Valery Sablin
Captain 3rd Rank Valery Mikhailovich Sablin (, ) (1 January 1939 – 3 August 1976) was a Soviet Navy officer and a member of the Communist Party. In November 1975, he noticed the rampant corruption and stagnation in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, he then led a mutiny on the Soviet anti-submarine frigate, Storozhevoy (, , meaning "Sentry") in the hope of starting a Leninist political revolution in the Soviet Union. His mutiny failed and he was executed for treason nine months later. The incident inspired the Tom Clancy novel The Hunt for Red October. Early life Sablin was born in 1939, the son of a Navy officer. He graduated from the Frunze Naval Institute in Leningrad in 1960 and served in the Soviet Northern Fleet. He was never afraid to openly express his opinions. In 1962, when he was 23, he wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev with a request to “rid the Communist Party of sycophants and corrupt elements.” Sablin was lucky and he was just reprimanded. In 1973, he graduated from the Lenin Military-Political Academy and was appointed a political officer. Captain Nikolay Cherkashin, one of Sablin's colleagues, recalled: He had always thought globally… He tried to deeply