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

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