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G western faces. Zapadnaya Litsa (base point)

Coordinates: 69°24′59″ s. sh. 32°25′59″ E  / 69.41639° N sh. 32.43306° E e. / 69.41639; 32.43306 (G) (O) This term has other meanings, see Western Faces.

Western Face- basing point of the Northern Fleet of Russia. The base is located in the Murmansk region, on the bay of the same name. It is located 45 km from the state border with Norway.

Includes 4 parts: Small Lopatkin lip, Andreeva lip, Big Lopatkin lip and Nerpichy lip. Malaya Lopatkina Bay was the first to be discovered and was the home port of the first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3.

Currently, it is the home port of several experimental nuclear submarines.

  • 1 Base history
    • 1.1 Malaya Lopatkina Bay
    • 1.2 Lopatkin Bay
    • 1.3 Nerpichya Bay
    • 1.4 Andreeva Bay
  • 2 Submarines based at Zapadnaya Litsa
  • 3 See also
  • 4 Notes
  • 5 Links

Base history

In the late 1950s, it became necessary to create a base in the Northern Fleet for the emerging nuclear submarine fleet. On April 30, 1957, a survey team landed on the shore of the bay to conduct a topographic survey of the area and study the surroundings. The detachment was led by A. M. Aleksandrovich. a few kilometers from the coast, a flat area was found, which was chosen for the construction of the village. Survey work was completed by the end of 1957, and the master plan for development was approved in 1958.

The only garrison town is Zaozersk (Severomorsk-7, since the early 1980s Murmansk-150). The population as of 2007 is 13.3 thousand people. At the time of the heyday of the base, its population reached 30 thousand people. The town is located four kilometers from Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay. Construction started in 1958. A paved road leads to Zaozersk, branching off the Pechenga-Nikel highway a few kilometers west of the Zapadnaya Litsa River. A railway line was under construction, but the construction was not completed.

On the territory of the base there are several base points - Malaya Lopatkina Bay, Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay and Nerpichya Bay. Andreeva Bay is a coastal missile base. The total length of coastal facilities is about 20,600 meters. Since its inception, Zapadnaya Litsa has been the base for new generations of multi-purpose and strategic nuclear submarines. All experimental nuclear submarines were also based here - K-222 of project 661 Anchar, K-27 of project 645 ZhMT, K-278 Komsomolets of project 685 Fin.

Bay Malaya Lopatkina

In the late 1950s, the first base was equipped in Malaya Lopatkina Bay. The first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3 "Leninsky Komsomol" was based and tested under the leadership of Academician Aleksandrov here. July (according to some sources in June) 1961, the 206th separate submarine brigade was transformed into the 1st submarine flotilla. It included the creation of the 3rd submarine division - the first division of nuclear submarines of the USSR Navy. its composition included the submarine K-3 and nuclear submarines of project 627A "K-5", "K-8", "K-14" based in Malaya Lopatkina Bay.

On July 15, 1961, the 31st submarine division was formed based in Malaya Lopatkina Bay. Initially, it included project 658 boats - K-19, K-33, K-55, the Dvina floating base and two floating barracks PKZ-104 and PKZ-71. During 1962-1963, the division was replenished with new boats 658 of the K-16, K-40, K-145, K-149, K-178 projects. 1963 "K-178" moved to the Pacific Ocean. In December 1964, a decision was made to transfer the 31st division to the 12th squadron of the submarines of the Northern Fleet, based in the Sayda Bay, Gadzhiyevo.

After the construction of the base point in Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay was completed in the first half of the 1960s, the boats were transferred there. And the Malaya Lopatkina Bay is used to repair ships. There is a mooring line, consisting of five piers, and a floating repair plant.

Lip Lopatkin

The second base point was Bolshaya Lopatkina, located two kilometers down the bay from Malaya Lopatkina Bay. It is the largest base for nuclear submarines.

The 11th division of submarines of project 675 was transferred here from the Malaya Lopatkina Bay. Later, the division received submarines of projects 949 and 949A.

There is a mooring line in Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay, consisting of 8 piers. For the maintenance of nuclear submarines, there is also a floating dock.

Guba Nerpichya

The construction of structures in the Nerpichya Bay, located in the depths of the bay, was completed in the second half of the 1960s. In 1972, the 7th division of submarines of project 675 was transferred here from Malaya Lopatkina Bay. By the end of 1973, it included 14 boats, 5 floating barracks and one torpedo.

In 1977, reconstruction began in order to create a base for the nuclear submarine of project 941 "Shark". The work lasted four years. A special mooring line and piers were created, which were supposed to provide boats in the base with all types of energy resources. A railway line was built to deliver the largest R-39 SLBMs in history to Nerpichya Bay. However, due to a number of reasons, the branch was never completed, and the piers did not provide the boats with energy resources, they were used as simple moorings. In 1980-1981, the 18th division of Project 941 submarines - TK-208, TK-202, TK-12, TK-13, TK-17, TK-20 - was transferred here.

Guba Andreeva

Five kilometers from Zaozersk there is a technical base in Andreeva Bay. This is one of the largest facilities of the Northern Fleet for the storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). The total area covers about 2 hectares. The structure of the base facilities includes a pier for unloading SNF, a technological berth, a coastal crane with a lifting capacity of 40 tons, a personnel sanitization station, storage facilities for liquid and solid spent fuel.

Submarines based at Zapadnaya Litsa

12th submarine squadron, 18th submarine division

  • TK 208 "Dmitry Donskoy" - the only TARPKSN of project 941UM "Shark", which is in service, is used to test ballistic missiles "Bulava".
  • K-373 - project 705 submarine decommissioned.
  • Several other mothballed submarines, including TK-17 and TK-20.

11th submarine squadron, 11th submarine division

  • B-138 Obninsk, B-388 Petrozavodsk (671RTMK Pike)
  • K-410 "Smolensk", K-119 "Voronezh", K-266 "Eagle" (949A "Antey")

10th submarine division

  • K-560 "Severodvinsk" (885 "Ash")

see also

  • Basis Nord - German base, planned in 1939-1940 on the same bay
  • Landing in the bay Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa (1941)
  • Landing in the bay Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa (1942)

Notes

  1. Zaozersk. - An article in the encyclopedia russika.ru based on data from the Western Litsa newspaper. Retrieved October 19, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  2. City district ZATO, Zaozersk. - Data from the official portal of the government of the Murmansk region. Retrieved October 18, 2010.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Lip Zapadnaya Litsa. - Information from the website of the non-profit public organization "Bellona". Retrieved October 18, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  4. 1 2 ZATO Zaozersk. - Presentation CD Murmansk Region - 2004. Retrieved October 18, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  5. 1 2 Lopatka, Lopatkina // Kola Encyclopedia. 4 vols. T. 3. L - O / ch. ed. V. P. PETROV - Murmansk: RUSMA, 2013. - 477 p. :ill.
  6. 1 2 I. Pakhomov 3rd Submarine Division of the Northern Fleet in the "cold war" at sea (1961-1969). magazine "Sea Collection" No. 2 for 2010. Retrieved October 19, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  7. 1 2 3 RED SIGNED NORTHERN FLEET. - Divisions of the KSF. Retrieved October 19, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  8. The Seventh Submarine Division of the Northern Fleet: history, events, people.. Retrieved October 21, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012.
  9. Kommersant-Vlast - Northern Fleet
  10. The first submarine of the "Ash" project became part of the Navy. 17.6.2014

Links

  • Map
  • Western Faces (English)

The base point is located in the Murmansk region, on the lip of the same name. It is located 45 kilometers from the state border with Norway.

Includes 4 parts: Malaya Lopatkina lip, Andreeva lip, Big Lopatkin lip and Nerpichy lip. Malaya Lopatkina Bay was the first to be discovered and was the home port of the first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3 or "Leninsky Komsomol".

Currently, it is the home port of several experimental nuclear submarines (NPS).

The name is found in the literature (which is not true) - Base, Naval Base.

PB history

At the end of the 1950s, it became necessary to create a point in the Northern Fleet for the emerging nuclear submarine fleet. On April 30, 1957, a survey team landed on the shore of the bay to conduct a topographic survey of the area and study the surroundings. The detachment was led by A. M. Aleksandrovich. A flat area was found a few kilometers from the coast, which was chosen for the construction of the village. Survey work was completed by the end of 1957, and the master plan for development was approved in 1958.

On the territory of the PB there are: Malaya Lopatkina Bay, Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay and Nerpichya Bay. There is a coastal missile base in Andreeva Bay. The total length of coastal facilities is about 20,600 meters. Since its inception, Zapadnaya Litsa has been the base for new generations of multi-purpose and strategic nuclear submarines. All experimental nuclear submarines were also based here - K-222 of project 661 Anchar, K-27 of project 645 ZhMT, K-278 Komsomolets of project 685 Fin.

Bay Malaya Lopatkina

In the late 1950s, facilities were equipped in Malaya Lopatkina Bay. The first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3 "Leninsky Komsomol" was based and tested under the leadership of Academician Aleksandrov here. In July (according to some sources in June) 1961, the 206th Separate Submarine Brigade was reorganized into the 1st Submarine Flotilla. The 3rd division of submarines was created in its composition - the first division of nuclear submarines of the USSR Navy. It included the submarine K-3 and nuclear submarines of project 627A "K-5", "K-8", "K-14" based in Malaya Lopatkina Bay.

On July 15, 1961, the 31st submarine division was formed based in Malaya Lopatkina Bay. Initially, it included project 658 boats - K-19, K-33, K-55, the Dvina floating base and two floating barracks PKZ-104 and PKZ-71. During 1962-1963, the division was replenished with new boats 658 of the K-16, K-40, K-145, K-149, K-178 projects. In 1963, K-178 moved to the Pacific Ocean. In December 1964, a decision was made to transfer the 31st division to the 12th squadron of the submarines of the Northern Fleet, based in the Sayda Bay, Gadzhiyevo.

After the construction of the base station facilities in Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay was completed in the first half of the 1960s, the boats were transferred there. And Malaya Lopatkina Bay was used to repair ships. A mooring line consisting of five piers and a floating repair plant were located here.

Lip Lopatkin

The second stage of construction was the Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay, located two kilometers up the bay from the Malaya Lopatkina Bay. It is the largest nuclear submarine base.

The 11th division of submarines of projects 670 and 671 was transferred here from Malaya Lopatkina Bay. Later, the division received submarines of projects 949 and 949A.

There is a mooring line in the Bolshaya Lopatkina Bay, consisting of 8 piers. For the maintenance of the nuclear submarine, a floating dock was previously also located here.

Guba Nerpichya

The construction of structures in the Nerpichy Bay, located deep in the bay, was completed in the second half of the 1960s. In 1972, the 7th division of Project 675 submarines was transferred here from Malaya Lopatkina Bay. By the end of 1973, it included 14 boats, 5 floating barracks and one torpedo.

In 1977, reconstruction began with the aim of creating facilities for the nuclear submarine of project 941 "Shark". The work lasted four years. A special mooring line and piers were created, which were supposed to provide boats in the PB with all types of energy resources. A railway line was built to deliver the largest R-39 SLBMs in history to Nerpichya Bay. However, for a number of reasons, the branch was never completed, and the piers did not provide the boats with energy resources, they were used as simple moorings. In 1980-1981, the 18th division of Project 941 submarines was transferred here - TK-208, TK-202, TK-12, TK-13, TK-17, TK-20.

Guba Andreeva

Five kilometers from Zaozersk there is a technical base in Andreeva Bay. This is one of the largest facilities of the Northern Fleet for the storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). The total area covers about 2 hectares. The facilities of the base include a pier for unloading spent nuclear fuel, a technological berth, a coastal crane with a lifting capacity of 40 tons, a personnel sanitization station, storage facilities for liquid and solid spent fuel.

Submarines based at Zapadnaya Litsa

12th submarine squadron, 18th submarine division

11th submarine squadron, 11th submarine division

  • B-138 "Obninsk", B-388 "Petrozavodsk" (671RTMK "Pike")
  • K-410 "Smolensk", K-119 "Voronezh", K-266 "Eagle" (949A "Antey")

10th submarine division

see also

  • Basis Nord - German base, planned in 1939-1940 on the same bay

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Notes

  1. . - An article in the encyclopedia russika.ru based on the data of the Western Litsa newspaper. Retrieved October 19, 2010. .
  2. . - Data from the official portal of the government of the Murmansk region. Retrieved October 18, 2010.
  3. . - Information from the website of the non-profit public organization "Bellona". Retrieved October 18, 2010. .
  4. . - Presentation disk Murmansk region - 2004. Retrieved October 18, 2010. .
  5. // Kola encyclopedia. In 5 vols. T. 3. L - O / Ch. ed. V. P. PETROV - Murmansk: RUSMA (IP Glukhov A. B.), 2013. - 477 p. : ill., portr.
  6. I. Pakhomov . magazine "Sea collection" No. 2 for 2010. Retrieved October 19, 2010. .
  7. . - Divisions of the KSF. Retrieved October 19, 2010. .
  8. . Retrieved October 21, 2010. .

Links

  • (English)

An excerpt characterizing Zapadnaya Litsa (basing point)

While Boris entered him, Pierre walked around his room, occasionally stopping in the corners, making threatening gestures to the wall, as if piercing an invisible enemy with a sword, and sternly looking over his glasses and then starting his walk again, pronouncing obscure words, shaking shoulders and arms outstretched.
- L "Angleterre a vecu, [End of England]," he said, frowning and pointing his finger at someone. - M. Pitt comme traitre a la nation et au droit des gens est condamiene a ... [Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and the people right, sentenced to ...] - He did not have time to finish Pitt's sentence, imagining himself at that moment as Napoleon himself and, together with his hero, having already made a dangerous crossing through the Pas de Calais and having conquered London, - as he saw a young, slender and handsome officer entering him He stopped. Pierre left Boris a fourteen-year-old boy and decidedly did not remember him, but, in spite of this, with his usual quick and cordial manner, he took him by the hand and smiled amiably.
- Do you remember me? Boris said calmly, with a pleasant smile. - I came with my mother to the count, but it seems that he is not completely healthy.
Yes, it looks unhealthy. Everything disturbs him, - Pierre answered, trying to remember who this young man was.
Boris felt that Pierre did not recognize him, but did not consider it necessary to identify himself and, without experiencing the slightest embarrassment, looked into his eyes.
“Count Rostov asked you to come and dine with him today,” he said after a rather long and awkward silence for Pierre.
- A! Count Rostov! Pierre spoke happily. “So you are his son, Ilya. You can imagine, I didn't recognize you at first. Remember how we went to Sparrow Hills with m me Jacquot ... [Madame Jaco ...] a long time ago.
“You are mistaken,” Boris said slowly, with a bold and somewhat mocking smile. - I am Boris, the son of Princess Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya. Rostov's father's name is Ilya, and his son's name is Nikolai. And I m me Jacquot didn't know any.
Pierre waved his arms and head as if mosquitoes or bees had attacked him.
- Oh, what is it! I confused everything. There are so many relatives in Moscow! You are Boris...yes. Well, here we are with you and agreed. Well, what do you think of the Boulogne expedition? Surely the English will have a hard time if only Napoleon crosses the canal? I think the expedition is very possible. Villeneuve would not have blundered!
Boris did not know anything about the Boulogne expedition, he did not read the newspapers and heard about Villeneuve for the first time.
“We are more busy here in Moscow with dinners and gossip than with politics,” he said in his calm, mocking tone. I don't know anything about it and don't think so. Moscow is busy with gossip the most,” he continued. “Now they are talking about you and the count.
Pierre smiled his kind smile, as if afraid for his interlocutor, lest he say something that he would begin to repent of. But Boris spoke distinctly, clearly and dryly, looking directly into Pierre's eyes.
“Moscow has nothing else to do but gossip,” he continued. “Everyone is busy with who the count will leave his fortune to, although perhaps he will outlive us all, which I sincerely wish ...
- Yes, it's all very hard, - Pierre picked up, - very hard. - Pierre was still afraid that this officer would inadvertently get into an awkward conversation for himself.
“And it must seem to you,” Boris said, blushing slightly, but without changing his voice and posture, “it must seem to you that everyone is only busy getting something from the rich man.
"So it is," thought Pierre.
- And I just want to tell you, to avoid misunderstandings, that you will be very mistaken if you count me and my mother among these people. We are very poor, but I, at least, speak for myself: precisely because your father is rich, I do not consider myself his relative, and neither I nor my mother will ever ask for anything and will not accept anything from him.
Pierre could not understand for a long time, but when he understood, he jumped up from the sofa, grabbed Boris by the arm from below with his usual speed and awkwardness, and, blushing much more than Boris, began to speak with a mixed feeling of shame and annoyance.
– This is strange! I really ... and who could have thought ... I know very well ...
But Boris interrupted him again:
- I'm glad I said it all. Maybe it’s unpleasant for you, you’ll excuse me, ”he said, reassuring Pierre, instead of being reassured by him,“ but I hope that I didn’t offend you. I have a rule to say everything directly ... How can I convey it? Are you coming to dine at the Rostovs?
And Boris, apparently having shifted from himself a heavy duty, himself getting out of an awkward position and putting another in it, became again completely pleasant.
“No, listen,” said Pierre, calming down. - You are an amazing person. What you just said is very good, very good. Of course you don't know me. We haven’t seen each other for so long… children still… You can assume in me… I understand you, I understand you very much. I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't have the spirit, but it's wonderful. I am very glad that I got to know you. Strange,” he added, after a pause and smiling, “what you supposed in me! He laughed. - Well, so what? We will get to know you better. Please. He shook hands with Boris. “You know, I have never been to the Count. He didn't call me... I feel sorry for him as a person... But what can I do?
- And you think that Napoleon will have time to transport the army? Boris asked smiling.
Pierre realized that Boris wanted to change the conversation, and, agreeing with him, began to outline the advantages and disadvantages of the Boulogne enterprise.
The footman came to summon Boris to the princess. The princess was leaving. Pierre promised to come to dinner in order to get closer to Boris, firmly pressed his hand, affectionately looking into his eyes through his glasses ... After his departure, Pierre walked around the room for a long time, no longer piercing an invisible enemy with a sword, but smiling at the memory of this sweet, smart and tough young man.
As happens in early youth, and especially in a lonely situation, he felt an unreasonable tenderness for this young man and promised himself to make friends with him without fail.
Prince Vasily saw off the princess. The princess held a handkerchief to her eyes, and her face was in tears.
- It's horrible! terrible! she said, “but whatever the cost, I will do my duty. I will come to spend the night. You can't leave him like this. Every minute is precious. I do not understand what the princesses are delaying. Maybe God will help me find a way to prepare it!… Adieu, mon prince, que le bon Dieu vous soutienne… [Farewell, prince, may God support you.]
- Adieu, ma bonne, [Farewell, my dear,] - answered Prince Vasily, turning away from her.
“Ah, he is in a terrible position,” said the mother to her son, as they got back into the carriage. He barely recognizes anyone.
- I don’t understand, mother, what is his relationship with Pierre? the son asked.
“The testament will say everything, my friend; our destiny depends on it...
“But why do you think he would leave anything for us?”
- Ah, my friend! He is so rich and we are so poor!
“Well, that’s not enough reason, mother.
- Oh my god! My God! How bad he is! mother exclaimed.

