Whiskey on the Rocks: the real story behind Soviet submarine S-363’s Cold War grounding

On 27 October 1981, S-363, part of the Soviet Navy’s Baltic fleet, hit an underwater rock off the south coast of Sweden, and was forced to surface approximately six miles from its main naval base, Karlskrona.

According to the official Soviet version of events, S-363 had been forced towards shore due to an emergency – despite no distress call being issued. This doesn’t tally with the account of the skipper, Captain Pyotr Gushchin, who claimed the submarine became lost following a failure of navigational equipment.

Another theory suggests that the crew had been drinking heavily and throwing a party that got out of hand just before S-363 struck the rock.

The world reeled at the sight of a Soviet submarine, possibly carrying nuclear weapons, stranded on the Swedish coast. This was at the height of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear catastrophe cast a shadow over everyday life.

In the White House, the hawkish Ronald Reagan was US president. In the Kremlin, an ailing, ageing and paranoid Leonid Brezhnev held sway. And the man who had to mediate between them was the Swedish prime minister: the politician, and farmer, Thorbjörn Fälldin.

Although Sweden maintained strong ties with the US and other western governments, it was officially neutral during the Cold War. It would be 1995 before the country became a member of the European Union, and 2024 when it joined NATO.

But perhaps it was their neutrality, and the widespread view that the country was a backwater led by a man more interested in agriculture than geopolitics, that may have helped diffuse the impending crisis.

For instance, there was a moment when the submarine captain left the craft to be questioned by Swedish authorities. Had this happened in a NATO country, this would have been far more politically sensitive. As it was, the meeting took place after the captain had been granted immunity from prosecution.

After S-363 grounded, the Swedes – who were testing new equipment in a naval exercise at the time – started to investigate. Sweden may have been neutral, but its people were never blind to the threat posed by the Soviet bear.

The Whiskey on the Rocks incident: Europe’s Cuban Missile Crisis?

You can find out what happened next at the bottom of this article – spoiler warning for the new series, Whiskey on the Rocks – but first we caught up with director Björn Stein and scriptwriter and executive producer Henrik Jansson-Schweizer to talk about why they wanted to tell this story…

The whiskey on the rocks incident is not well remembered in the story of the Cold War, especially compared to the events like the Cuban Missile Crisis. How big a deal was it?

Henrik Jansson-Schweizer: This was Europe’s Cuban Missile Crisis. The world held its breath because we were very close to war.

Björn Stein: It was huge, one of the most reported incidents in Sweden after the Second World War. But when we talked about making the series, half the population of Sweden didn’t know about it, which was shocking to me. There was no trauma, no bad repercussions. Maybe sad stories stay with us longer – and in the end this was not a sad story.

It’s interesting it happened in Sweden, of all countries. It was this little neutral country, and we were the farmers who had no clue about world politics. We had no horse in the arms race and we weren’t part of NATO, which meant we could handle the incident differently than other countries around us.

The series, Whiskey on the Rocks, portrays Sweden as a parochial place. What was the country like?

Henrik Jansson-Schweizer: I would describe Sweden as a cousin from the countryside. I mean, our prime minister, Thorbjörn Fälldin, didn’t even speak English. He was a sheep farmer.

Björn Stein: When you saw images of the submarine, it looked like fake news. But it was real and just absurd. We chose to tell what actually happened as a comedy because there were so many absurd elements, with little Sweden suddenly coming to be in the line of fire, so to speak. Maybe happily enough, it was Sweden: we didn’t know how to handle this in an aggressive manner.

The tone of the series sometimes leans to absurdity. How much of what we see on the screen is true?

Henrik Jansson-Schweizer: We started out with an ambition to do a great thriller about the events, but that simply wasn’t possible!

Björn Stein: The submarine really was discovered by fishermen, and the Swedish military did row out in the middle of the night to try and measure radioactivity levels. Most incidents shown in the series are true. Before shooting, I showed a documentary about the S-363 to our director of photography and he said, “My god, everything happened!”

Do we know how S-363 came to run aground?

Henrik Jansson-Schweizer: What we realised when doing the research is that everyone we spoke to who was there knew exactly how things happened, but no story was like the next! Alcohol is one of the theories, and we choose to go with that.

Björn Stein: After the submarine got stuck, the first Swedish officer who came aboard was offered vodka, which was 96 per cent alcohol. It was more like doctors’ alcohol with some cherry. The Soviets drank a lot of it, so was this why they ran ashore?

The Swedish officer couldn’t drink it, and the Russians were offended. They were stranded on a rock in a Swedish military area and they were still offended.

How did the Whiskey on the Rocks incident change Sweden?

Henrik Jansson-Schweizer: The incident kind of dragged Sweden into the world. It was a wake-up call.

Björn Stein: For me, I think the assassination of Olof Palme [the Swedish prime minister who was gunned down in February 1986] was the big wake-up call.

But the S-363 was like a premonition, when we realised that there were foreign entities in our archipelago. In the years that followed, there was so much submarine chasing going on that one of the most exciting TV shows we had was the news.

Whiskey on the Rocks real history: what happened next

The days after S-363 became stuck were fraught with peril as the Swedes tried to discover if it was carrying nuclear weapons.

Later, the submarine’s political officer, Vasily Besedin, claimed this had been the case, also telling a Swedish journalist: “Our officers were ordered to blow up the submarine together with its crew if the Swedish military forces tried to take possession of the boat. These orders would have been completed.”

The most dangerous moment of the incident, however, came when the skipper was absent from the submarine – being questioned by Swedish authorities – and his officers issued a distress call due to worsening weather.

Around the same time, it appeared that two ships were headed from a Soviet fleet towards S-363’s location.

The Swedish armed forces stood poised for action until it became clear the ships were actually West German merchant vessels.

The S-363 remained grounded until 5 November, when it was hauled off the rocks by tugs, escorted out to international waters and returned to the Soviets. A report by Swedish authorities concluded that the submarine had entered the country’s waters on a spying mission.

Whiskey on the Rocks is available to stream on Disney+. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week

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