Authors: Kenneth Sewell
After Captain Zhuravin was transferred to the Kamchatka Peninsula to join the K-129, Irina frequently traveled from Vladivostok to the submarine base at Rybachiy. While waiting for a place of their own, they stayed with other submarine officer friends who already had apartments near the base. During her visits in the summer of 1967, the submarine was going out for a day or two at a time. The crews returned home after each short exercise.
She and other navy wives busied themselves tending to the children and exchanging stories about their lives and families back in European Russia. Occasionally, a new film would arrive to be shown at the officers’ club and that, for a time, became the center of conversation. But opportunities for entertainment were sparse at this isolated base.
Since the huge bay was home to a year-round Soviet fishing fleet, fresh seafood was always in abundance. Occasionally, a civilian steamer docked at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy and the wives took large bags across the bay to go shopping.
“We would run to the icebreaker for the trip to the city across the bay to buy fresh vegetables and fruit,” said Irina. “My friends and I would cook together and take turns minding each other’s children.”
When Captain Zhuravin sailed with the K-129 on an extended mission in October 1967, Irina returned to their apartment in Vladivostok, and to her job. She was a senior economist at the Primorskiy Kraiispolkom, the regional authority for Primorskiy Krai (province). She conducted research into programs for developing international trade for Soviet fisheries and forestry products.
In February 1968, Sasha and Irina had been at the spa for two weeks of their three-week allotted vacation when unexpected orders arrived. Captain Second Rank Zhuravin and the other officers were ordered to report back to K-129 immediately. The submarine was to return to sea as soon as possible on another autonomous mission of not less than two months.
Zhuravin’s promotion to captain first rank and commander of the submarine was put on hold, as was Captain Kobzar’s promotion and transfer to Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok.
Captain Kobzar, who had every reason to expect a leisurely refitting of the K-129, was also surprised by the abruptness of the orders. The order to embark on a new mission six months before schedule was completely out of keeping with the Soviet navy’s deployment routine for the missile boats. The sub had been in port only six weeks. What new mission could be so urgent that the normal home port call had to be drastically curtailed? Could replacements be found for the key crew members spread throughout Mother Russia on leave—most of them thousands of miles and many days’ travel away? Even if the furloughed crewmen could be contacted, most would never have time to arrange travel and return for sailing on such short notice.
The news of the sailing was more than a disappointing surprise. It struck the seamen as strange. But orders were orders. The officers and men of the K-129 would obey without question, and with a minimum of open complaint.
Captain Kobzar was told only that K-129 was needed to replace another boat for immediate patrol in the northern Pacific. Headquarters gave a vague explanation that another scheduled missile submarine had broken down and could not fill its regular patrol slot. They would provide replacement crew members in time for sailing.
For this mission, like all the others, the details were withheld. K-129 was to sail on February 24, 1968, with an expected return date of May 5. That was all the information the submariners were allowed to tell their wives, and probably all the information they were given.
The hardship was obvious. Captain Kobzar and his crew had settled in for a long period of limited coastal exercises that allowed them to return to their families almost every night. Believing he had six months to spare, the captain had granted extended leaves to eleven senior enlisted crewmen. Most of them were chief and first-class petty officers and warrant officers with key technical responsibilities for operating the boat.
Captain Kobzar was able to round up all his officers, since most of them were either at the spa or with their families on or near the base. He expected to have a difficult time replacing the key enlisted technicians needed for an autonomous mission of this length. Active Soviet submarines were required to keep a crew available for emergency sailing, but as a rule, the crews could be sent on no more than two seventy-day missions in a year. This new mission would be their third in less than a year, meaning that most of the regular K-129 crew would have spent almost eight months of service submerged in their submarine in a little more than a twelve-month period.
Such a rigorous schedule was highly unusual, except in an emergency or time of war. In peacetime, Soviet ballistic missile submarines, because their entire extended missions were spent underwater, were never turned around so suddenly for another arduous assignment. K-129’s crew was long overdue for a rest and the boat needed refurbishing and repairs from the most recent mission.
Inexplicably, this time the rules were ignored. The Kamchatka Flotilla was ordered to fill the vacancies in the roster immediately. With manpower shortages always plaguing the navy, K-129’s commander and first officer were undoubtedly pleased that a replacement crew was found so quickly. Fourteen replacements were ordered aboard the K-129 to fill the jobs of the regular crewmen on furlough. This brought the roster to eighty-seven, which was four more than the normal complement.
For the most part, the replacements were a ragtag assortment of ordinary seamen and a few senior ranking enlisted men. One warrant officer, seven petty officers, and six ordinary seamen were scrounged from other idled submarines undergoing repairs at the base.
Why K-129 was selected for this particular mission remains a mystery. Although there was a general shortage of missile submarines and trained crews throughout the Soviet navy in 1968, the Soviet Pacific Fleet was able to maintain an aggressive schedule of deployments. There were at least seventeen nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines stationed at bases scattered up and down the Asian coasts, plus five other Golf II submarines identical to the K-129 and a number of other older-type ballistic missile submarines stationed at Kamchatka. At any given time, some were at sea and on station, others were preparing for deployment or in transit to their assigned patrol areas, and the rest were on their way back or had recently returned to base. It seems logical that one of the boats preparing to depart would have been a better substitute for the submarine that had failed to make its scheduled deployment. K-129 was not the only option headquarters had for a replacement submarine to send on a routine, autonomous patrol.
The sudden order for K-129 to undertake this new mission was apparently as much a surprise to the commanders at headquarters in Vladivostok as it was to the submarine’s officers. Later, no one seemed to know why the K-129 had been dispatched on such short notice.