When Anna Mikhailovna went with her son to Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhy, Countess Rostova sat alone for a long time, putting a handkerchief to her eyes. Finally, she called.
“What are you, dear,” she said angrily to the girl, who kept herself waiting for several minutes. You don't want to serve, do you? So I will find a place for you.
The countess was upset by the grief and humiliating poverty of her friend and therefore was not in a good mood, which was always expressed in her by the name of the maid "dear" and "you".
“Guilty with,” said the maid.
“Ask the Count for me.
The count, waddling, approached his wife with a somewhat guilty look, as always.
- Well, Countess! What a saute au madere [saute in Madeira] of grouse will be, ma chere! I tried; I gave a thousand rubles for Taraska not for nothing. Costs!
He sat down beside his wife, valiantly leaning his hands on his knees and ruffling his gray hair.
- What do you want, countess?
- Here's what, my friend - what do you have dirty here? she said, pointing to the vest. "That's sauté, right," she added, smiling. - Here's the thing, Count: I need money.
Her face became sad.
- Oh, Countess! ...
And the count began to fuss, taking out his wallet.
- I need a lot, count, I need five hundred rubles.
And she, taking out a cambric handkerchief, rubbed her husband's waistcoat with it.
- Now. Hey, who's there? he shouted in a voice that only people shout, confident that those whom they call will rush headlong to their call. - Send Mitenka to me!
Mitenka, that noble son, brought up by the count, who was now in charge of all his affairs, entered the room with quiet steps.
“That’s what, my dear,” said the count to the respectful young man who entered. “Bring me…” he thought. - Yes, 700 rubles, yes. Yes, look, don’t bring such torn and dirty ones as that time, but good ones, for the countess.
“Yes, Mitenka, please, clean ones,” said the countess, sighing sadly.
“Your Excellency, when would you like me to deliver it?” Mitenka said. “If you please, don’t worry, don’t worry,” he added, noticing that the count had already begun to breathe heavily and quickly, which was always a sign of anger. - I was and forgot ... Will you order to deliver this minute?

True, it was previously known to my colleagues as Zapadnaya Litsa, and at first I was generally confused, thinking that these were different cities ... :) In general, the list of his beautiful names does not end there. He is also Severomorsk-7, he is also Murmansk-150. Once.
The town is located at a considerable distance from the place of our bridgehead - Severomorsk. Therefore, the trip there was the most tiring. And memorable. Actually, I managed to visit there only 2 times.

We always left Severomorsk early - around 6 am. Having not really rested from the last working day somewhere in Polyarny, it was hard to get up so early. Moreover, this total darkness of the approaching polar night... It will drive anyone into melancholy. But the fiery desire to visit all the destinations from the travel certificate did not allow me to give the job in Zaozersk to someone else from our team :) And I did not lose. Exhausting 7 hours of travel in both directions and 10 hours of work in each race returned a hundredfold.

So, dank November morning (or still night?...), 6 am. go....

It should be noted that we were very lucky with the driver, who was hired in Murmansk for the entire period of work. A young guy, very pleasant in communication, he can tell a lot about his region. At the same time, he patiently waited for us in the car, at all points for 8-10 hours every day ... I am generally amazed at this profession ... Of course, he was well paid for this, but still there is a human limit. It’s a pity I can’t remember his name anymore, but it seems that they even exchanged emails ... So, everything that I know about Zapadnaya Litsa and its environs - I know only from him. If something is wrong, they will correct me.

The first stop along the way is the Memorial to the Defenders of the Soviet Arctic. What could be seen in the dark by the light of the full moon? Yes, practically nothing.

Roadside. Trying to orient in space after sleep:

Memorial Complex:

The brightness of the photo was pulled from RAW, like a cat in one place. So that at least something could be shown to relatives :)

It was getting light...

It was we who left our footprints on the virgin snow that fell at night:

Didn't you see them there?

And here is our carriage:

And the moon shines softly on us ...

Then again for a long, long time they were shaking in the car, listening to the driver's entertaining story about the Valley of Death and the Valley of Glory. It took my breath away at the thought that I was going here, to these legendary places!

If you drive from Murmansk, then first you pass through the Valley of Glory, then the line - the Western Litsa River and the Valley of Death begins. There is another version of the names that combines both valleys into the Valley of Glory (or Death). Where do these names come from and what happened there?

And there was one of the largest breakups of the Nazi army. Almost in the first days of the war, the command of the German troops set the task of capturing the Soviet Arctic, Murmansk and taking possession of nickel developments. The whole operation was given a period of three days. But the Germans, having gone deep into our territories only 2-3 kilometers, remained lying in the granite hills, holding out there from July to November 1941 ... Therefore, for them the valley became the Valley of Death, and for the valiant defenders of the Arctic - the Valley of Glory. In fact, the Valley is one continuous memorial. On its territory, a few diggers found a bunch of different weapons, ammunition, remains, defensive fortifications, structures ... According to our driver, weapons were often found hanging on a tree, in a lake or right on granite hills. It did not sink into the ground (since it is almost non-existent here), as in other places, but remained to lie as it was laid. It was interesting to compare the state of buildings on the territory of the Germans and Russians. At least in the case of hospitals. In what conditions were ours and the Germans. Somewhere in those places there is a stone German hospital. There, they say, a lot of things have been preserved. Iron beds on springs, mattresses... In contrast to our hospitals, where the wounded often lay on the floor... And even with such a difference in software, we survived.

For interesting stories, we didn’t notice how we drove up to the checkpoint in front of the bridge across the Zapadnaya Litsa River ...

No, of course we noticed, otherwise we would have continued our way along the Valley of Glory with shot through wheels. Well, or they would share their piece of the valley with the Fritz :)

While they were looking for our lists there, I found time to run to the bridge and look at what is called the Western Lyceum:

Here is such a non-freezing rivulet:

Although it might freeze later?...

By the way, the river crosses the road twice on the way to Zaozersk, winding between the hills.

Once upon a time, a railway was laid in these parts, but now almost all of it has been dismantled. Only one mound remained. But not far from Zaozersk itself, there is still the canvas itself. We passed it - the "piece of iron" walked along the bridge over the highway.

In general, despite the seeming uninhabitedness of these places, it is full of traces of civilization. Both the departed and the present. Abandoned concrete boxes of buildings alternate with completely combat-ready air defense units - a couple of times we saw special vehicles with radars and something similar to mobile launchers behind the hills ...

Okay, I don’t know where I saw it and maybe I dreamed it all at all? .. :)

By the way, getting lost and disappearing in these places is easier than a steamed turnip. It is enough on a cloudy day to lose sight of the road and hello ... All the hills are similar to each other - go figure out where you came from. There are known cases of the disappearance of children who have gone to pick mushrooms and berries ... So, out of need, it is better not to go far from the road. :) You won't get lost, so you catch a bullet somewhere without noticing a thorn... And in some places it was simply not included in the project...

So, already on a bright day, we reached the end point ..

Oh no, it's not the end for us yet. We, please, to the bay ... But for now, we need to stock up on all sorts of wires at the local store ...
And at this time I walked around and around.

Local wooden chapel:

House of God, against the backdrop of abandoned houses of officers. There is some kind of tragic heroism everywhere here .. Places like that. I felt harsh...

Some kind of Ravenholm from Half-Life:

At night, it's probably especially fun here. On polar nights...

Although I may just exaggerate, people live. And not a few - 13.5 thousand people.

And here on the first floor there is a dining room. Not the same as in Gadzhiyevo, but you can eat.

In Zaozersk, by the way, there is a monument to the deceased boat "Komsomolets" and

Zapadnaya Litsa is the base point for the Russian Northern Fleet. The base is located in the Murmansk region, on the bay of the same name. It is located 45 km from the state border with Norway.
Includes 4 parts: Malaya Scapula, Andreeva Bay, Big Scapula and Nerpichya. Malaya Lopatka was the first to be discovered and was the home port of the first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3.
It is currently the home port of several experimental nuclear submarines.

Lip Malaya Scapula
In the late 1950s, the first base was equipped in Malaya Lopatka Bay. The first Soviet nuclear submarine K-3 "Leninsky Komsomol" was based and tested under the leadership of Academician Aleksandrov here. In July 1961, the 206th Separate Submarine Brigade was reorganized into the 1st Submarine Flotilla. The 3rd division of submarines was created in its composition - the first division of nuclear submarines of the USSR Navy. It included the submarine K-3 and nuclear submarines of project 627A K-5, K-7, K-14 based in Malaya Lopatka.
On July 15, 1961, the 31st submarine division was formed based in Malaya Lopatka. Initially, it included boats of project 658 - K-19, K-33, K-55, the Dvina floating base and two floating barracks PKZ-104 and PKZ-71. During 1962-1963, the division was replenished with new boats 658 of the K-16, K-40, K-145, K-149, K-178 projects. In 1963, K-178 moved to the Pacific Ocean. In December 1964, a decision was made to transfer the 31st division to the 12th squadron of the submarines of the Northern Fleet, based in Saidu Bay, Gadzhiyevo.
After the construction of the base point in Bolshaya Lopatka Bay was completed in the first half of the 1960s, the boats were transferred there. Small Spatula is used to repair ships. There is a mooring line, consisting of five piers, and a floating repair plant.

Lip Big Shoulder
The second base point was Bolshaya Lopatka, located two kilometers down the bay from Malaya Lopatka. It is the largest base for nuclear submarines.
The 11th division, armed with boats of project 675, was transferred here from Malaya Lopatka. Later, the division received boats of projects 949 and 949A.
There is a mooring line in Bolshaya Lopatka, consisting of 8 piers. For the maintenance of nuclear submarines, there is also a floating dock.

Guba Nerpichya
The construction of structures in the Nerpichya Bay, located in the depths of the bay, was completed in the second half of the 1960s. In 1972, the 7th submarine division armed with project 675 boats was transferred here from Malaya Lopatka. By the end of 1973, it included 14 boats, 5 floating barracks and one torpedo.
In 1977, reconstruction began in order to create a base for the nuclear submarine of project 941 "Shark". The work lasted four years. A special mooring line and piers were created, which were supposed to provide boats in the base with all types of energy resources. To deliver the largest R-39 SLBMs in history, a railway line was built to Nerpichy. However, due to a number of reasons, the branch was never completed, and the piers did not provide the boats with energy resources, but were used as simple moorings. Approximately in 1980-1981, the 18th division of the submarine was transferred here, which received into service the submarines of project 941 - TK-208, TK-202, TK-12, TK-13, TK-17, TK-20, which were put into operation.

Guba Andreeva
Five kilometers from Zaozersk there is a technical base in Andreeva Bay. This is one of the largest facilities of the Northern Fleet for the storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). The total area occupies about 2 hectares. The facilities of the base include a pier for unloading SNF, a technological berth, a coastal crane with a lifting capacity of 40 tons, a personnel sanitization station, storage facilities for liquid and solid spent fuel.

Topographic map of the Zapadnaya Litsa region.

Retirement
And we are going home. Many have travel documents not from their places of residence, but from places of conscription. The commander refuses to confirm the place of residence. We run to the old man. Kurkin, thanks to him, signs all the necessary papers without any problems.
Last morning at the Malaya scapula of the Zapadnaya Litsa base. They hugged their buddies, said goodbye to the officers of their combat units. We are going on a garrison bus to the city of Zaozersk. Farewell to the harsh northern cliffs, bird colonies, black waters of the bay. The road winds between the hills. How many times on this road hozheno in dismissal and back. On business and without business in the city. In the city we change to a regular bus to Murmansk. There are no others there, but it runs on one gas per day. Thank the Lord, commandant Yunusov did not find fault with anyone. Probably the reindeer died in the tundra. Something our boatswain Misha Gerasimov is very hard dragging his suitcase. He must have screwed up something. Murmansk. Train Station. You can walk around the city to see. What is there to see? Life ahead, I'll come again if I want to. You can go to the Leg Lake to the Nenets, buy souvenirs - folk crafts. But I want to go home more.
The reserved seat car rumbles at the joints. Suddenly, Misha Gerasimov jumps down from the top shelf. In his hands he has armor from the porthole from the mother ship. "Who put it in the suitcase!?" He yells. We roll with laughter. Misha, I'm sorry, but you thought that you stuffed your suitcase so much with things from the battleship. The bear soon departs, and we neigh together, remembering how they slipped a wrench for a hundred into the vacation suitcase. After a couple of compartments, a drunken sailor proves to the public that he served on a nuclear submarine. To the question of which one he indignantly shouts that she is alone in the USSR. I had to calm down and put to sleep. A real submariner will never boast of this.
We've arrived. Yaroslavsky railway station of the capital. I didn't warn my people about my arrival. Decided to make a surprise. I persuaded the boatswain Misha Gerasimov to stay with me for a week.
Could not resist, took a taxi. Here is the home. Large, eight-story, four entrance, on a quiet Moscow street in the South-West of Moscow. Second floor. Doorbell. The door is opened by a dear person - sister Anya. "Oh, Max has arrived!" she screams and throws herself on my neck.
Thus ended my Odyssey.
A year after my dismissal to the reserve, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev visited the project 651 boats.


Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev and Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin in 1967. visited the naval base of submarines of the Northern Fleet. On the left, Project 651 cruiser submarine missile carrier.

Later there were episodic meetings with the guys. A couple of months later, Chizh, our radio operator Volodya Chashin, came to my house. He came with a girlfriend. We listened to music, drank some wine, and they left and never called or called again. A year later, having retired to the reserve, Yura Stakhanov came to me - a sailor of a later call, to whom I transferred the management of receiving and transmitting devices. Stayed with me for a few days. We walked around the city. Bought him a civilian coat. Left no letter, no address. Two years later, I bought flowers at the Cheryomushkinsky market. I look, there is a taxi at the market. The taxi driver got out of the car and stands leaning on the hood. Kolya! Kolka Kolosov. "Hello!" Embraced. "How are you?!". "I'm fine!". And they dispersed, but it's a pity neither the address nor the phone number. A year later, I'm on the 115 bus on the street. Osipenko. The driver announces: “Comrade Max, please come to the cab!” Kolya! Kolka Maslov is a radio operator from Dikson. Opened the window. "Well! How are you!" "Everything is fine". 115 bus went its own route. I got off at my stop, went up to the driver's cab, saluted and dispersed or dispersed. Vanya Smagin called from the Paveletsky railway station. I drove up. We met and went home. Sit down and drink. Vanya worked on the railroad as a wagon trailer. The foreman of the cruise missile control team from the K-77 submarine Logvinenko called in. We drank. Overnight, we talked. He worked as an electronics technician on submarines. Once in the subway at the transition from the Oktyabrskaya ring to the radial, I met st. Lieutenant Pepper, he was already a captain of the third rank. They greeted each other and went about their business. It's still embarrassing. It probably seemed to us that we would live forever and always meet by chance.
February 23, 1967 is the day of the Soviet Army and Navy. Very sad. Drunk to hell. I'm going home, I'll lie down in a snowdrift - the sky is dark, dark blue stars are bright as over the Mediterranean Sea. Fine. But you can't lie down for long. Don't sleep, you'll freeze. The truth of the North Sea. Came home. The father asks: “Why are you so drunk?” "Holiday! I'm in a submarine!" “And I fought,” my father said quietly. I immediately sobered up and remembered these words for the rest of my life.
Many years later, Khimul, a medical chemist Volodya Khodakovsky, stopped by. Was in Moscow. Overnight at my place. He was already the chief engineer at a large construction site in Kyiv. We corresponded with George Delianidi. He invited me to his wedding, but I did not go, as always there was no time. He arrived already in the years of perestroika. He needed a visa to Greece. He told me that their Greeks are surviving from Georgia, and he is ready to leave. I had a residue, I began to say something about my possibilities to put him in a hotel, I'm afraid that he was offended. However, after his arrival, he wrote me a good letter. Recently, in 2008 I was already found on the Internet by the son of our ship's cook, Alfred Cosparance. It costs a lot! If the children remember us. The truth is, I can't get through to him. Hooray! In 2008. George Delianidi was found. He lives in Greece. We talked on the phone. It turns out that seven of our retired to the reserve before us. They went home, and we went to rocket and torpedo firing. When we left, they took a picture of our departure. This is a classic. Therefore, with the permission of George, I publish these pictures below.


