Authors: Kenneth Sewell
The Americans’ underseas launch of missiles by the USS
George Washington
created a major new challenge to the Soviets. Even though the Soviets began rapidly increasing submarine production, they continued to fall behind Western underseas warfare technology.
After completion in 1960 at the inland shipyard at Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the submarine designated K-129 sailed down the Amur River to the Tatar Strait and into the open ocean. K-129, which was built on the original Golf blueprint, was assigned to a Soviet submarine pack operating from the Pavlovsk Naval Base on Strelok Bay, forty miles east of Vladivostok. In 1964, K-129 was transferred to Rakushka Naval Base, 185 miles northeast of Vladivostok on the northern edge of the Sea of Japan.
It was at Rakushka on Vladimir Bay that the young Captain Second Rank Kobzar took command of K-129. Along with command of the boat came the promotion to captain first rank. Kobzar was thirty-four years old.
An event in Asia in 1964 had a dramatic impact on the strategists in the Kremlin and the mission of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. On October 16, the People’s Republic of China—the increasingly hostile former client state—successfully tested an atomic bomb. In less than a year the Chinese would up the ante with a successful test of their first hydrogen bomb. The Soviets knew the Chinese could rapidly weaponize their nuclear technology since they had transferred submarine and missile technology to China before the Sino-Soviet rift. Between 1950 and 1960, the Soviets had also provided the then-friendly Asian neighbor with blueprints for more advanced weapons systems, probably including the plans for the upgraded R-13 Sark missile and the D-2 launcher for the Golf submarine.
China’s sudden entry into the exclusive club of nuclear-armed nations was a greater threat to the Soviets than to the Americans, because of the immense size of the PRC army and its proximity to the Soviet border. KGB intelligence studies warned Soviet leaders that the large Asian population of eastern Russia was increasingly being drawn to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese style of Communism. From the early 1960s, Chairman Mao had viciously lashed out at Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev for deviating from the true path of Marxism. Beijing was challenging Moscow for hegemony over world Communism. The dispute quickly turned to direct confrontation along the twenty-four-hundred-mile-long common border in the Soviet Far East.
In 1963, the Kremlin made a final desperate effort to patch up the rift with China. A delegation led by its top China hand, Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, met with Chinese officials and offered to restore good relations between Moscow and Beijing. Suslov was the Soviet Communist Party’s chief ideologue and an unrepentant Stalinist. Rudely rebuffed by the Chinese, the delegation was convinced that the PRC—and Mao in particular—had suddenly replaced the United States as the Soviet Union’s primary adversary.
Thus, by 1964, the Soviets in the Far East found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea, with a nuclear-armed and hostile China next door and an even more powerful U.S. Navy in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet navy had to be modernized quickly. The Soviet Union desperately needed a submarine that could launch ballistic missiles while submerged. To improve the balance of terror, the Soviets wanted submarines that could carry a nuclear strike to the enemies’ cities and missile sites farther inland.
The Soviets had a more advanced missile system on the drawing boards, a system they determined could be adapted and retrofitted on the diesel-electric Golf submarines while improved nuclear submarines were being designed, built, and deployed.
The new sea-launched ballistic missile system designated the R-21 (Serb), with an effective range of more than 840 miles and a one-megaton warhead, was ready for installation by the mid-1960s. More important, the engineers had designed a new launch system, the D-4, which provided a capability for submarines to launch while surfaced or submerged. The combined system, known as the SS-N-5, would give the Soviet fleets their first truly atomic-age, sea-launch missile capability.
The Golf submarines in the retrofit program were designated Series 629A by the Soviets. NATO would identify them as Golf IIs, at which point the boats not retrofitted were designated Golf Is. When the retrofit was completed, the Soviets had a major new sea-launched missile system that could temporarily compete with the Americans’ superior SLBM technology, and an ability to put sea-launched, one-megaton nuclear warheads on practically every major city in China, as well.
Of the twenty-two Golf-type submarines in service in 1965, fourteen were selected to be retrofitted with the new Serb missile and underwater launch system. Captain Kobzar’s K-129 was one of these boats.
