In 1975, a disgruntled Soviet officer led a mutiny on board a state-of-the-art Russian warship. Unlike the movie captain portrayed by Sean Connery, this maverick sought to cause a revolution in his own land – and almost sparked a war in the process. In 1984, an insurance salesman-turned-author named Tom Clancy published his bestseller, ‘The Hunt for Red October’. The book, and the 1989 film starring Sean Connery, depicted the hijacking of a Russian nuclear submarine by a Soviet captain determined to defect to the West. Yet, as this documentary reveals, the story that inspired Clancy’s fiction was equally dramatic. Clancy’s book had its roots in an uprising on the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy, or Sentry, in November 1975. The mutiny was instigated by Political Officer Valery Sablin, the second-in-command, who had grown unhappy with corruption in the Soviet state. “He saw the party elite line their pockets with oil contracts and diamond mines,” explains historian Gregory Young. Infuriated by a state of affairs that saw workers living in poverty, Sablin, a committed communist, decided to spark a new revolution. Sablin’s plan was to seize the Sentry in Riga and sail it up the Baltic Sea to Leningrad, where he would launch an uprising. He began by locking the captain in a compartment and calling the ship’s 16 officers to a meeting. With impassioned rhetoric, Sablin tried to persuade them to back the mutiny. “It really was the speech of his life,” says Young. In the event, the officers were split down the middle. Some, including Lt Boris Gindin, saw folly in the plan. “He was going against the military Russian machine that could destroy you in a second,” he says. Gindin and seven others were locked in the hold by the plotters. However, Sablin’s plan to sail out of Riga as part of a convoy was dashed when one of the officers who had voted to back him slipped off the ship and went to raise the alarm. Sablin had no choice but to sneak o