Submarine K-85 in the small shovel of the Zapadnaya Litsa base. Works "Left small back". I'm in the conning tower on telegraphs. We're leaving the pier. The mooring team lays the mooring ropes in the stowed position.


The captain's bridge of the K-85 submarine, from left to right: the navigator of the boat, captain of the third rank Bardin; the commander of the boat is standing - captain of the second rank Sklyanin; half-sitting as the first officer - captain of the second rank Kurkin.


The first group of demobilized October 1966 from left to right: foreman of the group of electricians Georgy Delianidi; boatswain Misha Kolodiy; medical chemist Volodya Khodakovsky; ship's cook Alfred Casparance; foreman of the group of diesel operators Cherevan; foreman of the diesel group Krat; foreman of the Kuznetsov team. Look at the faces of these guys. They guarded the peace of our country during the Cold War. These people did their duty, just as their fathers did in the forties. Thank God there was no war, but if there was. But history does not allow the subjunctive mood. In the background, an underwater cruising missile carrier tail number 190 is leaving for missile and torpedo firing.


The guys say goodbye to their ship forever.


Goodbye Slovenian. Cruising submarine missile carrier K-85 leaves for missile and torpedo firing. The mooring team has been formed. The commanders of the bow and stern mooring teams report that the mooring is completed, the mooring rigging has been removed to its regular places. Now the command will follow: "Mooring team down."

Chapter 17 Autonomy

Autonomy

All. The time has come. We are leaving to carry out a combat mission - long-distance navigation - "Autonomy" or "Combat duty". Two weeks before going to sea - a medical commission. If you complain - you are sick or feel unwell - you will be written off, and a specialist of your profile from another crew will be called in your place. We did not have this, only the sailor Chernyak was transferred to the political department (I wrote that he was a Baptist), the sailor Kravets was transferred to another crew. The day before the release, we carefully check the materiel. In the evening, the foreman of the start team, Vanya Smagin, called me and Gena Erokhin. "Guys, my rear twin containers are not rising," he said. Here it is necessary to explain what a rear twin of containers is. The container is a steel cylinder, walls made of thirty-five millimeter steel, two meters in diameter, fifteen meters long. Two sealed lids. A rocket is placed inside the container. Two such containers are interconnected by a deck. The whole structure is hydraulically raised at fifteen degrees relative to the horizon.


Project 651 submarine with raised bow and stern missile containers.

There are two such sparks on the ship, one in front of the conning tower, the second behind the conning tower. At that moment when Vanya called us, the containers already had missiles, and not training ones, but combat ones, since we had to go autonomous. What to do? Who is guilty? No time to think. I, as a foreman of the team, reported to the commander. "So! I am going to sleep! In the morning, report on the elimination of the malfunction, ”I heard in response, and what could I hear? On the solid body, in the area of ​​​​the hydraulic unit, there is a hatch, but it does not open, but is a sheet of thirty-five millimeter steel, pressed against the solid body with thirty studs with a diameter of twenty millimeters every hundred millimeters. Naturally, there is a gasket between the hatch and the solid body. They opened the hatch. I lowered myself into the hydraulic assembly with a sheet of white paper. Vanya gave pressure from the edema - I moved the sheet around the junctions of hydraulic pipelines, an invisible jet of spinning oil hit the sheet of paper, leaving greasy streaks on it. Crack in the fitting of the durite hose. Vanya found the same hose in a zip (set of spare parts). Replaced. On command from the compartment of the container, they slowly and solemnly rose. To check the lids of the containers were opened, they were also opened hydraulically. With the lids open, sharp-faced cruise missiles peep out of the containers - a thunderstorm of enemy aircraft carriers. That's it, the problem has been fixed. Now we need to batten down the hatch. We are aware that if we do this job poorly, it is a threat to the life of the entire crew. We screw the nuts onto the studs, tighten them resting on each other with our feet. It's getting light. "Comrade Commander! The malfunction has been fixed!” I report to the commander. “Well, well,” I hear in response. The commander goes to the central post. "Combat Alert! Mooring team up! Stand in place! Volnov to the conning tower for telegraphs! We're going offline for three months. Thirty days to the Mediterranean, thirty days back, the rest on combat duty - to graze the enemy aircraft carrier, one of the tasks is to record the noise of its propellers so that the torpedoes of those who follow us do not miss. In case of hostilities, there is a package in the commander's safe and a special radio for such a case.
Getting used to camp life. There are three shifts on the ship, which means that the team is divided into three shifts. The time for each shift is also the same. Three breakfasts every four hours, three lunches, three dinners. Three times cinema. The film projector was commanded by the sailor Katanukhin, he was a projectionist in civilian life. The shift gathers after dinner in the first compartment: “Katnukhin, come on to the film!” The movie projector chirped. On the screen stretched over the covers of the bow torpedo tubes, Chapaev appears, he rushes on his white fighting horse to attack for our Soviet homeland. Instead of a newsreel, Katanukhin had cuts from our favorite places from different films.
A week later, I woke up with a loud bang. It seemed that someone was hitting the hull of the boat with a huge sledgehammer. The boat was on the surface, it was stormy. The roar was such that I decided that we were being heard not only by NATO anti-submarine defense, but also in Moscow. It turned out that the front door of the conning tower of the light hull was torn off by water, and, hanging on one hinge, it beat in time with the wave on the light hull, the water cut off the deck steel handrails like a knife. The door was tied with a shkert, wedged with a crowbar. Nothing helped. After some time, she again broke down and beat on the body. The commander called Lyosha Shcherbakov - the hold of the central post.
It was a muscular stocky guy. On his left arm, from shoulder to wrist, there was a tattoo: “Lyosha, love the one who loves you.” Lyosha taught me life. The fact is that the first mate, as he was supposed to, walked around the ship all the time, scolding everyone for the mess, and did it very insultingly for those whom he scolded. Lyosha was on watch. He conscientiously sat in his skerry among pipelines and valves and read a book. The first officer, seeing this disgrace, with swearing and reproaches snatched a book from Lyosha's hands and wanted to leave, but Lyosha calmly lowered one of the retractable devices, thank God, there are enough of them in the central post. And the way to retreat became more difficult for the first mate. “Put the book back,” Lyokha said quietly. The first officer put down the book with the words: "Calm down, grandmother, calmly." Lyokha lifted the retractable device. This incident was over. Therefore, when I shared with Lyokha that the first officer got me, Lyokha calmly said: “Didn’t you try to send him?” Soon, during the next disassembly, I did just that. In response, I heard: "Calm down, grandmother, calmly." Since then, I and the first mate have become friends. It so happened that we simultaneously stood on watch on the bridge. The first mate goes to watch, passing by the hatch to the lower deck of the third compartment, shouting: “Max!”, “What!”, I respond. "You're going to watch!" - yells the first mate. "I'm coming! Get dressed!” I yell back. The sergeant-major leaves. At the gangway from the lower to the upper deck is the combat post of the warhead-2 on duty. A young officer, Orlov, is on duty today. His face expresses extreme surprise. For him, a captain of the second rank is a career dream, and the position of senior assistant commander is an unattainable level. "Foreman. Is your relative a senior officer?” he asks me. “Dear uncle, it happened, so we serve on the same ship,” I answer.
So, the commander calls Lyosha. “Take a couple of sailors, a chisel and a sledgehammer. Cut the hell out of this hinge, and the door overboard. So they did. Thus. In the North Sea (I don’t know the coordinates), at the bottom lies our door from the light hull of the conning tower of the K-85 submarine.
The submarine is a closed space. When I was called up, I thought that, like in the Nautilus, I would be able to admire the underwater world through the porthole. Be that as it may, there are no portholes on combat submarines. Where are we going, where are we going? Glory to the Lord, the political officer (deputy) gathers us in the first compartment for political classes and tells us where and where we are going. From his stories, we learn that we have to overcome the line of PLO (anti-submarine defense) NATO - England, the Faroe Islands - Iceland. At this turn, NATO submarines and their anti-submarine aircraft patrol squarely. Monitoring is being carried out of the entry into the Atlantic of the northern navy of the USSR. In the event that a Soviet submarine is detected, NATO aviation drops self-propelled acoustic buoys that become attached to the noise of the propellers of your boat and it is quite difficult to get rid of them. Aviation arrives every morning and announces in Russian on the frequency of our radio: "Good morning, let's start working." Drops next acoustic buoys. True, they have an eight-hour - a working day in two shifts, and flying away in the evening, they send - "Goodbye, see you tomorrow." One way or another, the data that you have been detected are sent to the General Staff of our fleet and you receive the radio “Mission not completed. The crew died. Return to base. Further, upon returning to the base - analysis of the campaign with organizational conclusions.
For a day - two we go with the smallest moves, we maneuver. At night we surface to recharge the batteries. Diesel rumbles, it seems that NATO hears everything. But no, we have overcome the anti-submarine defense (ASD) of NATO and we are going sharply to the south-west towards Spain. On the occasion of overcoming PLO holiday. The political officer organizes amateur performances, the sailors sing songs that are broadcast on Chestnut. Poems appear:
Off the Faroe Islands
Not for good deeds and words
Uncle Sam put the PLO
Fleet Red to spite
So let's not let us down
The fleet, of which a particle
PLO let's go through cunning foxes
Uncle Sam's nose in the morning.

Zam arranges a sports day. Young people are pulling the rope, the bulkhead between the second and third compartments is open. A rope is stretched between the compartments. The sailors of the second compartment are pulling towards themselves, the sailors of the third compartment are pulling towards themselves.


It appears to be a door in the bulkhead between the second and third compartments.

In the heat of the moment, the sailors rest their feet on the instruments. I could not stand it: “Comrade captain of the third rank! They break the instruments - as we go further, we will drown. The deputy embarrassedly gives the command to stop the tug-of-war. Goes to the sixth compartment. There is a fuel intake valve. Big and fat. The deputy organizes a competition - who will pull up more times on this valve.


The valve is on the ceiling (in the upper part of the arch of the strong hull), however, the fuel intake valve is several times larger, but this one is also okay.

Sergeant Major Krat crawls out of the hold: “Comrade captain of the third rank, if you tear out the valve, we will drown.” The valve, of course, cannot be torn out, but it is impossible to joke with issues of survivability and the operation of instruments and mechanisms on the boat. Zam was generally a great inventor. He came up with the radio newspaper “Let's fight back the hated enemy!”, And the word to the enemy was pronounced in the Smolensk dialect through “ge”. Every dinner, as soon as we sat down at the table, “Kashtan” was turned on, and the cheerful voice of the deputy was broadcasting: “We are starting a radio newspaper of the K-85 submarine “Let's fight back the hated enemy!”. The team, along with the enemy, began to hate "Kashtan". Vadik Litvenenko approached me: “Comrade foreman. Can we put direct current into the socket, into which the deputy turns on the tape recorder, the tape recorder will burn out, there will be no radio newspaper. "Guys! You are crazy! Fire in the compartment! Yes, even autonomous! It is forbidden". "Comrade foreman! We will put Petya Brazhnik with a fire extinguishing hose at the bulkhead door of the second compartment, he will instantly extinguish everything. I don’t know how it happened, but one fine day, before dinner, the political officer turned on the tape recorder and his power transformer began to smoke. Zam flew out of the cabin: "Fire in the compartment!". Petya Brazhnik bursts into the compartment in his hands with a fire extinguishing foam cannon. He breaks into the political officer's cabin, foam covers the tape recorder, and accidentally gets into the political officer's bed, on his tunic and everywhere around. The cabin is cramped, and you have to act quickly. "Allay alarm!" Nobody even had time to react. According to the "Kashtan" the terrible voice of the commander: "Captain of the third rank Shipenko to me!". Zam runs to the third compartment. Commander in the cabin. “Comrade commander,” he reports: “The tape recorder has exhausted its motor resource!” The commander looked tiredly at the political officer: “Deputy, you already got the whole team,” he said. I thought with horror that there would be an investigation and that I and the guys would not do well. The case ended unexpectedly. For skillful actions during a fire in the compartment, Petya Brazhnik received ten days of leave to his homeland.
Dinner. The commander, saving fresh water, allows him to wash his face only in the morning and take a shower once a week. Before dinner, the ship's doctor Nikolai Nikolaevich Korol passes through the ship with a bowl in which alcohol is poured, pieces of cut bandage float in the alcohol. With tweezers, Kolya takes out pieces of gauze soaked in alcohol from the bowl and gives each one one. So sanitary napkins were invented, but Kolya was not given a prize for this invention.
Let's go to Spain. With my imagination, I see in my dreams either bullfighting or Spanish dances. Acoustics report: "Comrade commander from the starboard side, a stable sonar signal." Spotted! We maneuver, we go deeper, we emerge - to no avail. We give radio to Moscow about the incident. Like a little, of course, to Moscow. She, dear, will always help out, always help. The answer was not long in coming “The American Coast Guard will test new powerful sonars, but the signal-to-noise ratio in the signal reflected from the target at such large distances is such that, being off the coast of America, what is happening off the coast of Spain, they, of course, cannot distinguish anything ".
Calmed down. Let's go to Gibraltar. Passing through this strait is a difficult task, it is narrow, on the Spanish coast is the American base "Rota". The width of the strait is 14-44 km, the length is 65 km, the greatest depth is 1181 m. The sonar base "Rota" cuts and writes everything that passes from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea and back.
Central post. Instruments rustle peacefully, commands are occasionally heard. All of a sudden! Loud bang in the conning tower. The cry of a man. A deputy flies into the central post like a stone along a vertical ladder. division commander Pirozheniko. "The man was killed!" he shouts. Behind the deputy division commander Toiva Ushtal descends into the compartment. The face is bloodied, the right hand is hanging. The compartment resounds with the cry of a wounded animal.
The bulkhead between the central and third compartments was battened down, but I heard this cry. For a moment everyone is in shock. Toiva himself goes through the third compartment to the second to the doctor. In the second, Nikolai Nikolayevich picks him up. In a matter of minutes, the officer's wardroom turns into an operating room.


The wardroom in which the officers dine, if necessary, turns into an operating room. Spotlights are visible above the table, illuminating the operating table.

Commander's command: "Lie down on liquid soil (water layer with higher salinity). Command the mode of complete silence. Prepare for the operation." What happened. In the conning tower, to the right of the helmsman's post, there is a specially designed compressed air purification cylinder. Glass wool and turning shavings are used as a filter. As the investigation showed much later, there was an internal, hidden crack in the cylinder cap. The time has come and the lid is torn off.


Air pressure relief valve, very similar to the one torn in the conning tower.

