According to the detail design, the submarine Komsomolets was intended to be manned by highly qualified specialists from among officers and warrant officer technicians. According to the manning table approved in 1982 by the general staff of the USSR Ministry of Defense, the submarine’s crew was fifty-seven persons (twenty-nine officers with rank not below senior lieutenant, twenty-six warrant officer technicians, and two compulsory-service petty officers). In this case, the engineering department (identified as BCh-5) should have consisted of ten officers and ten warrant officer technicians.
However, the crew was increased later to sixty-four persons without industry’s consent. Further, warrant officer technicians were replaced by compulsory-service seamen, supposedly because of difficulty in manning crews with warrant officers, as well as for the purpose of economizing resources. This automatically reduced the crew’s potential in terms of its combat and occupational training. This change in the crew’s qualitative composition had an especially great effect on the damage control and electrical engineering divisions of BCh-5, which are the principal subunits to be engaged in fighting for the ship’s survival. Thus, although the total manning in the damage control division was increased by two seamen, one of three warrant officer technicians was replaced by a compulsory-service seaman. In the electrical engineering division, while the manning was kept the same, two of the four warrant officer technicians were replaced by compulsory-service seamen.
This reduction of professional level, “rationalized” by the Navy’s elite, affected not only the crew of the submarine Komsomolets but also of all other submarines. Note that this “rationalization” by the naval leadership was neither reflected nor evaluated in the documents of the State Commission. It would have been naive to expect such objectivity, since the “Combat Training” section of the State Commission Working Group, which addressed this issue, consisted entirely of fleet representatives who were to one degree or another accessory to such foolish bungling—bungling that may border on the criminal.
Great was the price paid by the country for such “economy”! For whatever reason, it was not until after the loss of the submarine Komsomolets that the Main Naval Staff came to understand that “the crews of ships of this type should be manned only by officers and warrant officers, because compulsory-service seamen and petty officers lack the means to adequately master operation of a submarine in such a short time.”1
The circumstances of the submarine accident were investigated in the following manner. The members of the State Commission subjected sixteen members of the crew that participated in the cruise to only an initial interrogation. In this case, most of the members of the working group were present, but for practical purposes they did not take part in the interrogation. And only once did a narrow circle of persons from the working group visit the hospital—and only for a short time—to officially interrogate crew members. Unofficially, however, without the knowledge of the members of the working group who represented industry, fleet representatives visited the hospital several times, where they talked with the crew and exerted certain pressures upon them. This is why the explanatory reports of some of the crew members differ considerably from what they previously had said to members of the State Commission. “The survivors talked a great deal in the beginning, but then they bit their tongues.”2
There is a basis to contend that, up to the time of the interrogation by the State Commission, the surviving members of the crew remained subject to influence from the leadership of the Northern Fleet and that they had received direction from that leadership that “industry is always responsible.” And it is absolutely clear that Captain 1st Rank S. I. Bystrov was totally inconsistent with reality when he asserted, “surviving Komsomolets crew members were questioned in a faultfinding manner by the State Commission, which also contains representatives of industry. All unanimously marked the high level of special knowledge of the submariners.”3
The working group has a tape recording of the interrogation of submarine personnel by members of the State Commission, the explanatory reports of the surviving members of the crew, extracts from the ship’s log, and extracts from the control log of the main propulsion unit. However, interrogation of personnel during visits to the hospital was not documented.
From the very beginning, naval representatives did everything to prove that the submarine was prepared well for the cruise, that the personnel were excellently trained, and that the actions of the ship’s attack center and the leadership of the Northern Fleet were the right ones; and, if the submarine sank and the greater part of the crew perished, it was at the fault of the designer and industrial workers.
An extensive campaign to publicize the “competent” actions of the crewwas begun in the press under the leadership of the Fleet Command long before the initial conclusions were reached by the State Commission. The campaign was also directed at concealing serious shortcomings associated with manning and training the crews, with servicing the submarine, and with solving social problems. Its purpose had nothing in common with real concern for people, or with the objective of raising the fleet’s combat readiness.
