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

But his second, even more important, task was to fight a civil war that threatened to unravel everything that the soviet system had accomplished and destroy the country. But at least they had the peasants, the workers, and the conscript soldiers and sailors behind them.

This is where the hard feelings against the Western powers, especially the United States, got a start.

The supporters of the tsars and the old regime formed a resistance army called the Whites to fight against the Communists, called the Reds. Had it merely remained an internal struggle it’s possible that the Cold War would never have occurred. But a coalition of allies led by the United Kingdom, France, and mostly the United States, attempted to invade the new Russia to put down the Communists and restore the old royal regime to power.

It didn’t work, of course, though it took the Reds until 1922 to prevail. And besides the future Cold War, it spawned a whole new way of thinking about governing a people.

Before the revolution, Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued that it would take a tight-knit and secretive organization to overthrow the government. And, they argued, because of the civil war aided by Western powers it was going to take the same sort of tight-knit, secretive organization to run the government. Lenin and his pals saw such a government as their only way out. After all, the three most powerful nations on earth were lined up against the Communists.

But Lenin went a step further by doing something no one in the West could fully understand or appreciate. To begin with, he banned all other factions or political parties. The new Soviet Union was to be a one-trick pony. Most important, he argued that the Party should consist of an elite, highly trained cadre of professional and dedicated revolutionaries who would be willing to devote their lives to the cause.

Only Party activists were put in charge of the bureaucracy, factories, hospitals, food suppliers, universities, and the military.

Loyalty and iron discipline were the new watchwords. It was called the nomenklatura system. It was the standard practice, if not the law of the land, in full force that early November 1975 in Riga.

This was supposed to be Russia’s answer to democracy. The elections started at the bottom and worked up, but the orders and policy decisions started at the top and worked their way down. Before long it became tantamount to treason to question the top-down orders. And in order to protect the elite from challenge by the majority of the population, who were, after all, only kulaks, to rule meant you had to be a member of the Party. And in order to be a member of the Party you were required to take special courses, attend special political indoctrination camps and schools, pass a series of tough exams, and finally be nominated by three members of the Party who were in good standing.

It soon became an elite club. If you weren’t a member of the Communist Party you were one of the little people. And little people got nothing!

Actually, it was even more complicated than that, as most things usually are. The revolution began in October 1917, and two months later the Bolsheviks created what was called the Cheka, or secret police, which several years later finally changed its name, if not its method of operations, to the KGB. The Cheka’s first task was to ferret out the counterrevolutionaries and kick them out of the Party or bring them to trial. Less than one year later the secret police was charged with targeting all the old tsarists, plus any party or person opposing the revolution, including the Cossacks, who’d been around a lot longer than the Communists.

The first spymaster, Felix Dzerzhinsky, for whom a square was named in downtown Moscow, called what he was doing the Red Terror:

“We represent in ourselves organized terror. This must be said very clearly. Such terror is now very necessary in the conditions we are living through in a time of revolution.”

Which was a very understandable sentiment at such a difficult time in a new government’s existence. Except that after the revolution was over with and after the civil war had been waged and won, the Cheka and its descendant organizations never changed their tune. From December 1917 until this early evening aboard the Storozhevoy it was operations as usual.

Although technically Russia didn’t become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until the end of 1922, when Belarus and Ukraine joined the main body of Lenin’s Moscow government, by then the first serious seeds of discontent were already beginning to be sown, starting with the navy.