Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (25 page)

“We cannot go on like this any longer,” he begins. “You have been lied to. We all have been lied to, even the officers. The Rodina is on the verge of defeat. But the real enemy is not across the ocean, he is right here in the Motherland, and we must do something before it is too late for us all.”

Not one of the 150 enlisted men assembled says a word. No one
moves a muscle. It’s obvious that they are surprised by what their
zampolit
is saying to them, even if they don’t yet fully understand what they are being told. But like Sablin they understand that this is a moment in time that none of them will ever forget.

“I offer no criticism of the Communist Party or of the October Revolution. Those are pure. But there are men in Moscow who are bringing the Rodina to her knees like a common whore. Your mothers and sisters have been told so many lies that they may have to go begging on the streets. They may have to get down on their hands and knees just to feed their families! To feed you fine boys!”

There is a stirring now among the assembly. Sablin is painting a dramatic, if dreary, picture of what will happen unless they do something about the sickness and corruption that has gripped Moscow.

“The people of Russia—your fathers and your brothers—have no rights! They’re starving while a few old men in the Kremlin drink champagne and eat caviar and blinis.

“Brezhnev and his pals are making fools of you. It is finally up to us, the men in the military, to protect our Motherland from the real enemy, and we must let the people know what we are doing.

“Russia must finally become the democracy that Lenin promised us, or else we will remain a backward country, a poor country with no opportunities.”

The first of the rumbling dissent begins, and Sablin’s heart picks up a pace. He has them now!

“We need new leaders to run the country! Leaders whom the people will elect! Honest men who are patriots, willing to do as
we
tell them, not as they tell us!”

Sablin is overcome by his own words.

“The Party leaders in Moscow are getting rich off the labors of your fathers and brothers, and the heroic sacrifices of your mothers and sisters. It must end now!”

The murmuring is getting louder. These sailors, most of them twenty or younger, are being moved by the
zampolit’s
impassioned words.

“I want you to follow me to Kronshtadt, where we will go on television and take this message directly to the people,” Sablin tells the crew.

“I have spoken with honest officers in many military units all across the country who agree with me. They have promised to rise up to support us, if we will only lead the way.”

This is a lie; the only person he’s told about his plans who isn’t aboard the ship at this moment is his wife. But the crew believes him.

“We’ll be lined up and shot!” someone shouts. It’s the same fear that Shein had expressed.

“No one will be shot,” Sablin assures them. “I’m an officer, and I’m giving you men a direct order. No one in the Soviet navy has ever been shot for obeying a direct order.”

“What if we don’t agree?” someone else shouts. “What if we just return to our
cubricks?
You can’t have a fucking mutiny without us.” The speaker is anonymous in the darkness and in the ranks, so he’s braver than those in the front row.

“That doesn’t matter,” Sablin says. “Because I’ve already told Moscow what we will do. If we don’t get out of here in the morning, the KGB will come aboard and arrest us all. You included. So make up your minds right now.”

No one says a thing.

“I want to know who is with me!” Sablin cries.

He strides directly to the first man in the formation and looks him directly in the eyes. “Are you with me?”

“Yes, Captain Third Rank!” the young man shouts without hesitation.

Sablin steps to the next man. “And you?”

“I agree,” the crewman responds immediately.

The polling of votes goes very quickly. In the end, not one of the crew is against the mutiny.

“You will not regret your decision,” Sablin tells them from the head of the formation. “Officers in all the fleets are standing by for word from us to join the revolt.”

Gindin and the five other officers and three midshipmen who voted against Sablin are locked in a compartment near the bottom of the
Storozhevoy
that is used as a maintenance depot for the ship’s main sonar stations. For the next couple of hours they are left to their own devices; in fact, they can hear no sounds of any struggle topsides, no shouting, no gunshots. Nor does anyone come to talk to them or threaten them. But that business is inevitable, and they all know it.

“This is a mutiny,” one of the officers says. “And we’re a part of it, whether we like it or not.”

