2nd part of Ted's post

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET>]

2nd part:



Nevertheless, they managed to get to the text of the screenplay. And if one asks them what exactly is there that they do not like, 

they say - everything! From the beginning to the end. They cannot even find a proper word for it; in fact there is a word, but not a 

proper one - in English it is spelled with four letters... I am not going to quote here this piece of... art. And it is not because I am 

afraid to be sued over violation of copyrights. The ordinary human decency would not let me to do so. Because it would be like 

peeping into a certain medical institution, the one where they do not have too many door-handles, right at the moment where one did 

not let the patients to finish watching the Wizard of Oz. And so they have an animated discussion - how did it finish? Because the 

whole this screed should rather be attached to its author's health history, than hit the movies:many scenes are placed in the 10th 

compartment of the submarine, which had only eight of them, sailors steal oranges; for that officers beat them with sticks, sailors 

and officers alike tank booze around with some breaks for brawling, the submarine is leaking (during combat patrol!); sailors cover 

holes with paint, crewmembers communicate almost entirely by the means of lingo and swearing, etc., etc., etc. Anything has 

changed from the times, when in Moscow polar bears allegedly used to hunt for pedestrians outside the Bolshoi Theatre? Let us 

rather give the floor to the crewmembers themselves: V.A.Kovalkov: What disturbs us the most in this screenplay? The lies, 

preposterous lies. They portray us as drunkards. It looks like during the patrol all we do is drinking vodka, playing cards, and 

swearing. And with a danger in sight we allegedly fall in panic. Under the name of our glorious K-19 they show some pirate 

submarine with the crew resembling a bunch of anarchists, or half-drunken cowboys from American movies.4   



V.A.Shabanov: They don't even understand what kind of people they try to sully in their film. Our K-19 was the first Soviet nuclear 

submarine with ballistic missiles - you can imagine how thoroughly was the crew selected. All the officers with university degrees, 

four of them had diplomas with distinction; 70% of sailors had technical education. Each of them spent 9 months in a training unit, 

where he mastered his submarine function. For a year they all studied at the nuclear centre in Obninsk. And Americans dare to 

portray them as rogue savages! Our first officer Vaganov once said - "if we announce now, that we're hiring volunteers to serve aboard 

the first nuclear missile submarine in the Soviet Union, there won't be getting rid of them; they'll shatter the recruitment offices".5  



Yu.F.Mukhin: Americans tried to portray us as a bunch of angry, always quarrelling one with another guys, deprived of comradeship. 

The best proof that it's a lie, is the fact that we all - the sailors of K-19 - 



we've been and we still are a crew. And we unanimously speak against attempts to disgrace the eternal memory of the dead, and 

the honour and dignity of the alive.6  



Yu.V.Yerastov: This American screenplay is a mixture of malice and the utter ignorance. Just imagine - according to it our squadron 

leader sits atop the reactor's hatch and drinks pure spirit from a water bottle. They certainly have no clue, that such a stunt is just 

technically impossible. Whatever American authors think, a nuclear reactor is not a potty. In order to sit on it one would need to 

unseal the hardware bulkhead, which is under vacuum. That would cause unsealing of the reactor itself.7  



Yu.F.Mukhin: Or take such a detail - they came up with the film title K-19: The Widowmaker. They don't even realize, that she made 

only two widows, because the crew's average age was 22.5 years, and most of them did not have families.8   



The basic plot of the American screenplay is simple - mutual hatred of the captain and his first officer. The captain is a despotic 

tyrant (Harrison Ford), the first officer (Liam Neeson) looks like a democrat. When the reactor malfunctions, the captain keeps 

drinking undisturbed, and the first officer is locked in his own cabin. As soon as the alarm goes off, the crew panics. The democratic 

first officer leads an armed mutiny of the sailors, who demand landing on the American soil - a crystal dream of New Russians 

A.D.2001 in the 1961 entourage. I have seen Harrison Ford's better performances. This only proves that Russia alone ceased the 

Cold War, while the United States keep waging it with the former zeal. In the distant 1961 the submariners of K-19, in the United 

States dubbed as "Hiroshima", went to the compartments contaminated by lethal radiation to save their ship, their mates, and the 

whole world, with America in first place. Chernobyl could have happened 20 years earlier, and closer to the United States. On their 

very National Day. The "made in Hollywood" nuclear hell offers a set of standard thrills: scintillating wires, clouds of poisonous 

vapours, meters going crazy, people going crazy... The tragedy transforms into a colourful farce. In fact everything was way calmer, 

and way more frightening.  



