock, six days per week. The pace always seemed alive, even frantic, and very messy, with noise and smoke. The entire shipyard smelled like a combination of seawater, oil, gasoline, paint, and rancid grease, but inside each cekh the overriding smell almost always seemed to be that of sweat.

Building a ship was a long, hot, very hard job, done by men and women, who in those days weren’t very keen on bathing regularly. Nor did Moscow care. Ships needed to be produced as fast as humanly possible to defend against the enemies of the Soviet Union.

Inventory depots of spare parts that had been manufactured elsewhere were contained in two- and three-story buildings scattered throughout the shipyard. And there were two buildings, both of them three stories tall, that housed the medical staff, a complete dispensary, and a hospital. Building ships at the pace Moscow wanted them built was not only a difficult business; it was also a risky business.

Railroad sidings crisscrossed the entire yard where not only warships were being constructed but also civilian ships such as tankers and transport ships of every kind were built or repaired. Six long piers stretched out to deep water at Yantar Zavod, and each could accommodate two or three ships at the same time.

The shipyard was a busy place.

“I was very excited to be doing my job,” Gindin recalls. “To me it was one of the most prestigious jobs an officer could have. I was part of a great experience. I was part of not only building the Storozhevoy from the keel up; I was on the first crew that would take him to sea.

“We were giving birth to our ship. We had a feeling of pride, excitement, contentment, and a sense of accomplishment.”

Even after the mutiny and its consequences, Gindin will consider these months at Yantar Zavod the most satisfying, gratifying times of his life. A period, in fact, that he would live over again without a moment’s hesitation. Powerful stuff for a kid in his early twenties. A Russian Jew from Pushkin.

Finally it’s time for the officers and sailors to move from the compound to the ship. They’ll be living aboard, even as work is still being done, but now just about everyone is happy and in good spirits. They are the crew who are building this ship, and they are the crew who are the first to sleep and eat and work in the compartments, and they are the crew who will take him to sea for his trials, and they are the crew who will sail on his first rotation.

Painting still needs to be finished, and trim work needs to be completed, though on Soviet warships there is very little of that sort of nonutilitarian nonsense. Adjustments need to be made on every single system aboard; that includes all the electrical wiring and equipment, all the weapons systems, all the electronics, all the plumbing and fuel tanks and piping, and the four main gas turbine engines as well as the small diesel engines that provide electrical power. The cabins and galleys and mess halls and cubricks and the bridge all need finishing. When that’s done, the ship is sailed to his base at Baltisk where the missiles and mines and ammunition for the guns need to be loaded aboard so that during sea trials all the weapons systems can be tested.

It’s this mix of civilian shipbuilders and navy crew aboard at the same time, working around the clock to finish the ship and take him to sea, that creates some moments of frustration but other moments of sometimes black humor.

Nikolai Lisenko, who is the civilian manager for all the painting jobs on the Storozhevoy, needs Boris’s signature certifying that work done in the machinery spaces has been finished to strict military specifications.

Fifteen huge fuel tanks hold 175,000 gallons of diesel oil low in the hull, divided port and starboard. They supply the fuel for the four big gas turbines and for the diesel auxiliary engines. Gas turbines and diesel engines do not run if the fuel is dirty. That means that the insides of the big tanks need to be painted thoroughly. No spot can be missed, and that includes dozens of small connectors, valves, and piping through which the fuel is distributed.

Lisenko comes to Boris to report that the tanks and piping have been painted. He wants the lieutenant’s signature on the compliance certificate.

It’s what Boris has been waiting for, because he watched the entire process. Lisenko hired women to climb through the access hatches and do the painting. But the women Boris saw doing the work were big, heavy boned, even fat. There is no way that they could have done a good job. They don’t have the agility.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t sign the certificate,” Boris says.

Lisenko’s face falls. He wants to argue, but Boris is firm.

“There is one condition, however,” Boris tells the supervisor.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“I need paint.”

Lisenko is to deliver to the ship three barrels of fresh paint and a very large bag of new, clean brushes. Boris will have his own sailors finish the job.

Within the hour the paint and brushes are delivered and Boris signs the certificate. How Lisenko will explain the missing supplies is his own business, but Boris is certain that his engines will get clean fuel.

About two weeks later Lisenko is back for another signature. His crew has finished painting the bulkheads and decks in the machinery spaces. Boris is doing some paperwork in his cabin when Lisenko shows up. The man is in his forties, short, stocky, always moving fast, his eyes shifting. He tries to smile, but it never looks sincere. His blue coveralls don’t fit, his hair is always a mess, and he’s usually spattered with paint.

“How are you, Boris?” he says. He has a small, round face and beady eyes. He’s clutching some papers in his hand. “We’re finished painting your spaces. Is everything okay? I’d like you to sign—”

Boris cuts him off. “You must be kidding? Do you see my cabin?”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Lisenko says. He’s looking around Boris’s cabin, trying to figure out what he’s missing. But so far as he can see, the paintwork looks pretty good.

“Well, let me explain something to you, Nikolai. I’ll be going out to sea on a six-month rotation. But you already know this.”

Lisenko nods. “Da, I’m aware.”