The entire contents of the balloon escaped. Glass wool hit Toiva in the face. Damaged the capillaries of the face. Therefore, the whole face was covered in blood. Luckily, he managed to instinctively close his eyes. The hand was severely injured. Two fractures, apparently the ill-fated cover fell into the hand. Turning shavings hit the chest from the bottom up. For five hours we lay on the liquid ground. Nikolai Nikolaevich, having set the fractures and put on splints, carefully pulled turning chips out of the skin on his chest. After the operation, Toiva was laid in Nikolai Nikolaevich's cabin. Naturally, they reported to Moscow. Moscow responded quickly. In a response radiogram, it was reported that at the entrance to Gibraltar (the coordinates were reported) a Soviet ship - a hydro-reconnaissance officer, would be waiting for us, which would take on board a wounded sailor. They asked him to betray his photograph together with Toiva. Other documents are not needed, there are no problems with them.
Night. Caravans of merchant ships gather near Gibraltar for its passage. We look at this picture through the periscope. We notice a vessel in silhouette and identification marks similar to a hydroprospector. He leaves the caravan and heads west. We follow him. When the caravans forming off Gibraltar disappear over the horizon, we emerge. Two dark silhouettes of ships slowly glide across the water. "Where are you from?" - in Russian, the hydroprospector does not maintain silence. "From afar!" - in Russian, the commander responds. “If you beeches ninety. Approach on the right side, ”the hydroprospector reports. They didn't dare to screw up. The rough sea did not allow. We agreed as follows: Toiva was tied to a stretcher. Four throwing ends were tied to the handles of the stretcher. The two front ones were sent to the hydroprospector, the two rear ones were kept. At the hydroprospector, they chose mooring lines, we etched our own into tightness. So Toiva was taken to the hydroprospector, they didn’t drop or hit him.
There is nothing to do, it is necessary to enter the Mediterranean Sea. We get the radio: “At “X” hours “X” minutes, in the coordinates “X / Y”, a trade caravan of the USSR is formed for the passage of Gibraltar. You go at depth "H" under the caravan speed for five hours, five knots.
So they did. Five hours later, a sharp course to the south “Urgent dive! Full speed ahead! Passed Gibraltar. There were no comments during the communication session with Moscow.
We are in the Mediterranean! Beauty! Warm and humid. At night we surface to recharge the batteries, the plankton leaves such a bright luminous trail behind the stern that it seems to be visible from the moon.
For the first time, the boat 651 of the project entered the Mediterranean Sea. On this occasion, again a holiday. According to "Chestnut" for the whole ship, a well-known, paraphrased song with a guitar.

Tired of talking and arguing
And look into tired eyes
In the far blue Mediterranean
Our boat is weighing anchors.

Captain of the second rank Sklyanin
Went out to sea without waiting for the day
Raise your glass to say goodbye
Young tart wine.

We drink for the furious and recalcitrant,
For those who have matured penny comfort.
Whispers in the wind "Jolly Roger"
Flint's grandchildren sing songs

I'm on watch. Gauges show increased humidity in the right rear container. Report to the central post. Solution: "Raise the container at night, open the lids and sort it out." Gena Erokhov and I are examining the sealing ring of the container lid. Here, the rubber is torn. Either the wire hit, or something else. But there is no time to guess at the reasons, we will figure it out later. Now head over heels in the compartment, find a spare seal. Found. The lid is two meters in diameter. The metal hoop that holds the seal is bolted on every hundred millimeters. Removed the hoop, removed the seal. They put in a new one, and it is more than necessary. Report to the bridge - silence in response. Nothing to do. I take a shoe knife, cut the seal with a wedge. I cover the docking place with raw rubber. The container is closed, the spark is lowered. The device for registering humidity in the container shows the norm.
Arrived at destination square. Now keep your ears open. Acoustics write the noise of the propellers of an enemy aircraft carrier. The commander of the BS-4, Senior Lieutenant Valery Petrovich Krikun, takes everything that is visible through the periscope. But here's the problem! You can't see anything through the periscope. Sweat optics. I still can't understand the physics of what happened. In the northern latitudes, the periscope worked well, did not sweat. In the subtropics should work even better. No, wet coating covers the glass. Almost nothing is visible. We decided to dry. They began to blow it with air passed through a silica gel (moisture absorber), but there was no result. Then someone suggested: "We need to warm up the air." Warmed up, no result, even warmed up, the same thing. When it was still warmed up, the glass cap that covered the optics burst. Water rushed into the periscope. They popped up promptly. Thank God we weren't spotted. Somehow the tightness was restored. Incident. Obliged to report to Moscow. The commander argues with the deputy for a long time. division commander, how and when to report. The commander wants to complete a combat mission at any cost. Deputy the divisional commander rests on the safety of navigation.
The radiogram is gone. Waiting for an answer. In Moscow, they immediately decided not to take risks. We receive a radiogram: “Return to the base. On the surface." Later we were told that Moscow asked the plant and headquarters in Zapadnaya Litsa: “How many periscopes do they have?”
Nothing to do. We urgently leave the area of ​​duty. We surface in the surface position and follow in the direction of Gibraltar. They raised the Soviet flag, but the smallest one. The commander ordered to look beyond the horizon. A ship or plane appears on the horizon - an urgent dive. I reported the antenna malfunction, got the go-ahead for repairs.


The front of the conning tower is deployed in position - escort of a cruise missile. The focusing grating with the receiving node of the Argument antenna is visible. Retractable devices are visible above the wheelhouse. The second from bow to stern is the periscope.

Gena Erokhin and I took a mattress with us, turned the antenna towards the clear sun and lay down on it to watch the sea and the sky.


Antenna tracking cruise missiles "Argument". Photo from the K-77 submarine, which has become a museum in the United States.

I kept looking towards Africa. I have already heard tom-toms of African tribes. The guys, free from the watch, poured onto the deck. They caught a flying fish that plopped down on it. A fish is like a fish, but on its back it has wings like a dragonfly, naturally in proportion to the size of the fish. By evening, the sun began to set below the horizon. The sea shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. I didn't even go to dinner, it was so beautiful.
"Urgent Dive!" In Moscow, they figured it out. The radio “Continue the mission at the discretion of the commander” came. "Hooray!" The task is not disrupted, we turn around and return to the duty area at full speed.
The first combat shift in the first compartment. Who is on the bunk, who is on the deck. We sit and listen to how the deputy fought. divisional commander. And he fought in 1945 with the Japanese. They went on a hike. They lie down and wait for an enemy ship to pass by. They waited and waited, and when they surfaced for a communication session, they were told: “Japan has capitulated. The war is over." What happened next, we did not hear - "Emergency alarm!!!" The sailor feels when it is a training emergency alarm, and when it is not a training one. Malfunction of the "Granite" system, which controls the horizontal depth rudders. Nose trim. We're sliding deeper and deeper. In an instant, I am at my combat post. Hands clung to the flight control device of the rocket. Look at the depth gauge located on the left.


Depth gauge

The arrow is not very fast, but not slowly crawling deeper and deeper. The strong body begins to compress the pressure of the water column. The cork begins to crack, which is sheathed in a durable case from the inside. I wasn't scared for myself. With horror, I imagined a picture: Moscow, a house, the bell rings at the door of the apartment, the postman brings home a funeral. What will happen to mom? sister? Father?
Thanks God! The helmsmen manually align the rudders. The boat slowly but surely takes a horizontal position. The accident lasted seconds, but in those seconds we fell from fifty to one hundred and fifty meters under water.
Life took its course. Watch, sleep, rest. Since there are three shifts on the ship, then the bed in the second compartment is one for three. I, like many others, settled down easier. Between the two instruments, I laid boxes with zip (spare parts) on the deck, covered them with a mattress, hung a tarpaulin at the entrance, and it turned out to be a small but cozy cabin. There was even a picture hanging on the device. There is nowhere to wash on the ship, so the crew is given bedding and underwear for a week. After a week, dirty laundry is placed in a plastic bag. Ballast is placed in the bag, and all this is fired overboard through the Duk apparatus (a small torpedo tube), directed towards the bottom. For eternal storage at the bottom of the ocean. Rubbish is also disposed of.
I woke up from the command "Alarm, do not approach the bulkhead of the first compartment, back pressure has been created." Waking up, the brain is tight, but it thinks: “Back pressure means a hole, which means they discovered and knocked out.” In fact, if there is no war, the sailors of the whole world understand that their profession is already deadly, and do not drown each other. Even if they find someone else's boat in the territorial waters of the country, patrol ships throw depth charges, but by, only to drive it out of the territorial waters and that's it. It turned out that the accident consisted in the fact that paper was stuck in the rack of the front cover of the "Duk", which some smart guy did not put in a plastic bag, but simply threw it into the duk. According to the law of physics, if you create a pressure equal to the outboard, water will not go into the compartment. Taking advantage of this law, "Duk" was opened and the paper was pulled out.
I have served for four years now. After coming from the autonomy - demobilization. I need to bring something home from work. There are several tins of dried ram (dried fish). And what if you save on sheets. After all, they are given out every week, and I will sleep for two weeks, but I will bring six sets home. I sleep in my skerry, and I have a disturbing, even terrible dream. My father and I are walking along the Vvedensky (German) cemetery in Moscow. My mother's mother, my grandmother, is buried in this cemetery. My father and I walk along different alleys and I can’t meet him in any way. Hot, stuffy. I jump up from my bed and feel that I am standing ankle-deep in diesel fuel. The fact is that when diving, in order not to crush the tank, the fuel (diesel oil) is displaced by sea water into the expansion tank. And if the valve of the pipeline that passes fuel into the expansion tank is not opened in time, diesel fuel will go directly into the compartment through the emergency bleed valve. And so it happened. The watchman overslept the dive, the valve for supplying fuel to the expansion tank was closed, diesel fuel went into the compartment. On alarm, the main drainage pump was turned on and the diesel fuel was pumped out of the compartment with the help of my sheets, which I wanted to bring home. So the ship killed in me the peasant thirst for hoarding.
Time is over. Time to go home. With a sense of accomplishment, we go to the base. We are already seasoned sailors. Passing Gibraltar under a caravan of merchant ships is a piece of cake. Further north, northeast. Let's go through the NATO PLO, and then it's a stone's throw to the house. Forty days almost without incident. On the approach to native waters, the commander decides to surface and sail on the surface. Stormy. I'm on the bridge, above the conning tower. He is dressed in a Canadian - trousers made of bearskin almost to the neck, on top of a jacket made of the same leather with a hood that closes with a zipper. When the zipper is open, you get a large fur collar like a sailor's. The fire belt girdling me is chained to the bridge rail. Otherwise it is impossible, it will be washed away by a wave. Indescribable beauty. The sea rises up. The boat slides off the wave like a sleigh down a hill. At the end of the mountain rises a new mountain. The boat crashes into it, freezes, as the diesel engine is dragged up with the help of propellers, and gravity rolls down from the wave. The wave slowly picks up the boat and lifts it to the crest. On the ridge, the top of the water mountain engulfs the boat like the tip of a whip. The wave rolls over the bridge. I take a deep breath, bend down and cover my face with my hands in huge mittens. The wave comes from the direction of the sun. The sun shines through the wave. Boat in a hole between two waves. The wave through which the sun shines is green-blue, with a white surf at the top. Beauty for life. A boat - a five-story house - a shell in the abyss of a raging element. That her diesel and propellers. Here the ball is ruled by Poseidon - the god of the seas and oceans. Those brief hours of storm in the North Sea alone were worth four years of service.
A day later, the storm subsided. We're trying to dive in. "Emergency alarm" - when diving, the retractable device - RDP (diesel operation under water) does not close. This device resembles a diver's snorkel. The valve on its upper part is closed with the help of a float, which, when the diver dives, emerges and thus closes the breathing tube from water entering it.
The commander calls three sailors: the diesel operators Cherevan and Shipovsky, the bilge Shcherbakov. The task is to submerge the boat to the depth of the extended RDP. A group of sailors on an inflatable boat, in wetsuits, will approach the RDP valve and see what is wrong with it, if possible, fix it. In case NATO planes arrive, the boat leaves, but we will come back for you. Thanks God! NATO aircraft did not arrive. The guys in the valve found an old quilted jacket. Someone threw it between a strong and light body. She swam, swam, but sucked her into the RDP valve. Later, when the commander and others were awarded for this campaign, the guys were not forgotten.
Above the Western Lyceum, the march of the Slavyanka sounds. We are met. We are like Arkharovites - some in a peakless cap with a white top, some in a padded jacket and black earflaps, some in a robe and a black cap, some in uniform. The command does not swear. Everyone understands what is happening. We stand in solemn formation on the deck of the K-85 cruising submarine missile carrier. Of course we are happy, but we are tired. The commander reports to the division commander, Rear Admiral Yegorov: "The task of the command to carry out a combat mission in the Mediterranean Sea has been successfully completed." "Thank you for your service!" - Rear Admiral addresses us. “We serve! Soviet! Union! - we yell so that the seagulls break from their homes in the bird rookery of the coastal cliffs.


The personnel of the K-85 conscription in 1962. When the guys were taking pictures, I was on vacation.


Therefore, the chief foreman Volnov M.I.

We go to live on a floating base. The commander gathers us - old-timers. “I understand,” he says, “it's time for you to demobilize. But the task must be completed. It is necessary to carry out torpedo and rocket firing. Only with successful torpedo and rocket firing can autonomous navigation be considered successful. We serve the Soviet Union - what questions and doubts there may be. Task number one is to hand over military weapons. Ammunition of combat torpedoes and missiles. In Kislaya Bay, we hand over combat missiles, load training ones. We also change torpedoes for training ones. All! We are ready for everyday peaceful military work.
Again trip to Severodvinsk. The task is torpedo and rocket firing. We load training torpedoes quickly.


First we load the bow torpedo tubes,


then feed.

It was not so easy with rocket firing. Loaded. We went to the assigned area. Escort aircraft arrived from near Kyiv. Preparing a training rocket for launch. Instruments show: "Electronic locks of (conditional) atomic warheads do not open." Aviation is waiting. A special officer approaches the commander with a report. "Comrade Commander. The aviators betrayed the encryption to us, but I can’t decipher it.” Shootout. We went to investigate the base. It turned out that the wires for opening the electronic locks of the atomic warheads of the right and left sides were mixed up. An installer flew in from St. Petersburg - Volodya Zalit - a worker from the Baltic Plant. Fixed everything. A day later they went to shoot. This time everything went fine.


Launch of the P-6 rocket from the boat 675 of the project. NATO classification "ECHO". 651 project NATO classification “JULIETTE” fired also.


Cruise missiles were equipped not only with submarines, but also with surface ships. Gorgeous! On takeoff, it opens its wing opening. Starting powder engines throw it out of the container, then they unfasten, just like the starting stage of a space rocket.


Back view

Tasks completed, let's go home to Zapadnaya Litsa. At the exit from the throat of the White Sea - a radiogram: “Floating German mines from the time of the war were found in the throat of the White Sea. Stop moving and drift until further notice." Apparently the cables holding them were rusted.
We need to go home. We go to the commander. “Comrade Commander, you need to go home. Maybe something like that." The commander makes a decision: “Let's go. On the bridge we set up a watch of old-timers who need to go home. Look in all four directions. Any floating object is an alarm.” It's raining from the sky. On the fly, it freezes and turns into flying icicles. Icicles cut the face. What to do? We put on gas masks. Cold rubber sticks to the skin of the face. We find the largest gas masks. We wrap the face with a scarf. We stand on the bridge for no more than half an hour. Every half an hour, a monster descends into the central post. A gas mask sticks out of the hood of the Canadian woman, on the glasses of which there is an icicle.
We arrived at the base. Solemn meeting on the occasion of the end of autonomous navigation. The commander was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. The guys who repaired the RDP were awarded medals. The commander is gathering us. Thank you for your service! You are a well-deserved people. There is nothing to reward you.
And thanks for that!
The command has a banquet in the evening, awards on the occasion of the accomplishment of a combat mission.

Chapter 16

Pre-autonomous period


I'm on my second vacation. Near sister Anya and dad. New 1966.

Vacation flew by quickly and without much adventure. Svetlana had already cheated on me by that time. We met, of course I was angry. She, according to female wisdom, that the way to a man's heart lies through the stomach, fed me a homemade dinner. However, the whole history of our relationship could not be called a novel. Rather, it was a whim. For the first time, I had a relationship with a woman without mutual affection. Yes, and thank God. If we got married, both of us would not be happy. It's very important to be understood. It's important to have a friendship.
Another thing is male friendship, especially naval friendship on a ship. I had a friend Georgy Delianidi, a Georgian Greek. He was not very tall, but Caucasian handsome man. He always kept his back straight. Brown eyes, slightly hooked nose. Dignity and some cheerfulness were always read in the eyes. For some reason, there were no mustaches. When we took up duty on the ship together, after a certain time in the third compartment the telephone rang: “Listen, dear! Come, I fried a barbecue, ”Georgy said. He served as the foreman of the electric team, a combat post in the fifth compartment. And in the fifth compartment there was a ship's galley.


From left to right Ch. foreman Gena Erokhov; worth st. the first article by George Delianidi; I.

The ship's galley is the realm of our ship's cook, Alfred Casparance. We are grateful to Alik for "Tasty and healthy food" and in general he was the soul of the team.

