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

felt like this.
    They talk about the rotation they’re finally coming off and the big repair job they were stuck with on the way to Cuba. There’ll be a lot of work for them at the shipyard, but in two weeks they’ll be home with their families.
    Vladimir is married and has one young kid. Each year Boris helps Vladimir celebrate his anniversary and the birthdays of his wife and son. It’s a sweet Russian custom, especially among sailors at sea. The little celebrations tend to make the loneliness more bearable.
    Boris is thinking that he won’t be able to celebrate his father’sbirthday next year, or any year after that, when Nikolay Bogomolov gets on the ship’s public-address system—the 1MC. He’s the duty officer on this shift. It’s coming up on 1900 hours, and Nikolay announces that all officers and midshipmen are to report to the midshipmen’s dining hall in uniform.
    Boris and Vladimir head belowdecks. They’ve been off duty, so they have to change into the uniform of the day. All the ordinary sailors not on duty are watching a movie in their dining hall. It’s
The Battleship Potemkin,
which is the favorite of just about every
zampolit
in the fleet.
    Sergey Kuzmin, who’s the lieutenant in charge of BCH-3 sonar systems, wants to know what the hell is going on. According to Sergey, this sounds like one of Sablin’s little tricks. The
pizda,
pussy, has been sticking his nose into everybody’s business for the past five days.
    Sergey Bogonets, who’d had Boris help play a trick on Bogomolov, storms out of his cabin, a deep scowl on his dark face. “The bastard wants to get back at us for the trick with the shower,” he says. “Just watch: When we get dressed up and back to the dining hall, there won’t be any meeting.”
    But playing this kind of a joke on the ship’s officers at the end of a six-month rotation is a dangerous thing to do. There’ll be a lot of resentment that might spill over to the next rotation. What is not needed aboard a ship at sea, especially a warship at sea, is a group of officers who are holding a grudge. The safety of the ship depends on the complete and instantaneous cooperation of the entire crew.
    But if it’s Sablin calling this meeting, then none of them have any choice but to snap to, like dutiful Communist sailors, and at least give the appearance of appreciating his lecture. The
zampolit
is the number-two officer aboard any Soviet warship. That means he answers only to the captain and no one else. And in political matters the
zampolit
is the supreme authority.
    Curiously, the officers don’t particularly care for Sablin, but the sailors do, because this
zampolit
really listens and really seems to careabout the welfare of the enlisted men. He’s an officer, but he’s sincere. The officers, however, who are educated, can tell the difference between being sincere and being genuinely brainwashed.
    “Political classes were a fact of life,” Gindin says. “It felt foreign to us even though we’d been hearing the same things all of our lives. The lies we were being told never touched us, never got into our bones, never adhered to us. The classes were distant from reality, in a sense just another obligation.”
    Most of the people aboard ship or in high school or in college felt stupid and degraded being forced to study this stuff.
    Everybody knows it’s a lie.
    But at the same time everyone lives the lie because it is the only life they know. “You believe in things,” Gindin says. “You are ready to put your life on the line for the ideals, and yet somewhere inside, maybe not consciously, but somewhere, you see things differently. But you can’t change things and you continue to live the way you are told to live.”
    The story is that Sablin actually
believes
the Party line. He is an idealist who knows in his heart-of-hearts that a better life is just around the corner for all of them. If they just stick with the basic principles, if they just keep on