About the book: 2012 / A new book by the famous Russian marine painter Vladimir Shigin is dedicated to the now forgotten disasters of the Soviet submarine fleet. The author is the first to talk about pre-war emergency incidents on our submarines, the cause of which was the ramming of our own surface ships, and, at times, the top officials of the state were personally involved. The story of the explosion of the submarine Shch-139, which was lost as a result of sabotage, still raises many questions today. For many decades, the circumstances of the death of the secret “baby” of the Baltic Fleet M-256, which died near Tallinn in 1957, remained unknown. A special place in the book is occupied by the 1961 tragedy in Polyarny, when two submarines exploded right at the pier. For the first time in the book, the author used unique archival documents that were still inaccessible to readers.