The administration of the CPSU Central Committee also voiced its opinion. A news brief appeared in the May 13, 1989, edition of Pravda regarding decoration of the crew of the submarine Komsomolets. The assessment of the crew’s professional actions had already been made. “In a critical situation the crew acted with maximum bravery and technical competency, fighting to save the ship and render it safe.” Thus, the administration of the CPSU Central Committee confirmed and approved the actions taken by the naval leadership to conceal the true causes of the accident. These same objectives were also pursued by the State Commission.
But let’s return to Captain 1st Rank Y. A. Vanin’s crew. It had undergone combat training, passed all of the tests, and was brought out to the first line4 by September 1987. Under a point-scoring system, the crew was fourth (out of five) in the division, and it had not participated in a single independent combat patrol. The assertion that this was “one of the strongest crews one could imagine”5 was quite significantly exaggerated. In 1988 the crew underwent retraining at the training center, and in September it was certified with an unsatisfactory score in ship damage control (as reported in a letter from submarine commanders of the Northern Fleet’s First Flotilla sent in August 1989 to CPSU Central Committee Secretary O. D. Baklanov). According to documents, the average score received by the crew in work on damage control problems was only 2.7 on a five-point scale. But this fact is not contained in materials of the “Combat Training” section of the State Commission Working Group, which consisted of naval representatives only. This fact does appear, in distorted form, in N. Cherkashin’s articles6 as: “And in the training center where both of the crews had been ‘perfected,’ they hastened to write an unfavorable performance report on Vanin, the deceased commander of the Komsomolets, second-guessing the usual course of thinking of the supreme leadership: ‘criminal negligence.’”
In the letter mentioned above from the submarine commanders, it is asserted that the crew had corrected the shortcomings revealed in work on damage control problems, and completed them with a good grade. But knowing the make-up of the command of the division to which the submarine Komsomolets belonged, one can assert that none of the division’s flag officer specialists were sufficiently versed in the matériel of this submarine to rule adequately on performance in damage control problems.
2. Raising the Navy flag on Komsomolets
“In early January 1989 a conflict occurred among the crew during the submarine’s preparation for patrol duty. The conflict arose because of the crew’s work on ship damage control problems, which was being evaluated during an emergency party meeting,”7 and it ended with Captain 3rd Rank A. S. Ternovskiy, the submarine deputy commander for political affairs, being sent to the hospital. “It so happened that the crew of the Komsomolets would not accept the former deputy commander for political affairs, and did not wish to go out to sea with him,” is the “spin” N. Cherkashin put on this event.8
Let’s return to the act drawn up by the “Crew Political Morale” section of the State Commission Working Group: “Captain 3rd Rank Y. I. Maksimchuk was transferred to crew 604 on temporary duty for the time of patrol duty on 16 January 1989 in place of the regular political worker, Captain 3rd Rank A. S. Ternovskiy. Captain 3rd Rank A. S. Ternovskiy was not allowed to serve patrol duty for health reasons. Prior to patrol duty he visited the hospital twice for treatment from 12 January to 27 January 1989 with a diagnosis of a ‘neurological condition, not sharply pronounced, situationally predicated’ and from 16 February to 28 February 1989 with a diagnosis of ‘an asthenic state, moderately expressed.’”
The places of the cause and effect were deliberately changed here. The deputy commander for political affairs wound up in the hospital as a result of a confrontation and his suspension from patrol duty, and not vice versa, as the working group section tried to portray. One need not be a great expert in medicine to understand that this “cause” of Ternovskiy’s replacement was clearly fabricated. The members of the section also understood this—that could be the only explanation for the following supplement to the act: “In resolving the matter of suspending [Now he’s suspended, although previously it was said that he was disallowed.—D. R.] Captain 3rd Rank Ternovskiy from patrol duty, it was also considered that he was unable to carry out his duties in full volume.” As a result of the conflict, Captain 1st Rank Y. A. Vanin’s crew was broken down into opposing groups and was practically demoralized. Besides that, in order to delay departure of the crew into combat service until a healthy environment was created, the political organization decided to “strengthen” the crew with the chief of the political department of the division. And the question stands: would the tragedy have occurred if the political organization of the Navy objectively investigated the conflict? So what was the reason for Ternovskiy’s suspension? Illness, or his “inability to carry out his duties in full volume”? The section members never did get around to attentively analyzing this conflict, and they didn’t talk with Ternovskiy. Obviously, they only tried to show that there are no shortcomings in the work of the Navy’s political organs, and that there couldn’t be any.
