Captain 3rd Rank Gennady Kapitulsky
Chief Propulsion Engineer, Soviet Navy
Gennady joined the navy as an engineer, and served as the officer responsible for propulsion. The Soviet submarine service was the elite of the armed forces and in many ways submariners had a good life. 鈥淲e got things on the submarine which you couldn鈥檛 buy in the shops.鈥� But the risks were huge.
Gennady always served on ballistic missile submarines, mainly the Yankee class, whose missile range was so limited that they had to patrol in areas close to the American coast. On one such mission in 1986, disaster struck. A leak in the missile chamber of the K-219 led to a fire, which resulted in four deaths and the sinking of the submarine. Gennady himself remembers his own sense of injustice that he might die like this. 鈥淚 wasn鈥檛 afraid. I didn鈥檛 panic. I just felt it was unfair.鈥�
