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

It’s five months now that Boris has been aboard ship. He is an engineer by education at the academy, but perhaps even more important, he is an engineer by birth. He loved and respected his father, who was an engineer. Some things run deep in a man’s blood. Especially a Russian man’s. Which translates to mean that Senior Lieutenant Gindin knows the machinery and machinery spaces aboard this ship better than anyone else aboard, except perhaps for Potulniy, the precise captain. In fact, that’s one of the reasons both men have a building respect for each other.

Make no mistake, this is the captain’s ship, no matter how Gindin already feels about him. So when it it’s time to send the Storozhevoy down the ways, launch him into the water, it is Potulniy’s wife, Nadezhda, who is given the honor of breaking the bottle of champagne against the bow.

The entire crew is gathered on the dock, along with the shipyard workers and managers, plus a lot of navy dignitaries. It’s a crisp late-fall day, with a sharp blue sky and fast-moving white clouds. A fairly good breeze is kicking up small whitecaps in the harbor, and everyone is in high spirits. The Storozhevoy not only looks like a deadly Soviet warship of the line, but also is beautiful, with graceful lines and a design that U.S. Navy analysts would later call “neat, workmanlike, and elegant.” He bristles with weapons systems, rocket launchers, torpedo tubes, deadly-looking guns, rotating radar antennas, and dozens of systems that many of the visitors can only guess and marvel at.

“It was the true moment of the Storozhevoy’s birth,” Gindin recalls. “We felt like parents about to see their first kid taking its first steps. I was new, but still I sensed that I was a part of what would be a significant event in my life. I was very proud of my ship and my crew, that we were going to be serving in this state-of-the-art vessel.”

The port side of the ship rises sharply above the crowds. Nadezhda climbs four steps up to a wooden platform that puts her within swinging distance of the sharply flaring bow, her husband at her elbow to make sure she doesn’t trip and fall, and some admiral and his aide next to them.

Potulniy hands his wife the bottle of champagne that is suspended by a thin rope from a truss above the platform. She is to swing the bottle in an arc so that it will break against the hull. “God bless this ship and all who sail on him,” someone in the crowd is bound to mutter as the bottle breaks.

Nadezhda raises the bottle over her head and swings it as hard as she can toward the Storozhevoy’s bow. The bottle makes its short arc, slams against the thick steel plating of the bow, and bounces off.

All those gathered for the ceremony on the dock heave a collective sigh. Such missteps are not unknown at ship launchings, but Gindin feels goose bumps on his skin.

“I can’t explain,” he remembers. “But something inside of me tightened up. My gut clenched and I felt a terrible uneasiness. It sounds silly, I suppose, but I had the feeling that maybe the Storozhevoy was a cursed ship.”

Not all men who go to sea are superstitious, but most of them are, and sitting in the midshipmen’s dining hall, facing Sablin, Gindin is remembering that launching day on the dock at Yantar Zavod 820 with a certain amount of dread. Maybe he was right after all.

But that day in Kaliningrad there is no time for that kind of a sentiment. Nadezhda Potulniy swings the bottle again and this time it breaks, to everyone’s relief. Once the Storozhevoy is in the water the work gets more intense.

In the first place, the remainder of the crew come to live aboard, which means that in addition to testing, aligning, and adjusting the myriad of systems, the officers—including Gindin—must teach their sailors everything, which includes showing them where and what the equipment is, how it works, and what they need to do to service it. He has to prepare the written instructions for all of those tasks as well, explain where each man’s post is, what his responsibilities are, and what his duties are under every circumstance imaginable.

In addition to getting the ship ready for sea, getting settled in, getting to know one another, the officers must teach their three-hour political indoctrination classes every second Monday, come rain or shine, come commissioning or war.