It was worth it. True, due to his misfortune, a Dagestani Ivanov, the son of the director of the prison, got into Zhora's team. As soon as Ivanov's head rose above the deck, when he got out of the hold, the command sounded: “Ivanov, into the hold! Not all the batteries were serviced, the oil was not wiped everywhere, ”poor Ivanov again dived into the hold. George laughed at us: “Men! Your Russian girls will not wait for you. They are all like that. Here in the Caucasus, my girlfriend will wait as long as I serve. And indeed, none of us waited, and not only girls, but also wives. I'm not judging anyone, it's just the way we are. In the fourth year, Zhora received a letter that his girlfriend had run away with a Russian to Krasnodar. It was terrible to look at Zhora. The face is gray, the eyes are evil. Finally, he turned to the political officer: “Deputy, let me go home for ten days. I'll find them and kill them!" The political officer was frightened: “Georgy, you are our chief electrician, we have combat missions before us, how will we carry them out without you, no, you can’t leave. Our ship is the combat unit of the fleet, and you are the combat unit of the ship.” Georgy turned purple all over: “Well, then wait for the deputy, I will stab you,” he said, and with that the conversation about the vacation was over.
Dagestan Ivanov is a thin, frail, but smart guy. So that Georgy did not drive him very much, he was put as a messenger in the officer's wardroom. Everything would be fine, but either Ivanov pulled up his underpants high, or it was a property inherent in his causal male place, but this place sometimes looked out of his underpants. In the tropics, when the ship is at forty degrees Celsius, such a messenger carrying you lunch, the picture is not pleasant. As soon as the "Kashtan" announced "Team to dine, the officers are invited to the table" - Ivanov regularly carried food from the galley to the officer's table. There is such a tradition in the Navy: the largest bone with meat (mosol) is served in meat soups to the most respected officer. Alfred Kasparans - the ship's cook - gave Ivanov a mosol. “This is for the first mate,” he instructed the orderly. Ivanov put the mosol to the first mate. When everyone had eaten, Ivanov carefully hid the mosol in the refrigerator, warmed it up the next day and served it to the first mate again. On the third day, the picture is as follows: Ivanov flies out of the wardroom, followed by a mosol, followed by the scolding of the first mate. Poor Ivanov, in an autonomy in the Mediterranean, had appendicitis. The ship's doctor Nikolai Nikolaevich Korol operated on him in the wardroom, which was specially designed on boats for an operating room. The operation lasted more than an hour, we deliberately lay on liquid ground so as not to shake. The first mate nervously walked along the corridor along the wardroom and grumbled: "Kolya, you, in addition to appendicitis, cut off half of the causal place for him." Ivanov spent two weeks in the doctor's cabin. The doctor's cabin if there are no patients - a cabin, and if there are patients - this is an infirmary.
The first mate called me: “Volnov, I need to escort my family from Murmansk here to Zapadnaya Litsa. Will you go?" "Yes sir. I will go, comrade captain of the second rank. From Zapadnaya Litsa to Murmansk, the Santa Maria went - either a big boat, or a small ship. Its name was Kirovobad, but the nickname was Santa Maria. He carried out household needs, who to bring from the mainland, who to take to the mainland, to throw food at the base or something else for the household. We got to Murmansk well. I met the family of the first mate. She consisted of a wife, daughter and son. Who is older, who is younger, I do not remember. No luck on the way back. Dense fog, and "Santa Maria" went only along the coast. That is, the captain saw the coast, knew its outlines well, and so along the coast, along the coast, and came to Zapadnaya Litsa. We walked in dense fog for about two hours. Finally we came out into a clearing - a gap in the fog. Having escaped into the clearing, they thought to see the shore, but they saw the Norwegian border patrol ships. This meant that we had already passed our own and were passing through neutral waters. They quickly turned back. An hour later, the wind blew, dispersed the fog, but began to rock the ship. The civilians were seasick. I, looking at them, also became infected. So, helping the wife of the first mate, calming the children and keeping an eye on things, I finally got to my native Malaya Lopatka of the Zapadnaya Litsa lip. At the pier, "Santa Maria" was already waiting for the first mate, naturally he was worried, since we were two hours late. The car took away the family of the first mate, I never saw them again.
I already wrote that Kurkin was not a standard person. For a torpedo attack, he duplicated a counting device on a special marine slide rule, which considered the probability of a torpedo hitting a target. It looked like this. In the central post in his corner, the first mate in the course of a torpedo attack conjures over maps and tablets. This slide rule flies out of the corner first, followed by a tablet. Behind the tablet is the command "Torpedo tubes fire!".


Torpedo tubes of the first compartment. Boat - museum

And they hit. I must say that a torpedo and torpedo firing is an expensive pleasure. First, a target is set at the range. Torpedo bombers are on duty behind the target. The torpedo, having passed under the target (as it is conceived so as not to change the target each time), should emerge and mark the place of ascent with an illuminating flare. If the torpedo does not surface, then a noise generator is turned on on it to detect the torpedo by acoustics. On the next firing, we lost a torpedo. The commander called everyone who wanted to get ten days of home leave to the bridge. Everyone is staring at the sea in the hope of seeing a torpedo that has surfaced. Acoustics listen to the horizon. "Comrade Commander! I hear the sound of a torpedo to the right of the bow ten, ”acoustic reports. Let's go right ten. An hour passes. "Comrade Commander! I hear the noise of a torpedo on the left aft ten. We turn around, go left aft ten. After four hours of searching, the navigator rises to the bridge: “Comrade commander! We've been walking around in eights for four hours. We need to figure it out." Understood. Acousticians heard the noise of their own boat refrigerators. A few days later, a message in the local newspaper: “Echoes of war! Fishermen "BMRT -10" caught a torpedo in their trawl. The torpedo did not explode. Apparently a lot of time has passed, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge." In general, jokes are bad with torpedoes. Spare torpedoes are on racks in the eighth aft compartment.


Eighth torpedo compartment. K-77

Once the first mate, as usual, bypassed the compartments. Opening the bulkhead door in the eighth, to his horror, he saw that sailors on hoists were shifting a spare torpedo. To the question of the first mate: “What are you doing?” He heard the answer: “Comrade captain of the second rank. Yes, we decided to arrange another bed. You can’t enter the torpedo compartment with matches in your pocket, let alone shift torpedoes on the move. The sergeant-major did not shout. He quietly said: "torpedo in place." As soon as his command was carried out, he approached the torpedo, checked the mount in a marching manner and said: "Don't touch the torpedo again if you want to return home." No one else touched the torpedoes. I don’t know how, but Kurkin had such a power of persuasion that sometimes his glance was enough to remember everything he wanted to say for the rest of his life.
To accomplish a combat mission, it is necessary to load combat missiles and torpedoes, but before loading it is necessary to check the equipment with training missiles. Torpedo, what is it. A torpedo is a torpedo. Rockets are more difficult. We receive an order: "Load training missiles at the base in Severomorsk." About half a day of transition and we are in the North Sea Bay. A large bay, on one side of the bay, a city lives peacefully with its life, on the other, a rocky shore with a concrete pier several kilometers long. We moor at the pier. Upon closer inspection, the rocky shore, the hills are the creation of human hands. Concrete structures, reminiscent of rocky hills, are inlaid with huge granite boulders, so that they cannot be distinguished from the creations of nature. Those places where the concrete is bare are bashfully covered with camouflage netting. We raise the missile containers, open the lids, install the loading frame, in general, everything is as always. Suddenly, one of the small rocks drives off and a trailer with the first rocket leaves the resulting failure. The escort officer presents the documents to our commander BC-2. Viktor Pavlovich looks through the documents, signs the certificate of acceptance of the missiles himself and with the boat commander. The missiles are loaded. Let's start checking the instruments. A few hours later, everything is checked, everything works. We start unloading. Reverse lock, trailer pulls up. Viktor Pavlovich hands over documents. The escort officer takes the documents, then the rocket. There is a snag on the third rocket. The accompanying officer, after reviewing the documents, orders something to the driver of the trailer, he turns around and leaves, the officer also, without saying a word, gets into his UAZ and leaves. We stand for an hour and a half. The commander tries to find out what's the matter over the link, but no one knows anything. Three hours later, a UAZ car drives up with another officer with a package for the commander. It turns out that one of the four missiles turned out to be combat. Order to the commander: "Go to Kislaya Bay to deliver a combat missile to the military missile base." Went. Went under unloading. In order for the enemy not to peep, we were fenced off with a floating fence. This is a solid fence of sections four meters high, on pontoons. Sections are connected by chains. Such a fence is dragged by a special tugboat. Circus attraction with a special curtain. It was worth sending the lead boat on a campaign around Scandinavia in order to protect themselves from their own with a floating fence. They just brought the rocket to the loading frame and began to lift it with a crane, suddenly stop, a civilian dry cargo ship is going past the bay. We waited until he passed. The rocket was loaded onto a trailer, and he disappeared into a crevice in the rocks.
As soon as we entered Severomorsk. Tale about the North Sea goat. Nobody knows how he appeared in Severomorsk. Someone said that he was brought, virgin lands, when they went to harvest in Kazakhstan, someone referred to the sailors from the Caucasus. But a mountain goat lived in a taxi rank near the city seaport. A handsome man - steep horns, like two huge commas flaunted on his proud head, slender legs, hair is not long, but sufficient in order not to freeze in the Arctic. An intellectual's beard, with a wedge. The goat was not grey, but brown-black with white spots. Taxi drivers loved him, fed him, and the goat did not live badly. Everything would be fine, but he took for a partner in the competition - who gored whom, plump women who turned their backs on him. At the sight of the victim, he got up, backed away for a run, stood up, and if the victim was not warned, and she did not turn or move away, from a run, she struck the enemy with horns at the level of her goat's lowered head. There were many complaints and claims, but everything somehow managed, and the goat lived and got on. I don't know how long he lived in a taxi stand, but among the taxi drivers there was a joker, and maybe jokers. The fact is that taxi drivers also worked as porters. When a passenger steamer came, taxi drivers ran to the pier to bring the client's things to the car. So when most of the taxi drivers left for the pier, these pranksters caught the goat and stuffed it into the trunk of the nearest Volga. The goat did not have to sit in the trunk for a long time. Soon the owner of the car was trotting with heavy suitcases in front of a portly lady - the wife of some naval commander. The driver ran up to his car from behind, and the owner of the luggage decided to see how he put her suitcases in the trunk. With a dashing movement, the taxi driver pressed the trunk lock button. The trunk lid swung open and, to the horror of the portly lady, and the driver, a mountain goat, completely stupefied from crowding and darkness, flew out of the trunk like a spring. A squeal of horror filled the taxi rank, the taxi driver dropped his suitcases in surprise and went speechless. The goat, rolling its eyes wildly, tapping its hooves, shot across the asphalt, rushing through the city towards the nearest hills. In the next moment, a portly lady was lying in a swoon on the pavement. The taxi driver cursed furiously. I do not know the fate of this goat. Yes, and I did not see this event, but I heard it more than once in different variations.

Chapter 15 The Accident

Accident
We reached Zapadnaya Litsa without incident, but this is what happened next. We went on a small coastal voyage. No signs of trouble. On board was the deputy division commander captain of the first rank Pirozhenko. He was getting used to the crew, as he was supposed to go with us on an autonomous basis. He performed the duties of "senior on board", apparently this was due to the fact that for the first time the boat 651 of the project performed the task of combat duty in the Mediterranean Sea.
It should be clarified that on boats around the clock work takes place in three shifts. Each shift has its own day. Three lifts, three breakfasts, three lunches, three dinners, three movies, and so on. The watch lasts four hours. Therefore, three senior officers - the deputy division commander, the commander and the first mate alternately carry the command watch in the central post,. The first shift is on watch, the second is awake on the watch, the third is resting - sleeping.
Completed assigned tasks. I was given acoustics to listen to the sounds made by killer whales. I took over the watch when the boat began to surface. The arrows of the instruments registering the state of the missile containers swayed in their usual rhythm. Suddenly I was deafened by the howler "Fire in the container." Eyes fixed on the dashboard. The arrow of the device "Water level in the container" slowly crept up and began to sway in time with the ship. The brain quickly thought: “Water in the container, the sensors shorted out with water, so the howler “Fire in the container” worked. I turned on "Chestnut" (radio communication on the ship). "Central post! The third compartment reports - Water in the right bow container! A few seconds later, the deputy division commander jumped into the hatch of the instrument deck. Thick, but not full captain of the first rank Pirozhenko, he was not tall, always in a good mood. I always saw him smiling. His smile with a narrowed eye seemed to say: “Don’t drift, it wasn’t something else, we’ll break through”


From left to right: flagship mechanic, commander of K-85 captain of the second rank Sklyanin, deputy. divisional commander captain first rank Pirozhenko, political officer K-85 captain third rank Tatarintsev.

This time, for a second, I read the confusion in his eyes. Mustaches in different directions, eyes searching the dashboard inquiringly. In the meantime, we surfaced. The deputy division commander and I climbed onto the bridge. “Raise the front pair of containers,” commanded the commander. Part of the deck slowly crawled up and stopped when it reached a slope of fifteen degrees. "Open container lids." A stream of water escaped from under the back cover of the right container. Luckily, there was no rocket in the container. Happiness is happiness, but trouble is big. Again to the factory, for repairs, what kind of autonomy is there. The container is lowered, we enter the base. The mood is worse than ever. After mooring, the general construction. Rear Admiral Egorov rises on board. Well, now it's going to blow! “Equal! Attention! Comrade Admiral. Yegorov did not give a report. “At ease. You will continue to go to sea like this. Drown to such and such a mother, ”he said, turned and left the ship. This short speech got everyone to the liver. When the formation was disbanded, I approached the commander: “Comrade commander, do not go to the dock, we ourselves will put the container on alert.” "Well, well, let's go." Only now, forty years later, when I am writing these lines, I understand the extent of his responsibility and courage to make such a decision. The degree of trust and faith in us. Sklyanin was a commander with a capital letter. What happened? The young sailor Grishka, as a member of the launch team, inspected the container before going to sea. The container is a cylinder of thirty-five millimeter steel, two meters in diameter and fifteen meters long. End faces of the cylinder are closed hermetically by covers. Inside, along the edges of the cylinder, there are guide rails along which the rocket is lowered into the container. On the front cover there is an antenna with waveguides - for testing the rocket, the system interacts with the rocket's transceivers. The container is sheathed with stainless steel sheets and connected to the ship's solid hull by a ventilation system. Approximately in the middle of the container there is an onboard connector that connects the electronic components of the rocket with the ship's equipment. The side connector at the moment of launch is undocked by hydraulics, and if it has not undocked, there is a knife that will cut the cable when the rocket leaves the container. Everything is thought out to the smallest detail. The connector is located under a small hatch that connects the container to the outside world. Grisha slammed this hatch, but did not tighten the cremalier. It turned out that when diving, the hatch was pressed against the hull, and the deeper we dived, the stronger the hatch was pressed against the hull. While under water in the boat there is always excess pressure.
When surfacing, the commander peeled off the upper hatch hatch. So that the excess air pressure accumulated in the boat does not open it, there is a latch on the hatch that allows you to slightly open the hatch to relieve pressure, in addition, if the pressure is very excessive, there is a pressure equalization valve on the hatch cover
Old submariners said that in old boats in small volumes, pressure accumulated very quickly. When surfacing, when the commander opened the hatch of the conning tower, the signalman walking along the vertical ladder behind him held his legs so that both would not be thrown out of the boat by excessive pressure.
Upon ascent, overpressure opened the port connector, and water entered the container.


In the foreground, you can see the red hatch of the board connector, which was pressed, but not battened down by the sailor Grisha.

It was decided so. While the container is being repaired, I live there. I equipped a mattress with a pillow and a blanket in a container, the guys brought me breakfast, lunch and dinner. The hard work was done by the whole team. The first thing they did was to remove the stainless steel sheeting. Several hundred bolts. I clearly noted where and how each sheet was attached. The inside of the container was washed, peeled, wiped and painted. Then the stainless steel sheets were put in place. The waveguide system of the front cover of the container was disassembled. The waveguides were washed with alcohol and wiped with white calico. The antenna drive motor was lubricated, thank God, it did not suffer from salt water. I had to tinker with the board connector. I dipped the connector in distilled water, took it out after a few hours, and dried it with a hair dryer. After a while, the megohmmeter shows a short circuit between the contacts. Salt absorbs water. You have to disassemble the connector. It has three hundred and sixty contacts. I had to take three hundred and sixty needles, tie three hundred and sixty threads. After all, you can not confuse the sockets, which include contacts. This entire disassembled structure was soaked in distilled water, then in alcohol, dried with a hair dryer and assembled. I lived in a container for three weeks. Even on crossings, I stayed in the container. It was, of course, scary. Suddenly turn off the light, or block the ventilation. When the container is raised, the lids are open, there is a connection with the world and it’s not scary, but it’s another matter when you are hermetically sealed in the container, because whatever happens, you won’t shout, you won’t get through. On-board tests with a training rocket showed that everything works, and it should not be otherwise. For this work, I received an additional ten days of vacation.

Chapter 14 Growth

The ship also needs to be prepared for the trip. Let's go to Rost. Growth already by the 60s of the last century became part of Murmansk, although it was called a village for a long time. The settlement was formed in the 30s of the 20th century near the ship repair workshops founded by the polar explorer Papanin to repair the ships of the Northern Sea Route, and later became the 35th ship repair plant. By the 60s of the 20th century, the plant had already become a fairly large enterprise and "overgrown" along the perimeter with many auxiliary industries and other enterprises, one of which was the base of the nuclear icebreakers of the Northern Sea Route, which still exists today.
There the ship is docked, the water is pumped out, and the beautiful hulk again exposes its underwater part. Repair work involves painting and repairing equipment. Better not get up. It seemed to me that after the repair the ship was painted, and the mechanisms - the valves of the dive-surface system and the fuel system became worse. At least before the repair, I did not notice fuel leaks from the fuel valve seals, and after the repair, the seals flowed so much that I had to tie a plastic bag to each valve, and every morning drain the leaked fuel into the line of the main drain pump.


