The Man Under the Uniform

By Richard Hardenburg
British Salmoa Times Correspondent, Northern Fleet Library, Severomorsk

In the reading rooms of Severomorsk, beneath the unblinking gaze of uniformed clerks, I sifted through the slow decay of war - paper yellowed by frost and decades. Page after page of declassified reports slid beneath my fingertips. One name surfaced with the inevitability of a tide: Captain Pyotr Alekseyevich Volkov, Third Rank, commander of Submarine K-88 Grom.

The documents were fragments - a personnel file, a reprimand, a medical note, a hastily typed line in a mission log. Yet, like scattered bones, they assembled themselves into a man.

Volkov came from a lineage carved out of hardship. His father fished the treacherous White Sea. His grandfather was a burlak on the Volga - one of those human engines who bent their backs until vertebrae surrendered, dragging barges for men who never learned their names. The family inheritance was measured in tears, sweat, and blood. Volkov carried it north into the Arctic, where he bent the sea to his will, though never once forgetting the cost.

His wife, Captain Yevgeniya Petrovna Petrova, served as a surgeon in the Medical Service at Murmansk hospital. The reports describe her as tireless, relentless - a woman who fought death with scalpel and will alone. Her colleagues murmured the old platitude, “You can’t save them all.” She refused to concede even that. The loss of their daughter, Galina Pyotrovna Volkova - killed in a Luftwaffe raid in 1942 - hardened her resolve into something unbreakable. Every soldier on her table became a battle she refused to lose.

Volkov’s own record bordered on legend. His crew had a saying: “If you want to sink them, send the Grom.” Mission after mission, he returned half-frozen but unbowed. Yet the same dossier that recorded his triumphs carried a quiet condemnation: Politically irresponsible. That single phrase sealed his fate. He was passed over for promotion, denied the rank that discipline and daring had already earned him a dozen times over.

In the margin of one report, scribbled in cramped handwriting, was a note that stopped me cold:
“Calculated heroism first, immolation only if it saves lives.”

His philosophy, reduced to a line of pencil graphite. It defined him. He pushed his men hard, but shielded them like his own blood. They called him Volk - Wolf.

The paper trail frays and ends in 1943. The last documents belong to the log of K-88 Grom. The entries shift from precision to unease. Mentions of warped horizons. Bearings that contradict themselves. A sky where familiar stars vanish, and unfamiliar ones replace them. The navigator writes that the compass “turns in circles as if hunting something.” A sonar operator notes that the sea becomes “flat as glass, then a vertical plane.”

A silence outside the hull is described as “too complete to be natural.”

Volkov’s final recorded words are stark in their simplicity:

“If we do not return, remember the sea took us, not the enemy.”

I closed the file in the cold quiet of the library. The man who emerged from its pages was more than a commander. He was the inheritor of generations of labor — a husband forged by loss, a father hollowed by grief, a wolf among captains.

Whatever befell him - and whatever swallowed the Grom - bears all the signatures of what we now call the Anomaly.

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Postscript by Richard Hardenburg

On board USCGC Healy, Arctic Ocean

This dispatch was first typed in my lodgings at Northern Fleet Headquarters, after my return from the library. Revisiting the reports and my notes fills me with a deep, enduring unease. War remains the purest calamity humanity inflicts upon itself.

In my next dispatch, I will attempt to trace how Captain Volkov — and the final voyage of K-88 Grom — became entangled with the Soviet Anomaly