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

Peter I was hooked. As soon as he was old enough, he ordered a real shipyard be built in the White Sea, which almost immediately began cranking out warships. Next he turned his attention to the Baltic and the Black Sea in the south, built a couple of shipyards, and by the spring of 1696 two warships, twenty-three galleys, four fireships, and more than thirteen hundred small vessels were crewed and got ready to do battle against the Russians’ old friends, the Turks.

It’s not that the Russians or the Cossacks had anything against the Turks, except for Turkey’s strategic location in control of the very narrow Bosporus and even narrower Dardenelles. Beat the Turks, and Russia was free to break out into the Mediterranean Sea and, from there, the open Atlantic. The entire world would be theirs, something that was difficult to achieve from Arkhangel’sk, up in the Arctic, which at the time was their only port.

The first step was to take control of the Azov Sea, from which Russian ships would have access to the Black Sea. This was done by June of that year, with the help of forty Cossack boats. The bells were rung in Constantinople as well as in Moscow.

But in October the tsar ordered that a permanent well-stocked and well-funded Russian navy be created in the Sea of Azov. Peter I went down there and lived in a tent to be in command of the Russian navy, while Chief of the Admiralty Alexanter Protasyev oversaw the construction of the base and the ships, which was done by several thousand serfs under the direction of hundreds of shipwrights and officers imported from Western Europe.

In 1697 Peter I sent sixty of Russia’s young noblemen to Europe to study shipbuilding and navigation and went himself to Holland to study advanced nautical sciences while working as a common ship’s carpenter.

When he returned to Russia he was a certified shipwright, and he’d brought back hundreds of books, charts, tools, and even ship models from which the new Russian navy would be designed and built.

In 1698 he opened the Nautical School and Maritime Academy for future seamen and the Nautical School of Mathematics and Navigational Sciences in Moscow.

The very next year, a Russian fleet of ten ships of the line, armed with 366 guns and a crew of more than two thousand officers and men, plus two galleys and sixteen smaller boats, broke out into the Black Sea and headed toward Constantinople. The Turks were so impressed they surrendered without a shot ever being fired. It was one of the very few times that the bells did not ring in Moscow.

With the northern fleet set at Arkhangel’sk to take care of business on Russia’s Arctic coast and the southern fleet in the Black Sea to mostly keep the Turks at bay, Peter I turned his attention next to his second most hated enemy, Sweden.

Although the northern fleet had successfully defended the realm against the Swedes trying to attack over the Northern Route, the tsar figured the only way to beat them was to have a Baltic fleet. If he could pull that off, Russia would not only present a serious threat to Sweden but could also take a run at Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, not to mention Finland and even Denmark. The only problem was that Sweden had thirty-nine ships in the Baltic and Russia didn’t have one. Nor were the Swedes about to leave the Russians alone long enough to build such a fleet.

Thus in 1700 began the navy’s part in the twenty-year Great Northern War, when a fleet of seven Swedish ships attacked the Arctic port at Arkhangel’sk. The Russians not only beat them back but also followed them, capturing strategic Swedish territory and even a couple of Swedish ships that had tried to come up the mouth of the Neva River to St. Petersburg. The bells in Moscow rang again, but everyone who survived got a medal with the inscription: The unprecedented has happened. The Order of St. Andrew the Summoned was created.

Even more important, on May 16, 1703, Peter I ordered the building of St. Petersburg Fortress at the mouth of the Neva and Fort Kronshlot in the Gulf of Finland to protect a new admiralty on the left bank of the Neva where the Baltic fleet would be built.

One year later a second Swedish attack against St. Petersburg was beaten back, and in the summer of 1705 a much smaller Russian fleet sent the Swedes packing after a fierce sea battle that lasted several days. The Russians didn’t have a modern navy yet, but they were sure heading that way. And no one could fault the Russian sailors, officers, and crewmen alike for lacking courage and sheer tenacity. As a result the Moscow bells never seemed to stop ringing.

The great northern struggle finally came to an end. Peter I died in 1725, and for a couple of decades the Russian navy fired no shots in anger. Waging war was an expensive business, and Russia needed to refresh its coffers.