True, we were in dry dock during repairs in Rost.
Boat 651 of the project is moored by the first hull on the left side.

First they lived on the floating base "Fyodor Vidyaev". A huge ship, when it was built, I don’t know, but I know that there were copper tanks with boiled water. The Vedyaevsky toilet made a terrible impression on me, in a marine way - a latrine. There were no partitions in it, and there were a hundred shocks in a row. In orderly rows they went into the future, it seemed to the horizon. There was an impression that the whole crew could immediately sit down on these shocks, not only the crews of the boats living on Vedyaev, but also the crew of Vedyaev himself. Dirt, rats are a hallmark of this ship. During emergency tidying, they found a pantry with dead rats, the smell was terrible. Cleaned out, torn out at least their compartment. I slept on the second tier. At night I woke up from the fact that someone was looking at me. I opened my eyes. On the pipeline that ran over my bunk, right above me, at chest level, a rat was sitting on the pipe. She sat on her hind legs, her front legs tucked up to her. A long pink tail hung down almost to the blanket. She looked intently and attentively. The thought flashed: "Now it will bite on the nose." I slowly and carefully pulled the sheet of the duvet cover over my face, holding it upside down. “If she jumps, I will throw her a sheet on the deck,” I decided. After a couple of seconds, the rapid steps of a receding rat were heard through the pipe. I changed my mind about biting, I thought with relief. The rats ate galley waste and were well-fed, well-fed and therefore not aggressive. There was not a single case of a rat biting someone.
The boat is in the dock, the first mate can go on vacation. Captain of the second rank Kurkin is a dashing submariner. In full dress, he says goodbye to officers and sailors on the occasion of leaving on vacation. Our first officer was not an ordinary person. He was an officer, as it seemed to us, in years (although the military retires at forty-five). He was not tall, strong build, even a little overweight, his style of behavior was, to put it mildly, rude. It cost him nothing to yell at the sailor. For example, a sailor needs to go on leave. He goes to the cabin of the first mate: "Comrade captain of the second rank, I ask you to sign a leave to the city." The chief mate reads the leave for a long time, signs, takes out the seal in the pencil case from the safe, opens the pencil case. Suddenly he remembers: “I need to go to the first department.” The seal is removed into the pencil case, the pencil case flies into the safe, the safe is locked with a key and the first mate goes to the first department. The sailor, like a fool, stands and waits for him to return, and the time for dismissal goes by. After some time, the first mate returns: “Why are you standing here?” He asks the sailor. “Stamp for leave”, - “come on”, the sailor receives the long-awaited seal, you can go on dismissal.
“Comrade captain of the second rank! You forgot to sign the documents, ”the officer on duty reports from the bottom. The first mate puts the suitcase on deck and runs down the ladder to sign the documents. Well, finally, everything. We escort the first mate to the checkpoint. The checkpoint of the plant is a formidable post. On it are civilian northern women. They differ in that they clearly carry out their service. For example, he sees our Soviet sailor climbing over the fence - he returns from AWOL. No, to turn away, not to notice. On the contrary: “Stop! Who goes!" And yes, it can shoot. The sergeant-major passes by the sentry. “Open the suitcase,” the sentry commands. “Yes, I am a senior assistant commander from a submarine. Yes, I am the commander without five minutes, ”the first officer is indignant. There is nothing to do, the suitcase opens and a huge wrench falls out of it, which the guys managed to put in at the moment when the first mate was running to sign the documents. The scandal was quickly resolved and the first mate, thank God, did not miss the plane.
The team is involved in the repair of the ship. She is in charge of painting. We prime with red lead with ethinol. Etinol is a synthetic drying oil. It is used as a basis for the preparation of soils for metal (the same minium is diluted with ethinol). Minium is lead, iron. It differs in color. It turns out naval primers that are not afraid of salt water. The outer casing is factory painted. For painting work, the ship is covered with scaffolding. First, the scaffolding was installed in the stern, in the area of ​​​​the steering group, behind the propellers. I must say that the vertical rudder of the boat is a structure of five meters by ten. Thanks to him, the huge ship was very easy to manage. Such a huge steering wheel, of course, was controlled by hydraulics. Thanks to sloppiness, the hydraulics, of course, were forgotten to be turned off. At one not perfect moment, someone sat down with his back to the steering lever and scratched himself. A huge rudder demolished the scaffolding on both sides, but it was lucky, it was a lunch break, and there were no people on the scaffolding.


Project 651 submarine in dry dock. Containers are raised. Scaffolding is installed along the body.

“Foreman of the second article Volnov to the commander!”, “Comrade commander! The foreman of the second article Volnov arrived at your order, ”I report. "What's going on in your team? Look at the lids of the missile containers! ”Commander Captain Second Rank Sklyanin speaks quietly, but every word reaches the last convolution in the brain. I look up at the open lids of the missile containers. They are painted with ethinol - brown, on ethinol red red lead is written “Peace to the world! War is war! Containers were painted by sailors BCH-2 - my subordinates, which means that I am responsible for their work. "What world? - The commander is indignant, - How do you educate them! We are called to war! Immediately repaint everything, tear off the inscriptions with metal brushes. “Comrade commander, people are eighteen years old. They are already adults. How to educate them? - emboldened, I object. “E ... at (Swear, scold and scold again),” the commander says, of course, not so intelligently, but in maritime jargon.
Painting of ballast and fuel tanks was entrusted to the crew. This work is a technological operation that can be done only by young and reckless sailors who are behind their ship and "into fire and into water" and into the tank. Tanks of the main ballast are quite large rooms in which several people can freely fit without interfering with each other. The tanks are connected to the outside world by a system of pipelines for supplying air, for purging them when the ship emerges.
Dear reader, if necessary, I will try to explain the principle of immersion - surfacing of the boat, since the entire submarine fleet is based on this. A tank is a metal container welded to the outside of a solid ship hull. It has ventilation valves at the top and kingstones at the bottom. At the command "Urgent dive", - automatically, at the command from the central post, the hydraulics open first the kingstones, then the ventilation valves and water enters the tanks. What happens at this time with the crew? According to the combat schedule, a sailor is assigned to each valve. Having heard this command, the sailor should look at his valve opening mechanism (kingston) and count to six, if after the count of "six" - the hydraulic valve opening mechanism (kingston) did not work, the sailor should open the valve manually. There is a scope for this. Rozmakh - a cap wrench, the handle of which is a meter with a diameter of three centimeters. There were times when a sailor threw a key on the valve actuator without counting to six, this is very bad. You can imagine, the above described metal lever, soaring up or down, powered by hydraulics. There were cases when sailors suffered at the same time. The ship sinks under its own gravity, the sinking is also facilitated by the course and horizontal rudders of immersion - ascent. At the command "Urgent ascent! Blow out the ballast” ventilation valves are closed. High pressure air is supplied to the tanks. Air, through open kingstones, displaces water from the tanks. Dear reader, thanks to the above, you can imagine how smoothly and accurately the bilge team must work. When you look at them during a dive - ascent, you marvel at how quickly and deftly their hands flicker over the mass of valves, it looks like a pianist's playing, only each key of this organ must not be pressed, but unscrewed or twisted.


blowing columns of the Central City Hospital (tanks of the main ballast), in the central post of the submarine.

When diving, in order to stop the inertia of the dive, the pulp and paper industry (quick dive tank) is blown, it is also "fast". The main ballast tanks remain full.
According to the combat schedule, this task was to be performed by the young sailor Demsky. He was physically weak, and every time he hung on the valve, rested his feet on the ceiling and yelled: “Help!” - there were always helpers.
So, painting ballast tanks. Cysteine ​​had to be cleaned, peeled off the old peeling paint from the walls, for this we had metal brushes. The peeled paint, of course, did not go anywhere, but in the form of dust and lumps hovered in the air inside the tank. In order not to breathe this muck and not to suffocate, they worked in gas masks with a long trunk, the end of which was sticking out of the tank. Peeled paint was removed from the floor of the tank with buckets, and the remains with a vacuum cleaner. The sailor got into the tank through a special removable hatch, which is opened only during repair work. Then the tank must be painted from the inside. For this, a pneumatic spray gun is given, filled with paint "Surik Marine". A sailor in a tank is waving a spray gun, from which red lead is sprayed in all directions, painting everything around, including himself. The painting of fuel tanks is worse. With the “carrying” lamp, you climb through the holes in the outer frames, not knowing if you will crawl out back. True, thank the Lord, there were no stuck ones. Since fuel tanks still retained fuel residues, they also worked in gas masks.
It was funny to watch how sailors get out of the tanks in padded jackets, the same pants and tarpaulin boots, painted bright red. They gather in heaps to smoke and wander in colored formation to the locker room and shower room.
We had almost no contact with the factory ones, they did their job, we did ours.
True, there was one contact. It was necessary to grind a detail for our antenna on a milling machine. I went to the machine shop. "Guys! Who can machine such a detail on a milling machine? “Seryoga,” said the old worker, “the third machine in the second row.” I approached Seryoga. Seryoga appreciated the work in half a liter of alcohol. That's what they decided on. In the evening, the work was done, the settlement was made. The next day I decided to hang a friend Seryoga. I walked around the shop, Seryoga was not there. I approached one of the millers. “Where is Seryoga?” I asked. "Seryoga of that one," he tersely waved it off in the north. My heart sank into my heels: “is it really bad alcohol, is Seryoga poisoned?” beat in my frightened brain. After walking around the shop for a bit, I went up to the worker who worked next to Seryoga. "What's wrong with Seryoga?" I asked timidly with bated breath. “He got drunk, fool, and flew into the well,” I heard the answer, “Yes, what will he do, he’s alive, they pulled him out, he’s just resting now,” the worker added. Relieved from the heart. I didn't order anything else from the shop.
Finally, we were transferred from the mother ship to the barracks. It was a standard military unit with a parade ground for drills and physical education. We went to the factory in formation. Carried the usual army service. Like everyone else, we were assigned to the guard and patrol on weekends. "Foreman of the second article Volnov". "I". "Assigned to patrol. Senior - senior lieutenant Byrdin, second patrol foreman of the second article Erokhov. We got a plot in which there was a women's labor colony. Women served their terms not in prison, but in settlements. We lived in a hostel, we line up for work, we line up from work. Morning and evening check. The rest lived as civilians. It was cold for us to walk down the street. We decided to go to their club to warm up, and to check if there were any sailors in the club who were forbidden to visit these places. Come in. The club is a standard room: not like a school assembly hall, not like a school sports hall. The music rumbles. The air is saturated with the smell of cologne and women's sweat, it is not smoky, but not transparent. Women dance something like rock and roll, twist or neck, however, all the same, if only to move to the beat of the music and at the same time splash out the accumulated energy. A large woman with a very short haircut dances with elements of Russian dance, she has a thin little woman in her arms, her arms and legs hang down and twitch to the beat of the music. The rest are a mass of jumping, wriggling female bodies, who, apparently, really want to forget themselves at this "celebration of life." Want to leave. We're leaving. We walk along the dark streets of the thirty-eighth kilometer, that's the name of this place. The area is very restless. Families of fishermen live here, who spend many months at sea. Before the outfit, the commandant instructed us: “In that month. A fisherman came from the sea, and his wife had a sailor from the military. So the fisherman threw him out of the window, breaking the glass frame with them. The poor fellow fell from the fifth floor onto the roof of a store built into the house. Crashed to death. So if you see a sailor or an officer, immediately detain the documents and send them to the commandant's office. Thank God, only once I had to serve as a patrol in these places, but believe me, that was enough.
In the crew in my team was a young sailor Chernyak. Good guy. I liked that he graduated from the radio engineering school. He was tech savvy. And I often put it on instrument maintenance, instead of drill or chores. Often Chernyak asked to be assigned to the repair of instruments on Saturday. When visiting the baths, he offered to guard the uniforms of the team while everyone was washing, and preferred to wash after. But one day I was called to the first department. “Comrade foreman, how is your political education work?” "What's the matter?" - perplexed, I asked. "Do you know there's a Baptist among you?" “I don't know,” I replied. “The fact of the matter is that you do not know your subordinates well. An analysis of the correspondence of the sailor Chernyak shows that, but a Baptist.
A Baptist is a Baptist. I didn't quite understand what was going on. He serves well, and religion, probably, is his business. Influence on the rest is the business of the political officer. Although it is very difficult to influence the crew team. The team somehow learned, perhaps from the political officer, or maybe on purpose, that the sailor Chernyak was a Baptist. And it began. At dinner: “Chernyak is a Baptist, he can’t have a meat patty. A movie about love, no, Chernyak is also not allowed. I must say that he steadfastly endured the attitude of the team towards him.
Boat team. I am the foreman on duty at the coastal barracks. Everything is quiet. Suddenly a call: “Comrade foreman! You are asked to come to the checkpoint." " What's the matter?" I ask. "Yes, here Chernyak's wife arrived." "Which wife? There is no wife in his personal file.” I go to the checkpoint. A rather pretty girl is standing in the entrance. "Comrade foreman, I am Chernyak's wife." "Which wife? He has no mention of any wife in his personal file. “We are married in a civil marriage. We have a baby. I really missed you, so I came from Donetsk.” What to do? I found the officer on duty in the company, Lieutenant Orlov. "Comrade lieutenant, Chernyak must be rescued, his wife has come to see him." “Okay, I know one grandmother here, she rents rooms for the night,” said Orlov. We went to the city to the grandmother. Agreed. Chernyak's wife is waiting at the checkpoint. They gave her an address and told her to wait, as soon as the team came from the factory, we would give Chernyak a leave of absence. For a leave, I turned to the first mate: “Comrade captain of the second rank! The wife came to the sailor Chernyak, she should have a leave of absence. “There is nothing to hang around the women! Will wait for Sunday, ”said the first mate. I to the political officer: “Comrade captain of the third rank. The sailor Chernyak's wife came to visit. You should be on leave." The political officer agreed, but warned them to be in the barracks without delay at twelve zero zero. The team arrived from the factory, dinner. Before dinner, I called Chernyak, handed him a leave, allowed him not to go to dinner, but warned that the leave was only until twelve. "Come at twelve, check in, and then we'll see." Chernyak dressed quickly and was the only one seen. After dinner, Petya Brazhnik approached me - a sailor of remarkable height and the same strength. "Max," he boomed. “And what did the crane operator from the factory floating crane do at the checkpoint?” “Yes, this is Chernyak’s wife,” I answered. “No, Max is definitely a crane operator from a floating crane, I know for sure,” Petya boomed again. "Wow! We've done it!" I complained. “Maybe they have love,” I thought, “but it’s still not good, and also a Baptist.” At five minutes past midnight I was awakened by Lieutenant Orlov on duty. "Max! Chernyak did not return from his dismissal. Forty-five seconds up. “Eroshka! Rise - Chernyak did not come from his dismissal. "Vanya - get up!" Praise the Lord, we know the address. Let's go together. We find grandmother's house. The house is old. Behind the door is a large hallway, dark and dirty. From the hallway there are many doors to many rooms. We know which door Chernyak is behind. We open the door wide open: "Rise!" - frightened faces. Chernyak understands everything. In order to avoid the worst, he quickly, in forty-five seconds, dresses. From Grandma's house to the unit, Chernyak ran, urged on by our kicks. His wife never came to the checkpoint again. Later, before autonomy, for reasons of his religion, he was decommissioned from the ship. I got a job in the political department of the division and was reeducated, which our head of the political department was very proud of.
The commander calls the three of us: me, boatswain Misha Kolodiy, Gena Erokhov. Business trip to Zapadnaya Litsa, to the base. The ship ran out of alcohol. We accompany a forty-liter flask. While it is empty, but on the way back it will be full and sealed. The ship's mechanic captain of the third rank Milokostov forgot his slippers at home. The city of Zaozersk - proudly in which the families of officers lived - was located among the rocks and hills ten kilometers from the submarine base - "Western Faces". Milokostov gave us the keys to the house, explained where his slippers were, and asked us to bring them. We arrived in Zaozersk, took the flask home to the mechanic and went to draw up the paperwork.
Three foremen, old-timers, in full dress are walking around the city. We did not have time to react, but the commandant of the garrison, Major Yunusov, met us. "Documentation!" - present documents, explain the business trip task. “Why are you not at political classes on Tuesday? - Yunusov asks for the sake of formality, - So. Collect all the cigarette butts around the city, report to me, I will check, get the documents, ”with these words, Yunusov retired towards the commandant’s office. The eternal question - what to do? Thank God, by this time I already knew the deputy commander for armaments. The fact is that at that time there were still few rocket specialists and I, Gena Erokhov and Vanya Smagin fired from all the ships that handed over the combat mission of firing. From the mechanic's apartment, I managed to get through to the deputy commander for armaments, to tell about what had happened. An hour later, we already had the documents. Another problem is that they did not take food certificates with them. There was no food for us at our own mother ship, at our own galley. But a sailor, he is a sailor for that, that he has no hopeless situations. We found fishing gear, an hour later we had half a bucket of haddock and a few pieces of flounder, which is not royal food. Fried fish at the mechanic's house. He also found butter and flour. I remembered how my mother did it, and we had a notable dinner. The next day the garrison bus was already taking us to Murmansk. Luckily, Yunusov did not see the bus off.
God bless! Repair completed. Team on board. The dry dock is filled with water, the gate leaves open. "Combat Alert! We pass the narrowness! Both motors are small back. "There are both motors small back." I am at my combat post on the command "We pass the narrowness." I am sitting at the end of the open hatch from the conning tower to the ship's strong hull, in front of me are my favorite machine telegraphs. The commander clearly gives commands and I, it is I, who transmit them by machine telegraphs to the minders or diesel operators, they do not see how the ship is moving, they blindly carry out the will of the commander, and I am the conductor of this will. You have to be extremely careful and precise. My fate and the fate of the ship are now one. We went out to the open sea "All-clear of combat alarm". The commander, with relief, descends from the bridge along the vertical ladder along the hatch of the central post. When the commander passes from top to bottom past me. I rise from the hatch and stand at attention on command. “Well, what are you waiting for, go and rest,” the commander grumbles and descends to the central post.

