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

“Maybe so, but the captain has to give his approval for all meetings,” says Vinkurov, who is the commander of BCH-2 in charge of artillery. He’s a tall, blond guy, very strict with his officers. He wants to be captain of his own ship one day. “This is a holiday. There’s no urgency. Nothing has happened to cause such a meeting. It makes no sense, I tell you.”

It makes no sense to Boris, either, but an order is an order, and along with the other officers he heads forward to the midshipmen’s dining hall. It’s one of the largest compartments where the officers can gather on the entire ship. It’s on the port side, toward the bow, and right under the upper deck, on the opposite side of the ship from the Sekretka, the Secret Library where officers have to go to check out the classified documents, blueprints, and manuals for the weapons and equipment under their responsibility.

Once again Gindin is struck by how unnaturally quiet the ship seems. No engine noises, of course, because they are at a mooring, but there are no crewmen running around, making jokes, talking loudly, arguing perhaps. No officers are in their cabins now, the doors open, drinking spirt and telling stories or laughing or debating about something or playing chess, which sometimes can be loud.

Captain Lieutenant Nikolay Proshutinsky, who is in charge of the entire BCH-3 acoustic systems division, storms up the corridor from his cabin. He’s Kuzmin’s boss, and he slaps Sergey on the back.

“Eb tvoiu mat,” Proshutinsky says. It’s a uniquely Russian expression, which literally means “fuck your mother,” but it’s never used in that context. Instead, the phrase means that something is screwed up. Almost like the American GI expression FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Eb tvoiu mat, what the fuck is going on now?

“I don’t know, Lieutenant,” Kuzmin replies. He gets along well with his boss. “Maybe it’s Sablin going to give us a patriotic speech like last year.”

Proshutinsky is shaking his head ruefully. “Well, if that’s all it is, let’s not keep our good zampolit waiting.” He looks over at Gindin and grins. “Anyway, when we’re done Boris has invited all of us to his cabin for some spirt, isn’t that right?”

They come around a corner and straight ahead is the open door to the midshipmen’s dining hall. It’s this exact point in time that Gindin will remember for the rest of his life, though he doesn’t know it now, but he has developed a very bad feeling. One that he thinks he shares with the other officers. At that moment, for some reason he can’t know, he wishes that he could talk to his father for just a minute or two. Boris wants to ask for some advice. But even if he could somehow magically talk to Iosif, Boris wouldn’t know what to ask for.

Wherever his future lies, it’s just beyond the open door.

10. SOVIET DOGMA

HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER

When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, one of the first things they did was rename the Imperial Russian Navy, calling it the RKKF—Raboche-Krest’yansky Krasny Flot, Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. Next it renamed most of the ships. And then almost nothing happened for fifteen or twenty years. Little or no money was given to build the navy, and the midshipmen graduating from the leadership and engineering schools languished in a fleet that had almost nothing to do.

Remember, it was the battleships Potemkin and Aurora and others that had supported the revolution, but Lenin’s new government, as idealistic and egalitarian as it was supposed to be, had a short memory.

And everyone in the world knew that the new RKKF was little more than a rust-bucket joke. During the negotiations of the Washington Naval Treaty right after WWI when the most powerful nations met to cap the size of the world’s navies to limit the possibility of another war, the Soviet Union was not invited to the table. It was a slap in the face that the new Communist government was completely ignored.

They were busy doing other things, like killing the kulaks, their own people, by the millions. In fact, by the end of WWII, when the body count of Jews killed by Hitler topped 6 million, the body count of kulaks, or peasants, killed by Stalin may have topped 40 million, though nobody knows for sure.

During the Winter War in 1939, the Soviet navy saw a little action in the Baltic, but it wasn’t until Hitler’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa that the Soviet Union finally woke up to the fact that if it wanted to be a world power it needed a modern navy. It was too late to play catch-up in WWII. In fact, most of the Soviet Navy consisted of ex-U.S. Navy Lend-Lease destroyers, and what navy the Soviets had in the Baltic was blocked for the duration in Leningrad and Kronshtadt by German and Finnish minefields. But the seed of an idea had been firmly planted in Moscow.