The English title Man and Sea Warfare rearranges a blunter Russian original — Voina. Okean. Chelovek: War. Ocean. Man. That is the more honest ordering, because the book is not about the sea and not really about warfare. It is a manual for the political officers of the Soviet Navy on how to build, and keep intact, the mind of a sailor who may spend months submerged beneath an ocean he cannot see, waiting for an order he hopes never comes. Its subject is what Soviet military writing called the "human factor": morale, nerve, discipline, ideological conviction, the psychology of a crew under strain. Progress Publishers issued it in English in 1978, translated by Yuri Sviridov, with no named author — the text refers throughout to "the authors," a collective of naval political-education specialists of the kind the Main Political Administration of the Army and Navy produced in quantity. It is, in the most exact sense, a book about the manufacture of men for a fleet.
It is worth being clear about the date. The spine says 1978 and, unusually for this series, the spine is close to right. The book calls Marshal Andrei Grechko "the late Marshal Grechko" — Grechko, the Minister of Defence, died in April 1976 — and cites an imprint of his The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union dated 1977; it quotes the decisions of the 25th Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1976, as recent. This is a text of 1977, translated and printed in 1978. There is no glasnost jacket on an older book here, no reprint lag to correct. What the reader holds is a document of the exact moment it claims.
That moment matters, because it is the high summer of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov's navy. Gorshkov had been Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy since 1956, and across those two decades he had turned a coastal-defence force — a fleet built to guard approaches and little more — into a service with warships in every ocean of the world. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union maintained a standing squadron in the Mediterranean (the Fifth Operational Squadron, established in 1967), a squadron in the Indian Ocean, port calls in Cuba and West Africa, and a role in the sealift that carried the Angolan intervention of 1975–76. In 1970 the navy staged Okean, a global exercise coordinating operations across the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean and Norwegian seas at once — an exercise this very book cites in a footnote as evidence of the fleet's reach. In 1976 Gorshkov published The Sea Power of the State, the doctrinal summa of the whole build-up. Man and Sea Warfare is the same enterprise seen from below decks: not the strategy of the ocean-going fleet but the making of the men who crew it, and it carries Gorshkov's own words as scripture. "The creation of an ocean fleet worthy of the world's first socialist country," he is quoted as saying, "is the embodiment of the will of the Communist Party and of the Soviet people to see their country a great sea power, as well as a great continental power."
Who was the book for? Progress printed it in English, in London-facing English, at precisely the years when Western naval staffs were most alarmed by the Soviet flag appearing in waters it had never troubled before. A reader in the West was meant to meet, in these pages, not a menace but a moral community: disciplined, cultured, devoted, peaceable. The book is the soft complement to Gorshkov's hard doctrine — the human face of the fleet, offered abroad while the fleet itself was doing the thing that frightened people. And it is in the join between those two things, the face and the fleet, that the book gives itself away.
For the doctrine the book preaches is that navies are aggressive when imperialists build them and defensive when socialists do. "The transition of the world's advanced countries from capitalism to imperialism at the end of the 19th century," it explains, produced expansionism and arms races; the imperialist powers, "not surprisingly," now attribute "prime importance to the Navy" and are shifting from a land-based strategy to an "ocean-oriented one." Western navalism is greed, gunboats, the ICBM moved out to sea to shield the aggressor's homeland. The men who serve those navies are drawn as mercenaries: bourgeois morality, the book says, teaches the sailor to see "his tour of duty as a means of making money," and trains him on the principle of homo homini lupus est — man is a wolf to man. The talk of a Soviet naval threat is a "myth," a slander "exploited by the military of certain imperialist powers to justify their own actions which create tension in some parts of the world."
Then, a page later, comes the sentence the whole book is written not to notice. Describing the change in the fleet since the Second World War, the authors declare: "The domination of the World Ocean by the imperialist navies has been ended once and for all. Soviet warships are now present in different parts of the World Ocean, where the national interests of the Soviet Union and the cause of international security demand it."
Read those two clauses together. Navalism — the projection of naval force worldwide in the service of a great power's interests — is denounced as the imperialist vice on one page and announced as the socialist achievement on the next. The tell is not that the book is wrong about Western navies; the United States Navy was indeed a global instrument of American power. The tell is that the book cannot see that it is describing its own fleet in the language it reserves for the enemy's. When American carriers appear off a foreign coast it is gunboat diplomacy; when Soviet warships appear "in different parts of the World Ocean" it is the defence of "international security." The category of navalism, in this book, is defined so that it can never apply to the navy that published it. This is the recurring signature of the whole Progress series, tested across dozens of its volumes: the accusation is built so that it cannot be turned on the speaker. A navy is imperialist by its owner's class, never by its conduct — and so the same act, the same squadron in the same sea, changes moral colour depending on whose flag it flies.