Chapter 13 Political Officer

Political officer

The political officer - deputy commander of the boat for political affairs (deputy) was the captain of the third rank of the Tatars. This is the life of an intelligent officer with a good-natured round face. At political classes, and in everyday life, he spoke in a quiet, insinuating voice. I saw him smiling all the time. For some reason, I did not remember his political conversations or classes, although all the time a combat leaflet was issued on the ship, and a wall newspaper was regularly posted on the mother ship. We, apparently through his efforts, were always aware of political events in the country and in the world, but this was done somehow imperceptibly, as if by itself. The deputy has been serving for the twenty-third year now and think hard about your life in civilian life after demobilization. He entered and successfully studied at the Correspondence Trade Institute.


From left to right: sailor BCH-2 - launch team Grisha (about him in the “Accident” section), political officer third-rank captain Tatarintsev, I, Art. lieutenant Perets, sailor BCh-2 Belokobilsky.

I do not know what influenced our deputy, but during our arrival to the north and the entry of the boat into combat formation, a fleet-scale emergency was discussed. Several relatively young officers who wanted to be demobilized ahead of schedule, drunk with songs on the guitar, on a cart, with a horse harness, arrived under the windows of Admiral Lobov, commander of the fleet. I do not vouch for the authenticity of the event, but I heard it for sure. All several were immediately demoted and demobilized.
Toli this served as an example for the deputy, or it just happened in itself, but our deputy began to drink alcohol, and after a while he got involved. Naturally went denunciations. During the inspection of the moral and political training of the K-85 crew, the political officer noted - the smell of alcohol. At political classes, indistinct speech and gestures were noted. It ended sadly. Already in Zapadnaya Litsa we came from a three-day transition. They came at night. We moored. After midnight, lights out - they went to bed already on the mother ship. At seven in the morning, like all the crews living there, the rise. Raising the flag - breakfast. I run down the ladder to the galley. Sat down for breakfast. I wanted so much fresh white bread, baked with a nostrilous loaf from a coastal bakery, but there is no bread on the tables, half-eaten on a hike. It must be said that on boats, alcoholized bread is stored in sealed plastic bags. Before serving, it had to be heated in the oven, then it swells and, taking the form of a bag, becomes edible. If this is not done, then when you open the package, the bread crumbles in your hands. We were served on the tables, of course, not warmed bread and of course black. The team was outraged. Someone shouted: “The political officer is here! Let him intercede for us!” The attendant ran to the deputy's cabin. Reported what happened. Tatarintsev put on his tunic, turned away, took ... grams for courage, and went down with the attendant to the galley. After listening to the dissatisfied hubbub of the team, he ordered the duty officer to invite the chief of staff of the division, since the headquarters was located on the same floating base. The chief of staff arrived. “Stand still,” the deputy commanded, “comrade captain of the first rank,” he began loudly in a military way, and suddenly, “you tell the people the truth, why is the bread moldy?” The moment of silence lasted forever. Finally, the chief of staff broke the silence: “The kitchen attendant - replace the bread! Why do sailors have cans of condensed milk instead of mugs? - replace! - the captain of the third rank of the Tatars - to me! He turned and quickly climbed the ladder to the upper deck.
Soon the party conference of the fleet was held. I was delegated from the K-85 crew. I keep this mandate of trust to this day. In the Zaozersk club, all the naval authorities, many admiral's epaulettes, but mostly captains of the first rank, are on the presidium. Commander Admiral Lobov. It was a tall and stout man. A real commander, towering head above all the officers around him. The voice is muffled but loud. Sitting in the presidium, he listened attentively to the reports, but regulations are regulations. The speaker is on the podium, he is carried away by his report, Lobov is carefully looking at his watch. “Break,” he announces, the speaker falls silent without finishing his sentence. After the break, and maybe the next day - the report of the commander. I don’t remember the content of the report, except for one phrase: “But I don’t need such political officers as the captain of the third rank of the Tatars from the K-85 submarine.”
The deputy was demoted, dismissed from the armed forces without the right to a pension. I haven't seen him since the party conference. Soon a new political officer was appointed to us - captain of the third rank Shipenko, they said that he was transferred to us from a floating crane, but that's another story.

Chapter 12 Going North

We're going north.

All. We're leaving for the North. Although Severodvinsk is also not south. I don’t remember if I wrote about the wives of officers, but eleven weddings were played in Tallinn and eleven female silhouettes saw us off at the Tallinn pier in the “Merchant’s” harbor. Valery Petrovich Krikun had a fiancee Mila. She studied to be a doctor at the Odessa Medical Institute. She was also among the mourners in Tallinn, but Severodvinsk is not Tallinn. After the winter session, she came to Valery Petrovich in Severodvinsk. Cold, frost, snow, almost polar night. Moreover, Valery Petrovich fell ill. Mila suffered, suffered, and left for warm Odessa, without waiting for the end of the holidays. The officers then said to Valery Petrovich: “She will not live in Zapadnaya Litsa. Stop it." But you can't tell your heart.
Mila flew to the city of Zaozersk, a military town in Zapadnaya Litsa. Radiologist, no x-ray machine. There is a polyclinic, but without x-rays. Gord was built on the rocks ten kilometers from the base. The layout of the city is not intricate - the square of houses formed spacious courtyards. There are not many streets, the layout is perpendicular. Houses of Moscow projects are five-story buildings, but not panel ones, but brick ones. For the whole city, which was a city rather by status than by volume, there are three or four stores, but the supply is from Moscow. City of mothers and strollers. There is nowhere for women to work. Their task is a new generation, care, education, the warmth of the hearth, which is so necessary for seamen officers, because they serve twenty-five years. The city is surrounded by rather harsh nature. There is no forest, but there are rocks, lakes, a lot of mushrooms. In winter, if there is no snowstorm, it is very good to ski. Swimming in lakes, hunting in summer. Once we were driving from Murmansk. The officer who accompanied us suddenly saw two drakes on a roadside lake. "Stop," I commanded the driver. The car stopped. The officer jumped out of it, snatching a pistol from his holster as he ran. He fired the entire clip at the ducks, but never hit a single one. I rejoiced at the drakes, who, having waited for the end of the shooting, climbed onto the wing and flew about their business.
X-ray is necessary. On an armored personnel carrier between the hills. Three hours walk to Murmansk. They brought an x-ray machine. Installed. Settled. Mila earned a job as a radiologist. And we went offline. We arrive in three months, and they say to Valery Petrovich: “I often went here alone from the coastal base for x-rays, and even went home to you.” Valery Petrovich found this one. Began explanations, scandals. Mila looked at all this, and left. I think Valery Petrovich got it with his whining. Another thing, the commander of the movement group Vasyuk. He married a very young girl and explained to her, “You are a sailor's wife. I'm on a boat, you're on a floating base. Holidays together." It turned out to be a strong family.
Guba Zapadnaya Litsa is the most beautiful place.


Large spatula.

The base in Zapadnaya Litsa is divided into several points for basing and servicing diesel and nuclear submarines. These are Malaya Lopatka lip, Bolshaya Lopatka lip, Nerpichya lip and Andreeva lip. Despite the fact that we were stationed there in 1964-66, the rapid development of the base in Zapadnaya Litsa took place in the late 70s and early 80s. Today, the total length of the coastal facilities located in Zapadnaya Litsa is about 20,600 meters. Zapadnaya Litsa has traditionally been the base for new generations of nuclear submarines. Multi-purpose, strategic and tactical nuclear submarines were based here. All experimental, one-of-a-kind, class submarines "Papa" (K-222), "November" (K-27) and "Komsomolets" (K-278) were assigned to the base in Zapadnaya Litsa. Malaya Lopatka was the first base in Zapadnaya Litsa, equipped in the late 50s. It was in Malaya Lopatka that the first nuclear submarine, K-3, was based. The house of academician Alexandrov, who personally supervised the testing of a nuclear power plant on a submarine, has still been preserved here. In 1959, the first formation of the nuclear submarine (K-5, K-8, K-14) was formed in Zapadnaya Litsa, later the merger. After the completion of the construction of the complex of facilities in Bolshaya Lopatka in the first half of the 60s, Malaya Lopatka is used for the repair of ships. Today, a floating repair plant is located in Malaya Lopatka, the berthing line consists of five piers.


Coastal cliffs are the best place for personal time in shore leave.


Local map. In addition to Malaya Lopatka, I visited Bolshoy and went or went to Zaozersk.


Submarines at the piers of the "Western Face" - Big shovel.

The Swedes and Norwegians call it fiords. We stood in the Small shovel. It is clear that if there was a Small, there was a Big shovel. Closed from storm winds by rocks, on the south side such that the sky can only be seen with your head up high. On the sheer wall, at the very top, they will wipe Stalin and the inscription "Remember the war." Between the rocks and the sea is a strip of rocky land about fifty meters wide. Rocks with picturesque lakes and waterfalls hang over it.


Mezhozerny duct in the distance a small waterfall

Perpendicular to the coastal strip, the piers are the creation of human hands. The road to the proud Zaozersk is laid along the seashore, then windingly rises between the rocks, on top of one of them is a German armored personnel carrier from the war. How they got him there is unclear. There were battles here, but this is the only place where our ancestors did not give the enemy a single inch of Soviet land. Since the war, Zapadnaya Litsa has been called the "Valley of Death". The Marine Corps, formed mainly from prisoners, stood here to the death. Opposite the piers, a bald mountain protrudes from the sea. It is huge, closes the scapula, forming two straits. One passage to the Bolshaya shovel, the other exit, to the sea, bypassing the island of the Jug. There is a bird market on the bald mountain. Birds - seagulls, cormorants, fulmars. Sailor fun. You can catch a seagull or a cormorant for a fish. A funnel is inserted into the beak of a caught bird and a little diluted alcohol is poured. A drunken cormorant flies into the flock, writing out a pretzel in the air. Another entertainment. A piece of sleeve is cut off from the vest. Slits for wings are cut in the sleeve. If you put this clothes on a cormorant, then it becomes a bird - a military sailor in a vest. It is a pity that the bird dies as a result. She can't remove the wet rag. You can draw a vest on the chest of a cormorant with blue paint, and write the USSR on the wings with red paint. But it is difficult, the pen is greased, and the paint does not adhere well. The political officer told us that these cruel jokes provoked a note of protest from Sweden. Apparently, painted cormorants flew to the Swedish coast. In addition to catching cormorants, you can also catch fish. Tackle for fishing - fishing line, one end of which is dressed on a finger. At the other end of the nut, two leashes with fishing hooks are tied to the nut. You can fish sitting on the pier, but there is another way. An old-time sailor lays down on the top bunk in the mother ship's cabin by the porthole. A young sailor sits on the bottom bunk. He strings two pieces of herring on fish hooks and throws a nut with leashes into an open porthole. Next is the case of the old man. He moves his hand up and down, on the index finger of which the other end of the fishing line is tied. If the fish grabbed the prey, it is very well felt with the finger. It is necessary to hook - and the fish is on the hook. Mostly cod and haddock are caught, but sometimes flounder comes across. If a flounder is caught, it seems that he has caught an elephant. At the first moment, it hardly breaks away from the bottom, then gliding behind the fishing line in the water, it easily flies out of the water. The old-timer takes the caught fish out of the porthole, lowers it on the fishing line to the young sailor, he removes the fish, throws it into the bucket, puts pieces of herring on hooks again. With a catch, a young sailor runs to the galley, where he either cokes or fries the fish himself. They eat fish together. In this case, terms of service and rank do not matter.
Morning. We are standing on the pier. Morning building for exercise. Before us is the flagship athlete. A healthy kid in a tracksuit, I don’t remember his name or rank. “My combat mission,” he loudly declares, “is to prepare the crew for a long voyage. In the campaign, you will be limited in movement and therefore now you must move a lot and strenuously. I graduated from the Stalin Institute of Physical Education. What are you looking at me? I am not afraid of this name. Crew on the way! Run (on the way to the city of Zaozersk) march! We are running uphill. We don't run very fast. Around the cliff, the road for vehicles, it goes up steeply. Ten minutes later we reach the turning stone, which is about two kilometers from the starting point. The stone is huge, it broke off a rock a long time ago and lies almost on the road. Rather, the road bypasses it. On the stone is an inscription in white paint “Driver - attention! Rockfall!". On the other side of the road there is a dried-up riverbed, or rather, not a riverbed, there is no river there, but then who sawed through this crevice between the rocks? Perhaps the spring waters that flow here at the end of May have made their way to the sea over many years. We turn around and run back. Running down is harder than going up. Stones run with us. When you run up, the rocks run down and you don't hit them. When you run down the stones with you along the way and they, catching up with you, beat painfully on your legs. Below is a series of physical exercises, including throwing heavy stones. The main thing here is not to hit a friend. I liked the exercises, of course, except for running down.
There is nowhere to go on weekends. The city of Zaozersk is small.


Military parade in Zaozersk. May 1st rather than New Year's, or maybe it's Navy Day, but it's still cold.
By the way, civilians are also without coats - it’s like the day of the Navy, but why is there snow on the square?

Everybody knows each other. Well, you walk the streets. You will go to the garrison store. Incidentally, the supply of the city at the level of Moscow. And walk ten kilometers to the city. Buses are official, carry only on business. A platoon of drivers was recruited from Lithuanians, so don’t vote, they won’t stop during the flight, but there are three stops: Small shovel, Big shovel, the city of Zaozersk. Another reason not to go to the city is Yunusov, the commandant of the city. One winter I went to the city to the post office. I missed the bus, and then Yunusov's bus pulls up to the commandant's office. Nothing to do. I got bolder. He approached the commandant: “Comrade major. Allow me to apply. Me in part 40621 on the ship. Let me follow you on the bus." Yunusov looked me up and down. "Wait," he said and went to the commandant's office. Almost an hour has passed. It's cold, going to the commandant's office to warm up is scary, you can stay there for a long time, they will find fault with something. Finally Yunusov left. Passed me by. I got on the bus and left. So I had to walk ten kilometers in the cold, where I ran, where I walked. Yunusov had another joke. He liked to see off the bus, which once a day went to Murmansk. The picture is like this. A sailor comes up to the bus with documents for demobilization, with travel documents home. Yunusov is standing at the door of the bus. "So! Documentation!" Sailor presents documents. “Take off your headgear,” Yunusov commands, “they were not tonsured according to the charter. Get your hair cut, come to the commandant's office for documents. Where there. The bus has already left, the next in a day. Train or plane tickets will also have to be re-registered.
So the weekend, which was one, two, and miscalculated, I loved to spend in the hills. The cascades of lakes are especially beautiful. One is higher than the other. Water overflows like waterfalls from the upper to the lower, and, finally, breaking on the rocks, flows into the sea in a stormy stream. The water is purest. If you toss a coin, it glistens in the sun for almost a minute as it sinks.

Chapter 11 Fleet Unit

Combat unit of the Northern Fleet

In the month of July 1964 a great event - we passed state tests and from December 30, 1964. become a combat unit of the Northern Fleet.


General formation of the K-85 team 1964 FMF day coincided with the end of state tests. December 30, 1964 the boat became part of the Northern Fleet. On the photo on the left flank in front of the formation of the military - civilian members of the state commission. There are two tugboats behind the boat. Behind the tugboats, the superstructures of the Varyag missile-carrying cruiser, armed, like us, with cruise missiles, are visible.

On the occasion of the boat's enrollment in the Northern Fleet of the USSR, let's remember our fathers - commanders and crew members. Sorry guys if I didn't remember anyone.

