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

“Captain, I think we’re getting ready for another rotation, which means six months at sea,” Gindin points out respectfully.

“That’s right, Boris.”

“Do you want to make it back on your own? Without asking for help, no matter what happens?”

“Of course.”

“Or maybe get towed back to base in shame?”

“Out of the question,” Potulniy fumes.

“Then, sir, I don’t see why our missing waterline should be a problem.”

Gindin is allowed to keep his junk, and ten days out of Cuba the stuff comes in handy.

The first problem is the electrical cable runs, which have been severed and partially ripped away from the inner hull. It’s no good trying to get at them from inside the hull; too much equipment and too many bulkheads would have to be cut away, and there’s no time for it. Gindin’s roommate, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov, who’s in charge of BCH-5’s electrical systems, will have to go over the side and do the job himself. If his lifeline doesn’t break, sending him into the sea, where there is virtually no chance of ever getting him back aboard, if the towering waves and motion of the ship don’t dash him against the hull, crushing the life out of him, and if the edges of the jagged tear don’t rip his body apart, he’s faced with the almost impossible task of identifying and splicing as many as one hundred electrical cables. But he’s a Soviet navy officer, filled with nearly the same zeal as Potulniy and Gindin. Firsov does the job, and when he’s hauled aboard three hours later, drenched with seawater and sweat, his body battered and bruised, every single circuit that he had spliced works.

“I would call it an extreme situation, and one tough job to do,” Gindin says. “But it was our duty, and no one looked at us like we were some kind of heroes.”

The storm calmed down, but the waves are still very high when Seaman Semyon Zaytsev, the ship’s best welder, is sent overboard to patch the hole with metal plates. Another seaman is sent overboard after him with a bucket of gray paint. “By the time the whole thing was done the ship looked like new. We spent a month in Cuba and no one ever noticed that we ever had any damage,” Gindin says. But this is the typical bond between Soviet sailors. You get into a tough situation, and you pull through, no matter what. “As simple as that,” Gindin says. “I’m still very proud of my crew for what they did that day, and how they did it.”

5. THE FINEST NAVY ON THE PLANET

In 1984 Tom Clancy published his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, very loosely based on an article about the Storozhevoy mutiny that appeared in Seapower Magazine and the master’s thesis of an officer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. The Storozhevoy was an ASW frigate, while Red October was a new Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine with a nearly silent propulsion system. Aboard the Storozhevoy a few of the officers and crew arrest the captain and stage a mutiny because they believe the Soviet system under Brezhnev is rotten. Aboard the Red October the captain and a few of his officers fool the crew into trying to defect to the West with the submarine because they believe that the Soviet system under Brezhnev is rotten and that with boats such as the Red October a global thermonuclear war is not only possible but likely. Clancy starts his story with the Red October sailing out of the submarine base at Polyarnyy, in the Arctic north, under the command of Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, on the sub’s maiden voyage. They are to test the sub’s silent drive against submarines of his own fleet and then return to base for an evaluation. If the submarine is as silent as his designers hope him to be, he will be able to sneak to within spitting distance of the U.S. coast and fire his nuclear missiles anytime he wants and there would be no warning. Millions of Americans would die, and a World War Three from which no one on the planet could survive would begin.

But soon after they submerge, Ramius murders their zampolit, Captain Second Rank Ivan Putin, because he is the one man aboard who could stop the mutiny in its tracks. Ramius makes it look as if the zampolit’s death was an accident so that the part of the crew not in on the plan will not become suspicious. It’s Ramius’s intention to sail his boat out into the open Atlantic, eluding detection by his own navy until he can somehow make contact with the U.S. Navy, ask for asylum for him and his crew, and offer his boat as a prize. The story hinges on a letter Ramius posted to his uncle Admiral Yuri Pedorin back in Moscow before Red October sailed, stating his intention to defect to the West. This, of course, leads to the massive hunt for Red October by Russian as well as U.S. and British military forces.