FROM DESIGN BUREAU
TO CONCERT HALL
THE JOURNEY OF
SOVIET SUBMARINE DESIGNER
DAVID FINKO
BY JOC MICHAEL FOUTCH, USN

At the end of an extraordinary odyssey, a Russian submarine designer-turned composer lives and works quietly in Philadelphia, still haunted by the ghosts of the past but gratified by steady international acceptance of his music. This man is David Finko, an American citizen since 1986, and his unusual story spans much of the Cold War and provides considerable insight into the U.S.-Soviet submarine design competition of the 1950s and 1960s. 

But to understand the son, one must first understand the father. 

Life was difficult at best in Stalin's Soviet Union. Paranoia was everywhere, from the "Great Leader" at the top, to the lowest tenement dweller at the bottom. Suspicion of one's neighbors was part of daily life - a whisper of disloyalty, a joke, even, could send a family to a labor camp above the Arctic Circle. 

For a Jewish family, the harshness of everyday life was sharpened by persistent anti-Semitism much like that in the early years of Nazi Germany. To the customary prejudice that had harried the Jewish people for centuries was added the distrust of anyone with family in other countries, and Jews were especially suspected because of their overseas contacts with relatives or fellow Jews in places like America. Before the Communist Revolution in 1917, Jews couldn't even live in Moscow or St. Petersburg, nor hold positions of respect and prestige, and the best they could hope for was to run a small tailor or grocery shop. Even after the revolution and the migration of Jews to Russian cities, the doors to prosperity were narrow, and Jewish children in the Soviet Union were necessarily taught the value of study and hard work. 

One way Soviet Jews could enhance their position - and their chances of survival - was to break into the "military-industrial complex." With the Soviet Union preparing for war, there could be no luxury of excluding "undesirables" from occupations - such as engineering - that would benefit the mobilization effort. So, despite an unofficial policy of discrimination, the government specifically sought the most clever and talented engineers to staff their submarine design bureaus. Such a man was David Finko's father.  

Rafael Matveyevich Finkelstein had been born in Belorussia, the son of an illiterate hostler who later served in the Russian Army in World War I. He displayed a prodigy's talent for mathematics and won admission to Leningrad University as a teenager. After graduation, the Soviet Union snatched him for study at a prestigious research establishment, leading to a tour at the Institute of Naval Architecture, which set the stage for a brilliant career in submarine design. Moreover, the family had a strong navy tradition - with David, the family could boast six naval officers and at least one merchant seaman closely related; his uncle was a Soviet Army colonel and his aunt a Soviet Army medical officer. For David - born in 1936 - military life was an expectation. This made for a difficult relationship with his father. "He thought I was a sissy, that I was weak. I loved music - I wanted to be a musician - and serving in the navy was not my idea. But when I was nine, my father was told that the government's desire was to train me for the submarine business."  

At the time Hitler seized power in Germany, Finko's father was promoted to a special position as senior engineer in charge of calculating the strength of submarine hull plates and frames; and when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, he was advanced to head the entire hull department in his design bureau. "You must understand," the son says, "that this was an incredible advance in his career, especially for a Jewish man of very humble origin. He was even made a member of the Communist Party - you couldn't even run a hairdressing salon in the Soviet Union without being a member of the Party." 

An example of the Echo II-class Soviet submarine, which Finko helped design.

To keep ahead of the advancing Germans, Rafael Finklestein and his family we re moved from Leningrad to the city of Gorky on the Volga River. There, in a new facility, the father oversaw the hull department for Central Design Bureau #18, a super-secret naval agency working on designs for S-, K-, M-, and Pike-class submarines through the end of World War II and into the beginning of the Cold War.  

There were perks available to the son of such a respected father. While others suffered pitifully from wartime food shortages and rationing, David was offered an identification card and ration pass to eat in the bureau's sumptuous cafeteria, where he would later occasionally see German war prisoners forced to work on submarine design projects for the Soviets. After the war, these same engineers modeled the Zulu- and Whiskey-class submarines on the German type XXI boats. 

In 1948, Finko's father moved to Special Design Bureau 143 - created that year to develop submarines with air-independent propulsion and later, nuclear power - and then in October 1953 to the Krylov Central Scientific Institute in Leningrad as a senior research specialist. There, he developed algorithms for designing the hulls of deep-diving submarines and taught university courses on nonlinear elasticity and strength of materials. 

By this time, with the Cold War well under way, submarine warfare had emerged as a major focus of the East-West confrontation. The United States was first off the mark in deploying a nuclear-powered submarine - USS Nautilus (SSN-571) - in early 1955, but it was not until three years later that the Soviet Union laid down their first nuclear powered boat, the first of the November class, which joined the Russian fleet in late 1960. This was roughly the same time that USS George Washington (SSBN-598) made the world's first submarine deterrent patrol, and that significant U.S. head-start acted as a spur to the Soviet design bureaus. 

