Shipyards building or repairing warships are required to have navy representatives to oversee the work, inspect the finished products, and sign off that the jobs have been done to specs. The gas turbine guy at the yard was gone, so Boris was sent to fill in.
From the day Boris arrived in Zhdanov he realized that this was a dream come true. It would be a perfect place for him to work and to continue with his career. Navy officers don’t have to serve aboard ship to get paid and to get promoted. There are important jobs ashore, such as that of a ship inspector.
Not only that, but Gindin figured that if he could land a job in Zhdanov, he would no longer have to spend six months at a stretch at sea, which meant he could find a girl, get married, and raise the family he wanted. He would be a naval officer, earning good money, getting the respect of the people around him, and yet almost every night he would be able to get aboard the train to Pushkin and go home.
It couldn’t get any better than that. The problem was how to do it.
Gindin scheduled an appointment with Captain First Rank Anatoli Goroxov, the man at the shipyard who was responsible for filling all the navy specialty positions—mechanics, electrical, acoustics, rocket systems, guns, and torpedoes. Gindin was filling in as a gas turbine specialist and he wanted to know whether the position was only temporarily vacant or Goroxov needed someone permanent.
As soon as Goroxov saw Gindin’s résumé and found out that he had a propiska for Leningrad and the area, the captain was over the moon. The Storozhevoy’s young gas turbine engineer was an answer to a prayer.
The only hitch was that since Goroxov had no real idea who or what Gindin was, he would need a reference. A letter from Captain Potulniy would do nicely.
Boris did his work at the yard without a hitch, and as soon as he reported back to the Storozhevoy he laid out his request to the captain. Potulniy was a good man. He didn’t want to lose Boris, whom he had come to trust and to rely upon, but by the same token he was a fair man who did not want to stand in the way of an officer’s advancement. So Potulniy said yes. He would write the letter of reference if Gindin would first go with the ship to the parade and celebration in Riga, then spend the two weeks at the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad and finally help take the ship back to base at Baltiysk.
The main reason Potulniy laid those conditions on Gindin was because Captain Lieutenant Alexander Ivanov, who was commander of BCH-5, Gindin’s boss, would be on leave. The job then of running the entire mechanical, electrical, and steam boiler/fuel group would fall on Gindin’s shoulders.
Of course Gindin jumps at the captain’s kind offer. It’s a chance of a lifetime, a dream come true.
It’s another gun barrel Gindin is looking down as Sablin waits for the officers to make their decisions. In the blink of an eye Gindin can not only see his career going by the wayside, he can also practically see and feel and taste the past seven years as if they were happening at this instant. Especially when the Storozhevoy was being built.
18. BUILDING THE STOROZHEVOY
It takes two years to build a warship that size. The Storozhevoy’s keel is laid down at the boatyard called Yantar Zavod 820 in Kaliningrad, which is a little less than fifty kilometers farther up the inlet from his eventual home port of Baltiysk, in 1972, and the ship is finished in early 1974.
Boris joins the building crew about five months before the ship is ready for sea. At that time they have a different zampolit, a pinch-faced little man who does everything strictly by the book and never cracks a smile. He’d transferred from a submarine and shortly after Boris arrives is transferred to still another ship. His replacement is Sablin, who is like a breath of fresh air by comparison.
Sablin is approachable, friendly, cracks jokes, even smiles. But he is the zampolit, and he believes in the Party line and does his job well, so the officers and sailors must still attend political indoctrination classes, but somehow with Sablin the mumbo jumbo isn’t quite as boring. Things start to look up.
The officers and crew lived in housing outside of Kaliningrad, about twenty minutes by tram from the shipyards and thirty from downtown.
It wasn’t a very large area, and it was protected by a tall fence. Guards were stationed around the clock at the front gate, and anyone wanting to get inside had to show his papers. In the middle of the compound was a three-story redbrick building that housed all two hundred of the officers and men, plus some classrooms where everyone took their political training, just like aboard ship.
The place was something like a cross between the ship and a military jail, although there was a small general store where you could buy a few things if you had the money. Canned food, candy, cookies, milk, cigarettes. The store also sold navy uniforms and insignia, so everyone was expected to look his best at all times. They had a basketball court to use in their spare time, whenever there was spare time, and a park where they could relax.
Captain Potulniy, his zampolit, and his starpom, the three senior officers, had rooms of their own. The other officers all bunked in the same room, and the rest of the crew lived in one big cubrick.
When a ship was built in the yard, his crew was assembled from throughout the fleet and was housed in this compound until it was time to move aboard. Then, when the next ship started construction, the new crew would take over the redbrick building until it was their time to move aboard their ship.
Gindin’s typical routine during these months was morning exercise and breakfast, political training, and then down to the ship with the sailors in his section. There he would continue their training while overseeing the installation of his gas turbines, diesels, and other mechanical equipment. They ate lunch at the compound and then in the afternoon would return from the ship for more training and dinner.
Gindin was off duty the evening of every third day, which meant he could take the tram into the city and perhaps see a movie or eat at a nice restaurant. In his estimation Kaliningrad wasn’t much of a city, plain and a little drab compared to his hometown of Pushkin with its trees and flowers and parks and palaces, but it was better than the compound.
The shipyard, which was also surrounded by a fence and patrolled by guards, was like a small city of long one-story buildings, called cekhs, in which were produced the equipment and parts that went into building a warship.
Hundreds of machinists, welders, lathe operators, and engineers worked around the clock, six days per week. The pace always seemed alive, even frantic, and very messy, with noise and smoke. The entire shipyard smelled like a combination of seawater, oil, gasoline, paint, and rancid grease, but inside each cekh the overriding smell almost always seemed to be that of sweat.
Building a ship was a long, hot, very hard job, done by men and women, who in those days weren’t very keen on bathing regularly. Nor did Moscow care. Ships needed to be produced as fast as humanly possible to defend against the enemies of the Soviet Union.
Inventory depots of spare parts that had been manufactured elsewhere were contained in two- and three-story buildings scattered throughout the shipyard. And there were two buildings, both of them three stories tall, that housed the medical staff, a complete dispensary, and a hospital. Building ships at the pace Moscow wanted them built was not only a difficult business; it was also a risky business.
Railroad sidings crisscrossed the entire yard where not only warships were being constructed but also civilian ships such as tankers and transport ships of every kind were built or repaired. Six long piers stretched out to deep water at Yantar Zavod, and each could accommodate two or three ships at the same time.