The K-129 was ordered to the Dalzavod shipyards for the missile retrofit and a complete overhaul. As was customary, the captain and senior crew members stayed with their ship for this work. The Dalzavod facility had been the premier Russian shipyard in the Far East since the late 1880s. It was located in a suburb of the bristling Soviet naval facilities at Vladivostok. This huge shipyard was as well equipped as any in the Soviet Union, with a giant quay wall, three dry docks, two side-launching ways, and two floating docks. The six Golf submarines in the Pacific Fleet were to be retrofitted with the improved missile systems and returned to duty as soon as the conversion was completed.
While the extensive missile launch retrofit was taking place, K-129’s captain arranged to have another, customized modification made to his boat. Kobzar wanted more space in compartment two where the officers’ cabins were located, along with the cipher room, the sonar room, and one of the sub’s three communal toilets. One way to achieve this was to move the cipher room out of that area. During the overhaul at the Dalzavod shipyards, the captain bribed an engineer with a case of vodka to make the additional, unauthorized alterations to his boat.
The cipher room was a closetlike enclosure where the encryption codebooks and decoding machines were kept in a locked safe. One of the few underused spaces on the submarine was in compartment four, which housed the three huge missile tubes. There was space between the tubes and in walkways between the tubes and hull. The cipher room was replicated there, and the equipment moved from compartment two to compartment four.
Moving the cipher gear to compartment four not only freed some space in the officers’ quarters but placed the critical cipher equipment and codebooks much closer to the communications room and the control center. Thus, the unauthorized innovation was both a convenience for the officers and a practical improvement to the boat’s overall utility.
Captain Kobzar’s uncharacteristic independent streak did not go unnoticed by his superiors. The captain’s action was so unusual that it sparked an investigation by Soviet naval intelligence. The chief engineer from the Dalzavod shipyards was questioned about having accepted the case of vodka as a bribe and ultimately forced to sign an affidavit admitting complicity.
While the K-129 and other Golfs were being retrofitted with the modern missile and launch system in the shipyard at Vladivostok, China was wasting no time modernizing its own navy. Coincidentally, in September 1966, a submarine almost identical in appearance and operations to the Series 629 Golf (Golf I) originally deployed by the Soviets was completed at the Dalian shipyards on the north shore of the Yellow Sea in China, approximately 750 miles southwest of Vladivostok.
The Americans soon became aware that the Chinese had launched this improved Golf with enhanced ballistic missile range. The intelligence agencies of both the Soviets and the Americans watched with growing concern as missiles with ever greater range and capacity were tested in the deserts of western China. China had been testing its own missile delivery systems since at least 1958.
In addition, a dozen Chinese attack submarines began to appear around the fringes of the Asian continent. China had been rapidly turning out Soviet-style, diesel-electric attack submarines at shipyards at Jiangnan, Wuchang, and Fulin. With typical Western bias, the Free World had hardly noticed Mao’s ambition to build an offensive naval force until the Chinese tested the first Asian atom bomb.
The KGB knew the Chinese had also married their newfound nuclear warhead and missile technology to at least one submarine and they assumed that U.S. military intelligence knew it, too.
When the conversion of K-129 to a Golf II–type submarine was completed in 1966, the Soviets had a greatly improved weapon to send back into the Pacific. With its extended missile range, the Golf II submarine could hide and launch its missiles from an area of ocean six times larger than before. That meant it was a much more elusive weapon, and posed a greater threat to American cities, ports, and military installations located anywhere within eight hundred miles of a coastline. The new Serb missile was not as good as the American Polaris system, but the Golf II submarines such as K-129 now had the ability to fire while running submerged at four or five knots.
After the retrofit, K-129 was reassigned to a new unit as part of the Kamchatka Flotilla. There was no visible difference to the sub’s external features, since the improvements were all internal. However, the wet launch system did add considerable weight to the submarine and additional stress to the hull.
In early January 1966, Captain Kobzar sailed his newly refurbished submarine fourteen hundred miles from Vladivostok to the submarine base near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy on the Kamchatka Peninsula. K-129 was one of six of the remodeled boats assigned to the Soviet 29th Ballistic Missile Squadron.
