Authors: Kenneth Sewell
When the K-129 returned from an extended mission these sailors, who lived in barracks, worked around the submarine performing repairs, cleaning, and routine maintenance. While the navy skimmed the best of the conscripts, these men received little specialized training. They were placed on the job and given specific duties.
Most of the lower-ranking members of the normal, eighty-three-man complement serving aboard Golf-type subs were from villages and towns scattered across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of them were from the Soviet
Stans,
predominantly Moslem republics. Others were conscripted from Tatar ethnic groups of the steppes and Siberia. The conscripts in the lower ranks were treated as younger members of the K-129 family. These sailors from the collective farms and herder villages obeyed whatever orders they received from any authority figure they encountered. In general, their greatest ambition in the Soviet submarine service was to finish their hitch and return home as soon as possible.
T
HE
S
OVIET SUBMARINE OFFICER
was effectively indoctrinated throughout his training to dedicate life and career to the state, and yet, paradoxically, a strong devotion to wife and children humanized this “new Soviet man.”
The senior staff officers of K-129 had been carefully selected, highly trained at the best naval schools, and drilled in the Marxist tenet of “State above all.” At the same time, there is ample evidence that these men’s families strongly influenced how they carried out their duties to the motherland.
Homecoming after a long patrol was an occasion of real celebration for the officers and crew. Naturally, the men were glad to be back on land where their accommodations, though Spartan by Western standards, were luxurious compared to the cramped bunks and stagnant air on the boat. The return to port was even more significant for those who would be reuniting with their families. Many of the senior crew members had wives and children living in government-provided apartments on or near the base, or in housing in nearby military villages. Some lived across the bay in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. A few families of officers recently transferred to Rybachiy still lived at large naval complexes near Vladivostok, waiting for housing assignments closer to the base.
Despite the strictness of the Soviet military system, the navy actually encouraged cadets to marry at the end of their academy training. The navy provided transportation for their brides to follow them to the far-flung naval bases where they were assigned.
The submariner families lived insular lives, far removed from most population centers and still more distant from the realities of the failing Soviet economy. The pay of junior officers was low, but the navy compensated in other ways, offering families a privileged lifestyle compared with that of average Soviet citizens. Free housing, often with a television set and sometimes a private bath, was furnished whenever available. The families enjoyed better food, a wide selection of otherwise scarce clothing, and a few luxury items. Almost everything needed for a relatively comfortable lifestyle was provided more generously to the families of submarine officers than to any other military or workers group in Soviet society.
An especially popular perk for the submariners in the Pacific Fleet was a health resort holiday provided at the end of each extended mission. The Soviet bureaucrats justified the expense of the recreational junkets by calling the resorts “sanitariums” and including rehabilitation sessions on the agenda. But the accommodations and programs at the sanitariums were more like the vacation spas offered as rewards to European workers and their families. If the submariner’s wife lived near the base, she was included in the holiday.
When the K-129 returned in January, the crew members were offered twenty-day respites at such a spa. Shortly after being cleared from the mission, approximately half the crew left for the spa, while the other half did light duty around the Rybachiy submarine base. When the first group returned, the other half went.
The hot springs spa, which included family cottages as well as recreational, medical, and therapy facilities, was located at Paratunka Village, about twenty miles from Petropavlovsk.
Captain Kobzar enjoyed the privileges of a submarine commander, and his family had been awarded comparatively comfortable quarters in the officers’ housing section at Rybachiy Naval Base. He and his wife, Irina Ivanova, had two children, sixteen-year-old daughter Tatiana and son Andre, who was eight. As a submarine commander, Kobzar was already among the elite of the Soviet navy, and his family was accorded the privileges of that rank.
The circumstances of his younger first officer, Captain Third Rank Zhuravin, were more representative of the lifestyle of the average Soviet submarine officer in the Pacific Fleet.
Captain Zhuravin’s wife, also named Irina, still lived in an apartment in Vladivostok, waiting for housing at the base. Zhuravin telephoned her as soon as he could get permission to use a secure phone line. The telephone link between the Kamchatka base and Vladivostok was made through an undersea cable. Coincidentally, the U.S. Navy was already designing bugging equipment to tap this underwater cable. A U.S. spy submarine would later plant the bugging equipment.
