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

That strange conversation sticks in Gindin’s mind this morning. From the day Sablin was assigned to the Storozhevoy he took a great interest not only in the men and their personal lives but also in the operations of the ship: the electronics and navigation systems, the weapons and their computers, even the pumps and mechanical equipment. So it should come as no surprise that he is interested in the gas turbines.

But later that same morning, after the parade in town, Sablin is even more animated than usual, Gindin recalls. “Asking me how I liked the parade and how everything went. He also asked me if everything was okay on the ship, the engines, the mechanical systems. I got the feeling he was putting so much emphasis on this day that something personal and significant must have happened in his life. Or was about to happen. But he was kind enough to ask about my mother’s health and her condition after my father’s death.” It touches Gindin deeply that someone cares.

Still, as Gindin is standing at the rail, everything that’s happened in the couple of days since they came up from Baltiysk adds up to an odd foreboding.

6. DEFENDING THE RODINA

The Russian navy has been continuously at war for nearly its entire history and, since the end of WWII, preparing for the mother of all wars with the United States. A lot of ships have gone to the bottom since the late 1500s and early 1600s, and with them tens of thousands of sailors.

The Russians have fought the Swedes, the Danes, the Finns, the Italians, the English, the French, the Chinese, and the Japanese, but mostly the Turks, with whom they battled from 1575 until the end of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s new government ended the war, dissolved the Russian navy, and created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet.

In the early days the Slavic Cossacks sailed in tiny ships called chaikas, which meant “seagulls,” because they could fly across the water so fast. Scarcely fifty feet at the waterline, the open boats could hold as many as seventy warriors, who would crouch down beneath the gunwales, which were bordered with twisted cane for extra buoyancy and protection. These were ships completely open to the weather, and the Cossacks terrorized the Ottoman Turks and Crimean Tatars no matter the season. Slavs and Russian sailors, then and now, were a tough lot not to be taken lightly.

An old Russian proverb sums up the three hundred plus years of war until the Bolsheviks took over: In Moscow they ring the bells often, but not for dinner.

But it wasn’t until the mid-1600s that the situation for the Russians really began to heat up. In fact, historians call those years the Time of Trouble, just before the Romanovs took over and imposed the death penalty against the sailors aboard any foreign ships caught off their northwestern Arctic coast in the White Sea, especially Dutch and British merchantmen hunting fur seals up there.

When Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich commissioned the first real warship to be built inside Russia, christened the Frederick, the floodgates were opened and Russian sailors began losing their lives in droves. On the ship’s very first voyage on the Caspian Sea, the three-masted Frederick, with 247 hands on board, was overcome by a fierce storm and the ship went down with all hands. They rang the bells in Moscow.

Of course that didn’t stop the Russians from building ships and sending men and boys to sea to make war on their neighbors.

In 1656 the Russian military attacked and took over a couple of Swedish forts and immediately started building ships on the spot to make war in the Baltic. But the Swedes were just too tough, and in 1661 Russia was forced to sign a peace treaty and give back the forts they had taken, plus all the ships they had built. This was at the cost of a few hundred more good Russian men and boys. Once again the bells in Moscow were rung.

Even that couldn’t hold the Russians back. They had the bit in their teeth, and the tsar concentrated next on the Volga River and Caspian Sea, where in two years four ships were built, including the twenty-two-gun galley Oryol, which means “Eagle,” only this time it was the Cossacks who turned rebellious, grabbed the ship, ransacked it, and sank it in the Volga.

It was about this time, near the end of the 1600s, when Peter Alekseevich became Tsar Peter I at age ten. Even at that tender age the new tsar was fascinated with ships, shipbuilding, navigation, and naval warfare, so a miniature shipyard, for which tiny replicas of famous Western warships were constructed, was set aside for him and his pals to stage their mock battles.