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

Gindin slowly holds his hand out. As he turns it over he opens his fist and a black backgammon piece falls into the basket. But it’s in slow motion. It’s as if the laws of gravity have been erased at that instant. Time is all but standing still.

The black backgammon piece turns end over end, falling, it seems, forever from an impossible height.

Gindin looks up again into Sablin’s eyes. The zampolit’s excitement fades like the smile from the lips of a jilted lover.

“Boris,” he says sadly.

In Moscow the Kremlin is all but deserted. Brezhnev and most of the Party’s leadership are at home, enjoying the day after the holiday, with perhaps a vodka or two, maybe some sweet Russian champagne. It is a time for families. They think that they’ll be back at their desks in the morning. But they’ll be back a lot sooner than that, and for a reason not one of them can possibly imagine at this moment.

PART 4 THE MUTINY OF FFG STOROZHEVOY

24. POTULNIY’S ARREST

Leadership aboard a Soviet warship, aboard any warship, is from the top down. Obviously. But what’s not quite so obvious is that if the captain of a warship is suddenly removed like Bligh aboard the Bounty, the absolute authority devolves to the next in command, or whoever deposed the captain.

The big rub is that the other officers and crew have served under the captain and not the first officer or, in the case of the mutiny aboard the Storozhevoy, the zampolit.

Captains are to be obeyed instantly and without question. It has been a law in every navy the world over for the entire history of men at sea. And for good reason. It is only the captain who has been trained to command his ship. It is only the captain who has earned the trust and respect of his men by taking them to sea and bringing them home alive. It is only the captain who has the absolute authority of life and death over every man aboard. The starpom is only in training for the job, and the zampolit is nothing more than the Party hack.

Everyone knows the system and the law, but there’s probably never been a warship on which at least one of the crew has not thought about mutiny. Captains have to make dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions every single day their ship is at sea. If a captain is under stress, such as during a storm or time of war, his orders come even faster and must be instantly obeyed for the safety of the ship and his crew.

No one can agree with every order, nor can every order please everyone or even be understandable, say, to a kid fresh off the farm and out of boot camp.

Over time these kinds of misunderstandings and resentments can lead to a full-blown mutiny. Some little incident provides the spark, rage boils over, and a part of the crew takes over the ship. Like with the Potemkin sixty years earlier. People get killed. The survivors go to prison.

Another separate class of mutinies exists in which one of the men aboard ship, and it’s usually an officer, wants to make a statement, sometimes about a tyrannical captain, as in the case aboard the British sailing vessel Bounty, or sometimes, like this moment at a mooring in the Daugava River, a zampolit wants to make a statement about the rotten government he serves under.

Something dreadful has happened that Gindin, who has just dropped his black backgammon piece into the basket in the midshipmen’s dining hall, has no way of knowing. Only three men at this moment share that knowledge, Potulniy, Sablin, and Seaman Shein, the sailor in the projection closet. But everyone else is about to feel the consequences, which carry the very real likelihood that all of them will die.

Earlier that afternoon, when one-third of the crew had been given liberty to go ashore, Sablin had retired alone to his cabin to write a letter outlining exactly what he planned to do this evening. He was going to explain his purpose to the key officers and crew, who would take over the ship and first thing in the morning leave with the rest of the fleet. But instead of heading to the shipyard for his two-week refit, the Storozhevoy was going to lay off Leningrad, where Sablin would broadcast his statement to the Soviet people.

It was the same message he’d written to his wife, Nina, and had posted from Baltiysk four days ago just before they’d sailed up here. He carefully folded this letter and sealed it in a plain white envelope on which he wrote: Cptn. Potulniy.

Next, he called Seaman Shein to his cabin. Sablin had taken the young mechanic into his confidence before they’d left Baltiysk a couple days ago, promising that if the sailor could convince some of his friends to help with the mutiny Sablin would guarantee their demobilization when it was all over.