Like the purpose of the mission, the originating command authority has never been revealed. No higher Soviet command ever publicly took credit for issuing the order. One thing is clear, however. In the tightly controlled hierarchy of Soviet ballistic submarine forces, no deviation from standard procedures happened in a vacuum. A missile submarine would never have been assigned an extended mission except by very high authority. The orders that arrived at Rybachiy Naval Base to dispatch the submarine under such unusual circumstances could only have originated in Moscow.
The inexplicable order to rush K-129 back to sea was only one of several mysterious events that occurred before the boat’s departure.
The order to sail early was so odious that some of the sub’s officers and sailors risked stern disciplinary action to make their opinions known. In the Soviet navy, with political officers throughout the ranks, there was usually far less open complaining than in most of the world’s military establishments. But the peculiarity of the order seemed to overcome the normal reluctance to complain.
In this case, there was more of an air of despondency than bitterness. After they returned to the flotilla headquarters to learn more about the circumstances of being recalled to sea, Captain Zhuravin and some of the other boat officers’ behavior became uncharacteristically odd.
Captain Zhuravin, without telling Irina the reasons, visited a banking facility where he kept his business papers and savings account. He asked an official for a form to write a will. The official, a woman who handled his personal papers, told him, “Don’t be silly, you do not need to write a will.”
In the days before sailing, the submarine’s first officer went around the base to all his friends—many of whom had served with him on previous assignments—and asked them to dinner, so he could properly tell them goodbye. He also wrote a letter to his son, Misha, and left it with someone at the base to mail at a future date. In the last line of the letter, Captain Zhuravin wrote, “Son, don’t forget your dad.”
Irina’s husband seemed deeply depressed. It was the first time she had ever seen him react so negatively to any assignment, no matter how difficult. During the years he had served on submarines in the Black Sea and the Pacific, he had been on scores of missions, including some that seemed more unpleasant than this latest assignment. Captain Zhuravin had never openly objected or complained.
He was not the only officer who reacted strangely when they were recalled to sea duty so early. Tamara Orechov, wife of chief engineer Nikolai Orechov, told Irina Zhuravina that her husband was also very distressed by the orders. Tamara said Kolya was understandably exhausted from the last mission, but it was more than that. He became unusually depressed by this sudden assignment. She, too, thought her husband’s reaction was unusual. Orechov had always enthusiastically prepared for previous departures.
The slow pace of routine refurbishing, which would normally have taken three to six months, was accelerated as the sailors of K-129, joined by the replacement crew, skipped over routine maintenance and went about performing emergency repairs that would be absolutely necessary to safely sail the submarine.
The boat was fueled with a light-grade diesel called D-37 oil. This fuel was preferred by Soviet submarine commanders because it burned clean, with almost no trace of smoke. The sub’s huge electric batteries were serviced, and food and medical stocks quickly stowed to accommodate the early departure. Three tarp-covered trucks from the tightly guarded nuclear armory delivered freshly fueled ballistic missiles. Interior Ministry soldiers, under the watchful eye of a KGB officer, stood rigidly at guard on the windy pier as the missiles were hoisted by crane and carefully lowered into the launch tubes. All nuclear weaponry was under the direct physical control of the KGB and not the Soviet navy. The nuclear-armed missiles were stored in KGB-secured facilities and distributed to the various naval commands as needed for missions.
The senior crewmen and officers, who remained near the Kamchatka base because their dependents were there, worked feverishly to prepare the boat for sea duty, even as they grumbled at having to sail again so quickly. They were naturally reluctant to leave the comfort of their warm barracks or apartments, and the arms of wives and girlfriends on base and in the nearby military towns of Paratunka and Nikolayevka. Their displeasure over the new orders did not prevent them, however, from keeping an especially close eye on the quality of foodstuffs being loaded. As members of the navy’s elite Soviet submarine service, they were accustomed to the best of rations, and were even allotted generous supplies of caviar.
The supplies were stowed in every nook and cranny throughout the tight quarters of the submarine. Fresh meats and vegetables were placed within easiest reach, to be consumed early in the mission; dried buckwheat bread and canned foods would be the fare as the mission lapsed into weeks. Since K-129 would make no port calls on these extended missions, everything the crew needed to subsist, including fresh water, had to be brought aboard before sailing.
A day before the scheduled departure, Captains Kobzar and Zhuravin received another jolt. It was an even more drastic deviation from operational protocol than being rushed back into service ahead of schedule.
The submarine’s crew roster had already been filled with replacements, and they had been introduced to the section officers they would serve. Since these replacements were from other submarines stationed at the base, they were quickly integrated into the regular crew. The new men were assigned to their duty sections, shifts, and bunk schedules. With the replacements, all work assignments were covered for the upcoming mission.
Then, without explanation, eleven strangers, all in the uniforms of Soviet sailors, showed up at the pier where K-129 was berthed. They carried written orders to join the crew. The latecomers, including nine in the uniform of common seamen and one wearing the insignia of a seaman first class, were led by a chief petty officer. The chief produced orders assigning this squad to duty aboard Kobzar’s submarine as temporary replacements for his furloughed key senior enlisted men. These last-minute assignments were especially unusual, because their numbers raised the crew total to ninety-eight, fifteen over the normal complement of eighty-three men.
There is no record of how Captain Kobzar reacted to the sudden appearance of strangers with orders to join his crew. But the appearance of these mystery men may have triggered Captain Zhuravin’s unusual behavior. It is certain that the captain or first officer would have brought the over-age of personnel to the attention of base authorities. With more than a dozen extra men aboard, the tightly packed submarine would be even more uncomfortable, if not operationally hampered, on a long sea voyage.