“Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s it.” Dikiy is not complaining, just confirming a fact. He is a strong, genuine man. More precisely, he is very Russian. He is used to privation. His loyalty is to the motherland rather than to whoever happens to be her leader at a given time. If he allowed himself to think any other way, he would have been out of here long ago. The captain acknowledges that anything can happen, including famine, which is precisely what his rations evoke.
These cans and paper bags contain the month’s supplies for the three members of Captain Dikiy’s family. He has a wife, Larisa, who qualified as a radiochemist. She has a degree from the prestigious Moscow Institute of Engineering and Physics, whose graduates are headhunted straight from their benches in the lecture room by the computer firms of Silicon Valley in California.
Larisa, living with her husband in a closed military township of the Pacific Fleet, is unemployed, however. This is a detail of no interest to naval headquarters or to the faraway Ministry of Defense. The recruitment policies of staff headquarters mean they stubbornly refuse to see the gold lying at their feet. Larisa cannot even get a teaching job in the school for submariners’ children. All the posts are filled, and there is a waiting list. Unemployment among the nonmilitary personnel here runs to 90 percent.
The third member of Captain Dikiy’s family is his daughter, Alisa, in second grade. Her situation is also unenviable. There is nothing in this military township to bring out the abilities of Alisa or the other children. No sports center, no dance floors, no computers. All the garrison’s children can lay claim to is a dismal, dirty courtyard and a building with a video recorder and a selection of cartoons.
Truly, Kamchatka is at the outer reach of our land and at the extremity of state heartlessness. On the one hand, we find here cutting-edge technology for the taking of human life, and on the other, a troglodytic existence for those who supervise the fancy equipment. Everything relies entirely on personal enthusiasm and patriotism. There is no money, no glory, and no future.
The place where Dikiy lives is called Rybachie. It is an hour’s drive from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the capital of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Rybachie is perhaps the world’s most famous closed military township, with a population of twenty thousand. It is the symbol and the vanguard of the Russian nuclear fleet. The township, packed with the most modern weaponry, is where Russia’s east-facing nuclear shield is situated, and where those who keep it in working order live.
Because Captain Dikiy’s submarine is one of the most important constituents of this nuclear shield, it follows that Dikiy himself is a vital component. His submarine is a technologically perfect piece of weaponry whose equal is to be found nowhere else on the planet. It can destroy entire surface flotillas and the best submarines of the world’s military powers, including the United States. Under Dikiy’s command is a unique weapon armed with nuclear missiles and an impressive array of torpedoes. While we have such a defense capability, Russia is not seriously vulnerable, at least not from the direction of the Pacific Ocean.
Captain Dikiy himself, however, is highly vulnerable, and primarily from the direction of the state he serves. But he rarely thinks along those lines. Like many other officers, he is skilled at surviving without money. His salary is low and paid irregularly; it is often as much as six months late.
When there is no money, Dikiy declines to eat on board his submarine (though officers are entitled to meals there). He takes home his entitlement in the form of a packed meal and shares it with his family. He has no other way of feeding them. As a result, Dikiy is a pale shadow of a man. He is unconscionably thin. His face has an unhealthy pallor, and it is clear why: the captain of the main constituent of Russia’s nuclear shield is undernourished.
Of course, constantly being in a radiation zone also takes its toll. In the past, the job had its compensations, because submariners were highly eligible as bachelors, but circumstances have changed. Nowadays, young women look away when naval officers walk by.
“Actually, the poverty is not the real problem,” Dikiy says. He is an ascetic, a penniless romantic, an officer to the marrow of his bones, almost a saint of our times, when values are assessed in the cynical language of the dollar. “You can live with poverty as long as you have a clear goal and understandable operational tasks. Our real misfortune is the perilous state of the country’s nuclear fleet, the sense of hopelessness. They don’t seem to understand in Moscow that these armaments have to be taken seriously. In ten years’ time, if the present level of financing is maintained, there will either be nothing here in Rybachie, or NATO will be refueling at our piers.”
To escape from the hopelessness of what is occurring in front of his eyes, Dikiy has decided to continue his studies at the General Headquarters Academy. He wants to write a dissertation about the state of Russia’s national security at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. He hopes, when he has concluded his research, to give an academically grounded answer to the question that troubles him: In whose interests was it to undermine Russia’s national security?
Although his interim conclusions are not favorable to Moscow, the captain is not antagonistic or offended at what has been going on. He thinks it is appalling that Moscow behaves as it does, but there is nothing to be done about it. Except to tough it out, because we are stronger and more intelligent than our superiors.
In Dikiy’s job, his life is not his own. He cannot live the way most people do. To be on five-minute standby for his submarine, he must always be on call. He can’t just go into the countryside berrying, picking mushrooms, or walking with friends. He has to live at the post he has accepted and cannot pass his duties over to anyone else. He has to be with his officers to make sure they do not become demoralized. He must find time to look in at the barracks to keep a fatherly eye on what the naval enlistees are getting up to. He is a busy man.
Many military officers, although living like a beggar much as Captain Dikiy does, can at least earn a bit on the side after a day’s work, to feed their families and to buy clothes and even their uniforms (a majority of officers have to do this). Captain Dikiy has neither the time nor the opportunity to take a second job. In the few hours that remain after work, he is required to relax, to catch up on sleep, to restore his equanimity. When he boards his submarine, he must be at ease. It is a requirement of the job. The consequences of nervous debility could be catastrophic.
“I have to be as calm and balanced at work,” Dikiy explains, “as if I had just come back from vacation, as if everything was sorted and I didn’t have to worry about how I am going to feed my wife and daughter tomorrow.”
“You say you have to. It seems to me that this is viewing the situation the wrong way around. You are serving the state, and so surely it is up to the state to create the right conditions for you to come to work in a calm frame of mind.”
Dikiy smiles a rather patronizing smile, and I am not sure who this strange, tough, special man is feeling more condescension toward: me for asking such questions, or the state for spurning those who serve it best. It turns out that it is toward me.
“The state is not able to do that at present,” the captain says finally. “It isn’t, and there’s an end to the matter. What point is there in demanding something that isn’t there? I am a realist and not quick to anger. All the sentimentalists and the bad-tempered people left here long ago. They resigned from the navy.”