By the beginning of the cruise, the crew consisted of sixty-four persons: thirty officers, twenty-two warrant officers, and twelve compulsory-service petty officers and seamen. In this case, eight of the officers were lieutenants—that is, 25 percent of the officers had served aboard a submarine for about a year after graduating from school, and their rank (and consequently their level of occupational training) did not correspond to the approved table. It should also be noted that damage control division commander, Captain 3rd Rank V. A. Yudin, possessed the specialty of a turbine engineer—in no way corresponding to the position he occupied—and had served in this position for only about a year, while the division’s second officer was a lieutenant and also lacked sufficient experience. Moreover, one of the two warrant officers in the division (Warrant Officer Y. P. Podgornov) was unable to pass the tests, and he was not certified for independent control, while two of the three seamen were in their first year of naval service.
It is clear from the above that, prior to the ship’s departure for sea, the crew lacked a damage control division as a full-fledged combat unit. Thus, the requirements of the “Manual of Submarine Damage Control” (identified as RBZh-PL-82) were violated:
RBZh-PL-82, Article 173: Departure for sea is prohibited … when a full complement of trained personnel is lacking.
The fact that the requirements of the manual were violated was not reflected in the documents of the State Commission.
Unfortunately, this was not the only violation. As it became known later, Warrant Officer S. S. Bondar, Warrant Officer Y. F. Kapusta, and others were not certified for independent control. Neither they, nor the assistant commander of the division, Captain 1st Rank B. G. Kolyada, nor the head of the political department of the division, Captain 1st Rank T. A. Burkulakov, knew the layout of the submarine Komsomolets. Also, the assistant commander in the political section, Captain 3rd Rank Y. I. Maksimchuk, did not know the layout of the submarine, and part of the crew did not pass exams involving damage control.
Due to objective causes, the submarine crew could not have possessed high professional skill and experience in operating the matériel, which ultimately affected the outcome of the crew’s fight for the submarine’s survival. This was not so much the fault as the misfortune of the crew.
There should be concern regarding the quality and rigor of the curriculum provided submarine crews at training centers. The quality of the training is extremely unsatisfactory, because it is carried out sporadically, with emphasis on theory, and without relevance to a particular submarine, especially when it comes to carrying out general damage control exercises aboard ship. Also, the centers are poorly supplied with trainers and training displays.
The Navy also lacks a system of occupational selection of submarine crew members on the basis of psychological stability in extreme situations. “We aren’t cosmonauts,” one highly placed official from the Navy commented. Does he really believe that a combat patrol by a submarine under fully self-contained conditions is any less complex and dangerous a mission than a flight into space?
Submarine crews are perpetually diverted from combat training for garrison duty, for housekeeping work, and for other incidental duties; this occurs both during construction and testing of a submarine and during patrol duty.
Training complexes are absent from the permanent home port of submarines. Because submarines are provided an unsatisfactory supply of electric power and working power production units, it is impossible to organize high-quality crew training aboard the submarine itself.
The prestige of serving aboard nuclear-powered submarines dropped dramatically in the last two decades, because such service involved continual relocations, absence of housing, the unsettled daily life of the families of submariners, and the difficulty of the work itself. Also, there are no prospects for providing housing to them upon completion of service. The possibility for promotions in rank (and consequently pay raises) are limited when a submariner serves permanently in a single position. All of this results in high turnover of seagoing personnel and limits the possibilities for growth of professionalism. The second crews of submarines, which are deprived of the possibility for learning from the experience of qualified industrial specialists, and upon whom all of the above factors act to a significantly greater degree, find themselves in an especially difficult situation. Consequently, it is no accident that most of the worst accidents aboard submarines happen with the second crews.