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

Most Soviet navy bases are up around the Arctic Circle or close to it and are frozen over for much of the year. Arkhangel’sk in particular is blocked by ice six months out of the year. Vladivostok in the Far East is unusable for several months each year, and even the Baltic Fleet at Baltiysk and Riga is closed down sometimes for three months.

Gorshkov partially solved the problem by building the world’s most powerful fleet of icebreakers. No longer were the northern ports closed when they were most needed.

The admiral’s solution to the other two problems was as brilliant as it was simple. If it came to war, the U.S. Navy could effectively hold almost the entire Soviet fleet close to home by mining and blockading the narrow passages leading to the open ocean. In the Pacific Ocean the La Perouse Strait, north of Japan, and to the south the Tsushima Strait are the only ways out for the Soviets. In the Atlantic the so-called GIUK, or Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, could easily be controlled by the Allies. Then there are passages that are even tougher for the Soviet navy: the Turkish and Gibraltar straits, the Suez Canal, and up north the Skagerrak-Kattegat straits.

The way around this was to deploy Russian warships beyond these choke points, so that if it came to a war, they would not be held close to home. But that was the second part of the problem. In the early days Soviet warships could not be resupplied at sea. They had to return home for that. Admiral Gorshkov ordered the design and building of a fleet of supply ships, and he strongly urged the Kremlin to use its considerable diplomatic skills to set up places overseas where Soviet ships could be restocked. Angola, South Yemen, and Cuba were among the first.

As a result of these policy changes, the Storozhevoy stayed out to sea for six months at a stretch and stopped at Havana for something more than Gindin’s trip ashore to visit with VIP wives.

Under Gorshkov the navy became not just a stepchild of the Russian military establishment but an extremely important leg in what was called the nuclear triad for deterrence, which consisted of land-launched nuclear missiles, air-launched nuclear missiles, and nuclear missiles launched usually from ballistic missile submarines. The Soviet navy not only operated a fleet of the largest missile subs but also could launch nukes against NATO from a wide range of surface ships, and its ASW platforms, such as the Storozhevoy, were very good at what they were designed to do. Namely, to protect the Rodina.

So, starting in the sixties the navy became the branch of the military to join, and it attracted a lot of very bright, very ambitious young men into the academies. Which was a great deal. Civilians entering the trades, such as engineering or medicine, would have to work until they were sixty-five before retiring. But naval officers could retire after only twenty-five years of service—which included the five years they spent in the academies. It meant a naval officer could retire around age forty-four or forty-five, a full twenty years earlier than his civilian counterpart. But since the navy was expanding at such a rapid rate, it also relaxed many of the usual Soviet restrictions, such as not admitting Jews to the inner circle. This was exactly Boris Gindin’s ticket, though when he signed up he didn’t realize how difficult the work would be, nor how it would end for him and the rest of the Storozhevoy’s crew.

Once Soviet ships were able to deploy to every part of the world, Groshkov’s next job was to establish its missions beyond the vague but important notion of protecting the Rodina. In the good admiral’s mind there were four basic missions that his navy would have to carry out.

The first and most important was deterrence. Using the fleet, especially its ballistic missile submarines lying just off the U.S. coast, to threaten an all-out attack with no notice and no hope to defend against, the navy was an important tool for preventing a global thermonuclear war from ever happening. Of course Western analysts put a different spin on the issue, looking at the massive Typhoon-class missile subs as offensive, first-strike weapons. It was the same view the Soviets maintained when it came to the U.S. Ohio-class SSBMs.

The second mission was power projection, which the U.S. Marine Corps is so good at. The United States fields 180,000 marines, while the Soviet Naval Infantry only has 12,000 troops. But Gorshkov saw to it that there would be at least one naval infantry regiment in each fleet. It was a start.