“I don’t know how it’ll be possible for me to relax in here on my off-duty hours. I have no place to put my shoes, for instance. Not even a drawer. And my bed is damned uncomfortable. It would be so much better if I had a nice sofa with a good mattress. It would make my life defending the Rodina so much easier to bear.”

Lisenko’s smile is suddenly genuine. “I don’t think that will be a problem, Boris,” he says. “Could you please leave your cabin and come back in… let’s say two hours?”

Boris grabs the papers that he’s been working on and heads up to the officers’ dining hall. When he returns to his cabin two hours later, a drawer has been installed for his shoes and sitting against the wall is a very comfortable-looking sofa.

Lisenko hands the compliance papers to Boris, who signs them, and leaves. It’s another of the systems in the Soviet navy that work.

A few days later Potulniy happens to walk past Boris’s cabin and knocks on the door. Potulniy wants to discuss the progress that has been made aligning the main gas turbine engines. He notices the changes immediately.

“Very nice, Boris,” he says.

“Thank you, sir,” Boris replies, wondering what’ll happen next. What he has done is not strictly by the book, and the captain has a reputation for following Soviet naval regulations pretty closely.

“You seem very cozy in here. Not bad for a senior lieutenant. I guess if I were to ask you how you got this sofa in your cabin it would sound silly, so I won’t ask.”

“Yes, sir,” Boris says. He’s not even going to try to explain.

“It looks like only you and I among all the officers got sofas.” Potulniy smiles.

He knows that Boris has been putting in some very long hours getting the work done belowdecks, and he’s guessed that Boris has made some good connections with the contractors, which means the jobs that Boris oversaw have been done right. Potulniy decides to cut his senior lieutenant some slack.

The captain smiles again. “Good work.”

19. WARSHIP

It’s five months now that Boris has been aboard ship. He is an engineer by education at the academy, but perhaps even more important, he is an engineer by birth. He loved and respected his father, who was an engineer. Some things run deep in a man’s blood. Especially a Russian man’s. Which translates to mean that Senior Lieutenant Gindin knows the machinery and machinery spaces aboard this ship better than anyone else aboard, except perhaps for Potulniy, the precise captain. In fact, that’s one of the reasons both men have a building respect for each other.

Make no mistake, this is the captain’s ship, no matter how Gindin already feels about him. So when it it’s time to send the Storozhevoy down the ways, launch him into the water, it is Potulniy’s wife, Nadezhda, who is given the honor of breaking the bottle of champagne against the bow.

The entire crew is gathered on the dock, along with the shipyard workers and managers, plus a lot of navy dignitaries. It’s a crisp late-fall day, with a sharp blue sky and fast-moving white clouds. A fairly good breeze is kicking up small whitecaps in the harbor, and everyone is in high spirits. The Storozhevoy not only looks like a deadly Soviet warship of the line, but also is beautiful, with graceful lines and a design that U.S. Navy analysts would later call “neat, workmanlike, and elegant.” He bristles with weapons systems, rocket launchers, torpedo tubes, deadly-looking guns, rotating radar antennas, and dozens of systems that many of the visitors can only guess and marvel at.

“It was the true moment of the Storozhevoy’s birth,” Gindin recalls. “We felt like parents about to see their first kid taking its first steps. I was new, but still I sensed that I was a part of what would be a significant event in my life. I was very proud of my ship and my crew, that we were going to be serving in this state-of-the-art vessel.”

The port side of the ship rises sharply above the crowds. Nadezhda climbs four steps up to a wooden platform that puts her within swinging distance of the sharply flaring bow, her husband at her elbow to make sure she doesn’t trip and fall, and some admiral and his aide next to them.

Potulniy hands his wife the bottle of champagne that is suspended by a thin rope from a truss above the platform. She is to swing the bottle in an arc so that it will break against the hull. “God bless this ship and all who sail on him,” someone in the crowd is bound to mutter as the bottle breaks.

Nadezhda raises the bottle over her head and swings it as hard as she can toward the Storozhevoy’s bow. The bottle makes its short arc, slams against the thick steel plating of the bow, and bounces off.

All those gathered for the ceremony on the dock heave a collective sigh. Such missteps are not unknown at ship launchings, but Gindin feels goose bumps on his skin.

“I can’t explain,” he remembers. “But something inside of me tightened up. My gut clenched and I felt a terrible uneasiness. It sounds silly, I suppose, but I had the feeling that maybe the Storozhevoy was a cursed ship.”

Not all men who go to sea are superstitious, but most of them are, and sitting in the midshipmen’s dining hall, facing Sablin, Gindin is remembering that launching day on the dock at Yantar Zavod 820 with a certain amount of dread. Maybe he was right after all.

But that day in Kaliningrad there is no time for that kind of a sentiment. Nadezhda Potulniy swings the bottle again and this time it breaks, to everyone’s relief. Once the Storozhevoy is in the water the work gets more intense.

In the first place, the remainder of the crew come to live aboard, which means that in addition to testing, aligning, and adjusting the myriad of systems, the officers—including Gindin—must teach their sailors everything, which includes showing them where and what the equipment is, how it works, and what they need to do to service it. He has to prepare the written instructions for all of those tasks as well, explain where each man’s post is, what his responsibilities are, and what his duties are under every circumstance imaginable.

