The Hunt for Red October (novel)/Fridge

• Main
• Characters
• Fridge
• Headscratchers
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Funny
  • Heartwarming
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

• In the novel, there is a scene where one of the many attack subs, the ES Politovski, undergoes a critical reactor failure that destroys the sub. In a rather obtuse way, this was foreshadowed earlier in the book, during the section describing Ramius' life. It stated that he had been baptized as a Roman Catholic but it could never be revealed, even to him, as 'Marxism-Leninism is a jealous god that allows no others'. The scene involving the Politovski has the zampolit overriding the chief engineer's request to back down on the dangerously overloaded reactor for repairs. The engineer protested in his mind about 'the Party thinking that physical laws could be overturned by the whim of an apparatchik'. In a round about way, Marxism-Leninism (as a godhood proxy as Ramius described it earlier) was being stealthily paralleled to a theocracy, where the fiat of the priests of the faith (or in this case, the Zampolitni of the Party) trumped everything, even nature itself. An irony there, considering the religious suppression in the Soviet era.
• Worth noting that the novel was Very Loosely Based on a True Story about a mutiny onboard a Soviet warship in the 1970s, though so many details were changed and so much dramatic license applied that all it has in common with the actual event is "Some Russian sailors decided to defect and take the vessel they were serving on with them".

Back to The Hunt for Red October (novel)