In the sea adventure novel “The Secret Fathom” (Платов is the writer’s pseudonym), Leonid Lomaќin tells of the courage and fearlessness of Soviet Baltic sailors during World War II— and how the sailors managed to uncover the secret of a German submarine known as “The Flying Dutchman.”
However, “The Secret Fathom” is not a documentary book; invention is tightly interwoven with historical facts. The author describes a fictional “Flying Dutchman” as a submarine “for especially secret missions”—as a kind of stylized version of the multifaceted and cunningly disguised sabotage activity that the USSR’s enemies carried out at the time.