Irina Zhuravina, age thirty-three, had married the dashing young submariner immediately after graduating from Moscow State University of Foreign Relations with a degree in international economics. Her new husband had graduated from the Riga naval academy the year before, with honors.
About a year after joining him for his first assignment to a submarine stationed on the Black Sea, Irina delivered a baby boy, Mikhail. The child was twelve years old and in the sixth grade at school when his father assumed the first-officer position aboard K-129. The family grew close because of Zhuravin’s frequent transfers, and when the father was in port, he and his son were inseparable. Irina affectionately called her husband Sasha and her son Misha.
Irina had reluctantly remained in their apartment near the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok because Captain Zhuravin had sailed on a long patrol almost immediately after being transferred to Kamchatka in the summer of 1967. Her mother flew out from Moscow to help her with Misha while Zhuravin was at sea, and to assist them later when they moved closer to the base. They would have more choices in housing with his promotion, and they planned to look for a new place before he assumed command of the K-129.
It was years since Zhuravin had been on furlough. In addition to finding a house, the couple hoped to take an extended trip back to Moscow and western Russia to visit family and friends before the submarine’s next extended mission. That mission was scheduled for June. The captain had spent an aggregate five years at sea during the last eleven years of their marriage.
This latest homecoming from an extended sea tour should have been an especially happy occasion for the family, but as it turned out, it was less than joyous. Zhuravin returned from the mission suffering from a chronic respiratory illness. He told Irina the ailment was only a side-effect from inhaling diesel fumes and stagnant air during seventy days at sea. But the symptoms were serious enough that Zhuravin was given medical treatment at a base facility. Irina flew in from Vladivostok to be with him.
Captain Zhuravin’s illness seemed to worry his wife more than it did him or the doctors. Irina was concerned that the long days submerged in the foul air of diesel fumes and chemicals from the sub’s lead acid batteries had done permanent damage to her husband’s lungs. After she arrived, he continued to experience bouts of profuse nasal bleeding and other symptoms of respiratory infection.
Following his treatment, Irina and Sasha joined one of the groups of K-129 officers who were taking the coveted recreation trip to the health spa. It was near the end of January when they arrived at the Paratunka Village sanitarium. After several days of relaxation with other officers and their families, Sasha’s ailments seemed to improve.
At the spa, couples were billeted in private cabins and had unlimited use of a modern gymnasium and other recreational facilities on the grounds. The Zhuravins spent much of the holiday mixing with other K-129 officers and their wives. With them at the spa were the weapons officer, Captain Third Rank Gennady Panarin, and his wife, Zoya, and the chief engineer, Captain Third Rank Nikolai Orechov, and his wife, Tamara. During the vacation, Irina also got to know the ship’s doctor, Major Sergey Cherepanov, and the
zampolit,
Captain Third Rank Fedor Lobas. Her husband jokingly told her that the party spy Lobas had been ordered to keep an eye on her.
The greatest reward of being stationed in this isolated part of the Soviet Far East was the beauty of its wilderness. Kamchatka Peninsula was not connected by highway or railroad to the more settled Russian mainland. The vacationers occasionally spotted the area’s giant Russian bears, cousins of their Alaskan counterparts, the Kodiak grizzlies.
After Zhuravin’s recovery, their days at the sanitarium-spa were filled with sledding excursions and day trips to explore the snow-covered slopes of the nearby volcanic mountains: Koryaksky, Avachinskaya, and Kozelsky. There are more than three hundred volcanic peaks and thirty active volcanoes in the region.
It was during this convalescence that the K-129 officers learned of an ominous incident in the Pacific.
On January 23, 1968, patrol boats of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) attacked and seized the U.S. Navy electronic surveillance boat USS
Pueblo.
The American ship was sailing about fifteen miles off the North Korean coast in the Sea of Japan. Most nations recognized a twelve-mile territorial limit. One American sailor was killed in the attack and eighty-two seamen and officers were taken prisoner.