In addition to getting the ship ready for sea, getting settled in, getting to know one another, the officers must teach their three-hour political indoctrination classes every second Monday, come rain or shine, come commissioning or war.

Four months later they sail the fifty kilometers west-southwest to their base at Baltiysk, where Potulniy assembles his crew on the dock for a brief ceremony with the commander of the Division of Big Antisubmarine Ships, Bolshykh protivolodochnykhn korablejj, Bpk Captain Second Rank Gennadi Zhuravlev. They’re all wearing their holiday uniforms because the Storozhevoy is being formally accepted into the division and readied for the shakedown process that will finally get him prepared for his first rotation. The testing and training become intense. The sooner the ship is certified, the sooner he can put out to sea to help defend the Motherland.

The Storozhevoy spends much of his time tied up at the dock while his systems and his crew are shaken out, but he also puts out to sea in the Baltic, sometimes for just a few hours, sometimes for a few days, no matter the weather. Every single system, down to the last nut and bolt, the last soldered connection, the last paper chart and pair of binoculars, the last set of parallel rulers, must be aboard and must be just right.

Then, finally, the blessed day the crew has been working for arrives. The Storozhevoy is given his final sign-off. His sailing orders. He is ready to put out to sea on his first six-month rotation.

The Storozhevoy is a warship.

20. ENGINEER

When Gindin looks back on his twelve years of service in the Soviet navy it is with a certain amount of nostalgia and pride, even though his career ended badly and even though at its best his career was hard. There was almost continuous training, dealing with recalcitrant sailors, working long hours, no social life, putting up with the political indoctrination. Not very glamorous. In fact, at times Gindin had to wonder what was so good about the life of a Soviet navy officer.

“I always liked mechanics,” Gindin says. “It runs in my blood. I was never afraid to roll up my shirtsleeves and do the dirty jobs. I could work for hours and never notice where the time went. I enjoyed working with my hands. It wasn’t often you’d see people who were happy with their lives. But I was.”

Gindin has a growing love affair with the Storozhevoy from the moment he first lays eyes on him at the shipyard. Each time Gindin steps off the ship and walks away, he has to stop on the dock so that he can turn around and look at the Storozhevoy. Gindin knows everything there is to know about the ship, which makes him love him all the more.

To a true sailor a ship is more than just a collection of nuts and bolts, engines and pumps, wires and gauges, hatches and portholes, ladders and companionways. He is a living, breathing being that, very much like a high-class society woman, needs constant attention. That is perhaps why in most navies a ship is referred to as a she.

The Storozhevoy is in the Atlantic on the way home from his first rotation. In addition to the two marching gas turbines and the two boost engines, there are five much smaller diesel engines aboard that provide electrical power. After nearly six months at sea one of the diesels has broken down, and Gindin has used all the spare parts he’s managed to hoard. The diesel will not run properly, so he shuts it down so that it won’t damage itself beyond repair. If that happens the engine will have to be scrapped and Gindin will have a lot of explaining to do.

He gives his crew strict orders that under no circumstances will they start diesel number three. But there are two problems. The first is that according to regulations these engines have a five-thousand-hour life span before they should be rebuilt or replaced. That’s about one six-month rotation, plus a little safety margin. As with all things Moscow dictates, if a piece of machinery doesn’t live up to its expectations, the factory where it is built will not be found at fault, but the men who’ve been given the thing will be held accountable. The fact that this engine quit before its scheduled time is Gindin’s fault.

His solution is simple. His men will continue to log the engine’s hours in the book as if it were running. That way when they get back to base at Baltiysk diesel number three will have performed up to expectations and can be rebuilt or replaced. This is another system in the Soviet navy that works, despite regulations.

The second problem is Gindin’s sailors. These are the same young boys who steal potatoes so they can have midnight snacks because they’re hungry. The same guys who carry heavy wrenches back and forth so that they can get out of work. The very same kids who won’t get out of bed in the morning because they claim their fathers are alcoholics. They’re country bumpkins, muzhiks, and prostofiljas, but they are as curious and inventive when the need arises as they are usually bored. Just about every minute of every hour of every day and night of their lives is scheduled for them. They have to do something or they’ll go crazy. It’s called ispytyvat’ sud’bu, or, testing fate, pushing the envelope, just to see what happens.

It’s early afternoon of a lovely day. Gindin has gone up to his cabin to get a technical book when Igor Sheskin, one of his sailors, comes rushing up the companionway, all out of breath and red faced, screaming something about diesel number three.

Gindin jumps off his chair. “What are you talking about?” he demands.

“We can’t stop it!” Sheskin shouts. “It’s gone crazy!” He’s a blond kid with broad shoulders, one of Gindin’s best men. Sheskin is one of those born mechanics, a guy who knows how to use his hands.

