Life Follows Art

Soviet sub goes on the rocks

It was a typically quiet Scandinavian night for the scattered residents of the Blekinge archipelago on Sweden's southeast coast. Suddenly their rustic peace was shattered by something that went bump in the dark. "First we heard a gigantic crunch," recalls one resident of the 60-is-land group. "There was a lot of rumbling. The whole island shook." Some of the hardy islanders heard the sounds of a diesel engine racing and blamed the whole incident on Swedish naval maneuvers. The community went back to sleep.

The following morning, Fisherman Bertil Sturkman got a rude surprise. Rowing his dory past Little Horse Island, a rocky nodule in the Blekinge cluster 330 miles south of Stockholm, he sighted a 250-ft. Soviet "Whiskey"-class patrol submarine, No. 137, hard aground about 10 yds. offshore. Sturkman rowed on to deliver news of his find, and thus began an international fuss worthy of the 1966 comedy film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

It took the Swedes 15 hours after the grounding to get a navy picketboat to the scene, but then the pace quickened. Armed with submachine guns, Soviet crewmen paced the deck of the sub, a diesel-powered relic from the 1950s, which lay stranded like a great gray whale. Swedish Commander Karl Andersson boarded the intruder and talked to Captain Pyotr Gushin, whose increasingly melancholy air bore a remarkable resemblance to that of Actor Theodore Bikel, the beleaguered commander of the Soviet sub in The Russians, etc. Andersson emerged to say that the Soviets "blamed their accident on an error of navigation." Then he added sarcastically: "It's pretty hard to miss Sweden."

Swedish marines and paratroops, some with blackened faces and camouflage gear, surrounded the area. Swedish helicopters hovered overhead. On the mainland, Swedish police began discreetly phoning hotels on the chance that some Soviets may have slipped ashore and registered as guests. None were found.

A flock of ten Soviet ships, including two destroyers, waited nervously at the limit of Swedish territorial waters, twelve miles offshore, as Moscow requested the right to salvage its stranded vessel. But Swedish Prime Minister Thoerbjrn Faelldin insisted that his government would do the salvaging, and only after it had held an investigation to learn why the submarine had invaded Swedish waters. Such an inquiry required the presence of Skipper Gushin, but he refused to leave his ship, even when entreated by two Soviet diplomats. The Swedes settled in for a possible siege, as Gushin awaited orders from his naval superiors. Although Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Yakovlev took what Swedish officials described as the "very unusual" step of apologizing for the incident, Foreign Minister Ola Ullsten later declared, "Of course that's not enough. We have to complete the interrogation."

At week's end the Blekinge standoff was still dragging on. Western defense analysts assumed that the Soviet sub had gone aground during an espionage operation against Sweden's Karlskrona naval base, only nine miles up the coast. The Swedes were left to explain why they did not detect the clumsy intruder as it nosed about in the narrow channels of the archipelago. Everyone had questions, but Gushin knew one thing for sure. During their talk, he illustrated to Andersson what he thought would happen to him when he finally got home: the Soviet officer dramatically drew a forefinger across his throat.

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