The retrofitted subs operating out of the Rybachiy Navy Base on the Kamchatka Peninsula became a menace to America and the object of intense surveillance by the U.S. attack submarines operating near the Soviet Asian coasts. Assignments from that deep-water port took K-129 to the edges of the territorial waters of the United States for the first time. It is known that K-129 completed at least two of these long-range missions in 1967.
While the Americans and Soviets were rushing into production a new generation of nuclear-powered submarines, it was this aging diesel-electric boat that would soon become, for both sides, the most hunted submarine of the Cold War.
T
HE SUBMARINE OFFICER OF THE
C
OLD
W
AR
R
ED
N
AVY
was as close as the Marxist system ever came to producing the idealized “new Soviet man.”
These naval officers, along with the few cosmonauts and a smattering of top aviators, were the first generation of men born and reared entirely under the control of a Communist state. By selection, training, and discipline they were sterling examples of what the proletariat could accomplish under the best that the Soviet system had to offer.
While these men were not state-controlled robots, their intensive indoctrination made them both technically well educated and extremely patriotic. The submarine commanders never hesitated to risk their lives and boats for the cause and, if given a verifiable order, they would have launched nuclear missiles on an enemy city without qualms. This devotion to state, however, came with a major caveat. These officers strictly adhered to a regimen of procedures and a chain of command that absolutely prevented them from exercising even the slightest degree of personal initiative. Just as the submarine officers would not hesitate to obey orders to the letter, their intensive indoctrination prevented any deviation from their assignments. There were no cowboys in the Soviet submarine service.
The commander of K-129, Captain First Rank Vladimir Ivanovich Kobzar, was recognized by his peers and superiors alike as the embodiment of this first generation of new Soviet men. His loyal service was rewarded in January 1968.
Kobzar was told he was slated for appointment to a command position with the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok. This increase in responsibility would almost certainly bring with it the rank of rear admiral. Another unexpected honor was bestowed on him. The veteran submarine captain received the Soviet Union’s second-highest military honor, the Order of the Red Star. This prestigious medal was awarded for outstanding achievement in the defense of the USSR by acts or conduct that ensured state security. Captain Kobzar was cited for personal courage and valor. The specific act that merited this recognition was then, and remains today, a state secret. His crew was told only that the medal was awarded for a submarine mission Captain Kobzar headed during 1967. It is reasonable to speculate that he received the honor for commanding the first Pacific Ocean mission to bring a Soviet submarine within ballistic missile range of the American mainland. This was a major step toward establishing nuclear parity with the United States.
The significance of the Red Star to the Soviet submariners went far beyond the name of this medal. The Soviet navy—from the lowest seaman to the top admiral—literally sailed and served under the symbol of the Red Star. Their ships flew the Red Star on the naval banner when they left and returned to port, and every officer and enlisted man wore a Red Star on the crown of his cap.
Captain Kobzar was one of the most experienced veterans of the post–World War II Red submarine service. Upon graduation from the naval academy at Sevastopol, he received command training at Leningrad before being posted to the Far East in 1952. A “sailor’s sailor,” Kobzar worked his way up through the ranks, serving on submarines in the Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok and Nakhodka before assuming command of the K-129 at Rakushka in 1964.
He was born in the small Ukrainian village of Ternavshchino. A tall, good-looking man with brown curly hair and a somber demeanor, Kobzar was by all accounts a dedicated and respected officer. He was highly regarded by his superiors and fellow officers and, though a stern commander, was considered fair and protective by those who served under him.
Submarine officers enjoyed the greatest prestige and privileges of any members of the Soviet armed forces, which could have placed them in an elitist class in the minds of other crew members. Still, there was a warm camaraderie between most officers and the men in the enlisted ranks on their subs. The close living accommodations and shared risks of the service fostered a level of cohesion unheard of in other branches of the Soviet military.
