The Last Sentry: The True Story That Inspired the Hunt for Red October

Although it bears only a passing resemblance to the Tom Clancy thriller, this account of a mutiny aboard the Russian destroyer Storozhevoy offers a revealing look at Soviet decrepitude, circa 1975. The hero of the story is the mutiny's leader, Valery Sablin, a political officer charged with inculcating Marxist-Leninist principles in the ship's crew. A humane and idealistic man, Sablin took said principles all too seriously, and decided to seize the ship as a platform for launching a revolution that would redeem Communism from the corrupt reality of the Soviet system. The authors' starry-eyed profile suggests that Sablin may be ""the freest man in the Soviet Union,"" but his rebellion seems little more than a quixotic farce that was snuffed out in a few hours; he apparently intended to sail to international waters and then demand that the Soviet authorities give him daily television and radio air time to broadcast revolutionary manifestos. What's more interesting is that he managed to persuade most of the ship's crew, in the course of a couple of fiery speeches, to go along with this scheme, an accomplishment that speaks volumes about the latent discontent with Communism. Ex-Navy officer and political scientist Young and ex-marine and online publisher Braden explore this conundrum by probing conditions in the Soviet military and by offering a sketchy rehash of Soviet history that sometimes reads like a primer for naval cadets. Still, their well-researched reconstruction of this astonishing incident reveals some of the brittleness of the Soviet Union's totalitarian facade. 30 illus.