Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October by Boris Gindin, David Hagberg Page A

Lieutenant,” Kuzmin replies. He gets along well with his boss. “Maybe it’s Sablin going to give us a patriotic speech like last year.”
    Proshutinsky is shaking his head ruefully. “Well, if that’s all it is, let’s not keep our good
zampolit
waiting.” He looks over at Gindin and grins. “Anyway, when we’re done Boris has invited all of us to his cabin for some
spirt,
isn’t that right?”
    They come around a corner and straight ahead is the open door to the midshipmen’s dining hall. It’s this exact point in time that Gindin will remember for the rest of his life, though he doesn’t know it now, but he has developed a very bad feeling. One that he thinks he shares with the other officers. At that moment, for some reason he can’t know, he wishes that he could talk to his father for just a minute or two. Boris wants to ask for some advice. But even if he could somehow magically talk to Iosif, Boris wouldn’t know what to ask for.
    Wherever his future lies, it’s just beyond the open door.

SOVIET DOGMA
     
HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER
    When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, one of the first things they did was rename the Imperial Russian Navy, calling it the RKKF—
Raboche-Krest’yansky Krasny Flot,
Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. Next it renamed most of the ships. And then almost nothing happened for fifteen or twenty years. Little or no money was given to build the navy, and the midshipmen graduating from the leadership and engineering schools languished in a fleet that had almost nothing to do.
    Remember, it was the battleships
Potemkin
and
Aurora
and others that had supported the revolution, but Lenin’s new government, as idealistic and egalitarian as it was supposed to be, had a short memory.
    And everyone in the world knew that the new RKKF was little more than a rust-bucket joke. During the negotiations of the Washington Naval Treaty right after WWI when the most powerful nations met to cap the size of the world’s navies to limit the possibility of another war, the Soviet Union was not invited to the table. It was a slap in the face that the new Communist government was completely ignored.
    They were busy doing other things, like killing the kulaks, their own people, by the millions. In fact, by the end of WWII, when the body count of Jews killed by Hitler topped 6 million, the body count of kulaks, or peasants, killed by Stalin may have topped 40 million, though nobody knows for sure.
    During the Winter War in 1939, the Soviet navy saw a little action in the Baltic, but it wasn’t until Hitler’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa that the Soviet Union finally woke up to the fact that if it wanted to be a world power it needed a modern navy. It was too late to play catch-up in WWII. In fact, most of the Soviet Navy consisted of ex-U.S. Navy Lend-Lease destroyers, and what navy the Soviets had in the Baltic was blocked for the duration in Leningrad and Kronshtadt by German and Finnish minefields. But the seed of an idea had been firmly planted in Moscow.
    After the war the Soviets went on an all-out crash program of shipbuilding, starting with submarines from homegrown designs supplemented by designs liberated from the Nazis and liberated from the United States and other Western nations. Although in the early days the Soviets were almost always one generation behind NATO boats, they were cranking out warships at a furious pace.
    Next the Soviets turned to their surface fleet, arming just about anything that could float, no matter what size, with a lot of missiles, including the big cruisers of the Kirov class that displaced 24,300 tons and then in the sixties and early seventies their helicopter aircraft carriers the
Moskva
and
Leningrad,
followed up by the Kiev-class ships. The Soviets could never hope to match the U.S. advantage in super-carriers, so they had to concentrate on their submarine fleet and ship-to-ship missiles. Anyway Stalin didn’t really understand sea power and did not want to