“What are you talking about?” Vinogradov asks. “We’re not part of anything. We voted against Sablin!”

“Yes, but we did nothing to stop him.”

“Didn’t you see the guns? What did you want to happen, that we be shot down like stupid heroes?”

“Well, we’ll probably get our nine ounces in the end,” Vinogradov says. “Doesn’t matter whose gun it comes from, one of Sablin’s cronies from the crew or one of Brehznev’s pretty boys from the KGB.” He
pokes a finger toward Gindin. “What do you think, Boris? Will we get out of this one alive? Or maybe this is a test. Just some sick joke that our
zampolit
has played on us?”

Gindin shakes his head. “This is no joke, and I think we have to find a way to get out of here before Sablin carries it too far.”

“He can’t get the ship out of here and sail to Kronshtadt without us,” Sergey Kuzmin says.

Some of the others are swearing, and a few of them are banging their fists on the metal bulkheads and the door. But they stop suddenly and look across at Sergey. Maybe he has a point and the situation isn’t as desperate as they first thought. If Sablin couldn’t get out of here in the morning when the rest of the fleet was leaving, someone would come over to investigate, and the jig would be up.

“I’m not so sure,” Gindin says. He is remembering the odd conversation he had with Sablin a couple of days ago. The
zampolit
came down to the engineering spaces and asked all sorts of questions about the engines and their control panels.

“Complicated machinery down here, Boris,” Sablin said. “It must be difficult to teach these boys how to do their jobs.”

“Not so tough,” Gindin replies. He’s proud of his crew. They are good sailors, for the most part, and he’s taught them well.

“They couldn’t be left on their own, if there was an emergency,” Sablin said. He is looking at gauges on the control panel. “Say if you were delayed for some reason, they wouldn’t know what to do. They’d be lost.”

“If it was a big enough emergency and our lives depended on getting under way, they could manage until I could get down here,” Gindin said.

Now, locked in the compartment, he realizes just how shortsighted he’d been.

“What are you talking about?” Vinogradov demands.

Gindin looks at his fellow officers. All of them have stopped their shouting and banging, and they’re all staring at him like he was a man
from Mars. “If he has the enlisted crew with him, plus Vladimir and the other officers, he could do it.”

“What, start the engines and sail out of here?” Kuzmin demands.

Gindin has talked with some of the other officers who found Sablin’s behavior over the past few weeks just as odd as he has. The
zampolit
has been asking a lot of questions.

“I think so,” Gindin says.

“Who’ll navigate for him?” Vinogradov wants to know.

Gindin shakes his head. “He could head down the river, and once out in the open Baltic he just has to follow his nose.”

“So he follows his nose, Boris,” Vinogradov asks. “But to where?”

“Sweden,” Kuzmin breaks the sudden, dark silence.

“My God,” one of the other officers says softly. “The bastards insane. He means to defect. We’re all dead.”

“Not unless we can get out of here first,” Gindin says. “Sablin told us he wasn’t leaving until morning.”

“But there’s only nine of us,” Kuzmin points out. “If he convinced even half the crew to go along with him, there’s nothing we could do aboutit. There’s just too many of them. They wouldn’t even need guns.”

“If we can get out of here we’ll find the captain; he’ll know what to do,” Gindin says.

“If they haven’t killed him,” someone counters. “Or if he’s thrown in with the mutiny, and is just lying low.”

Some of the others start to object, but Vinogradov holds up a hand to silence them. “Shut up and listen to me. The captain would never go along with a crazy scheme like this, no matter how convincing Sablin is.”

No one says a thing,

“Has anyone seen him this afternoon?”

Still no one says a word. The compartment is absolutely still. They all understand that their lives hang in the balance of a great number of factors, most of which are totally out of their control.

“Maybe Sablin shot him and hid his body somewhere,” Vinogradov suggests.

“That’s not possible,” Gindin says.

“How do you know, Boris? How can you be sure? Are you willing to bet your life, all of our lives, on Sablin’s kindness? If he’s killed the captain, what’s to prevent him from killing us all?”

