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

Boris’s roommate, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov, is at the breakfast table when Gindin walks in and takes his place. The captain’s not here this morning, but Zampolit Sablin is, and it looks as if he has a fire in his belly.

“Good morning, Boris,” Sablin calls with a lot of bonhomie. “It’ll be a fine day, don’t you think?” He’s got dark hair, a good build, and the kind of face that is always smiling.

Gindin remembers an incident when the ship sailed down to East Germany for a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. A parade had just passed by, and everybody on the pier was happy. Gindin and Sablin and some of the other officers went down on the dock, and Sablin scooped up one of the children and held the kid high in the air with a big smile. Everyone was laughing and singing. Sablin was married and had a child of his own, and he liked all children. But Gindin wasn’t married, had no children, and didn’t understand. Except that Sablin has the same happy, excited look on his face this morning as he had in Germany that day.

“What’s with our good zampolit?” Firsov asks. He’s five-nine, with blond hair, a mustache, and a wicked kick on the soccer field. He’s a bright guy. He and Gindin have hit it off.

“He’s always like that,” Gindin says. “He thinks he’s here to save us.”

“From what?” Firsov asks. “Our crazy crew?”

Gindin looks sharply at him, thinking that he was the only one who’d noticed that something strange was going on. Things felt different somehow. It promised to be a bright, crisp weekend, and there was nothing to spoil it. Yet coming up a companionway from belowdecks he ran into some sailors who were in a huddle, having a serious conversation about something. When they spotted an officer coming their way, they broke off.

It was a holiday, when people normally smile and laugh and have happy faces. But this morning Gindin has not seen any smiling sailors; he’s heard no jokes, no laughter.

Only sullenness.

Except from Zampolit Sablin.

The mess steward comes with Gindin’s food. All the officers contribute an extra twenty-five rubles a month for good food, but Gindin has a special relationship with the cook because he controls the ship’s water. It’s the same on all Soviet warships. Some systems in the military seem to work better than others, and this is one of them.

Another involves a pure alcohol, called spirt, which Gindin uses to clean his equipment. It’s 96 proof and when distributed to a friend or to anyone you would like to curry favor with is part of another system that works well.

“After duty we’ll have some spirt,” Gindin suggests to his roommate. “Maybe we’ll figure out what bug Sablin has up his ass.”

Firsov is quick to laugh, and their zampolit, out of earshot, nods his approval. Sablin likes to see his men happy, especially his officers. He has a seemingly genuine interest not only in the crew’s comfort and morale but, curiously, in the ship’s systems as well. All the ship’s systems, mechanical and electrical.

But this morning his mood seems somehow contrived. Maybe false. As if he were afraid of something.

Of what? Gindin wonders.

2. THE ACADEMY

1967

When Boris Gindin turned sixteen it was time for him to apply for his internal passport, which all Russians need to travel inside their country. It’s also a form of national identification and classification. His mother and father were both Jews. But under “Nationality” her passport was marked “Jewish,” while Iosif’s was marked “Russian.” It meant that Gindin had a choice—to declare himself a Jew or a Russian. His father told Boris to put down “Russian” because when it came time to make a career, life would be much easier for him as a Russian than as a Jew. He was rightfully afraid that the next year, when he was thinking about joining the Soviet navy, he would not be accepted because he was a Jew, unless he followed his father’s advice about the passport. Not that a religion would keep Boris out of the service; it’s just that he knew a Jew would never get into any of the prestigious academies that were necessary for advancement.

Go into the service as an enlisted man and any sort of a real career was impossible. It was a life he did not want to contemplate.

His father, a man whom Boris adored, was an engineer. Boris was going to follow in his father’s footsteps. But not as a civilian. Iosif was the sole breadwinner in the Gindin family, and even as an engineer he was barely making 160 rubles per month. That was scarcely enough to pay the rent on their small apartment and put food on the table. At first the Gindins shared a small apartment with several other people, the three of them living in one room. The Gindins never had good things; the furniture was shabby and primitive, their clothing hand-me-downs from relatives, they never had a vacation, and when Iosif had to go into the sanatorium for his failing health a difficult life got even tougher.