Admiral Rudolf A. Golosov, commander of the missile squadron to which the K-129 was attached, summed up the relationship this way:
“Submariners are a special brotherhood, either all come to the surface or no one does. On a submarine, the phrase all for one and one for all is not just a slogan, but reality.”
If Captain Kobzar was a respected father figure to the K-129 crew, his first officer, Alexander M. Zhuravin, filled the role of big brother. Captain Second Rank Zhuravin, also exceptionally tall for a submariner at six feet two inches, was popular with the men of the submarine from the moment he assumed the first-officer position. He was known for his good-natured joking and quickly became a favorite officer among the ordinary seamen. On routine trips around the bay when the boat was between missions, Zhuravin often fished with the enlisted men off the submarine’s stern.
Captain Zhuravin became K-129’s first officer in mid-1967, and had served with this crew on its most recent extended mission. A submariner for more than twelve years, with extensive experience aboard Golf I and Golf II subs, Zhuravin had been selected to replace Captain Kobzar as commander of the K-129 when Kobzar assumed his new duties at Pacific Fleet headquarters. Zhuravin’s first major assignment as submarine commander would be the regularly scheduled mission in early summer 1968, at which time he could expect a promotion to captain first rank.
A commander of a smaller attack submarine could hold that position as a captain second rank, but all missile boat skippers had to be at least captain first rank. The higher rank required for missile boat commanders indicated the Kremlin’s appreciation for the responsibility these officers assumed. The missile boat commander, despite all the checks and balances of the system, had the ultimate potential to launch nuclear missiles that could start a world war.
Zhuravin came from a family of Leningrad industrial workers. His parents and older brother all worked in the Yegorov Train Car Factory. But during the Russian Revolution his father, Mikhail Grigoriavich Zhuravin, had been a sailor on the famous cruiser
Aurora.
The crew of that ship mutinied against the czarist navy on behalf of the Bolsheviks in February 1917 and fired the first shot that signaled the start of the Communist revolution.
After graduating from the naval academy at Riga, Zhuravin worked through the ranks from lieutenant, senior lieutenant, captain lieutenant, and captain third rank, to his position as first officer of the K-129 with the grade of captain second rank. He served on submarines at Odessa and Feodosiya on the Black Sea.
In 1960, Zhuravin’s submarine was transferred from the Black Sea Fleet to the Pacific Fleet. This transfer of men and boat took him on an extraordinary voyage by submarine across the elaborate Russian inland waterway system. Czar Peter the Great had begun construction of the waterway in the early 1700s. Zhuravin’s submarine traveled from the Black Sea in southern Russia, through the Volga-Don Canal to the Volga-Baltic Waterway into the White Sea in northern Russia. The submarine then sailed along the top of the world through the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and through the Bering Strait into the Bering Sea, and finally, across the northern Pacific Ocean to Vladivostok.
Before being assigned to K-129, Zhuravin served on a Golf I submarine at Vladivostok and later on a retrofitted Golf II, identical to the K-129 he was soon to command. When he was transferred to the Kamchatka Flotilla, he joined the K-129 crew.
The rapid career advancement of both Kobzar and Zhuravin was based solely on merit. In the Soviet submarine officers corps in the late 1960s, political connections and party affiliations did not result in promotion. While submarine officers were required to be members of the Communist Party, and the party vetted candidates for command positions, first and foremost the typical submarine officer had to be technically proficient in the operations of the complicated, and often mechanically flawed, boats.
Captains Kobzar and Zhuravin, like all other Soviet navy officers assigned to high-level command positions aboard submarines, dutifully complied with the party membership requirements, but their careers were dedicated to the navy, not the party. Unlike many of the politicized postings in the Red Army, the submarine commanders were not political hacks. The submarine forces of the Soviet Union were too vital to the security of the Communist state, and the jobs too important to be filled by sycophants. Submarine commanders were handpicked by top admirals in the Soviet Supreme Naval Headquarters from the best officers in the Red Navy.
The candidate officers were selected in their teens from the cream of the Soviet youth. They were chosen strictly on the basis of their tested abilities and largely from the working classes, not from the families of Kremlin elite.
