Kilo Class

nonsense kind of a lady who had spent much of her career as a staff nurse in a Chicago hospital. She was five feet tall, fair skinned with obviously dyed blonde hair. In her new job as nurse-companion she wore a gray skirt with a white jacket and favored formality.

She addressed her four charges as Mr. Andrews, Mr. Nichols, Mr. Maklov, and Mr. Rabovitz. She would attend to their laundry, arrange for their various medications, and accompany them to the dining room, where she would eat with them and deal personally with the waitresses. The table was for five only.

On the first morning Edith had walked her charges slowly around the ship for some exercise after breakfast, watching the banks of the wide Neva River slip by during the thirty-eight-mile trip to Lake Ladoga. Mr. Andrews, a big, stooped man made smaller by the pain in his hip, said very little, except to Mr. Nichols, but Edith Dubranin seemed to strike up rather serious conversations with Mr. Rabovitz. Mr. Maklov, who also walked very slowly, seemed quickly exhausted by two strolls around the upper deck.

The nurse arranged for a steward to make sure there were always five deck chairs placed outside the two suites in the small private area reserved for the passengers who had paid the most.

Late in the afternoon the party of elderly midwesterners made their first contact with the outside world when the senior officer on the ship, Colonel Borsov, called to pay his respects, in impeccable English, to his most valued passengers. Like all such men on these tour boats, he would have been obviously ex-military, even without the formality of his rank, by which he announced himself.

Old Mr. Andrews made the introductions and explained to the ship’s commissar, in an infirm voice, how much they were enjoying the lake. He also mentioned that it was wonderful to be back in Russia four generations after his folks had left for the United States back in the nineteenth century. Colonel Borsov asked where the Andrews family was from originally and smiled when he was told, “Right up there in Archangel, on the White Sea.”

“Then we are from opposite ends of Russia,” the Colonel replied. “My family is from the Ukraine — like President Leonid Brezhnev.”

“Well, you are a very nice, polite man,” chimed in Mr. Maklov, brushing his white mustache upward with the back of his right index finger. “And I think you should run for president as well.”

This brought a smile to the face of the Colonel, who replied, “Not of Russia, nor of the Ukraine, Mr. Maklov. But perhaps one day of this shipping line.”

“Good luck to you, Colonel,” Mr. Andrews said. “A bit of ambition never hurt no one.”

“That’s right,” added old Mr. Maklov. “When you’re young, that’s the name of the game. And if I hadn’t shown some of it when I started out in insurance, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

“And the Yuri Andropov would be the poorer for it,” said the Colonel, gallantly. “By the way, have you been to see the little museum we have dedicated to Mr. Andropov, down on deck two. No?… Well, you should. I know you will find it interesting. He came from central Russia, along the Volga, you know? He was a great man, a lover of American jazz, who died too young.” He did not mention that Mr. Andropov was also a Communist ideological hard liner, who had been a ruthless head of the KGB. Neither would the museum.

“Well, we’ll certainly make a point of doing that before dinner,” said Mr. Andrews. “And we appreciate you visiting with us.”

When the Colonel left, Miss Dubranin walked with him and thanked him for making it such an enjoyable afternoon. “They will be so proud that you came to talk to them, Colonel. They are such lovely old gentlemen, it’s a real pity that walking is so difficult for Mr. Andrews and Mr. Maklov. But they are both very uncomplaining.”

“I was glad to come up and see them, Miss Dubranin. What line of business were they in back in the United States?”

“Well, Mr. Andrews had a business distributing spare parts for automobiles. Mr. Maklov was an insurance agent. I think Mr. Nichols at one point worked for Mr. Andrews, and Mr. Rabovitz was some kind of a retail buyer for a clothing store in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

“Men from the heart of the Western capitalist system, eh?” said Colonel Borsov.

“I suspect you will all be getting used to it before long,” replied the nurse.

“No doubt,” said the Colonel. “No doubt. But I must continue with my calls, and I hope we may speak again before too long.”