Because of his father's position and his own excellent grades, David Finko was selected for an apprenticeship for the top secret Central Design Bureau #18 in 1957. He studied for six years at the Leningrad Institute of Naval Architecture in a demanding curriculum in which the punishment for academic failure or disciplinary infractions was service as an enlisted man at a small base well north of the Arctic Circle. It made for a stressful academic experience.  

Later, Finko served as a naval cadet at the submarine base in Polyarnyy, from which he made several patrols on Whiskey- and Zulu class diesel boats. These were no pleasure cruises, but the crew's ability to endure the most difficult and uncomfortable conditions was a source of great pride. He remembers that on one patrol, he went two months without bathing, and on another - even in the Arctic - the submarine was a fetid, humid, foul-smelling hell. Life as a Russian submarine sailor was a way to prove your manhood, with street brawling and heavy drinking, but it was certainly a rough life, with little room for a gentle or tender soul. 

Subsequently, Finko found a niche working in section 21 of Abraham Kassatseaer's Bureau #18 on several early classes of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines, most notably the Echo-class guided-missile boats, which first appeared at sea in 1962, roughly contemporaneous with our own Thresher (SSN-593)-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. The engineering work was often sheer drudgery, but he was most discouraged by the security demands. Predictably, the bureau in Leningrad was tightly guarded. Entering the building to start the workday, "you would go straight to your desk. Nothing could be kept in your desk or on it. Only pencils and rulers. At the end of the day you had to give every scrap of paper to the security service department, and to sign a special record of that action, and to get the signature of the clerk at the security service department. He took all your work papers. You were given them back at the start of the next day. I believe they also watched every single one of us and listened to our conversations, even in the men's room and cafeteria. So it was a pain, you know?" And while naval architects or marine engineers - those geniuses in demand - in the bureau could roam the facility's libraries to read American magazines, pore over periodicals on western weapons and technology, and even examine refrigerator designs to help them come up with ideas, he remembers being restricted to his desk day after day to work on his drawings.  

Finko was a sociable young man who loved to talk - a perilous trait in the super secret submarine design field. "If I asked about operating depths... the question alone was a crime," he remembers. "And I worked in hull design! I needed to know that for designing a hull to withstand a certain amount of pressure." Departments in the bureau were strictly segregated. His area, hull structures and systems, never spoke with other functional organizations. No one in his construction department was allowed to review new technology - this was higher than top secret and very dangerous to work in because of the potential for inadvertent security slips. Even the archives, which held British or American designs and information on special steels, was not open to the rest of the bureau. If David needed to design a foundation for a propulsion system, the other departments would send him dimensions and a scheme. If he insisted on learning details of their machinery, he could be accused of spying.  

Despite the psychic rewards of working to defend the nation, the constant burden of security was increasingly oppressive. "You couldn't go on vacation to get away from it! You were under surveillance for everything by the KGB or by other state security. If I wanted to leave for a couple of days, I had to inform them where I would be and give them a phone number. If it was more than a couple of days, I had to report with my papers to the local commandant. So who needed such a life, being watched for whatever we said or what we did?" Make no mistake, he asserts - Bureau #18 was much like a prison or labor camp.  

Finko worked on both new designs and subsequent modifications of stern hull structures and prepared blueprints for use in the shipyards. His biggest projects included studies on how to reduce pressure - hull weight, high-strength welding, shafting and steering components, and deep-diving adaptations. His most miserable job, he remembers, was designing flooring, the metal planking inside the sub hull.  

The designers were expected to be patriotic, and particularly since he was a Jew, Finko was especially careful to express his loyalty to the Soviet Union loudly and often. "You could never be unhappy. That was considered American-like. You could never criticize an article in Pravda - never - and had to imitate them in saying things like, those American dogs, we'll get them!" For David, however, this wasn't entirely a false front - while finishing his graduate studies under the best technical experts in his field, he became very loyal and eager to help his country. And even today, after more than two decades in the United States, he still feels a certain pride in his homeland.  

"We knew Americans were strong , because they had money - but we also considered them weak, because they were spoiled by their luxury conditions. Russians were strong, with a depth of character built from living through harsh times. We felt - and were told over and over again - that working for communism was a noble cause; and that working for money was no different than working as a whore - absolutely! Our pay was miserable, but you went to work on submarines because you were a man, not a sissy - you wanted to defend the motherland, humanity, and communism. That's what they taught us to think from the start."  

During the 1960s, when the Soviet Union sought to surpass the West with advanced submarine designs, Finko labored on the Victor- and Yankee-class boats that later appeared in 1968. Money was never an issue, because so many resources we re devoted to building the largest and most technically-advanced submarine navy in the world. "Let me be clear," Finko expresses his strident opinion as he jabs his hand in the air. "The Soviet Union was not behind America in technology. Technology in the Soviet Union was for the Army and Navy, nothing else. Professors and scientists would make technology work not for themselves, or for money, but for their country."  

