“Do your parents send you parcels from Ukraine?”
“Yes, of course. And then we feed all our equally hungry friends.” She laughs loudly.
As one of our writers put it, you could make nails out of these people.
It is a curious fact that the years are passing—a great deal of time already separates us from the fall of the Communist Party—yet certain habits from the past remain untouched. Foremost among them is a pathological lack of respect for people, especially those who, in spite of everything, work devotedly and selflessly, who love the cause they are serving. The government has never learned how to thank the people who are dedicated to serving our country. You are working hard? Well, great, carry on until you drop dead or we break your heart. The authorities become more brazen by the day, crushing the will of the best of our citizens.
With the single-mindedness of a maniac, they stake their money on the worst. There is no doubt that Communism was a dead loss for Russia, but what we have today is even worse.
I continue my discussion of lofty matters with Captain Dikiy at the central control point of the Vilioutchinsk. Rybachie is closed to outsiders and the inquisitive, and even officers’ wives are not allowed access to the classified piers. For me, however, Military Intelligence has unexpectedly made an exception.
The predatory, combative ethos of the Vilioutchinsk is evident already from the shore. On the bow, on a black background, is a daunting piece of artwork: a grinning killer whale’s head. The naval artist, in his desire to make the monster as intimidating as possible, has given it many more teeth than are likely to be encountered in nature. The whale’s depiction there is not random. From the day it was built, the submarine was called Kasatka, “Killer Whale,” and it was renamed only recently—for what reason is a puzzle to the officers, but they have no problem with the new name.
My introductory tour provides me with a crucial insight, which is probably why I was allowed on the submarine in the first place. I wander past the mouth of a terrifying volcano—God forbid it should ever be stoked up the wrong way. An atomic reactor with nuclear missiles is an explosive mixture. The submarine is packed with nuclear weapons, the economy is in crisis, and the armed forces are in a state of disarray. What could be more scary than that?
As we continue the tour, Dikiy hammers his views home, and on ideological matters he is quite pedantic. There can be no compromises in the armed forces, no matter what changes are taking place in society. He rejects the notion of a right to disobey a “criminal order,” an idea that has been circulating stubbornly through army units since 1991. His view is that allowing a subordinate not to carry out even a single instruction or order because he considers it foolish or inappropriate will cause the whole system to collapse in a domino effect. The army is a pyramidal structure, and you cannot take that risk.
I see that both Captain Dikiy and the others who join in our conversation, all of them officers whose uniforms are decorated with ribbons for heroic submarine campaigns lasting many months, distinguish between two concepts. There is the motherland, which they serve, and there is Moscow, with which they are in a state of conflict. There are, they say, two separate states: Russia and her capital city.
The officers are frank. Viewed from Kamchatka, nothing of what goes on in the bureaucracy of the armed forces makes any sense. Why does the Ministry of Defense obstinately refuse to pay for the maintenance of the nuclear submarine fleet, when the military knows full well that not only is it impossible but indeed forbidden for officers to undertake such work locally, using their own resources? Why does the ministry mercilessly write off ten- to fourteen-year-old vessels that still have many years of life? Why, in fact, is the military systematically turning its nuclear shield, created by the efforts of the entire nation, into a leaky old sieve—and at a time when a real threat exists, primarily in the form of Chinese nuclear submarines lurking adjacent to Russia’s territory?
Also present on my exploration of the Vilioutchinsk is the most important person in the region, Valerii Dorogin, vice admiral of Kamchatka and commander of the Northeast Group of Troops and Forces. In the near future, Dorogin is to end his military career to become a deputy of the state duma. The officers speak frankly in his presence, in no way inhibited by his seniority. One feels none of the hierarchical pressure or barriers of rank that are usual in a military setting.
In large measure, this is because Dorogin is flesh of the flesh of Rybachie. There is nothing the officers and their commander are going to conceal from one another. Dorogin has served here, in this closed naval township, for almost twenty years. For a long time he was, like Dikiy, commander of a nuclear submarine. Now his elder son, Denis Dorogin, is serving in Rybachie. Just like everyone else, the commander walks to the pier in the morning. Like everyone else, he observes the disintegration of the military. Like everyone else he is here without any means of subsistence, waiting for friends to “fatten him up.”
The Northeast Group, the agglomeration to which Kamchatka belongs, along with Chukotka and Magadan Provinces, has been set up again as a result of the severe cutbacks. A similar grouping existed before the 1917 revolution and under the Bolsheviks in the 1930s.
In any grouping, one category of troops inevitably dominates. In Kamchatka, home of part of the nuclear shield, it is predictably the submariners, and, accordingly, a vice admiral is in command; he has under him infantry and coastal troops, aviation and antiaircraft forces. At first there was a certain amount of contention and dissent, but then everything settled down, due, to a large extent, to Dorogin’s influence. He is a legend on Kamchatka.
The vice admiral has spent thirty-three years in the navy; his total service record comes to another fifteen years because of his time in submarines. Dorogin’s legend is based not on his military past but on the present, however. He lives in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Until recently his monthly salary as the officer responsible for an enormous territory and second in rank only to the governors of three major Russian provinces was 3,600 rubles, or just over $100.
In reality, because of his pension, which he paid up long ago, he receives just under 5,000 rubles a month. By way of comparison, a city bus driver in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky earns 6,000 rubles a month.
Dorogin lives in a military apartment on Morskaya Street, in exactly the same conditions as the other officers. There is no hot water, and it is cold, drafty, and uncomfortable.
“Why don’t you just buy a basic boiler?”
“We don’t have the money. If we get some, we’ll buy one.”
The thing Dorogin values most is his reputation. His life is ascetic. The apartment is not bare, but there is no way it befits an admiral. His most precious possessions, concentrated in his study, are nautical knickknacks from decommissioned ships that once served in the Russian Far East. His great love is naval history.
“What about your house in the country? You must have a dacha. Every admiral in Russia has one.”
“I do, certainly,” Dorogin replies. “And what a dacha. Oh, dear! We’ll go and take a look at it tomorrow. Otherwise you won’t believe it.”
Tomorrow arrives, and I see a patch of land planted with potatoes and cucumbers on the outskirts of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. These vegetables will feed the vice admiral’s family over the winter. A decommissioned iron railway carriage stands on bricks in the midst of the vegetable garden: a place to work. Compared with Moscow expectations about the living standards of a military commander, it is a disgrace.