The cadets at the naval academies were educated and trained in specialties related to submarine operations, including weaponry, communications, engineering, and electronics. The submarine commanders, as well as the ships’ other officers and petty officers, also had to be jacks-of-all-trades, with a flair for improvising with “bailing wire and Band-Aids,” to compensate for the constant shortages of spare parts and technical problems.
The post–World War II submarines of the Soviet Union were constructed under much the same political pressure as Stalin had imposed on slave laborers to churn out vast armies of tanks for the Great Patriotic War. Sheer numbers counted for everything, while mechanical quality was often ignored. There was one obvious major difference. Mechanical failure of a tank engine or transmission was not likely to kill the crew. A leaking pressure hull or faulty hatch on a submarine was quite another matter.
Soviet submarine officers had to contend with dangerous risks to boats and crews created by the Communist bureaucracy, as well as head-to-head competition against superior American submarines and ASW aircraft. Party hacks in charge of shipyards and other production facilities frequently forced the navy to accept unsafe ships and other equipment into service before being properly tested. Submarine commanders bore the brunt of the mistakes made by the submarine builders, who were turning out boats of substandard quality, made by poorly trained workers. These boats often placed the lives of the officers and their men at risk. Between 1946 and 1991, hundreds of Soviet submarine sailors would pay for these mistakes with their lives.
But orders were orders and the Soviet submarine officers were obedient to a fault. Popular American movie plots to the contrary, there was not a single defection of a submarine crew during the entire Cold War. This loyalty to motherland seems even more surprising, in light of the fact that submarine commanders had ample opportunity to sail their boats independently into any harbor in the West.
Men such as Kobzar were indoctrinated from the crib to believe that the hardship of long years of service, isolated from home and family, was essential to protect their country from the imperialistic Western aggressors, particularly the Americans.
To compensate for the inadequacies of the Soviet military-industrial system, extraordinary men had to be raised to operate and fight these dangerous boats. Until the 1960s, most of the world did not consider the Soviet navy to be a competitive blue-water force. Against great odds, that reputation was gradually improving with the expansion of the submarine service.
The Communist system failed repeatedly on the economic front, with disaster after disaster in industrial and agricultural Five-Year Plans. But the Soviet submarine officer corps was honed at its excellent naval academies, and upon graduation these officers became the elite of Soviet society.
In 1968, Captain Kobzar, age thirty-eight, and Captain Zhuravin, four years his junior, were typical of the products of the postwar Soviet navy submarine schools. K-129’s captain and first officer had been selected to become submarine officers while in their teens. Each had entered a submarine academy at the age of eighteen: Kobzar, the Admiral Makarov Naval Academy at Sevastopol on the Black Sea in 1948; and Zhuravin, the Riszhskoe Academy for Submariners at Riga, Latvia, on the Baltic Sea in 1952.
Both officers began their naval careers while Joseph Stalin was still dictator of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet navy, which had been decimated by Stalin’s liquidation of all officers with the rank of rear admiral and above during the bloody military purges of the late 1930s, had been completely reorganized during and after the Great Patriotic War. As a result of the lingering memory of the purges, line officers in the military, particularly the navy, maintained a distrustful distance from the politics of the Kremlin. Even as they were forced to join and pledge loyalty to the Communist Party in order to attain higher rank, the typical submarine officer was strictly loyal to his fleet and military chain of command. The party was involved in every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, but operational naval command lines of authority were clear.
Like most of the veteran submarine commanders, Captain Kobzar held no position in the Communist Party. The younger Zhuravin held a minor post as secretary in a local party unit in Vladivostok.
Submarine commanders left the party’s ideological duties and indoctrination to the
zampolit,
or political officer, stationed aboard every submarine. The
zampolits
were the postwar equivalent of the infamous commissars of World War II. In the modern Soviet military, they did not stand in the rear with machine guns waiting to mow down retreating soldiers, but their presence in every major unit was nonetheless a powerful influence. Every Soviet submarine had a regular
zampolit
assigned. On K-129, that man was Captain Third Rank Fedor E. Lobas.