Finko claims the Soviet Union was a world leader in metallurgy, metal working and metal thermal treatment, enabling production of very strong and unique alloys of titanium and steel. Some Soviet submarines, such as Alfa-class submarines, broke ground with construction entirely of titanium and mastered the technique of titanium welding as early as the late 1950s. Another advancement of the Soviets was the idea of doublehull and triple pressure-hull submarines, a leap forward in innovation for their time. This all was "a very top secret. It was a saying at the #18: "A guilty tongue will be cut off together with the entire head". 

From 1960 to 1965, while Finko worked as a naval architect at the Submarine Design Bureau, he was also studying music at the Leningrad Conservatory, the alma mater of Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1965 and realized immediately that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in music, writing compositions.  

Recently, this son of a respected Cold War submarine designer sat at his dining room table in a modest home he owns on a cramped West Philadelphia street, without so much as a window air conditioner on a sweltering, humid day. His hair is gray and wispy on top. He wears a worn, buttondown shirt. There, he explained why he left the submarine community and eventually, the Soviet Union, for America.  

"As a Jew, I did not have any chance for promotion to higher positions," he admits. "My father was luckier, because he worked during World War II when everyone was needed, and he was much more talented than me. For me, working at Bureau #18 was a time-wasting, dangerous life without any prospects."  

Finko's avocation for music served as an excuse to leave the submarine business bit by bit, and his last tasks were on the Project 675 and 667 Echo II-class submarines, which first deployed in 1965. Nonetheless, he admits that his long career in engineering still serves him well in composing classical music. He remembers a time when he was recruited out of the submarine force for a brief time to work as a young welder on the first Soviet icebreaker, the Lenin. "I could just feel the enormity of that 16,000-ton vessel. I could feel the cosmos, the space, the depth of proportion, and that's how I had to write my symphonies." But leaving that career would mean repudiating all the work he had done - and turning his back on his father's legacy.  

"My father felt betrayed that his only son left the submarine design bureau," David says. "I knew I had a very bad relationship with him. I regret that now. He was an absolute genius of high caliber - I was nothing in the field compared to him. I understand that all my talents, in music, everything, came from him." Even worse, to create a new life for himself as a musician, the fledgling composer changed his last name from Finkelstein to Finko, severing another connection to his family. But his need to experience the world beyond that of the Soviet Union became stronger than any remaining loyalties. "I wanted to be really Jewish, to go to synagogue without persecution, which I believed you could do in America," he notes. "I thought because of communism I was deprived of knowing about trends and developments in contemporary music, so I wanted to upgrade my musical knowledge. And I wanted the economic opportunity."  

When David applied for immigration in 1979, the Soviet authorities immediately fired his father from his position and severed his connections to professional associations and working groups. For Rafael Finkelstein, fatally sick with cancer, this was a final, devastating blow, which he did not long survive. Even now, David feels terrible guilt in the strained relationship with his father and admits if he could live his life again, he would return to Bureau #18, if only to build a better relationship with the man he admires today.  

After Finko emigrated to the United States in 1980 with his wife and son, it appeared that he had attained much of what he had dreamed of. He received a number of commissions and eventually composed nine concertos, three tone poems, two symphonies, operatic works, and many other pieces. His orchestral works have been performed by major orchestras in America and Europe, and his viola concerto - which premiered in Leningrad in 1972 - has been especially well received. Another is a Harvard - commissioned work, the "Fromm Septet," and both are available on compact disc today. A significant influence in his music has been the work of his fellow Leningrad composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and it also reflects an admixture of both Jewish and Russian liturgical elements. Finko has taught composition at Yale, and taught music theory at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and the University of Texas, among other schools, and he has received a wide variety of cultural awards and honors around the world.  

From his rowhouse mere miles from the Liberty Bell in downtown Philadelphia , Finko reflects on his 23 years in America and is grateful for the freedoms and opportunities in his adopted country. "People from many countries strive to settle here and to make a much better living," he says. "People here are friendly and always smile. Anyone can buy a nice house and a good car here eve n on a low income, anyone can practice any religion here or be an atheist without any fear, anyone can publish anything without being persecuted. We could not have it (like this) over there. My son would be drafted and killed in Afghanistan if we stayed there. I could end in a prison for my anti-communist comments and anti-government jokes."  

Finko has never been granted university tenure in America, so he subsists on a small Social Security pension and occasional commissions for writing music. But, like so many in the former Soviet Union who have become artists, musicians or writers, he tries to draw strength from the struggle for life. "Pain is necessary for producing great art, music, and literature!" 

JOC Foutch is a Military Editor for UNDERSEA WARFARE Magazine.