There’s no time to ask questions. Gindin slams past the sailor and races headlong down the passageway and the stairs to the motor room. When he gets there, diesel number three is working like it’s been invaded by an evil spirit. It’s shaking nearly off its motor mounts, making crazy noises, belching smoke, and the RPMs are steadily increasing. The engine means to tear itself to pieces, and when it blows it will be like a bomb sending a spray of hot oil and jagged metal pieces in all directions. The motor room will be destroyed, and every wide-eyed sailor in the compartment will be cut to shreds. But none of these boys, not even Sheskin, know what to do.

Gindin has no time to think about the consequences. He rushes up to the engine and hits the EMERGENCY STOP button, with absolutely no effect. Diesel number three has a malevolent mind of its own.

He tries closing down the fuel distribution line, but that has no effect, either. Apparently the engine is siphoning fuel from one of the other distribution lines.

Finally Gindin yanks the handle that controls the air intake line, and almost immediately diesel number three begins to sputter and die, its RPMs slowly coming down and stopping.

The relative silence in the compartment is nearly deafening. Gindin is sure that his sailors can hear his heart slamming against his rib cage as he tries to catch his breath. He wants to tear into these guys. He’d given very specific orders that diesel number three was not to be started for any reason. For just this reason. If the engine had blown apart there would have been a lot of casualties down here, and all of them would have been on his shoulders.

At that moment he feels like slamming his fist in someone’s face. But Gindin is an officer and a gentleman.

Gindin has his sailors line up at attention and demands to know who started diesel number three and why. No one speaks up.

Gindin asks again, and still not one of his sailors speaks up.

Gindin has to go down the line, looking each sailor in the eye as he asks the same questions: “Did you start the engine, and if you did, why?”

Finally Andrey Bazhanov looks down and nods. “I did it,” he says.

Gindin holds himself in check. “I gave orders not to start diesel number three. Why did you disobey?”

“I knew something was wrong with the engine. I just wanted to see how it would work if it was started.”

Gindin reads the sailor the riot act. Bazhanov was young, he was bored, and he wanted to do something, anything, to make his day a little more interesting. They’re all warned that if something like this ever happens again, the guilty sailor will be court-martialed. Probably sent to prison!

Everyone learned a lesson that day. Gindin’s sailors learned that they were to obey orders at all times, and Gindin learned that he has to keep his ear to the ground and his eyes open so that he will know what is going on with his crew and his ship.

Another link has been forged in a chain that binds them together. Gindin does not report the incident to the captain. This hiccup in BCH-5 will stay there, and the sailors appreciate it.

The little incident will come back to pay big benefits at the very end of that same rotation when the Storozhevoy returns to his base at

Baltiysk. According to the engine logs, all five diesels have completed their scheduled life spans. They are to be replaced in the fitting-out process. This job, however, has to be done before Gindin or any of his sailors can go on leave. They’ve been on rotation for six months; everyone just wants to get off the ship, no matter how much they may love him, and go home.

Gindin reports to the assistant division commander who is in charge of all mechanical equipment. Replacing the five diesels should take one month, maybe a week or two more. It’s how long other crews have needed to get the job done.

“So, Senior Lieutenant, you may begin scheduling your crew’s leaves in thirty to forty-five days,” the guy says with a smile. “Good luck.”

Back aboard, Gindin calls a meeting with the six sailors responsible for the diesels to tell them that they can go on leave only after the diesels have been replaced. The sooner the job is finished, the sooner they can go home.

Everyone is eager to get started. This is a very well-motivated bunch of young men.

In order to remove a diesel engine from the ship, all of its supporting systems need to be disconnected, which includes the fuel lines, oil lines, air lines, and electrical cables. Gindin organizes a series of wooden crates in which the parts from each support system, for each diesel, will be labeled and stored after they have been thoroughly cleaned and checked.

Once that job is started, Gindin marches over to the building where the replacement diesels are stored and holds out a bag containing three bottles of spirt, the nearly universal Soviet naval scrip, in front of the depot manager.

“I want my five diesel engines delivered without delay,” Gindin says. “Is this possible?” Usually it takes three to four weeks for a delivery.

The manager grabs the bag and nods enthusiastically. “Lieutenant, if you give me twenty-four hours’ notice, you will have your diesels.”

Seven days later, the old diesels have been completely disconnected, and Gindin calls the depot manager, who is as good as his word. The next day his crew shows up with a lifting crane to remove the old engines and deliver the new ones.

Seven days after that, all the supporting systems have been reconnected and the five new diesels have been run up and checked out.

Gindin reports back to the assistant division commander that the work is done, but the guy doesn’t believe it.

“That’s impossible,” he sputters.

“Please, sir,” Gindin says, smiling. “Stop by yourself and check our work.”

Already Gindin has the reputation at Baltiysk as the young senior lieutenant who is almost always walking around with a grin on his face. The assistant division commander doesn’t have to put up with this kind of shit. “In the first place, Lieutenant, it takes twice that long just to get new diesels delivered, let alone installed.”

The grin on Gindin’s face widens. He can’t help himself. This is fun. “I insist, sir. Come see for yourself.”

The assistant division commander does just that, and he can’t believe his eyes. The five diesels have been installed, and they are running perfectly. Without another word he signs leave papers for Gindin and his sailors and storms off the ship and back to his office, wondering where the hell he went wrong.

