Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

The Deputy Procurator of Gorky explained the terms of the regimen decreed for me: Overt surveillance, prohibition against leaving the city limits, prohibition against meeting with foreigners and criminal elements, prohibition against correspondence and telephone conversations with foreigners including scientific and purely personal communications, even with my children and grandchildren.

It wasn’t until 1986, with Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, that Sakharov was finally allowed to return to Moscow for the last three years of his life.

That was still in the distant future for the officers and crew aboard the Storozhevoy getting ready to get under way this crisp early November evening. But if the Soviet Union’s most influential and famous citizen zen couldn’t stand up to the KGB, how could Sablin and his mutineers expect to do any better?

Just about every modern nation has its variety of secret service, but none of those organizations, not the CIA, not Britain’s MI6, not even the Nazi’s Gestapo, ever came even close to the all-encompassing power of the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnosti.

The KGB was into just about everything, with roughly the same powers and responsibilities as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Division, the Federal Protective Service, the Secret Service, and the Border Patrol and Coast Guard.

Besides spying on other countries, conducting sabotage and assassinations, the KGB regulated all thought, behavior, and speech in the Soviet Union. It controlled the arts, religion, education, the sciences, the news media, the police, and, in some ways most important, the military. Every unit and ship, including the Storozhevoy, had its KGB snitch embedded. On this evening Captain Lieutenant Aleksey Bykov, the KGB representative aboard the Storozhevoy, was gone. He’d been transferred to another ship, and his replacement wasn’t due aboard until after the refit at the shipyard.

The KGB kept track of the ethnic minorities across all of Russia and her republics, it stopped its citizens from skipping over the border to freedom, it kept a constant surveillance of troublemakers, such as Sakharov, and it made sure that every man, woman, and child in the country worked for the Rodina and for nothing else. No person, no thought, no ideal, was more important than the Motherland.

The KGB conducted its own arrests, its own interrogations, very often involving brutal torture: electric prods to the genitals, bamboo shoots under the fingernails, toenails ripped out with pliers, skin flayed off in long strips, hot branding irons under the armpits and in the groin, dentist drills without anesthetic, cold water hoses up the anus, not to mention various forms of psychological torture, including the use of a wide variety of drugs, including hallucinogens.

And the KGB conducted its own trials, usually in secret, the outcomes of which were never in doubt. After all, if the KGB had reason to believe you were guilty of a crime against the Soviet people, you must be guilty.

Lenin himself wrote that the “scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing more or less than unlimited power resting directly on force… not limited by anything… nor restrained by any laws or any absolute rules.”

Nothing had changed between the October Revolution of 1917 and the cold November night of 1975, except that the KGB, which had been christened the Cheka under its first chief, the sadist Felix Dzerzhinsky, was more efficient and scientifically brutal than ever.

One of the primary missions of the KGB was the suppression of dissidents and dissent, what was officially termed unorthodox beliefs, which included keeping things quiet. KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who would later become president of the Soviet Union, made it his prime mission to make sure every Soviet citizen toed the Party line: “…every example of dissent is a threat to the Soviet State… and must be challenged and… all the resources of the KGB must be mobilized to achieve this goal.”

Andropov even set up a separate organization within the KGB— the Fifth Directorate—to look out for and put down dissent anywhere and everywhere, including inside the military. The KGB was serious, and it was into this buzz saw that Sablin was leading the officers and crew of the Storozhevoy.