18 April 2008
 
The Red Tie

 

The politics of this day are small ones, and of little import to the wide world, though once they did. The professional association to which I belong holds one of it’s two annual events today, at the Crowne Plaza in Mr. Tyson’s Corners in Northern Virginia.
 
It used to be a Holiday Inn, and we have to still call it that for the benefit of some of our older members. Something as simple as a name change can be extraordinary difficult; it used to be simple: “See you at Red Tie at the Holiday Inn.”
 
Now it is “See you in Tysons at the Crowne Plaza that Used To Be the Holiday Inn,” which is clumsy and inelegant, like something translated from the original Russian.
 
Regardless of the name, there is a tradition to be celebrated, and those who still own them will proudly drag out their crimson foulards, embroidered with dozens of silhouettes of a Soviet-era Sverdlov-class cruisers.
 
Our ties commemorate the craft of all-source naval analysis, and naturally you would have to be an insider to recognize the profile of the ship. The Soviet designation for the class was “Project 68B.”
 
That fact was a secret all by itself. The mysteries of the cruiser were considered worth the life of Royal Navy frogman Lionel “Buster” Crabbe, who attempted an under-hull reconnaissance swim of the visiting Ordzhonikidze long ago.
 
Severdlov and her twelve sisters were the last conventional cruisers built for the Red Banner Soviet Fleet. Nikita Krushchev canceled the building program with the proliferation of the guided missile. He considered the heavy guns of the class to be expensive to maintain and obsolescent, and he was right.
 
The Soviets were always a land force, and the Navy was a peripheral issue, one that fascinated young Czar Peter, and was the reason for the relocation of his capital to St. Petersburg, which had access to the Baltic.
 
The land and the sea were always in tension, with the Bolsheviks rightly concentrating on the establishment of the Red Army. First things first, after all, and Navies are expensive things to build and maintain.
 
Nikita Krushchev had been a political officer in the Great Patriotic War, and was skeptical of the Admirals and the importance of their gray ships. In the transition from Marshall Stalin’s terror state, he demanded a new direction for the Soviet Navy, and a rising surface officer named Sergey Gerogyevich Gorshkov was there with an idea whose time had come.
 
Gorshkov had distinguished himself in service against the Germans in the Black Sea, and he was a graduate of the Frunze Higher Navy School. He had a brilliant concept, exemplified by the motto that hung on his office wall: "'Better' is the enemy of 'Good Enough'."
 
He reasoned that all the Soviet Navy required to demonstrate its worth to the Soviet State was to have two capabilities: the ability to destroy aircraft carriers and deliver nuclear weapons to the homeland of the Main Enemy.
 
The submarine, harnessed to the naval rocket, is the perfect low-budget counterweight to a robust, complex and very expensive multi-mission fleet.

The Chinese are making a great leap forward in the same manner today, stealing the technology where they need to, just as the Russians did.
 
Gorshkov produced hundreds of submarines, first diesel boats patterned of the last German models, and then nuclear ones. The safety procedures were appalling by western standards. There used to be a saying about the sailors who manned the ballistic missile submarines stationed in the Kola Penninsula:
 
“How do you tell a man from the Northern Fleet?”
 
“He glows in the dark.”
 
It was a brute force approach, good enough for what the Soviets needed.
 
Eventually, Gorshkov was on the brink of fielding a robust, complex and very expensive modern fleet, complete with his own aircraft carriers. It was part of what dragged down the Soviet State in the end. He died in 1988, before the collapse. I paid a visit to his grave in Moscow a decade later, and his tombstone is decorated with the tokens of his building program.
 
The decoration on our ties should be not be the profile of a cruiser; it should be the outline of one of the black submarines that were our fixation.
 
But cruisers certainly appear more nautical, and it is a joke concealed within an inside reference worn with a sport coat.
 
The proud Ordzhonikidze was sold to the Indonesians in March of 1964, and re-named Irian. Sukarno wanted a status symbol in his struggle to eradicate the Dutch regional presence in their former colony, and the story of Irian's decline is illustrative of the fate of all navies.
 
When Sukarno was replaced by Suharto in 1965, the Army assumed pre-eminence. The cruiser was expensive to operate, and was left to disintegrate at anchorage in Surabaya.
 
In time it was used as a prison for political opponents of the new regime, a traditional function of warships whose time has passed. Ask any sailor about the quality of life in the steel boxes, and you will find that there is little difference between a warship and a maximum security detention facility.
 
By 1970, even that function was no longer tenable and  Irian was abandoned. She broke her moorings in a storm, grounded on a sandbank and the hull was open to the ocean, and by 1972 was good only as a source of high-quality scrap steel.
 
Of the thirteen cruisers, twelve have been recycled. One remains as a memorial ship at Novorossisk. She is named in honor of the Tsar's land commander Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, the one-eyed general who opposed Bonaparte at Moscow.
 
Otherwise, they are all gone. Except, of course, all the little cruisers on our ties.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com