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

No one knows why Boris has been reassigned from his job as an engineer aboard a ship to a job as a commander of a small fire station, but rumors are still flying through the fleet about an incident aboard a Baltic Fleet ASW ship.

Gindin can’t explain his side of the story, of course, but if his brother-in-law knows or suspects something, he’s shown no sign of it. In fact, Vladimir has been just as open and kind and loving toward Boris as his sister has been. Family ties are very strong here.

Vladimir, who is a captain third rank, with a Ph.D. in military engineering, has invited Gindin to come to the base and take a tour of the ships. He’s left Boris’s name with the guards at the gate, to whom Gindin shows his military ID. He’s been allowed inside and has been directed to the docks.

But he’s standing, slack jawed, his heart in his throat, his stomach burning, looking up at a ship. No pride has been taken by the captain or crew. Rust weeps from fittings here and there. The paint has faded in big splotches, and nothing has been done about it. Patches have been sloppily welded into the steel plating of the hull. And his flags don’t seem to be as bright or snap as crisply as those on the other ships.

For just a moment Gindin was happy to see the ship.

“For that second or two it was like a reunion of old friends,” Gindin recalls. “We were happy to see each other after so long a time separated us.”

But then everything comes back in a sad, hopeless rush, and Gindin wants to turn away, but he can’t. He’s mesmerized by the ship and by his memories.

The numbers have been changed, but the name on the hull near the stern is the same. Storozhevoy.

No one had been hurt in the attacks that morning, except for Sablin, who received the gunshot wound in his leg. And after everything was over, Gindin had heard by rumors that Sablin had been tried and found guilty of treason and gotten his nine ounces from the KGB.

So now it was truly over.

A lieutenant comes to the rail and spots Gindin staring at the ship. “Hey, you, pizda, what are you looking at?”

Gindin slowly shakes his head. “Nothing, sir,” he says, and he turns and walks away without looking back.

AFTERWORD

With the book finished, Boris Gindin admitted that he’d experienced a mixed bag of emotions on the project, especially at the ending, when in Vladivostok he came across the rust bucket that the Storozhevoy had become.

“It was strange and unsettling to have to relive the incident,” Gindin said. “Sometimes I had nightmares about the KGB coming after me and my family for going public with the story.”

Even today he sometimes gets a cold feeling between his shoulder blades, and he stops a moment to look over his shoulder to make sure that no one is coming after him.

The death in London of the former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko weighs heavily on Gindin’s mind. The man was poisoned with a highly radioactive isotope of polonium, a method of assassination favored by the Soviet secret service. Russians have long memories and don’t treat people they consider traitors very kindly.

But it’s more than thirty years after the mutiny, and the real story that inspired Tom Clancy to write his first novel did not end on a sad note on the docks at Vladivostok. It was more involved than that, more complicated, with a happy ending.

After the KGB’s interrogation, during which one of the investigators even shared a bottle of vodka with Boris in the military prison where the crew was held, Gindin was demoted one rank and sent ashore to work at a fire department, as mentioned earlier. He hadn’t done enough to stop the mutiny. He was worthless. He was a traitor. He was a Jew.

Two years later he sent a letter to the Ministry of Defense requesting permission to resign his navy commission and return to civilian life. Such requests were rarely granted, and then it usually took a year or more for an answer to come from Moscow.

But within three weeks Gindin got his permission to resign and went to the only place he knew he’d be safe, home in Pushkin, to be with his mother.

It was only a one-bedroom apartment, and within a few weeks after Boris got home his sister, Ella, got a divorce and moved back with her two children, Vladik, ten, and Julia, three.

“The adjustment was tough,” Gindin remembers.

There was no privacy, no quiet time for him to figure out what to do next. And yet being surrounded by family, by a sense of normalcy in a world that, for him, had gone insane, was just the ticket to help him deal with the pain of a bright future that had gone up in smoke.

Ella worked as as Russian literature teacher at a trade school, where she got Gindin a job teaching auto mechanics. Their mother was receiving a pension of forty rubles a month from the state, which was impossible to live on, so Ella and Boris contributed most of their income to help run the household.