23. THE BIG LIE
The Soviet Union has lied to Gindin as well as it has to Sablin. The only difference is Gindin knows that he personally can’t do a thing about it, while Sablin believes that he can do something to change the system. Not only that, he feels that it’s his sacred duty as a good Communist to do something.
It’s these similar but divergent views that create the problem.
In the academy and then aboard every ship and at every base Gindin has been assigned to he’s had to give political classes to the sailors who report to him. It’s nothing new. It’s a fact of life for every officer in the Soviet military. And like the vast majority of officers, Gindin does what he’s told, but he doesn’t have to like those orders, nor does he have to comply beyond the strict letter of the law. He’s given his lectures, every second Monday, and at this moment, sitting in the midshipmen’s dining hall, for the life of him he could not give even a simple report of any political lecture he’s ever given. Not even the one from last week in which Sablin had taken such an interest.
Gindin had jotted down his lecture notes from some Pravda article and had brought them up to Sablin’s cabin for the zampolit’s approval.
“This is exciting, Boris; don’t you think so?” Sablin had enthused. “We’ll be sailing to Riga to help celebrate the great revolution. What a perfect time this is.”
For another boring political lecture? Gindin has to wonder. But the zampolit is lighting up like a May 9th fireworks display to celebrate the end of WWII.
“Anyway, this stuff doesn’t matter,” Sablin says, glancing at Gindin’s notes. “The only truth is what we make.”
“Sir?”
“You’ll see,” Sablin says, almost slyly, but he’s smiling.
They are now facing each other in this completely insane situation, and the same look of holy zeal is in Sablin’s eyes.
Political officers are born, not made. In Sablin’s case he was brought up as a navy brat, on navy bases, knowing little or nothing of the world of civilians beyond the main gates. From the moment he could walk and talk a number of stern principles were drilled into him: Duty, discipline, and patriotism. The military way. Loyalty to the Soviet system. The pure ideals of the Communist man. Child of the revolution. Never lie. Despise hypocrisy. Hate injustice.
When he was only sixteen, Sablin applied to the Frunze Military Academy and was accepted. He was a model student and in his first year was elected to run the Kommunisticheksi Soyuz Molodioshi, Komsomol, the Communist youth organization on campus. He became the conscience of the class.
His classmates said they all believed in the ideals of Communism and Socialism. They were educated to believe. But Sablin not only believed with all his heart; he also wanted to put the ideals into action.
All the ideals.
That meant the democracy Lenin promised after the revolution. That meant all men were to be treated as equals. That meant everyone produced to the best of their abilities and everyone received what they needed. There was to be no poverty. No hunger. No homelessness. No injury or illness that wasn’t addressed. Universal work and education.
But Sablin was not a stupid young man. He looked around and he saw that the bureaucracy since Lenin was filled with hypocrisy and that everyone was supposed to close their eyes to it all.
They swore oaths to Lenin and to Communism, but it was nothing but a pack of lies from Stalin to Brezhnev.
When Sablin was still in school he wrote an angry letter to Premier Khrushchev. “Social inequalities,” Sablin argued, “are bastardizing the ideals of the Soviet state. Something must be done before it is too late.”
Moscow was not amused. A letter of reprimand was sent to Frunze, and Sablin’s graduation was put on hold, maybe permanently. The wisdom of the time was that the young man’s career was over before it had really begun.
But Sablin was a starry-eyed idealist, the class conscience. Despite the setback, he finished his studies and graduated with honors. Not long afterward Khrushchev was kicked out and Brezhnev took his place, with the goal of making the Soviet navy the best seagoing force on earth.
Within five years Sablin emerged from the ashes of his reprimand like a phoenix to be offered command of a destroyer. He was of a good military family, he was a Frunze graduate, he was a loyal, if overzealous, Communist who sometimes took the Party line to extremes, and he obviously was fearless.
But Sablin turned it down, opting instead to go to the Lenin Political Academy, where he could study doctrine so that he could truly understand Communism. Instead of commanding a ship in battle, he wanted to command a ship’s crew in grasping the ideals of Socialism.
It’s possible that even then, at the age of thirty, Sablin was already planning to make his mark by challenging Moscow.
But if he expected to find the answers at the academy he would be disappointed, because those kinds of explanations did not exist. He dived headfirst into Lenin and Marx and Engels in the original books and articles. He was trying to understand the October Revolution at the intellectual level. But like a Catholic priest who begins to doubt his faith and the reasons for his celibacy, Sablin was already starting to have trouble swallowing the doctrine. Wherever he looked he saw corruption, inequality, and the unearned privileges of the nomenklatura.
They fought the revolution to stop all that, to stop the class system, to give the working class the true power, but all that had gone by the wayside. A few old men in the Kremlin, not the people, were in charge.
When he tried to dig even deeper—after all, the revolution was perfection; it was simply his understanding that was faulty—he discovered that a lot of material was off-limits. For instance: Leon Trotsky had been one of the revolutionaries alongside Lenin, but his books and articles were not available. Not even to academy students, who were supposed to be the crème de la crème of Communist youth. The guys who were supposed to go out into the service and, like pastors, guide their flocks. It was as if seminary students were not allowed to speak about the Devil.
Despite the censorship, despite the disappointments, Sablin graduated and went out into the fleet a dedicated Communist who wholeheartedly believed in the philosophy, if not in the bureaucracy.
In a capitalist world the ordinary workers had to accept the fact that there would be rich people and there would be poor people. It was a natural outcome of such a system, and like it or not, the proletariat had to live with the consequences. But in Socialism there weren’t supposed to be such inequalities. Communism was designed to be the purest form of civilization. In theory.
In practice even the most casual observer could see that reality in the Soviet Union didn’t come anywhere close to the ideal.
The men who ran the nation from Moscow would never voluntarily give up their power. There would be no elections. The new revolution had to come from within. This time a zampolit would have to provide the spark.
Sablin’s favorite theme in his political lectures was revolution. Especially the October Revolution and the mutiny aboard the Potemkin.
In fact, it’s the zampolit’s position that revolution is a fine navy tradition that shouldn’t be discontinued.
“Before you make your choice, there is something more I have to tell you,” Sablin says.
He has the absolute attention of every officer and midshipman in the dining hall.
“I and the officers and men with me will take the Storozhevoy’s mooring lines in and leave in the morning for Kronshtadt.” It’s in the Gulf of Finland just twenty kilometers from Leningrad. “I will declare that this ship is a military base all by itself, and I will demand that Moscow give us access to radio and television so that I can personally speak to the people of the Soviet Union.”