Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia
Nov 12, 2023 8:38:13 GMT
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Post by pats2001 on Nov 12, 2023 8:38:13 GMT
PART 39/The Gnevny Mutiny
When one branch of a nation’s military is drawn into political turmoil, other branches can also be affected by it. It happened in the United States during the run-up to the American Civil War, in late 17th century England prior to the start of Cromwell’s rebellion against the British monarchy, and in Bourbon-era France just before the start of the French Revolution. Vietnam saw its military engage in multiple coups during the early 1960s, and ideological feuding among the officer class is still an all-too-common feature of life in many modern Middle Eastern and Balkan nations. For the Soviet Union, a widening gulf between the Soviet military’s officer corps and the everyday servicemen in the field would prove to be a major catalyst for not just the collapse of Brezhnev’s war effort against NATO but also for major political upheaval in the post-Czech War USSR. Though no NATO forces had entered Russia proper yet, or even the heavily disputed Ukrainian territories where the anti-Brezhnev rebels still waged a guerrilla war against the Red Army, there was a growing fear among Soviet military personnel that it would only be a matter of time before they were fighting Western troops in the streets of Leningrad and Moscow.
Such fears were a key factor in motivating the crew of the Kanin-class destroyer Gnevny to take a drastic step in March of 1969 two weeks after the Frunze Academy uprising. Commissioned in January of 1960 as part of the Soviet Navy’s Black Sea Fleet and subsequently transferred to its Pacific Fleet, the Gnevny had been in service for over eight years when the Czech War began; equipped with anti-submarine missiles, she was assigned to mount deterrence patrols to discourage U.S. missile subs from launching strikes against Soviet Far Eastern cities like Magadan and Vladivostok. But with the Red Army knocked back on its heels in central Europe, the ongoing Sino-Soviet border conflict straining Moscow’s military resources even further, and the anti-Brezhnev rebellion in Ukraine weakening the USSR’s political and social foundations, Gnevny’s crew had grown steadily more disenchanted with their mission. The ship’s political commissars were doing their best to shield her crew from the increasingly bleak reality of what was going on, but the truth was penetrating nonetheless-- and when a petty seaman confronted one of the higher-ranking officers on this point, it would be like setting a match to a barrel of dynamite.
Even today the precise sequence of events between this one-on-one quarrel and the larger insurrection that followed remain the subject of intense dispute. But historians are in agreement on three key points: 1)the petty seaman and his officer antagonist had a fairly long history of personal animosity between them; 2)the Gnevny’s second-in-command had expressed concerns to his captain a day earlier that relations between the senior officers and NCOs were dangerously strained; and 3)the ship’s junior officers had themselves started to give rumblings of discontent. It was a perfect storm of grievances just waiting for a spark to set them off. No man stood on the Gnevny's deck that day would ever forget the moment when the NCO threw a punch at the officer in question, a junior lieutenant on his second tour of duty at the time. The outraged lieutenant reacted by drawing his service pistol and shooting the unfortunate NCO twice through the chest. Before the NCO's body hit the deck, the enlisted crew and the officers were at each other's throats in the most violent shipboard uprising the Russian navy had seen since the Potemkin revolt of 1905. In an interesting parallel with the Potemkin mutiny, one of the other key factors in the Gnevny revolt was dissatisfaction with the quality of the food supply; at least one warrant officer had chosen to face court-martial over the issue rather than consume what another crewman would later describe as "glorified rat poison".
Of the nearly 320 personnel assigned to Gnevny, at least a hundred would be killed in the mutiny outright and another forty or so would die from mutiny-related injuries before the revolt was finally put down; fifteen others would be executed by firing squad as the destroyer was heading back to port. By the time she arrived in Vladivostok on March 19-- a scant three days after the mutiny first broke out --her total personnel strength would be down to a mere 165 men. Furthermore, Soviet Navy engineers would need to conduct extensive repairs on her as she had sustained major internal damage, particularly in her bridge section, which had been the scene of a bitter firefight in the mutiny's final hours. Brezhnev was shocked to his very core when his top naval advisor debriefed him on the full extent of the violence which had taken place aboard the Gnevny. He would have been even more alarmed had he been able to foresee what was coming in the days and weeks ahead....
TO BE CONTINUED