Valery Sablin

Captain 3rd Rank Valery Mikhailovich Sablin (Russian: Валерий Михайлович Саблин, Valerij Michajlovič Sablin) (1 January 1939 – 3 August 1976) was a Soviet Navy officer and a member of the Communist Party. In November 1975, he led a mutiny on the Soviet warship Storozhevoy (Russian: Сторожевой, Storoževoj, meaning "Vigilant") 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.

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. In 1973, he graduated from the Lenin Political Military Academy and was appointed a political officer.

The mutiny

On 7 November 1975, Captain 3rd Rank Valery Sablin seized the Storozhevoy, a Soviet Burevestnik Class missile frigate, and confined the ship's captain and other officers to the wardroom. Sablin's plan was to take the ship from the Gulf of Riga north into the Gulf of Finland and to Leningrad, through the Neva River, mooring by the decommissioned cruiser Aurora (a symbol of the Russian Revolution), where he would protest by radio and television against the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev era. He planned to say what many were saying privately: that the revolution and motherland were in danger; that the ruling authorities were up to their necks in corruption, demagoguery, graft, and lies, leading the country into an abyss; that the ideals of Communism had been discarded; and that there was a pressing need to revive Leninist principles of justice (Sablin was a strong believer in Leninist values and considered the Soviet system to have essentially "sold out").