By Gregory D. Young and Nate Braden
Naval Institute Press, 2005
288 pp., $28.95

Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

Most authors would give anything for this book-cover blurb: "The true story that inspired The Hunt for Red October." Yet the reference to Clancy is ultimately superfluous. This account of a mutiny aboard a Soviet warship proves again that truth is more exciting than fiction.

The story of the destroyer Storozhevoy (Russian for sentry) has long been an allegorical tale in the West — an example of how the giant Soviet military had feet of clay.

In 1975, Valery Sablin, the "zampolit" (political commissar) aboard the Storozhevoy, allegedly convinced the crew to hijack the ship from its home port in Latvia and sail to asylum in Sweden. After a frantic chase across the Baltic Sea by Soviet warships and aircraft, the Storozhevoy was bombed and captured, and Sablin shot.

Young, one of the co-authors of The Last Sentry, was a naval officer who wrote an obscure thesis on the incident. Tom Clancy discovered it in the basement of the Naval Academy library, and the rest is fame and fortune.

Except that the real history was far more complicated. Using recently declassified KGB records and interviews with the Sablin family, the authors paint a picture of a man who was more Don Quixote than freedom fighter.

Capt. Valery Sablin was a devoted communist, a zealot who believed in Marxist-Leninism. Yet indoctrinating underfed and brutalized Soviet sailors led to his terrible realization that he had labored for a lifetime on behalf of a lie. The Soviet Union wasn't led by fiery Marxists bent upon creating utopia; it was ruled by decrepit, corrupt old bureaucrats who had led their nation into cynicism, apathy and bankruptcy.

Fifteen years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sablin decided to do something about it. The Kremlin's worst nightmare had come true. A zampolit, whose job was to ensure the political reliability of the military, would be the one to instigate a revolt.

Western observers believed that Sablin was attempting to defect to Sweden. Given a chance, what else would Soviet citizens do but flee their country for a more comfortable life? But preposterous as it seems, Sablin's plan was to sail his ship to Leningrad and broadcast a radio message exhorting the populace to overthrow their rulers and begin a real communist revolution. In his mind, he was following a proud Russian naval tradition — mutinous sailors on the battleship Potemkin in 1905 and the cruiser Aurora in 1917 had both been catalysts for revolution. Sablin's revolution ended a few months later with a gunshot in a dreary KGB dungeon.

Young and Braden try to portray their protagonist in a sympathetic light. Some readers will see Sablin as a fallen hero in the struggle against communism. Yet it is important to remember that Sablin was a genuine communist. He was not a saint. He lied to the Storozhevoy's crew to secure their cooperation. He gambled the lives of 150 men in a hopeless plan that only a chronic romantic could believe would succeed.

Just how separated Sablin was from reality was recalled by one of the destroyer's crew: "He didn't think they'd ever execute him. He never even considered the fact that he might be shot for what he did. He thought that he'd be reprimanded somehow, but would eventually return to the navy and continue to serve."

One wonders whether Sablin would have been any happier in the U.S. Navy. How would he have felt about pork-barrel defense contracts? He seemed to be a man who was too good for his own good.

The Last Sentry is interesting more for its incredible story than the presentation, which betrays its origins as an academic thesis. While Sablin is the focus of the story, the reader doesn't walk away with a sense of who he really was. That may not be the fault of the authors; perhaps the price of revolt within a dictatorship is obscurity. Yet despite the efforts of the Kremlin to bury the incident, the world knows of Valery Sablin. He had his vindication.