3 Review(s)

*A true story that inspired a best-selling novel*Suppressed in the USSR for fifteen years*Previously unknown episode from the Cold War Providing inspiration for Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, the 1975 mutiny aboard the Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy (translated Sentry) aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet government. Valery Sablin, a brilliant young political officer, seized control of the ship by convincing half the officers and all of the sailors to sail to Leningrad, where they would launch a new Russian Revolution. Valery Sablin was the son and grandson of naval officers, and enlisted in the Frunze Naval Academy at the age of sixteen. A strong believer in Communism, Sabin became disillusioned with what he saw as the hypocrisy of the bureaucratic system. Inspired by the memory of the battleship Potempkin, he hoped that his mutiny would spark a new rebellion. Suppressed in the Soviet Union for fifteen years, Young (the first American to uncover the mutiny twenty years ago) and Braden finally tell this remarkable story, drawing on recently declassified KGB documents as well as the Sablin family's papers. It is a gripping account of a disillusioned idealist forced to make the agonising choice between working within, or destroying, the system he is sworn to protect.