What makes the point unanswerable is that the book supplies its own counter-evidence, guilelessly, because to its authors it is not evidence of anything. On the long cruises the fleet now made, we are told, "Soviet naval vessels often call at foreign ports where the crewmen meet local people and get to know their customs and traditions. They see for themselves the tremendous prestige enjoyed by the Soviet Union throughout the world." Showing the flag in foreign ports to advertise the prestige of the state — this is a textbook definition of the naval diplomacy the book spends its early chapters condemning. The authors describe it as a wholesome exercise in international friendship because they are physically incapable of describing their own navy as doing what navies do.
What the book documents best, almost in passing, is the machinery by which this fleet was kept ideologically loyal at sea — and here the artefact is more valuable than the argument. Every Soviet warship carried, alongside its commander, a deputy commander for political work, the zampolit (the ship's political officer), described here as "the immediate organiser of Party and political work among the crew"; beneath him a shipboard Party organisation and a Komsomol (Young Communist League) branch reaching into every duty shift. The book details the whole apparatus with a functionary's love of procedure: the "political sessions," the study circles in Marxism-Leninism for officers, the agitators briefed daily, the closed-circuit radio ("Closed circuit radio broadcasts are a standard feature of everyday routine in the Soviet Navy," with programmes planned a month ahead and cleared by the political deputy), the wall newspapers, the shipboard library councils. Quoting Brezhnev, the authors call all this a weapon: Party and political work "have always been and remain a potent weapon of our Party." What the reader is being shown, without the authors quite meaning to show it, is that Gorshkov's real innovation was not only a blue-water fleet but a floating political apparatus — the Party's machinery of ideological control, carried to the far oceans in the hull of every ship. The genuinely novel object in this book is the propaganda system afloat, and it is documented here with a candour no outside analyst could have matched.
The reply to this was written forty years before the book, by a man who watched the officer caste it celebrates being born. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Leon Trotsky devoted a chapter, "Foreign Policy and the Army," to exactly the process Man and Sea Warfare is the mature product of. The Bolshevik programme, he recalled, had demanded "a replacement of the standing army by an armed people" and "in no case a privileged officer caste." What the bureaucracy built instead was the opposite: "The army not only has not been replaced by an armed people, but has given birth to a privileged officers' caste, crowned with marshals." When in September 1935 the Red Army restored the graded hierarchy of ranks it had abolished in the revolution — lieutenant up to marshal — Trotsky saw the purpose plainly. The reform, he wrote, "pursues a purely political aim: to give a new social weight to the officers," binding the commanding cadres "closer together with the ruling circles." Man and Sea Warfare is that officer caste's self-portrait, two generations on and afloat. Its unquestioned hero is the commander, whose authority over his crew is to be total; in combat, the book instructs, everything depends on "cast-iron discipline and the commander's total authority." Naval service, for the officer, is "a life-time occupation" — a career, a station, a caste position. The armed people of the 1919 programme have become the crew of a nuclear submarine, and the men set over them are a hierarchy running "from a ship's commander to a petty officer," each rung its own privilege. Trotsky's forty-year-old sentence reads as a caption to this book.
Trotsky also named the deeper thing the book cannot: that the bureaucracy's foreign policy served the bureaucracy's own conservation, not the world revolution in whose name it spoke. The Soviet ruling stratum, he wrote, values "the help and friendship of those who are kin to it in social type" and has "lost every trace of the faculty of revolutionary education of the masses." Its instinct is order, status, the international standing of the state. A generation later Ernest Mandel, writing for the Fourth International in the International Socialist Review ("Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution," March–April 1970), drew out the consequence for precisely the doctrine Man and Sea Warfare rests on. The bureaucracy, Mandel argued, is "instinctively afraid of any upsetting of the international status quo," and the doctrine of peaceful coexistence, far from being a strategy for revolution, is at best "an armistice — and a temporary one — on one of the fronts of the international class war." The fleet in this book is the armed guarantor of that status quo: a great-power navy defending a great power's interests and calling the defence "international security." It is the physical form of the conservatism Trotsky and Mandel diagnosed — not the revolution reaching outward, but the state protecting what it holds.