Miss Dubranin watched him descend to the lower deck, and she walked back and sat down once more. “Very nice,” she said, carefully.

A little later, on their way to the second shift, in the horseshoe-shaped dining room, they walked slowly past the museum and looked at the pictures of the late General Secretary of the Communist Party…pictures of him in his birthplace, Rybinsk; pictures of him in the Kremlin; pictures of him in Naval uniform, taking the salute at the Naval Academy in Rybinsk. Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984, before the full horror of the Soviet Union’s collapsed economy became known. Andropov, one of the very last of the Communist old guard, a blinkered man who thought until the day he died that another idealist from the Volga, Ilyich Lenin, may yet be proved right.

“What a total asshole,” murmured Andre Maklov.

And with that, the four old gentlemen and their nurse made their prolonged way to dinner, Mr. Andrews’s limp becoming noticeably worse. Two of their fellow passengers, both elderly ladies, smiled sympathetically as they passed. It was the natural telepathy of the elderly, a smile of shared anguish at the passing of middle age and the onset of twilight.

That evening they stood on deck with many other passengers and watched the distant shores of Lake Ladoga as the ship wended its way to the lake’s north end, where they would stop to see the islands. By 2200 the ship had cut its speed almost to zero for the night.

Tomorrow they would sail close to the islands before turning south, making a slow ninety-mile run down to the estuary of the Svir River. A hundred miles farther up the river would bring them to the port of Voznesene in the southwest corner of Lake Onega. They were scheduled to arrive there in the early morning hours of June 9 and would anchor for the night in the lake’s sheltered southern waters.

They would spend that day running north to the island of Kizhi to see the spectacular wooden churches, and would then steam down to an anchorage among the islands that dominate the central part of the lake north of Petrozavodsk. On the morning of June 10 they would set off for the Green Stop at the northwest corner of Onega.

During this time the four gentlemen from Minnesota quietly made themselves known to a variety of passengers. They never shared their table but would sit up in the little bar at the stern of the ship, sipping coffee and the occasional glass of Armenian brandy, listening appreciatively to the Russian songs that invariably broke out when sufficient vodka had been consumed. They befriended the young blond-haired steward, Pieter, who served during the afternoon and early evening. He liked talking to old Mr. Andrews about the secondhand American car he one day hoped to buy, though Mr. Andrews never seemed to say much himself.

Nurse Dubranin always awakened her men at 0630. She attended to their laundry and organized clean clothes. By 0800 the party from the Midwest had emerged from their two suites for breakfast. June 10, however, was an early morning. All five were out on deck before dawn as they cleared their anchorage off Kurgenicy and set off at a low speed for the main north-south channel, which lay to the northeast. The Captain spent much of the day cruising along the lovely western shoreline, which was dotted with remote farmlands.

In the late morning, the Yuri Andropov began to speed up, running straight for the Green Stop, which she would make by 1830 in the evening. They spotted Captain Volkov’s convoy, at 1252 about a mile ahead, driving slowly along the deep central channel. Traffic on the route had been unusually light during the last few days, but there were still five large freighters trying to pass the Tolkach barges.

The Andropov was not forced to wait in line with the freighters and overhauled the barges effortlessly. Nurse Dubranin and her four employers were out on deck to see the truly astonishing sight of three Kilo Class Russian submarines being carried across the lake and up to the White Sea on the biggest transporters any of the assembled passengers had ever seen.

The ship’s broadcast network pointed out that this was not an unusual sight. The barges were traveling the regular summer route for new Russian Navy ships that had been built, or undergone a refit, in the famous Red Sormovo Yards at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River. The Soviet Navy had been using these inland waterways for more than half a century to move warships around. Not, of course, in the winter, the female guide explained, because these northern waters were frozen solid from October to April.

She added that it was a testimony to the immense foresight of the Communist leaders who had constructed these “matchless” throughways, which joined rivers, lakes, and oceans together, through the canals. She also