21. BALTIYSK

The loyalty of Gindin’s crew is the barrel of still another gun that Gindin is looking down facing Zampolit Sablin in the midshipmen’s dining hall. The Storozhevoy may be his master, but his crew is the ship’s servant and Gindin needs to take care of both in any way he can.

But the situation is more complex than that. It’s not the ship, officers, and crew as separate entities that must work and live together. They’re three legs of a triangle, ship-officers-crew, that function together as a single entity. It’s another of the relationships that most civilians can’t appreciate at the gut level but that anyone who has ever served aboard a warship understands immediately.

At this moment on an early November evening aboard the Storozhevoy, faced with such a monumentally impossible decision, Gindin can perhaps be forgiven if he allows his mind to drift a little. He’s barely treading water in a monstrous ocean. In the troughs all he can see is black water in which he will surely drown. But at the tops of the waves he catches tantalizing glimpses of the base at Baltiysk, near enough to the home of the Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad to be a safe haven.

The fleet, which consists of nearly forty major surface warships, more than three hundred small combat vessels, 150-plus auxiliaries, two dozen submarines, 250 navy aircraft, and the one naval infantry brigade that Admiral Gorshkov promised each unit, is a formidable power. And yet the town of Baltiysk, where the bulk of the fleet put in after each rotation, is not much more than a village that opens to the Gulf of Gdansk and the Baltic.

Gindin recalls that the base was always busy with ships coming and going. While they were in port they were tied alongside four long docks and were connected to the shore by not only the bow and stern and spring lines but also lines and hoses that supplied electricity, potable water, and fuel.

The base always stank of oil and foul bilge water drained overboard. But everyone felt a sense of invincibility here. At sea you were sometimes surrounded by the enemy—American aircraft carriers, Italian submarines, the bastard German destroyer that had tried to crowd them—but at Baltiysk you were home free. Safe.

The main street of the base is tree lined in the summer, pleasant with buffets and little shops where sailors can buy milk and cookies and cigarettes and other homely little things.

And there is soccer competition. Eight ships in the Storozhevoy’s Bpk division have formed a league. They play on a field near the docks, with benches on the sidelines for the fans. Gindin and Firsov are among the men representing their ship, and whenever they play, Potulniy and Sablin and most of the other officers not on duty or away from the ship come down to the field to give their noisy support.

Soccer is the national sport of the navy, if not of all the Soviet Union. The competition is fierce, as such things are among young military men, and in the end tournaments are held to see which ship will get the Bpk division award.

Those are the very best of times that Gindin remembers now. The Storozhevoy’s team is playing a very tight match when one of the midshipmen sprains his ankle. The game is stopped until the injured man can be helped off the field and brought back to the ship and a replacement player put in.

That evening Zampolit Sablin visits the midshipman’s quarters to make sure he’s not in too much pain and to ask if he needs anything. It’s almost surreal at this moment thinking about the incident. But Gindin can’t help himself; he’s fallen into another trough.

Across the street is the security guard at the main gate. Once you clear that point you are free to go into the town, which is right there on the other side of the fence. But it’s tiny, only three restaurants, two movie theaters, and a few stores spread out here and there. Plus the gaubvachta, the military prison, there to remind every man, officer and sailor alike, that the Soviet navy takes its regulations very seriously.

During the winter the chimneys constantly belch wood smoke, which fills the sharp, crisp air. The townspeople mostly stay indoors, so when it’s cold the streets are all but deserted. It feels like life has been halted in mid-step, waiting for the spring to return.

In the summer, however, the streets are filled with wives pushing baby carriages or taking the children to the park to play. Sometimes off-duty officers will go to the park, too, where they will mingle with the children and the locals.

Gindin remembers a town beach that everyone could use, civilians as well as naval personnel. But the only way to get to it was through the base, so everyone had to be cleared at the gate and driven down to the water.

Other than that there was almost nothing for the wives to do while their husbands were away at sea for six months at a stretch. It was only one of many reasons that the divorce rate among young officers was so high.

Nevertheless, thinking about Baltiysk gives Gindin a little warm feeling. The base is safe, the workload there is 10 percent of what it is at sea, and it’s where the Rossia, his favorite restaurant, is located. Food aboard a Soviet warship, even aboard the Storozhevoy and even for an officer, is not very good compared to the meals they can get ashore.

When the ship is at base and Gindin is not on leave, he and the other officers and crew are given a part of one day in four when they can go through the gate into town. The wives of some of the officers live in Baltiysk, and others take the train to the base whenever the Storozhevoy is in port. But for Gindin, who is single, the Rossia is the first place he heads for.

The restaurant is cozy and the lighting is dim and romantic, things that speak to a Russian’s soul. The Rossia is a place where a guy like Gindin can dream about a wife he’s yet to meet. Besides that, the food is fantastic and there’s always entertainment, someone playing a guitar and singing sad Russian folk songs.

Gindin is a regular customer, he tips very well, and he is obviously single. Every waitress in the always-crowded house loves him. There are always lines of people outside waiting to get in. Any spot inside will be fine. But when Gindin shows up, the waitresses scramble to get him a special place right in front of the singers. Even if every table is filled, one of the waitresses will race to the back room, grab one of the spares, and hustle it out to the floor for the lieutenant.