When the reactor aboard K-19 malfunctioned, it simultaneously shut off radio communication. And as the situation in the damaged 

reactor was approaching to meltdown, the world at the same pace was approaching to a global thermonuclear war. The crew 

managed to fix reactor's compensation bars, but the raising temperature menaced with clinkering it into one mass and that would be 

pregnant with a nuclear catastrophe. The chief of the nuclear reactor compartment, Lieutenant Boris Korchilov was the youngest 

officer aboard. To the fresh graduate of a naval college, it was the first "big sea". It was not his job to crawl into the contaminated 

compartment, into 1000-Rt hell. He could remain on his post, and save his life. No martial court would find him guilty of anything. But 

who would do the job better than a nuclear engineer? It was the imperative to locate the damage and start repairs as soon as 

possible. It was impossible to stay in the compartment longer than 10 minutes. Yet he volunteered to go. At the hatch Zateyev 

stopped him: Boris, do you realize what are you going for? He answered: I certainly do, Sir. With him Seamen Savkin, Kharitonov, 

Kashenkov, Ordochkin, Starkov, Ryzhkov and Penkov went to the inevitable death. What kind of cretin can portray them as a 

confused, panicking riffraff? Only the one, who in similar situation would be the first to jump off board with his mate's life jacket. 

People with such a mentality are incapable to comprehend what does it take to volunteer to step into the radioactive hell, while 

others are being dragged out of there with terrible radiation burns, and the volunteer knows, that this is his fate too.  



Ten minutes were like the whole eternity. The invisible, inaudible, insensible rays were destroying people; others went to cover for 

them. The first officer, Captain Yuri Povstyev, who allegedly was locked up in his cabin, led the second party. When Korchilov 

removed the gas-protector from his face, yellowish foam started drooling from his mouth. The ship doctor was already at hand with 

his medical post, but what could he do with his pills and milk against the monstrous doses of radiation? They ionized all the bodily 

liquids of those, who were exposed to the radiation. Their bodies began to swell visibly. Their faces grew red. Pus discharges came 

from the roots of their hair. Their eyelids and lips swell beyond recognition. Hardly able to move their swollen tongues, they only 

complained of pain in the entire body. Swearing, lamenting, and cries for revenge are entirely a sick-minded Hollywood product. 

B.F.Kuzmin remembers:  



I was in the aft compartments during and after the reactor's malfunction and shutdown. The order came to the crew to abandon aft 

compartments and to gather at the central post. I was there when they carried unconscious sailors, who repaired the cooling 

system. It was a horrible sight: their faces, necks, and hands were all swollen from radioactive burns. And suddenly it comes out, 

that there's still some work to do, and so someone has to go into that hell, and to be dragged out in a half or one hour burnt with 

invisible rays. The entire nuclear staff by then was dysfunctional. So then their comrades volunteered to step into that hell. Yenin 

was the first, he asked: who will go with me? Kulakov and Svishch immediately stepped out. Is it called a panic in American 

language? 9  



After 40 years the memory fails on Kuzmin, so V.A.Kovalkov adds:



As the reactor was shut down, the crew was gathered in the bow, where the radioactivity was lower. The other reactor was shut 

down too. The submarine became motionless. A diesel submarine was already hastening with rescue. But every minute in the 

contaminated compartments was inexorably shortening lives of K-19's sailors. And then, to save the lives of others, someone had to 

sacrifice his own one, and go again to the contaminated compartment, turn the reactor on, and set the ship in motion. Three 

volunteers were needed. And so Boris Fedorovich Kuzmin without a hesitation went to the reactor compartment. Second to him was 

the secretary of the youth organization, and third was the secretary of the party section.10  



But the memory fails on Kovalkov too. He forgets to mention that he himself was the secretary of the party section.  



It took an hour and a half to mount the pipe and to start pumping the coolant again. Another hour to cool the reactor down to a safe 

state. The commander ordered to give everybody a hundred grams of vodka - a token of gratitude for their deeds. Usually the heroism 

is perceived solely as a certain spiritual impulse. It is not customary to admit that heroes usually sacrifice their lives for someone 

else's slovenliness. The investigation of the K-19 accident found its cause very easily - it was a tiny drop of cold metal negligently left 

in the pipe welding. Under the pressure it dropped out, and created the fateful leak. A little hack-work of a welder, a little negligence 

of a quality assurance officer... When the soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was presented with the request of posthumous award of 

Boris Korchilov with the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union, he resolved: We don't award for disasters. N.Khrushchev. Thus the first 

person in the state indirectly approved the hack-work of a welder, negligence of the quality assurance, and inconsideration of 

designers, who forgot to foresee what the crew had to cope with. And this silent approval acted for years and resulted in more 

accidents, out of which K-19 was the first.  



