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Preface
Nearly five hundred years ago the Russian merchant adventurer Afanassy Nikitin, the first European even before Vasco da Gama to have visited India, described all that he had seen in his memoirs titled “A Voyage across Three Seas”. To reach India Afanassy sailed down the great Russian river Volga, across the Caspian Sea, Persia and the Arabian Sea, and after a few years, returned by the Black Sea. We went to India by a completely different route and crossed many more seas. The first (Russian) edition was titled “A Voyage across Three Seas
– the Swan Song of the Submarine Cruiser K43”, as the submarine’s role in the training of Indian submariners and her subsequent passage to India was the final shining chapter in the history not only of the submarine, but of that entire class (Project 670, or in NATO parlance, the Charlie class). And for any Russian reader, the title of the book is identified completely with India.The Soviet Union’s lease to India of a nuclear submarine, an event without parallel in any other country, has long become public knowledge through the mass media. I therefore expose no secrets, especially since this relates to matters that occurred many years ago in another country. The history of “K43”, the lead boat of the class, is all the more remarkable as she spent many
years in all the oceans, and ultimately served longer than other submarines of the class, under the flags of the USSR, India, and Russia. I am proud to have had the opportunity to not just to serve on this legendary submarine, but also to have commanded her in this period of her service, perhaps one of the most glittering in the peacetime annals of submarines.After finishing the glorious story of this ship, I rather fancied myself as a writer, and unable to hold back, like the Chukcha*
in the popular anecdote, wrote a bit about India and the Indian Navy to augment the preceding chapter. I considered at that time and am still convinced that though we have given naval training to the Indians for many years, there are many things that we canlearn from them.I would particularly like to emphasise the important role of the Indian Commanding Officers during the lease as it was on their shoulders that the responsibility for the submarine squarely lay. The three of them: RN Ganesh, SC Anand and RK Sharma along with their crews, operated the nuclear submarine independently and safely for the three years of the lease, and demonstrated the capability of the Indian Navy even then, twenty years ago, to handle the most complex technology.
It is possible that some of my observations about India’s history and the Indian Navy will sound naive to Indians and other Englishspeaking readers, but the book is addressed mainly to the Russianspeaking readership, for the majority of whom this is a littleknown theme.
The concluding chapter about the training of submarine commanders in the United Kingdom is perhaps a little out of the overall context and is meant for specialists, but I thought it essential to include this aspect. I understand that we will never again have such training schools, but nonetheless I secretly nurse the hope that we shall be able to benefit from some of the experience of others as long as we have submarines. This experience, too, was written in blood; only it was the blood of British submariners, which does not differ in colour from ours.
The vocabulary I have employed in my narrative may have sometimes been unconventional and I hope the reader will forgive me for any transgressions; while I do need the help of a dictionary to harness the mighty Russian language; my command of “sailor’s language” is perfect! As we all know, one speaks as one thinks, and I have attempted to discuss a serious subject in everyday language, eschewing propaganda, military language and officialese. When I read a book or see a film about submariners where they proclaim the courageous and hazardous nature of their profession with much breastbeating I find it laughable and pathetic at the same time. All this is fine for impressing the girls and to make them gasp with admiration and wonder, but one cannot flog this cliche endlessly after all, we volunteered for this manly profession. And if it comes to courage and risk, surely the most demanding occupations today are those of the driver or pedestrian, who are fighting a real war with the traffic on the city roads. There is the old story about a British sailor from a seafaring family who is asked if he isn’t afraid to go to sea as his father, grandfather and greatgrandfather had all lost their lives there. To which the sailor retorts: “And what about you aren’t you afraid to go to bed every night, knowing that your forefathers all ended their lives there?”
Barely a year after the publication of the first edition of the book in Russian I was forced to take up my pen again under the pressure of circumstances and the persuasion of my friends, though
prior to this I had written nothing longer than “reasons in writing” at the behest of my superiors for some perceived infringement!What amazed me personally was that the book was popular not only with Navy men, but with people far removed from the military profession. Deferring to the numerous demands and requests from readers, I added accounts of our daily lives in India and corrected the mistakes and inaccuracies in the first edition.
January 2008 marked the twentieth anniversary of the hoisting of the Indian flag on the submarine and the commencement of the lease. She was given the marvellous name “Chakra”
– celebrated in legends and epic poems as the fearsome weapon of the Hindu god Krishna. Later we learnt that this name would be passed on as a legacy to the next Indian submarine. History marches on and perhaps soon we shall witness a “Chakra” – the bright symbol of friendship and trust between Russia and India – once again roaming the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean.