Tensions were already running high in the Pacific. The Vietnam War was also heating up, with the January Tet Offensive escalating that conflict to its most deadly level since the Americans had joined the war. The North Korean attack on the American intelligence-gathering ship became even more of a crisis when U.S. surveillance planes discovered the ship had been hauled to Wonsan harbor. The Soviet navy had recently opened a submarine base at the northern end of that harbor. The Americans learned that Soviet technicians had been given complete access to the pirated boat, with all its sophisticated spy gear. Suddenly, American Pacific forces were placed on high alert. President Johnson ordered the mobilization of six Air Force reserve and National Guard fighter-bomber units. An American naval armada began patrolling the North Korean coastline, dangerously close to the huge Soviet naval facilities at Vladivostok.
The growing tensions caused by the Korean provocation seemed a lifetime removed from the vacationing K-129 submariners and their wives. The Zhuravins and the other K-129 couples were, for all the world, a carefree assembly of sailors on leave. At least for this short time they were shielded by the mysterious vastness of the Kamchatka Peninsula from the machinations of war and the troubled Soviet economy.
The group frolicking in the Paratunka spa hot springs was typical of the young, educated Soviet submarine families sent from their homes in western Russia to the empire’s Far East outpost. None was more representative of this new privileged class of submarine families than the Zhuravins.
Irina and Sasha had been introduced when both were in their late teens. Her brother, Stanislav Grigorievich, who was destined to become an admiral of his own fleet in the post–Cold War Russian Federation Navy, was serving as a fellow cadet with Zhuravin at the naval academy in Riga. When Grigorievich gave Zhuravin a photograph of Irina and her address, a three-year correspondence began.
Her brother, whom she called Stas, brought Sasha home on vacation to Moscow. She was eighteen, Sasha a year older. Her classmates were jealous of her handsome naval cadet pen pal.
“When he visited, I was so proud to show him off to my girlfriends and the boys who had been flirting with me,” Irina recalls. “Of course, much of the charm was his uniform—he looked wonderful in it.”
Although they kept up a steady correspondence during her early years at university, she was not ready to marry. Irina was devoted to her education, and actively involved in Moscow life as an amateur artist and dancer. She was a member of the university’s folk dance ensemble, which toured the Soviet Union offering performances at workers’ co-ops. Every time the troupe performed near Riga she visited her brother and Sasha. After they graduated from the naval academy, Irina visited Sasha at his first assignment at Sevastopol. It was then that he placed a ring on her finger and said it was his intention to marry her.
“For me it wasn’t a surprise,” she said. “I had known for a long time that Sasha would be mine. Many girls were after him, but I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. I, too, had suitors, but I felt sure Sasha was the man for me. I showed my eleven-year-old cousin a photo of a class of forty cadets and asked her to pick the one I should marry. Without hesitation, she pointed to Sasha and said, ‘You should marry
him.’ ”
They were married soon after she graduated, and the newlyweds accepted the nomadic life of the Soviet submariner family. Irina went with her husband “from base to base, everywhere he served” during the early years of their marriage.
“I followed him like thread follows a needle,” she said.
Although submariners enjoyed perks that were not available to average Soviet families, life was not easy compared to Western standards. But to a young couple in love, who had been raised in the devastated remains of Russia after the Great Patriotic War witnessing purges and famines, their living conditions seemed good and navy life was exciting.
During Sasha’s rise through the junior ranks, the Zhuravins often shared an apartment with the families of two or three other submarine officers. They cooked meals over charcoal stoves and made do with whatever groceries were available at food co-ops on the bases.
Then orders came transferring Zhuravin to the Far East. His first assignment there was at a base near the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok. He sent for his wife and son immediately after finding an apartment close to the military complex in the big port city.
Their living conditions improved as Zhuravin moved up through the ranks. When Zhuravin was promoted to captain third rank in 1965, they had their own apartment in a modern building with other officers’ families. Irina described it as “one room with all the comforts, even a television set.”