Kamchatka, as we have seen, is not Moscow. People here are more straightforward and generous. Some fishermen present me with a sack of red fish they have just caught, silversides. I give the fish to Galina, the vice admiral’s wife, feeling a bit awkward because I am sure the wife of the commander in chief of Kamchatka must have tons of such fish brought to her door, but I simply have no way of cooking them myself.
To my great surprise, Galina thanks me effusively and bursts into tears. In her poverty she sees these fish as good fortune. She cooks dinner and is able to invite guests, even to pickle fish for the future. To crown it all, some of the fish, by luck, have gold inside them: red caviar.
Galina Dorogina tells me that although the wives of the senior officers have lived all their married lives on the peninsula, they have seen little of exotic Kamchatka. “Our lives have passed in training courses and campaigns, brief reunions and long partings,” she says.
For all that, Galina has no regret, not even for what have, in effect, been wasted years. “The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed much for the officers’ wives. If twenty years ago we were cold and hungry and I had to stand in line all day for a dozen eggs and they wrote my number in line on my hand, the only difference now is that we have absolutely no money. There are eggs in the shops, but the officers have no money to buy them with.”
Vice Admiral Dorogin’s thinking is an ideological mishmash, an amalgam of Communist and capitalist notions. This probably is to be expected from a man who spent almost all his life under the Soviet regime, was a member of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party, and now has to live with the realities of the free market. From my point of view, his ideas are outmoded; they are the stale ideology that lost its validity with the demise of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the vice admiral fully understands democratic aspirations and why they are needed.
Toward which of these ideological poles is his heart really drawn, and in which of these dimensions does he feel at home? It is not easy to tell, but I decide to try.
Dorogin is answerable for everything in Kamchatka, from the submarines to the state of the military museum. Here is just one episode from his life.
Among the units of the Northeast Group is the Twenty-second Chapaev Motorized Division. It bears that name because it is the same division as was formed in the Volga region in 1918 by Vasily Chapaev, a legendary hero of the civil war. It was here that his girlfriend, Bolshevik Anka, who figures in hundreds of questionable Soviet jokes, was a fighter.
After the Second World War, the Chapaev Division was redeployed to the Far East, and today it is famous in Kamchatka for the fact that its first company retains a soldier’s bed for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the world proletariat. In 1922, Lenin was made an honorary Red Army soldier in the division and the bed was accordingly allocated. Since 1922, wherever the division has been sent, it has been a tradition to transport Lenin’s bed along with the other equipment. Even today the bed enjoys a prominent position in the barracks. It is neatly made up, and the walls around constitute a Lenin Corner, with drawings on the topic “Volodya was a good student!” All these items are registered in a logbook kept in a secret location in the division.
In the view of the head of the First Lenin Memorial, Captain Igor Shapoval, twenty-six, the spirit of Lenin keeps his soldiers up to scratch.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. They see this neatly made bed and try to emulate it.”
I find this idea laughable, but then I find that Vice Admiral Dorogin believes no less than Captain Shapoval in the lofty ideological role of Lenin’s bed.
“New recruits find it a bit odd at first, but they come to respect it,” Dorogin says. “When democracy triumphed in Moscow, there were attempts to get rid of Lenin’s bed in Kamchatka, but we managed to save it. It’s hardly in the same category as your monument to Dzerzhinsky at the Lubyanka.”
Dorogin does not believe in change for its own sake. History is what it is, and you didn’t need to be all that clever to demolish a monument to the founder of the Bolsheviks’ secret police. He also considers that since the Lenin Corner was established in the Chapaev Division by a special resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars, at the very least it would require a directive from the government of Russia, signed by the prime minister, for the bed to be dispatched to the scrap heap.
We talk about which example soldiers in Kamchatka should now be invited to follow. The present commander of the division, Lieutenant Colonel Valerii Oleynikov, says unambiguously, “The example of those who fought in Chechnya and Afghanistan.”
The previous head of the First Lenin Memorial had indeed fought in Chechnya. Lieutenant Yury Buchnev received the award of Hero of Russia for fighting in Grozny. We continue this conversation, and I suggest that encouraging soldiers to emulate the military’s experience in Chechnya can hardly be a good idea. Dorogin keeps out of the discussion, which, as a senior officer, he should. He is serving his country, and as a matter of principle his political views should be of no concern to anyone. But about the future he is willing to speculate. Ideology is one thing; the army cutbacks are quite another. The officers feel they are sitting on a powder keg.
“We are half expecting that at any moment the state will give a raw deal to those who have served it loyally,” comments Alexander Shevchenko, the division’s chief of staff. The other officers, including Dorogin, agree. None of those likely to be retired have civilian qualifications commensurate with their rank and status in the service, and of course they will have nowhere to live. If they have to leave the armed forces, they will lose their homes, because, at present, all of them are living in military flats. Igor Shapoval, an engineer who maintains military vehicles, is skilled in the cold working of metals, so when he ceases to be an officer, he can look forward to a career repairing tractors, or serving the civilian population in a key-cutting kiosk. Shevchenko already has experience of civilian employment. For two of the three years he studied in Moscow at the Artillery Academy, he earned money on the side as a watchman in a florist’s basement, covering the twenty-four hours jointly with three other student officers.
The view in Kamchatka is that the Ministry of Defense does not agree that, in principle, an officer should dedicate himself to his military duties and not fritter away his time by working on the side.
“With things the way they are, it is only too easy to draw a man into illegal activity,” says the vice admiral. “I myself have been offered $2,000 in an envelope. This was by someone who was directed to me by a friend. He offered the bribe in a very respectable way: ‘You need money for medical treatment for your wife.’ At that moment he was absolutely right. The condition was that I should approve a contract for the sale of scrap brass on terms unfavorable to the army, not at $700 a ton but at $450. Actually, my signature was the last in a series of signatures of senior military figures. I could simply have thrown the man with the envelope out, but I called in the prosecutor. I thought it might be an example to others.”
Of course, Dorogin is in many ways a saintly man. Like many other officers, he is serving his country not for money but from a sense of duty. Only here, at the farthest reach of our land, are such spiritually healthy people to be found.
How long the patience of Dikiy, Dorogin, and others like them will hold out nobody knows, not even they themselves. Today’s navy is dependent on the older and middle generations of naval officers. There are almost no young ones. They don’t come out here. The few who do are not willing to resign themselves to the idea that they should devote all their strength to the navy and receive nothing in return. What kind of officers will the navy have left in a few more years?