“I don’t know anything for sure,” Gindin admits. “Except that unless we get out of here we’ll never know.”

“If we try to escape, what will our chances be?” one of the officers asks.

“I don’t know that, either,” Gindin says. “But I know for sure that unless we try our chances will be zero.”

The sonar supply compartment is actually two small rooms, equipped with only one work bench, a small closet that contains the power supplies, repeaters, targeting computers, and other electronic equipment that supports the sonar stations, and drawers that contain some non-classified schematics, a set of spare parts and a few screwdrivers, socket sets, and other small maintenance tools and testing gear.

At this point there is no phone in the compartment, nor is there any way in which to signal someone else aboard the ship, other than by banging on the light blue steel bulkheads.

The second, somewhat smaller compartment contains only more built-in drawers that hold more tools and test equipment and some technical manuals, which are supposed to be kept three decks up in the library.

Gindin steps through the open doorway into this compartment and almost immediately spots a water pump bolted to the deck in one corner. Pumps like these are located throughout the ship to move potable water from the tanks below to the various compartments where it’s needed. The designers placed the pumps wherever they saw fit in order to minimize the lengths of pipe runs. It is one of those Soviet economy measures that aren’t very elegant and don’t look good but work.

Some errant thought enters Gindin’s mind from way back. It’s a
lecture or a discussion at the academy about sabotage, what to look for, how to spot it, and how to prevent it. “This was a new territory for me,” Gindin says. “My job was always to make sure that all the mechanical systems aboard the
Storozhevoy
worked the way they were designed to work. Thinking about how to prevent Sablin from getting away from Riga by maybe sabotaging the ship was alien to me. And frightening.”

The mood among the crew is high with enthusiasm, but Sablin carries a tight knot in his gut. So many things can still go wrong with his plan that he can’t help but stop for a moment to reflect on just what it is that he has set in motion this evening. Two hundred officers and men are depending on him to get them through this ordeal. The burden is on his shoulders.

Sablin may be an idealist, but he’s far from being a stupid man. He knows that he will have one shot, and only one shot, at surviving this business. If he can convince the Russian people themselves to rise up in revolt, the Kremlin will be all but powerless to stop what he believes will be a groundswell—just like the revolt that toppled the tsarist government in October 1917.

He has worked out a plan for that.

Almost as soon as he had formulated his idea for the mutiny, Sablin began working on a speech that he would broadcast to the Russian people. He has recorded it, and once the
Storozhevoy
is in position near Leningrad and he has been given access to Russian radio and television, he means to broadcast his plea directly to the people.
“…
our announcement is not a betrayal of the Motherland, but a purely political, progressive declaration, and the traitors to the Motherland are those who would seek to stop us.

“My comrades want me to pass on to you our assurance that if our nation is attacked, we are fully prepared to defend it. Right now we have another goal: to take up the voice of truth
…”

But first he has to get away from Riga and the rest of the fleet, and to do that he has to make sure that the ship is secure. For that they will need weapons.

The warshots for all the
Storozhevoy’s
combat systems—the rockets, depth charges, and ammunition for the deck guns—have already been off-loaded before he heads to his refurbishing berth. This is routine. But the ship has two armories of light weapons, mostly pistols and AK-47 assault rifles.

Sablin got a set of keys for one of the armories from their
starpom
Nikolay Novozilov, before the exec went home on leave. Now Sablin takes a few of the enlisted crewmen with him, and they retrieve all the weapons and ammunition they can carry.

Then he begins issuing the orders crucial for their survival until they can slip their mooring and get out into the open Baltic. First he posts two armed crewmen on the bridge to make sure that not only the ship’s controls are theirs but also that no one can sneak up and use the radio to call for help.

Next he sends several crewmen belowdecks to help Shein make sure no one tries again to release the captain. Sablin sends others to the sonar compartment where Gindin and the others who voted with the black backgammon pieces are under arrest and one young man with a rifle to guard his cabin.