They called it the “Kotov Line,” a string of bunkers built by the Baltic sailors to hold the approaches to Leningrad. Along the swampy front, the Red Fleet sailors, no longer bound by ships at sea, laid timbers under fire while mortars dropped into nearby bogs.  By nightfall, the pillbox was standing – its gun already trained toward the dark forest beyond the river.  Working both as an engineering officer and correspondent, Vladimir Dubrovsky described them himself: men waist-deep in water, building fortifications while aircraft circled overhead, their hatred of the enemy stronger than exhaustion or fear.  

Episodes of bravery, perseverance, and patriotism such as this became a focus for Dubrovsky, who wrote throughout the war for the daily paper aptly titled ‘Red Baltic Fleet.’  On his eighteenth birthday, Vladimir volunteered for the Dzerzhinsky Naval Engineering School, and on that July 26th, 1936 he entered service as a cadet engineer in the Red Baltic Fleet. The developing fleet, built on steel and ideology, would define his life for the next four decades.  His work on paper became part of the war effort itself, chronicling the fighting on land and at sea and helping keep men and ships in fighting order through the darkest years of the war. 

<h2>LENINGRAD & NEVA</h2>

When the city closed in 1941, the Baltic Fleet was caught inside it, its ships locked in by ice and minefields, and its sailors gradually turned into infantry. The harbors froze under gray light, riddled with shrapnel and half-sunk barges. At the workshops along the Neva, Dubrovsky’s section labored to keep the smallest engines alive – cutters, minesweepers, and launches that ferried men and food across the river in the dark.  Tools froze to their hands, lubricants turned solid, and every repair meant stripping parts from a wreck to save another ship. In his articles, he described how the boilers had to be wrapped in cloth soaked with warm oil and how men took turns at the wrenches so the metal would not burn their palms. Even the act of keeping a pump running became a fight of its own.

He helped organize groups of ‘rationalizers’ – sailors and mechanics who devised new repair methods, recording their solutions so that other ships could use them. From these efforts came his first written work – technical notes regarding winter maintenance and emergency repair, circulated among ships and later printed in the Red Baltic Fleet. It was work done in starvation, with lamps smoking on the benches and the sound of guns carrying across the river each night. In one piece he praised the vigilance of watchmen who caught a drifting mine before it struck a hull, another on the care of engines through frost, urging sailors to keep their bearings clean “for the ship’s heart must not freeze.”

When the Baltic sailors were ordered ashore to reinforce the Leningrad Front, Dubrovsky went with them. The fighting along the Neva and the adjoining Volkhov Front was constant – an unending series of landings and counterattacks fought in swampland and snow. He witnessed the sailors who built pillboxes waist-deep in water after hauling beams through the marshes under shellfire; at the crossings, cutters pushing through mined channels; and engineers wading knee-deep to free jammed rudders or restart engines that had frozen solid. One of his dispatches told how a boatswain dove into an ice-gray sea to save a man washed overboard, another of a hospital ship bombed despite its Red Cross markings and the vengeance sworn by its rescuers.

His technical notes evolved into field instruction for damage control under combat conditions: how to isolate a burning compartment, rig a pump from scrap piping, or patch a hull while under pressure. By early 1943, when Operation Iskra opened a narrow corridor through the Volkhov Front to the city, he was already serving both as engineer and as instructor for the fleet’s combat department.

His superior, Captain 2nd Rank Lev Osinov, editor-in-chief of the Red Baltic Fleet paper, endorsed Dubrovsky’s Medal for Combat Merit in February 1944 for his dual contribution – repairing ships under siege and publishing the lessons that kept them afloat.  The citation described him as having “actively participated in many combat missions of small ships… taking part in patrols and other operations, and in land battles on the Neva and the Volkhov Front.” It praised his “persistent fight to improve combat mastery” and his articles “on the struggle for the survivability of the ship in battle.” 

<h2>VOLKHOV</h2>

The following year brought movement at last. South-east of the city, the Volkhov Front prepared to break through the ring, its divisions advancing through the swamp belt between Lake Ladoga and Lake Ilmen. Naval engineers and small-ship crews supported the crossings, and Dubrovsky was attached to them appropriately in both his engineering role and with the Red Baltic Fleet editorial staff as an Instructor of the Combat Department. His recommendation for the Order of the Red Star called him “a participant in a number of combat operations both on land and at sea,” noting that during the blockade he had “helped by his labor to repair the fleet’s mechanisms and ships” and that his constant contact with crews allowed the paper “to fulfill its organizational role.”