Yet I have a legitimate question: why do the Americans try to portray Soviet submariners like a sort of penalty battalion comprised of 

marihuana-doped Vietnam War dodgers? Is there any other reason than the primitive ignorance? Is it worth 150 million dollars they 

want to invest in the project?  



Yu.V.Yerastov: I think they really see us like a sort of savages. Or rather - they want to see us like that. To them we're second class 

people: always begging for something, and always yelping that they won't survive without foreign help. But do not confuse those, who 

go abroad with the hand held out for a sop, with us, navy officers. We're used to go to America's coasts not with the hand helt out, 

but with ballistic missiles.11  



V.A.Shabanov: I want to add something else. Americans, who have concocted the film closely co-operate with Nikita Mikhalkov's 

Studio TTT. Obviously they want to demonstrate the film in our country, it means they will make the audience (everybody believes in 

movies) to look at our Navy through American eyes. A classical Reaganite scenario: Russia = empire of evil.12  



The American movie company was ready to offer $1000 a head to any K-19's crewmember, who would became an extra in the film. 

Shabanov was also offered quite a buck for keeping his mouth shut and not speaking against the film in public. Their answer was in 

open letters, addressed to Harrison Ford, and the Navy commander-in-chief, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov. In the latter they 

emphasize:  



A group of American movie producers (K-19 Production, Intermedia et al.) together with the Russian Nikita Mikhalkov's company TTT 

is about to begin shootings for a feature film about the tragedy of SSGN K-19 along the screenplay, which deeply insults the honour 

and dignity of her crewmembers, dead and alive alike. Moreover, this screenplay is insulting to the whole Russian Navy: it portrays in 

a mocking way service and life of submariners, maliciously misrepresents the nature of service and personal relations of the 

crewmembers (notorious drinking, brawls, violence, crew's total technical illiteracy, lack of drill and discipline, and submariners' low 

moral standards). We have learnt that the representatives of the TTT company have started preliminary shootings on Navy object, 

having permission from Vice-Admiral Ilyin. [...] We earnestly ask you, Vladimir Ivanovich, to examine the existing situation, and 

terminate The Russian Navy's participation in production of this unworthy film.13  



As I write this article, the Russian support for the film has been withdrawn, and the filmmakers have moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

But with all the due respect to the Russian Navy, are there only veterans willing to defend the honour of their Ensign? They 

addressed the commander-in-chief, but filmmaking it is not his job. Where is their Supreme Commander? Here he has a good 

opportunity to support his patriotic declarations with deeds. Especially that they do not require any extraordinary heroism. Instead, 

he puts it in legal chicanery plane, and tries to figure out whether the honour has an equivalent in dollars or roubles. He might want 

to learn about the ways his predecessors used to solve politically sensitive issues.  



A 19th-century Russian chancellor, Karl Robert Nesselrode, once humbly snitched to the czar, Nicholas I, on Commodore Gennadiy 

Nevelskoy: the latter, while exploring the Russian Far East, founded there a Russian outpost, and raised the Russian Ensign. This 

caused England's protests and other diplomatic troubles. According to the chancellor, the culprit should have been reduced in ranks. 

Yet the czar promoted Nevelskoy to the Admiral. And as to his initiative, which caused such a heartburn in London, he said: Where 

the Russian Ensign once was raised, it just cannot be lowered. And another story featuring the same czar Nicholas I. In Paris they 

once wanted to stage a play about Catherine II, in which the Russian empress was portrayed in a rather frivolous way. Nicholas I, 

through his envoy in Paris, expressed his disappointment to the French government. In return he was said, that the spectacle would 

not be cancelled, since France enjoyed the freedom of speech. Nicholas I replied that if so, he would like to order tickets for 30 

divisions of spectators. As soon as his answer reached Paris, the spectacle was promptly cancelled. So, Mr.Putin experiences no 

lack of historical examples. The question is, which one will he follow? That of Nesselrode, or that of Nicholas I?  



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