Commander Fathers: Commander of the Northern Fleet - Fleet Admiral Lobov
Commander of the First Red Banner Submarine Flotilla of the Northern Fleet - Admiral Sorokin
Commander of the 35th division of anti-aircraft missile submarines - Rear Admiral Yegorov
Deputy Divisional commander - captain of the first rank Pirozhenko

DEPLKR K-85; V/Ch-40621; serial number 553 of the Baltic plant. Board number 148; since 1964 tail number 190
Commander Captain 2nd Rank V.S. Gribkov until 1965
Starpom - captain 2nd rank I.A. Sklyanin commander since 1965.
Starpom - Captain 2nd Rank Kurkin
Assistant Commander Captain 3rd Rank Maloletov
Zampolit - captain of the 3rd rank of the Tatars until 1966.
Zampolit - Captain 3rd rank Shipenko since 1966.
Navigator BCH-1 captain 3rd rank Bardin
The commander of the warhead-2 missilemen - Art. lieutenant - captain 3rd rank Medvedev Viktor Pavlovich
In 1966 arrived:
Officer of the management team P6 - art. Lieutenant Byrdin Valery
Officer of the management team P6 - art. Lieutenant Orlov
Command officer? to/r. P6 - art. Lieutenant Pepper
The commander of the warhead-3 of the mine-torpedo group - captain 3rd rank Andropov -
secretary of the party organization
BC-4 Commander - Lieutenant Commander Krikun Valery Petrovich
BC-5 commander - mechanic - captain 3rd rank Milokostov
The commander of the movement group - art. Lieutenant Vasyuk
Doctor - captain of the medical service Korol Nikolai Nikolaevich

Personnel
warhead-1
Bosun st.1st. Misha P. Kolodiy
Bosun st.1st. Misha Gerasimov
Art.2 Art. Alexander Dobysh
Steering signalman st. sailor Toiva Ushtal
Navigator sailor Demsky
warhead-2
Article 1 re-enlisted Boris Korastelyov
Article 1 Sergey
Art. start commands st. sailor Vanya Smagin.
Sailor Grisha
Art. autopilot commands. foreman Gena Erokhov
Art. sailor Vadim Litvinenko - phasing devices
Art. control commands i - ch. foreman M.I. Volnov
Transceivers sailor Yura Stakhanov
Instrumentation specialist P5 Art. sailor Tolya Baydak
Management to / r. sailor Petya Brazhnik
Management to / r. sailor Belokobilsky
Management to / r. sailor Chernyak
warhead-3
Art. 1 st. Gorshenyov B.G.
Art. 2st. Secrets V.N.
Article 1 Fedorov S.I.
Art. 1 st. Kravchenko I.F.
warhead-4
Radio operator st.1st. Volodya Chashin
warhead-5
Dieselist foreman Krat V.I.
Diesel foreman 1 st. Cherevan
Art. sailor Shipovsky V.M.
Art. 1 st. Sekletin E.F.
electricians
Ch. foreman Georgy Ivanovich Delianidi
Sailor Ivanov (Dagestan)
Bilge
Ch. foreman Kuznetsov A.E. - team leader.
Art. 2st. Shcherbakov A.M.
Art. 2 tbsp. Shustrov V.I.
Art.2 Art. Dmitrienko A.I.
Art. 2st Pyshnov L.P.
Chemist-medical instructor Volodya Khodakovsky.
Kok Art.1 Art. Alfred Casparance
Sailor Katanukhin - projectionist. I don't remember which warhead it belonged to.
There was also a shaman "Specialist" Normal guy st.2st., but I rarely contacted us, so I forgot his name.


Sailors and officers of K-85 at the pier in Severodvinsk "Coal Harbor", November 1964.
In the bottom row from left to right: I am a sailor Belokobilsky, I don’t remember, the commander of the BCH-4 st. Lieutenant Krikun Valery Petrovich, flagship mechanic, deputy. division commander captain of the first rank Pirozhenko, commander of the boat captain of the second rank Sklyanin, political officer of Tatarintsev, art. Lieutenant Pepper. In the top row, from left to right: fifth from left to right, boatswain Misha Kolodiy, eighth minder, st. first article Cherevan, eleventh Petya Brazhnik.


From left to right: sailor Grisha, political officer captain of the third rank Tatarentsev, I, Art. lieutenant Pepper, sailor Belokobilsky. In the background DEPLKR K-85

Chapter 10 Rocket P-6

Rocket P-6

In Severodvinsk, the Leningrad adjusters completed the commissioning of our missile system. As I already wrote, we shot back with a P-5 rocket. The time has come for combat training firing with the P-6 rocket. The P-6 is the rocket that made our ship even built. It is designed to destroy enemy aircraft carriers. It was the new formidable and main weapon of the project 651 and 675 boats in the P-35 modification, it was used on surface ships. The missile-carrying cruiser "Varyag", which was undergoing adjustment tests at the same time as we were in Severodvinsk, was also equipped with a cruise missile system.


Sea-based missile P-6. Below are outboard powder engines ejecting a rocket from a container.

At the level of the sixties, it was, as they now call it, a rocket with built-in intelligence. The first achievement is a drop-down wing, like that of the P-5. Everything ingenious is simple. The container in which the rocket was based on board the boat was round. The diameter is approximately two meters. Fifteen meters long. In order for the rocket to launch, a pair of two containers was hydraulically raised at an angle of fifteen degrees to the plane of the deck. The rocket flew on a liquid jet engine (like an airplane). In early literature, it was described as a projectile aircraft. In the container, the rocket lay with folded wings. They hung on either side of the fuselage like a bird with a drooping, stricken wing, though it didn't give that impression. The wings were attached to the fuselage with hinges, very similar to door hinges. At the moment of departure from the container, the wings swung open by aerodynamic force, and in the place where they, swinging open, adjoined the fuselage, there was a latch, the wings were firmly fastened to the rocket, and from that moment it was already a full-fledged aircraft.


Rocket P-6 - you can see the brilliant invention of Soviet designers - a drop-down wing.

The pre-launch preparation was controlled by several calculating devices, taking into account the sea roll and data on wind speed and direction. There was a calculating device for determining the probability of hitting the target. It consisted of many gears. Once, on one of the gears, the pin with which it was attached to the axle was torn off. I carefully set up the whole mechanism, took out a spare pin, fixed the gear. The device showed an error of two hundred and fifty kilometers. I had to call adjusters from Leningrad. The device has been repaired.
The flight path of the P-6 was unique. The first part - the rocket is gaining altitude. Height limit up to seven kilometers. The entire flight range was up to four hundred kilometers. In this section, the operator on the submarine, and in our case it was me, controls the rocket by the bearing (light green mark of the position of the rocket relative to the ship's course on the dark - right television screen of the missile control device in flight) in the same way as the modeler controls the radio-controlled model. The task of the operator, in the event of a missile being blown away by the wind or for other reasons, is to return the missile to a predetermined course. In the second part, forty kilometers before the target, the rocket turned on its own radar and transmitted to the operator on the left television screen of the missile control device in flight a location picture of the location of enemy ships.
The commander of the BCH-2 on his device, which had four screens, could observe all four missiles and give verbal commands to each control operator.
The commander of the boat at his combat post could view all four pictures from all four missiles in turn. With a light pistol, he gave all four operators in turn target designation. To whom what purpose to attack.


The combat post of the submarine commander during a missile attack. On the screen, the commander observes the location picture in the target area and, decides who to attack which target, with an electronic pistol (gray on the right) indicates to the operator leading the missile - the target for attack.

In the third part, the operator pointed to his rocket target and gave the command "capture". After that, the radar head of the rocket was tied to the target. The rocket fell at a dive. The most difficult was the dive from a height of several kilometers to a height of hundreds of meters above sea level. The missile, which remembered its binding, flew to the target almost from the horizon at an altitude of one hundred meters above sea level. It was impossible to hit her in this flight. The first launches determined the most difficult task - getting out of the dive. The air intake of the rocket's jet engine was located under the belly of the rocket and at the bottom of the peak, when the sea was rough, it sometimes scooped up a wave crest, which led to the fall of the rocket. Sometimes, due to the oscillatory mode when exiting the peak, the missile jumped over the target. When these tasks were completed, the Severodvinsk plant did not have time to cook the targets - all the missiles fell right on board. In the photographs of the attacked target, it was clear that there was a hole in the forest from the side of the rocket approach - a hole with wings. In the opposite, a ragged hole. The targets were boiled from metal barrels with masts, on which a metal mesh was stretched. Corner reflectors were placed on the masts. The target was to be recorded on the operator's screen as an aircraft carrier.
The first test of the missile was from the ground against a sea target. The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, wanted to see this test. He arrived in Nyonoksu. They carefully prepared for his arrival. An old, large destroyer was found, which could sink simply from a blow to the hull with a crowbar. For Khrushchev to see everything with his own eyes, a helicopter with a television camera hovered over the destroyer on the TV screen. Start! The developers were very afraid that in the oscillatory mode, the rocket at the maximum of the sinusoid would jump over the target. But lucky. The missile approached the target at a minimum. Got on board. The destroyer broke in half and sank in front of the General Secretary of the CPSU. Khrushchev was very pleased. Congratulated everyone. But at a banquet in honor of successful tests, he turned to the unit commander: “Everything is fine, but so much scrap metal was drowned. We need to equip the divers, let them raise the destroyer and hand it over for scrap.”


many years later, in 2008, I found on the Internet the “Nyonoks” badge, it depicts a P-6 or 5 rocket. So, in the life of the test site, it and the episode described above played a significant role.

Shooting rockets was, of course, not a cheap pleasure. Almost a million Soviet rubles cost one start to the state. Every time I was shocked when, preparing the rocket for firing, I climbed into the nozzle of the rocket, right up to the turbine. There should not have been any foreign objects in the air intake. The slightest forgotten rag or nut could lead, at best, to damage to the rocket, at worst, to a catastrophe on the ship. The turbine was made of special alloy blades, carefully polished and covered with a protective coating, and they were very beautiful. The electronics of the rocket contained silver-plated waveguides, selsyns, and radar antenna drive motors; all the wire harnesses were neatly packed into leather bundles by someone's skillful hands. And this property of our people, their work, should crash into a pile of metal barrels and rest forever in the abyss of the landfill in the Kandalaksha Bay with the name "Dump of Weapons". With my own hand I laid five missiles at the target for service, and one did not reach the target.

Feuerleitanlage
In the foreground is the device of the commander of the BC-2, he monitors the location picture of all four operators. In the background are two devices for control of cruise missiles from submarines. Two screens - the screen of the position of the missile relative to the course of the ship and the screen of the radar picture in the target area. Two more devices of cruise missile control operators from submarines stand opposite in mirror image.

Shooting is a responsible business. The third compartment is the middle deck. The training rocket is being tested. Above the operator's seat, a video camera shoots his hands, a tape recorder records the commands received and the answers to them. A hairy hand rests on my remote. As it turned out later, the hand of the inspector from the division headquarters. Without a moment's hesitation between my military duty to my superiors and my duty to a rocket, I hit the inspector's hairy hand with my right hand. Silence! At the analysis of the exercise, the inspector makes a conclusion: "The operator is nervous - remove him from firing." Where will they go. There are fewer operators than boats equipped with these missiles. And so we jump from boat to boat, so that the authorities report upstairs "The division is combat ready." Only that week I went to the K-77 in Gremikha to Kalguev Island for the next shooting.

The fact is that in 1963. not all boats of 651 and 675 projects have yet been equipped with cruise missile control specialists. In 1965, we were already based at Zapadnaya Litsa. We went to shooting ranges, handed in tasks. In the winter of the same year, I was temporarily assigned to the K-77 - commander Nikolai Kalashnikov. He was a young, energetic, stately officer. If our commander, captain of the second rank Sklyanin, was always in a naval uniform, always in a captain's cap or, in extreme cases, a cap, moved slowly around the ship with the dignity of a commander, Kalashnikov moved quickly, almost running. He was dressed in a padded jacket, on his head a sea earflap. I didn't even know what rank he was. But this did not affect his commanding dignity in any way, on the contrary, it was felt that the commander was with the team. The foreman of the BC-2 team was the foreman of the first article Logvinenko. We went to Gremikha, then to the island of Kalguev. If the K-85 inside was painted in ivory, gray and somewhere blue. K-77 - ceiling and appliances beige and brown. This gamma created a feeling of narrowness of space. They fired normally. Kalashnikov, with his usual humor to the report: “The rocket has left” (i.e., the launch was successful, the rocket left the container and is already in flight). He asked the question: “How is the rollback?” (rollback happens only for cannons, at the moment the projectile exits the barrel). The commander of the warhead-2 answered: “The rollback is normal” (that is, no one was hurt during the rollback). Of course, when firing missiles, there is no rollback and cannot be. But this artillery joke set the crew in a cheerful mood and cheered up. After completing a combat training mission near Kalguev. The commander ordered to go to Gremikha, the reason for entering is extremely simple and humane - the team was not in the bath for a week. Pure in body and soul, we go back to the Western Face. Forty years later, I learned a lot about the fate of the K-77. In the late seventies - early eighties, Gennady Lyachin, the commander of the infamous Kursak, served on it. The boat itself has become a legend - a long-liver. She starred in the American film K-19. Was a museum in the USA. I really hope that her journey is not over, and she will remind many more of the power of the USSR submarine fleet.
Just returned to the base, again on a hike. Unscheduled shooting. In the Navy, you're not supposed to ask questions. Shoot - so shoot. The rocket is loaded. We go to the firing line. How many nerves did it cost to shoot this rocket, which did not reach the target. Prelaunch preparation is excellent. We go to the target. Start. I'm flying a rocket. Forty kilometers to the target, a picture of the missile's radar opened up. Everything is quiet. Suddenly I see a false target on the right. She shouldn't be here. The throat of the White Sea is blocked, all ships are forbidden to appear in the firing corridor. The island of Samba Luda, behind which the goals are still far away, is not even visible on the screen yet. I see that the missile is turning on a false target. Command "Left". The rocket is not listening. "Hang up! Hang up! Hang up!" - the missile captures a false target. The screen goes blank, the missile rushes to attack a false target. I, overcoming myself, report to the central post: “Comrade commander! The missile captured and attacked the decoy.” In response, silence for five hours. You can't leave the battlefield. They fired one rocket. There are no neighboring operators. Nobody enters the control room. Viktor Palych also sits silently at the fourth instrument of the BC-2 commander. What have I not changed my mind during these hours. They didn't follow the fisherman, an unrecorded passenger ship. The military could not let an outside ship into the training ground, they are all disciplined and understand that any ship in the missile flight corridor is a potential drowned man. Five hours later, the commander himself descends to the instrument deck. Telemetry reported: "They hit a garbage barge that broke off in a storm and has been drifting in the Kandalaksha Bay for a month now." Later we learned that this rocket was undergoing transport tests. She was taken by rail to Vladivostok and back, and then put on the firing line. It can be seen that something shorted out when she was shaking along the railroad.
Loading P-6 missiles is also a ritual. Containers up, lids open. The trailer brings the loading frame. The truck crane delivers the frame for docking with the container. Vanya Smagin and I keep the frame from swinging with two shkerts, and Gena Erokhin directs it to the docking station of the container. The frame is installed. They bring a rocket.


The P35-3 is very similar to the P-6 on the trailer that delivered it.


Loading a P-6 rocket into missile containers of a Project 651 submarine.

I'm standing on the loading frame electric winch controller. Using the controller, I bring the platform of the loading frame under the place where the rocket will be lowered. The platform can slide on the rails of the loading frame. The loading frame guides are docked with the container guides. On these guides, the rocket on the platform descends into the container. The platform with the rocket slides along the guides under its own weight, since the angle of inclination of the container is fifteen degrees relative to the deck of the boat, but the electric winch cable prevents it from slipping uncontrollably. The rocket hovered over the platform. On the one hand, it must be kept from swinging by the wind. On the other hand, it is necessary to place the platform in such a way that the bed of the platform coincides with the supporting places of the rocket. The rocket on the platform should lie on the belly. As soon as the rocket is laid, Vanya Smagin on the one hand and Gena Erokhin on the other release it from the loading trapeze, which is attached to the rocket with four eyebolts, and the crane holds the loading trapeze by the earring. Done. I, slowly controlling the controller, lower the rocket into the container. The rocket is up. Its side connector docked with the side connector of the container. We remove the platform on the frame. The crane removes the frame. Vanya runs into the compartment and hydraulically sets the rocket mount in the stowed position. Carefully, the lids of the containers are closed, battened down with a rack. Spark of containers is lowered. The missile unit is ready for battle - the campaign is ready. In the air, the rocket flies thanks to the LRE (liquid-propellant rocket engine), and leaves the container on two powder engines. Rocket launch is a strong and not safe spectacle. In order to set fire to gunpowder in powder engines, you need to connect a connector to them - twenty-four volts. Voltage, of course, is supplied from the compartment, but first you need to connect the cable manually. The operation is simple but dangerous. Despite the fact that there is a device that shows that there is no voltage at the time of connection, it is always scary - what if it appears when a person connects the wires. Then it will burn to ashes, not even ashes will remain. Therefore, we excluded those who are married, and among the rest we cast lots - who will fall on him and go to connect the starters.

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