The crowds are usually split eighty-twenty between navy people and civilians. But everyone in Baltiysk serves the navy in one way or another, either in uniform or as a subcontractor or as a waitress in the Rossia. So every night the main topic of conversation in the packed restaurant is the navy. The faster the vodka flows, the faster the stories blossom, and the faster the guys grab any available girls and get up on the dance floor. As the noise level rises, so does the fun.

The Rossia is the place to be in Baltiysk. It has an atmosphere of relaxation and excitement. A secret place only a few hundred meters away from the ship that is light-years away from military duty, discipline, and responsibilities.

“Hey, Boris,” one of the waitresses calls when Gindin finally gets into the restaurant. She is carrying a table across the room, and he threads his way across the packed floor to where she sets it up.

She’s a pretty girl, with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a million-watt smile. She can afford to be extra nice; Boris would make a great catch. She brings him vodka, then herring and fried potatoes, pickles, stew, crusty bread, a quintessentially Russian supper, and he is in seventh heaven.

He has friends in the restaurant, and they have to wonder why he is getting such good service when they may have to wait for a drink or something to eat. But Boris is a regular, he’s an officer, he’s single, and he tips 30 percent.

That night in particular sticks out in Boris’s mind at this moment in the midshipmen’s dining hall, because of the warmth he felt. He was at peace with himself and the world. There were no difficult decisions to be made. No white or black backgammon piece to choose.

The waitress watches him that night, and at one point she comes over and lets him know that she gets off work at one in the morning. She’s interested. She would definitely like to spend some time with him. But it can’t happen. He has to be back aboard ship by midnight.

“Maybe another night,” Boris tells her.

She lowers her eyes in disappointment. “Sure, Boris,” she replies. She looks up and smiles. “May I get you another vodka?”

“Please,” he says.

After she leaves, he spots some friends, who join him for a few hours of fun. They’ve brought a girl, Olya, and everyone dances with her and sings and drinks and has something to eat. It’s not the most perfect night of his life to that point, but it sticks out in his mind right this moment, facing Zampolit Sablin and an absolutely insanely impossible choice.

22. SENIOR LIEUTENANT

Gindin’s thoughts are tumbling over one another now so fast it’s getting difficult to concentrate on any one thing, except for some crazy reason he fixates on how his fellow officers and sailors see him. It’s as if he’s looking at himself through the wrong end of a telescope. He’s way down at the end of the long tunnel, but he can’t make any sense of the details.

He’s always had what he feels is a good relationship with Captain Potulniy and just about everyone else aboard the ship. That includes the cook. But at this moment one incident sticks out in Gindin’s mind. He’s spent two days and nights fixing one of the diesel generators. He’s had little or no time to sleep, nothing substantial to eat, and he’s dead on his feet and hungry enough to eat a bear when he finally gets back to his cabin.

It’s late, well after the dinner hour, when he calls the officers’ galley and asks if the cook could send something up to his cabin.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but dinner is done. All the food has been put away, all the dishes have been washed, and the galley will not be open again until morning.”

“Okay,” Boris says. “I understand.” He goes to bed hungry that night. It’s not the end of the world, but a little something to eat would have been nice.

As it happens, the very next day the cook rushes to Gindin’s cabin. There’s absolutely no water—hot or cold—with which to wash the dishes. “We have to carry all the dishes and all the pots and pans back to the crew’s galley, where they’ve got water,” the cook complains bitterly. “It’s damned hard work, Lieutenant.”

Boris is combing his hair in the mirror and doesn’t even glance over at the cook. “I guess it must be very hard work. But I’m sorry; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The cook knows better. It’s not that Gindin can’t do anything about the water problem—he’s the engineer after all—it’s that he won’t do anything about it.

After that Gindin never has a problem with the galley. If he has to work overtime and misses a meal, the cook personally delivers something good to eat to the senior lieutenant’s cabin, and in turn the galley is never without all the hot and cold running water it needs. Gindin doesn’t think he’s ever abused the system, but sitting now in the midshipmen’s dining hall he can’t be sure.

And yesterday, after the parade, when the entire ship was in a festive mood, Gindin made the rounds of all the machinery spaces to check everything, including the bilge pumps that ensured the Storozhevoy would not sink at his mooring if he were to take on water.

Gindin was in a mixed mood all that day, happy about the parade, proud to be a Soviet naval officer, sad about his father’s death, looking forward to his new job at Zhdanov, and impatient to get on with his life.

It’s possible, he thinks now, that he might have been impatient with his sailors, too. It was a holiday after all, yet he spent nearly two hours going over every single detail. Nothing missed his scrutiny, not a grease fitting that wasn’t cleaned properly, not an engine gauge reading that was off by one tiny decimal point, not a finger smudge in one of the logbooks. Everything had to be exactly correct.

Maybe at the end of a six-month rotation, when all they could think about was getting off the ship and going home to see their families, they felt he was being too tough on them. Maybe they resented his orders. Maybe Fomenko, who couldn’t get out of his bunk because his father was an alcoholic, was hatching some revenge plot.

