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

After the war the Soviets went on an all-out crash program of shipbuilding, starting with submarines from homegrown designs supplemented by designs liberated from the Nazis and liberated from the United States and other Western nations. Although in the early days the Soviets were almost always one generation behind NATO boats, they were cranking out warships at a furious pace.

Next the Soviets turned to their surface fleet, arming just about anything that could float, no matter what size, with a lot of missiles, including the big cruisers of the Kirov class that displaced 24,300 tons and then in the sixties and early seventies their helicopter aircraft carriers the Moskva and Leningrad, followed up by the Kiev-class ships. The Soviets could never hope to match the U.S. advantage in super-carriers, so they had to concentrate on their submarine fleet and ship-to-ship missiles. Anyway Stalin didn’t really understand sea power and did not want to spend the money on aircraft carriers.

All this was during the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the race into space on which the Soviets had a lock, while the Soviet navy had all it could do to defend its own coasts from attack or invasion along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans and the Black, Caspian, and Baltic seas. There were four fleets: the Northern, based at Murmansk-Severomorsk, with at one point more than 170 submarines; the Pacific, based at Vladivostok; the Black Sea at Sevastapol; and the Baltic at Baltiysk. Plus by 1975 Soviet flotillas and squadrons were deployed in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean with access to supply and repair ports in Cuba, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the Seychelles, and Vietnam.

All of that rebuilding, all of the modernization of the fleet, all of the worldwide deployments, all of the drive for parity with NATO, and especially the United States, and all of the Soviet navy’s success belonged to one man, Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei Gorshkov, who understood two basic facts of life. The first was that the Soviet Union had to become a world naval power, with not just a coastal defense force but an arm of the military that could project its power everywhere on the globe. And the second was that the Soviet Union could never hope to match the U.S. Navy ship-for-ship. There wasn’t the time, the money, or the technology to achieve such a dream.

The main threats that the U.S. Navy posed against the Soviet Union were aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines. Gorshkov set about building a navy of warships equipped with powerful missile systems that could damage and sink even a supercarrier, and a navy of warships that could find and sink ballistic missile submarines.

But it wasn’t easy, especially in a nation whose heroes seemed to go in and out of favor faster than Western women’s fashions. His predecessor, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, was around in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and decided to scrap most of the navy’s big surface ships, which in the Party Secretary’s mind were draining the fragile economy. When Kuznetsov objected, he was fired and the forty-six-year-old Gorshkov was appointed to take his place. But the new boss of the Soviet navy knew when to keep his mouth shut, when to slip in through the back door, and when to finesse the Kremlin. In fact, Gorshkov long outlasted Khrushchev.

One of the early examples of how the wily admiral finessed the Kremlin leadership was the way in which he convinced the Communist Party that a strong navy was not only a necessity but also a bona fide part of the Russian national heritage. The superpowers of the United States, Great Britain, and France had convinced the world that Russia’s real power was as a land force. Her great armies were poised to pour across the Polish plains into Western Europe, and nothing but an all-out nuclear war could stop them.

This so-called Land Power Doctrine was imperialistic propaganda and nothing more, according to Gorshkov The doctrine’s only purpose was to keep the USSR from becoming a sea power, yet Russia had the world’s longest coastline and Russians have always loved the sea.

“It’s the Soviet manifest destiny to go to sea,” Gorshkov argued successfully. “Our navy will become the faithful helper of the army.” And the admiral’s timing was impeccable. It was 1962, in the midst of his campaign, when the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuba, turning the Soviet navy away. Moscow was finally convinced, and one of the most powerful and versatile navies of the world was reborn.

Gorshkov realized that a Russian navy faced three major problems: ice, choke points, and long distances. Once he was given the go-ahead, he attacked all three.