All that was missing was actor Alec Guinness’ voice. Otherwise, I felt like I’d stepped into master director David Lean’s movie Doctor Zhivago, one with no voice-over except my own that kept complaining about the cold.
To say the landscape was frigid or the weather freezing as we drove from St. Petersburg to Kronshtadt one December during the Yeltsin era would fail to convey the enshrouding Russian winter blanketing a topography blasted by ice and snow. The trees looked ready to snap into ice shards.
We had the car’s barely functioning heater cranked all the way up, though it didn’t do us much good. And the five or six layers of clothing I had on, including Patagonia-made thermal underwear, bought in Georgetown, was failing to keep out the bone-chilling frost.
I tried to sleep. But as Boris Pasternak noted in his novel: “A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one’s own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward.” And outward, all that could be seen was a blasted ice-scape that would have made me shiver just to look at, if I wasn’t already shaking.
My feet, encased in thick socks and Italian-made walking boots, remained chilblained. I tried to keep them from having any contact with the car floor, which only seemed to freeze them more. We drove on in silence to visit the brother of my then-wife.
He was serving (reluctantly) in the Russian navy as a crew member on a minesweeper with the Russian Baltic Fleet, and his vessel had docked at the naval port on Kotlin Island, just west of St. Petersburg. The town we entered was deserted; no sensible person was venturing out. That included presumably the guards at the gate to the naval base. We weren’t challenged as we entered the port.
And as we shuffled along, with my 3-year-old stepson whimpering about the frostbiting cold, we passed warships, mainly minesweepers, destroyers, and submarines. In the gloomy, fog-filled distance, we could make out the silhouettes of some huge ships: an aircraft carrier and cruisers, all at anchor.
I was reminded of that Kronshtadt visit by the July 2 blaze on board Russia’s super-secret, deep-diving spy submersible, the Losharik, the pride of the Kremlin’s clandestine deep-water intelligence gathering service. Fourteen Russian navy officers died in the fire during a mission 100 kilometers from Norway.
The Russian military has never released a photograph of the Losharik, but there are diagrams and artist impressions purporting to be of the model on military blogs. The only known publicly available photograph of what is believed to be the Losharik appeared in the Russian edition of Top Gear magazine, quite by accident, in a feature about a test car rally.
“On the shores of the White Sea, motorists of the magazine staged a photo session, at the same time passing a submarine peacefully passing along the coast — without being aware of what they were shooting,” according to the Russian think tank Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
The Russian navy wasn’t so good about keeping secrets and maintaining security back in the Yeltsin era. I was with a friend, another American, as well as my Russian in-laws as we wandered around the naval base. We clambered on board my brother-in-law’s minesweeper to be met by two affable sentries, who happily took us down below to give us a guided tour of their vessel, including the communications and control center.
After about a half-hour, a junior officer, who’d returned from the town, was nonplussed to find not only a Russian family picnicking on board but two Americans. He seemed unimpressed by my comment that he shouldn’t worry as we had no idea about the significance of any equipment we’d seen.
Anyway, it was far too cold to be fretting about security. Maybe the Guinness voice-over shouldn’t have been from Doctor Zhivago but from an Ealing comedy instead.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