The framing is visible from the book's first page, which opens not on the sea but on "the CPSU's Peace Programme" and the "relaxation of world tensions" — the détente-era vocabulary of the mid-1970s, in which the arms build-up is always the other side's and one's own forces are a "reliable bulwark of world peace." (The one enemy named in that opening besides the imperialists is "the Peking leaders," who "have in effect made common cause with the imperialist reactionaries" — a reminder that in 1977 the Sino-Soviet split ran through every Soviet account of who threatened the peace.) Trotsky had heard this music before. Writing in 1936, as the Soviet bureaucracy embraced the League of Nations and the language of collective security, he observed that the discredited war-slogans of 1914 — "the last war," "war for democracy" — had simply been given new names: "'Collective security' and 'general disarmament' are their substitutes." Behind the peace vocabulary, he warned, the leaders of the workers' movement were preparing "a new edition of the 'sacred union'" — the patriotic closing of ranks that had sent the workers of Europe to slaughter each other in 1914. A navy sold to the world as the servant of peace, crewed by men trained to see their country's global reach as the guarantee of that peace, is the naval chapter of exactly the story Trotsky told: the revolution's internationalism converted into a great power's patriotism, and the conversion concealed behind the word "peace."
None of this makes the book worthless, and it would be a poor introduction that stopped at the ideology, because the ideology is not, in fact, most of the book. Man and Sea Warfare is at bottom a work of military psychology, and over long stretches — chapters three and four above all — it is a genuine one. Its real subject is a real problem: what happens to human beings confined for months in a steel hull, far from home, under sustained stress, and how to keep them functioning. On this the authors are observant and, at moments, unexpectedly candid. They describe the degradation of performance under psychological overload with clinical care — the "mental, sensory and motor" impairment, the tremor and faulty coordination, the man who "loses his ability to think straight" and "may even fall prey to illusions and hallucination," the graded curve (the book prints it as a figure) by which rising stress first spoils complex tasks and then simple ones until "the man breaks down completely." They do not pretend Soviet sailors are immune. "The more psychologically unstable of the crewmen may panic and believe rumours," they write; caution gives way to fear; a man "has failed to withstand the difficulties" and, in the crews' own word, has "broken up." This is honest writing about combat stress, and it is more forthcoming than a triumphalist state was obliged to be. The material on the psychology of the prolonged submarine cruise — the monotony, the sensory deprivation, the deliberate provision of leisure, sport and reading to "break the monotony" — is a real contribution to a subject the world's navies were all wrestling with as patrols lengthened, and it can be read with profit as a period document of how one of them thought about it.
Where the book turns its observation into doctrine, though, the same reflex closes over it. Having described breakdown accurately, the authors insist on a single cause. "The basic cause of these unfavourable consequences," they write, "is inadequate moral and political education of the crewman." And the conclusion is absolute: "no psychological training, however skilfully conducted, can compensate for serious drawbacks in the moral and political education of the individual." Here a genuine phenomenon — the physiological and psychological limits of the human nervous system under extreme stress, which the book itself has just charted as a curve — is subordinated to ideology. The sailor who panics has failed not his nerves but his political instruction. It is a consoling doctrine for a political-education apparatus, since it makes the apparatus the answer to everything, including the failures of the apparatus; and it is the point at which the honest psychologist in the book is overruled by the commissar. The reader who wants to know what the Soviet Navy actually understood about the human costs of Gorshkov's long-range fleet will find it here — but will have to read the observation and discount the moral.
That, in the end, is how to read Man and Sea Warfare: as an unusually revealing artefact rather than an unusually dishonest one. It is not a screed. It is a working manual, most of it concerned with the undramatic real business of keeping a crew sane, competent and disciplined at sea, and on that business it is often shrewd. But it is also the intimate voice of the officer caste Trotsky watched being crowned with marshals, at the moment that caste acquired a global fleet — a book that condemns the projection of naval power across the world's oceans in the very years its own state was carrying out one of the largest such projections in history, and that cannot hear the contradiction because the contradiction is built into the words it thinks with. It teaches its sailors to see "the tremendous prestige enjoyed by the Soviet Union throughout the world" in the foreign harbours their warships now visited. A reader outside the doctrine sees something the sailors were trained not to: a great power's navy, doing what great powers' navies do, wrapped in the language of a revolution it had long since ceased to serve.