Afterward Gindin went to lunch with some of the other officers. They talked, he remembers that much now, but he cannot seem to focus. He can’t get a grip in his head. For the life of him he cannot remember one single scrap of conversation at yesterday’s lunch. Not one word of it.

He does remember returning to his cabin to lie down, but Sergey Bogonets knocks on the door. He wants to talk because he’s lonely. They all are. It’s a holiday and they’re missing their families. Sergey talks about his wife and son. She flew down to Baltiysk, but they could only stay a couple of days before they had to fly home. Their leaving put Sergey into a depression and he just wanted a little human contact.

They went out on deck to smoke a cigarette. It was getting dark and cold by then. Only a few people were still out and about to admire the ships. Now that the lights were coming on throughout the town and aboard the fleet, the evening was getting pretty. Even festive.

Gindin does remember thinking that the people of Riga were at home now, behind the brightly lit windows with their families, getting set to celebrate the holiday: “We envied all those lucky strangers.”

He and Bogonets stayed on deck for a long time before they parted. Gindin went back down to the engine room, this time not to inspect but to talk to his sailors. They seemed to be in just as odd a mood as he was, lonely, missing their families, feeling a little strained.

So they start to talk about their lives before they were drafted into the navy. One of them is a big, tall guy from the suburbs near Dnepropetrovsk in south-central Ukraine. He came from a family of farmers and he and his four brothers had to help with the chores. They had chickens, rabbits, and pigs but no refrigerator. In the spring they would slaughter a pig, cut it into small chops and roasts, pack it in salt, and store it in the root cellar, where it would stay cool. One pig would provide enough meat to feed the entire family all winter. When they wanted to have pork for dinner, a cut would be brought from the root cellar the night before and soaked in freshwater to get rid of the salt.

“It was always salty, just the same,” the sailor lamented. But he would have exchanged the Storozhevoy for just one bite of his mother’s cooking, salty or not.

23. THE BIG LIE

The Soviet Union has lied to Gindin as well as it has to Sablin. The only difference is Gindin knows that he personally can’t do a thing about it, while Sablin believes that he can do something to change the system. Not only that, he feels that it’s his sacred duty as a good Communist to do something.

It’s these similar but divergent views that create the problem.

In the academy and then aboard every ship and at every base Gindin has been assigned to he’s had to give political classes to the sailors who report to him. It’s nothing new. It’s a fact of life for every officer in the Soviet military. And like the vast majority of officers, Gindin does what he’s told, but he doesn’t have to like those orders, nor does he have to comply beyond the strict letter of the law. He’s given his lectures, every second Monday, and at this moment, sitting in the midshipmen’s dining hall, for the life of him he could not give even a simple report of any political lecture he’s ever given. Not even the one from last week in which Sablin had taken such an interest.

Gindin had jotted down his lecture notes from some Pravda article and had brought them up to Sablin’s cabin for the zampolit’s approval.

“This is exciting, Boris; don’t you think so?” Sablin had enthused. “We’ll be sailing to Riga to help celebrate the great revolution. What a perfect time this is.”

For another boring political lecture? Gindin has to wonder. But the zampolit is lighting up like a May 9th fireworks display to celebrate the end of WWII.

“Anyway, this stuff doesn’t matter,” Sablin says, glancing at Gindin’s notes. “The only truth is what we make.”

“Sir?”

“You’ll see,” Sablin says, almost slyly, but he’s smiling.

They are now facing each other in this completely insane situation, and the same look of holy zeal is in Sablin’s eyes.

Political officers are born, not made. In Sablin’s case he was brought up as a navy brat, on navy bases, knowing little or nothing of the world of civilians beyond the main gates. From the moment he could walk and talk a number of stern principles were drilled into him: Duty, discipline, and patriotism. The military way. Loyalty to the Soviet system. The pure ideals of the Communist man. Child of the revolution. Never lie. Despise hypocrisy. Hate injustice.

When he was only sixteen, Sablin applied to the Frunze Military Academy and was accepted. He was a model student and in his first year was elected to run the Kommunisticheksi Soyuz Molodioshi, Komsomol, the Communist youth organization on campus. He became the conscience of the class.

His classmates said they all believed in the ideals of Communism and Socialism. They were educated to believe. But Sablin not only believed with all his heart; he also wanted to put the ideals into action.

All the ideals.

That meant the democracy Lenin promised after the revolution. That meant all men were to be treated as equals. That meant everyone produced to the best of their abilities and everyone received what they needed. There was to be no poverty. No hunger. No homelessness. No injury or illness that wasn’t addressed. Universal work and education.

But Sablin was not a stupid young man. He looked around and he saw that the bureaucracy since Lenin was filled with hypocrisy and that everyone was supposed to close their eyes to it all.

They swore oaths to Lenin and to Communism, but it was nothing but a pack of lies from Stalin to Brezhnev.

When Sablin was still in school he wrote an angry letter to Premier Khrushchev. “Social inequalities,” Sablin argued, “are bastardizing the ideals of the Soviet state. Something must be done before it is too late.”

Moscow was not amused. A letter of reprimand was sent to Frunze, and Sablin’s graduation was put on hold, maybe permanently. The wisdom of the time was that the young man’s career was over before it had really begun.

