Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (7 page)

“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.”

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.