He traveled the supply routes along the Volkhov River where thaw and shelling turned the banks to mire. Amphibious groups ferried men and guns through flooded woods, engines choking in brown water while artillery on both sides fired blind through the fog. He followed the small-ship flotillas into the Gulf of Finland and the advance along the Karelian Front, and he joined naval patrols in Pinsk Bay, recording operations where gun cutters and motor torpedo boats struck against German positions on the coast.

The river crossings were not pitched battles but a succession of dangerous errands. Bridges were improvised from barges and planks, destroyed by fire, and rebuilt the next day. Communications failed often and resorted to orders passed by motorcycle or on foot. The fleet detachments that had learned to survive inside Leningrad now fought across the swamplands east of it, and Dubrovsky diligently recorded what held together and what failed. Operation Iskra in January 1943 had opened a narrow corridor to the city, but fighting along the Volkhov line continued deep into 1944, its landscape one of flooded villages, burnt forests, and the carcasses of trucks half-submerged in mud.

The winter thawed into another spring of assault. The Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts pressed westward toward Narva, pushing the Germans back through a chain of rivers and forests. Dubrovsky followed the flotillas of torpedo boats and gun cutters that supported the advance across the Gulf of Finland. He wrote of them as “boats that lived like infantry,” their crews fighting from ice to open water.

The articles he published during those years were written close to the line, describing the experience of boat crews – katyerniki – whose work combined naval combat, engineering precision, and survival at sea. He covered their tactics, the damage-control measures improvised after shell hits, and the morale of men who lived aboard craft no larger than a house. He edited reports from gunners, signalmen, and mechanics, shaping them into short features that commanders circulated through their divisions.

In August 1944 he detailed a patrol he had accompanied, an action typical of those closing months on the Baltic:

“The sun was already setting when the sea hunter, under Officer Klein, approached the enemy-held island. The previously silent shore came alive under gunfire. Shells burst near the bow, forming a corridor of flame through which the cutter drove at full speed. Then a shell struck the side. Klein sent his assistant and the boatswain below to inspect the damage while the cutter held its course, returning fire and continuing the mission. Below deck, water poured through a ruptured plate. The commander ordered depth charges rolled to starboard, and the upper-deck crew shifted their weight to match, throwing the boat into a deliberate list to keep the hole above the waterline. Damage-control men pumped steadily as shells splashed around them. Under its own power the boat withdrew, engines straining, and returned to base. The combat mission was accomplished.” 

<h2>VICTORY</h2>

With the Baltic coast cleared, the fleet turned south for its final offensive to support the assault Königsberg, the great fortress city of East Prussia. In those last weeks of the war, Vladimir worked among the forward bases at Pillau and Cranz, reporting on the landing craft and gunboats that ferried troops into the ruins until the campaign ended in April 1945.  By then he had reached the rank of Engineer-Captain-Lieutenant and, while a senior officer of the technical branch, remained assigned to the press service – an uncommon combination of engineer and correspondent that would continue through his post-war career.

As peace slowly returned to the Baltic the war’s engineers became the builders of a new era. The old bases at Kronstadt, Tallinn, and Baltiysk were raised from ruin and hulls that had survived the siege were stripped, refitted, and sent back to sea under new names. The Baltic Fleet grew to be part of the first line of Soviet defense in the Cold War, though it did not hold the status of other ‘blue water’ navies.

Dubrovsky remained an instructor of the newspaper’s combat department, publishing articles that conveyed the pride of service, the duty of maintaining equipment, the discipline of watchkeeping, and the seriousness with which the fleet viewed its craft. He ensured that the newspaper remained more than propaganda and was a valuable means of standardizing practice across the fleet and influenced the professionalism expected of the Soviet Naval officers and men.

The Navy marked his continued service with a second Medal for Combat Merit in 1947, another Order of the Red Star in 1951, and the Order of the Red Banner upon the completion of twenty years in 1956. Each citation listed the same assignment – editorial staff of Red Baltic Fleet – and each acknowledged his “technical and educational contribution to the combat readiness of the fleet.” By then he had risen to Engineer-Captain First Rank, and though his command was never in ships, in the decades that followed, he remained the quiet chronicler of the Fleet that stood as both symbol and sentinel of Soviet naval power.