But Sablin was a starry-eyed idealist, the class conscience. Despite the setback, he finished his studies and graduated with honors. Not long afterward Khrushchev was kicked out and Brezhnev took his place, with the goal of making the Soviet navy the best seagoing force on earth.

Within five years Sablin emerged from the ashes of his reprimand like a phoenix to be offered command of a destroyer. He was of a good military family, he was a Frunze graduate, he was a loyal, if overzealous, Communist who sometimes took the Party line to extremes, and he obviously was fearless.

But Sablin turned it down, opting instead to go to the Lenin Political Academy, where he could study doctrine so that he could truly understand Communism. Instead of commanding a ship in battle, he wanted to command a ship’s crew in grasping the ideals of Socialism.

It’s possible that even then, at the age of thirty, Sablin was already planning to make his mark by challenging Moscow.

But if he expected to find the answers at the academy he would be disappointed, because those kinds of explanations did not exist. He dived headfirst into Lenin and Marx and Engels in the original books and articles. He was trying to understand the October Revolution at the intellectual level. But like a Catholic priest who begins to doubt his faith and the reasons for his celibacy, Sablin was already starting to have trouble swallowing the doctrine. Wherever he looked he saw corruption, inequality, and the unearned privileges of the nomenklatura.

They fought the revolution to stop all that, to stop the class system, to give the working class the true power, but all that had gone by the wayside. A few old men in the Kremlin, not the people, were in charge.

When he tried to dig even deeper—after all, the revolution was perfection; it was simply his understanding that was faulty—he discovered that a lot of material was off-limits. For instance: Leon Trotsky had been one of the revolutionaries alongside Lenin, but his books and articles were not available. Not even to academy students, who were supposed to be the crème de la crème of Communist youth. The guys who were supposed to go out into the service and, like pastors, guide their flocks. It was as if seminary students were not allowed to speak about the Devil.

Despite the censorship, despite the disappointments, Sablin graduated and went out into the fleet a dedicated Communist who wholeheartedly believed in the philosophy, if not in the bureaucracy.

In a capitalist world the ordinary workers had to accept the fact that there would be rich people and there would be poor people. It was a natural outcome of such a system, and like it or not, the proletariat had to live with the consequences. But in Socialism there weren’t supposed to be such inequalities. Communism was designed to be the purest form of civilization. In theory.

In practice even the most casual observer could see that reality in the Soviet Union didn’t come anywhere close to the ideal.

The men who ran the nation from Moscow would never voluntarily give up their power. There would be no elections. The new revolution had to come from within. This time a zampolit would have to provide the spark.

Sablin’s favorite theme in his political lectures was revolution. Especially the October Revolution and the mutiny aboard the Potemkin.

In fact, it’s the zampolit’s position that revolution is a fine navy tradition that shouldn’t be discontinued.

“Before you make your choice, there is something more I have to tell you,” Sablin says.

He has the absolute attention of every officer and midshipman in the dining hall.

“I and the officers and men with me will take the Storozhevoy’s mooring lines in and leave in the morning for Kronshtadt.” It’s in the Gulf of Finland just twenty kilometers from Leningrad. “I will declare that this ship is a military base all by itself, and I will demand that Moscow give us access to radio and television so that I can personally speak to the people of the Soviet Union.”

This is even worse than treason. It’s outright insanity. Sablin means to get them all killed.

“How can you even suggest such a thing to us?” Sadakov shouted angrily. “You’re our political officer. You’re a good Communist. You’re supposed to set an example.”

We didn’t jump up and get out of there, Gindin remembers. None of us stormed to the front of the room to take our zampolit, who obviously was a criminal, into custody. “All of us officers were trained in military academies where we were taught to follow orders no matter what. Sablin outranked us, and it was mandatory to obey him. It was our legal and moral duty.”

The Russians say that all the brave men are in prison. You’re the boss, and I’m the dummy.

Someone gets up, walks to the table, and drops one of the backgammon pieces into the basket. Gindin can’t remember who was the first, nor could he see which piece the officer chose, but they are voting now.

The silence in the dining hall is thick. It’s like they are attending a funeral. Their own.

Gindin gets to his feet and walks up to the table. He stops for a second to look Sablin in the eye. The zampolit is fairly glowing with excitement. This is real history in the making. There will be movies and books and maybe even songs about this mutiny. It’ll be just like the Potemkin.

Gindin slowly holds his hand out. As he turns it over he opens his fist and a black backgammon piece falls into the basket. But it’s in slow motion. It’s as if the laws of gravity have been erased at that instant. Time is all but standing still.

The black backgammon piece turns end over end, falling, it seems, forever from an impossible height.

Gindin looks up again into Sablin’s eyes. The zampolit’s excitement fades like the smile from the lips of a jilted lover.

“Boris,” he says sadly.

In Moscow the Kremlin is all but deserted. Brezhnev and most of the Party’s leadership are at home, enjoying the day after the holiday, with perhaps a vodka or two, maybe some sweet Russian champagne. It is a time for families. They think that they’ll be back at their desks in the morning. But they’ll be back a lot sooner than that, and for a reason not one of them can possibly imagine at this moment.