His uncle had dreamed of service in the navy and had a library of marine literature, which inspired an identical love of watercraft for Isakov.

[1] In 1917, Isakov moved to Petrograd and entered the Naval Guards School of the Imperial Russian Navy and graduated as a midshipman in March of that year.

[3] He continued his service after the October Revolution in the Baltic Sea fleet as a torpedo officer, where he served on several warships, including the Izyaslav, the Riga, the Kobchik and the Korshun.

[1] In 1918, he took part in several battles against the German Imperial Navy until the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which effectively ended the war between Russia and Germany, granting the Baltic Sea to the latter.

[4] In 1920, Isakov was transferred and assigned to the destroyer Deyatelni, which patrolled from the Volga River down to the Caspian Sea and later shelled the positions of Allied interventionist forces in the midst of the Russian Civil War.

Nevertheless, Isakov temporarily served in the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet until 1942 when he became a commander in the North Caucasus Front, where German forces were attempting to penetrate the oil fields of Baku.

On 4 October 1942, Isakov was injured in a German bombing raid in Tuapse and had his foot amputated, spending the remainder of the war in a field hospital.

[1] After the war, during a celebratory banquet for the Politburo and marshals, on 24 May 1945, Stalin walked all the way to his distant table to clink glasses in a toast to his efforts.

[6] He received his Doktor nauk in 1937 after defending his dissertation on the routing of German forces by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of Tsingtao in 1914.

In January 1965, Isakov wrote in the newspaper Nedelya that "for centuries foreign enemies have tried to close for the Russian people all exits to the sea."

Isakov concluded "The fortress Oreshek or Schlüsselburg has remained in the mouth of the Neva to this very day as a reminder of how afraid they were of letting the Russians out of Lake Ilmen.

"[9] On the basis of this article, Ivan Dziuba, a Ukrainian-born Russian philologist and a staunch Leninist, criticized Isakov strongly in his book Internationalism or Russification (1968) for repeating "what was written by the propagandists of tsarist times and in their falsified history textbooks," an attitude "which looked on the whole surrounding world whether it was in the way of Russia or not, whether it satisfied the appetites of tsarism or not."