Vasily Arkhipov, the man from Zheleznodorozhny who saved the world!

Having lived in the small town of Zheleznodorozhny for some time now, I have long been thinking of how I could start an occasional blog on the town. It's rather difficult in many ways to talk about small satellite towns outside of Moscow. For one cultural life in these places seems to be rather non-existent. There is a certain irony of arriving at the station in Zhelezodorozhny. A few months ago bilingual signs at the station were put up in Russian and in English pointing you in certain directions. One of the most curious signs gives a pointer to a place which apparently sells theatre tickets. The problem is that Zheleznodorozhny does not even have a theatre. For that matter it doesn't even have a cinema in spite of the fact that in the 2010 census it was recorded as having a population of over 130,000 souls. There has been a sign suggesting for most of the past decade that a cinema would be built (undoubtedly one of those  multiplex cinemas purely for action films from Hollywood)- but there has been little real work carried out in the vicinity. The yellowing placards denoting public works have been replaced recently. Anyway, for cultural life, Moscow is only just over half an hour by elektrichka, so as long as one puts some effort into things, culture can be had.

Of course, Zheleznodorozhny's main claim to fame is that it was once named Obiralovka.  It was a settlement serving a station of the same name which became well-known due to Lev Tolstoy setting the suicide of his fictional character, Anna Karenina, in this very place. Truth to say, the town doesn't appear to have taken much advantage of this - not trying to draw the tourists in for example with some statue of Anna Karenina plunging to her death, though there is an Anna Karenina nightclub here. Yet apart from this and the fact that one of the great Russian symbolists Andrey Bely lived nearby, there seemed little to really write about for this blog.

Until today it seems when I learned that a certain Vasili Arkhipov lived here. For those who have never heard of Vasili Arkhipov is, they may be surprised to hear that they owe their very existence to this man. He was the co-officer who prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis when the Americans were firing depth charges to force the submarines to the surface. Thomas Blanton, a NSA director back in 2002, was quoted as saying that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world". Apparently, he was the only one of three senior officers who withdrew his consent from launching the nuclear torpedo which would have started World War Three. He had already heroically exposed himself to radiation in order to deal with an overheating reactor on a Soviet K19 ballistic missile submarine known as a floating Hiroshima over a year earlier. One year later it seemed that it was only Arkhipov's reaction which prevented the kind of nuclear madness that the superpower leaders were only too ready to contemplate.

So after all Zheleznodorozhny does have something to boast. A great shame, though, that no one has sought fit to honour him with any memorial apart from his tomb. The tomb of the man whom the human race owes its existence is hidden away in the Savvino cemetery of Zheleznodorozhny.

This anyhow is how Edward Wilson in the Guardian described the unacknowledged role of Arkhipov to twentieth century history and the fact that there is a twenty-first century:

If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life. It was the most dangerous day in history. An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba while another U2 had got lost and strayed into Soviet airspace. As these dramas ratcheted tensions beyond breaking point, an American destroyer, the USS Beale, began to drop depth charges on the B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon.
The captain of the B-59, Valentin Savitsky, had no way of knowing that the depth charges were non-lethal "practice" rounds intended as warning shots to force the B-59 to surface. The Beale was joined by other US destroyers who piled in to pummel the submerged B-59 with more explosives. The exhausted Savitsky assumed that his submarine was doomed and that world war three had broken out. He ordered the B-59's ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing. Its target was the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force.
If the B-59's torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. The next wave of bombs would have wiped out "economic targets", a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's SIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan – a doomsday scenario that echoed Dr Strangelove's orgiastic Götterdämmerung – would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.