Mutiny. David Hagberg and Boris Gindin, New York, Forge Books, 2008; 381pp, Bib. In 1983, the owner of a modestly successful insurance agency in Maryland was down to his last hope. He had written a novel based on a tale told him by one of his clients, a former naval officer. He had sent the manuscript to every publishing house he could think of and been turned down. Most of them thought his tale simply too outlandish to be believable. Finally someone suggested he try the United States Naval Institute Press. He sent it to them with faint hope as the USNI had NEVER published a novel. Period.
The novel was the story of a Soviet warship whose crew mutinies and which then tries to defect to the United States. The Naval Institute went against the grain and published the novel. The book did modestly well at first, then many Pentagon “insiders” began reading it and recommending it to others. Finally someone passed it to then-President Ronald Reagan who pronounced it “the perfect yarn.” The book, of course, was
The Hunt for Red October. The author was Tom Clancy, who subsequently hit the big time and became one of the top-selling authors in publishing history.
In the fall of 1975, Senior Lieutenant Boris Gindin was an engineering officer in the Soviet Navy. He had been assigned to a new ship and was excited at the prospects. To western intelligence, she was a “Krivak I” frigate, to the Soviet Navy HE (all Russian ships are referred to by the male pronoun) was the “Small Anti-Submarine Ship” Project 1135-class
Storozhevoy.
A Krivak I at speedThe
Storozhevoy was everything you could want in a frigate. She had anti-sub missiles and rockets, 21-inch torpedoes and huge surface to surface missiles to deal with any surface threat and two turrets with paired 76mm cannon to handle anything else. She also boasted four Diesel turbine engines which could drive the ship at nearly 30 knots. The superstructure was studded with air-search and navigation radars and fire-control systems. Below decks was a sophisticated sonar system.
Gindin had a seaman’s sixth sense that all was not right on this day and events would soon prove his unease to be fully justified. As he checked on his men and made sure the engines were ready for the day’s schedule, his feeling of foreboding increased.
The schedule was for the
Storozhevoy to work with other units of the Baltic Fleet in a long-planned exercise. Afterward the
Storozhevoy would put into Kaliningrad for two weeks of repairs and refitting. Gindin was looking forward to taking a few days leave to see his mother.
Unbeknownst to Gindin, the ship’s KGB political officer, or
zampolit, had other plans. He intended for the ship to go out with the rest of the fleet, break off and sail to Leningrad where he would then broadcast an indictment of the Soviet leadership for deserting the ideals of Marxism/Leninism and calling on the “the people” to rise up and throw off the usurpers and restore true Communism to the Soviet Union.
The true story of the
Storozhevoy gives real flesh and blood to Clancy’s outstanding novel. It also illustrates just how deadening the hand of the Soviet government was in all aspects of Russian life. Suffice to say that Gindin did everything he could have as a patriotic Soviet officer to stop the mutiny.
He was punished anyway.
Boris Gindin now lives in the United States.
