In November 1975, on the 58th anniversary of the October Revolution, a young officer of a Soviet anti-submarine frigate led a mutiny aimed at recovering the Bolshevik revolution. Inspired by the rebellion of the battleship Potemkin in 1905, which was immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s great film, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet’s frigate Sentinel headed to Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), cradle of the 1917 revolution. Fearing a chain reaction, the Kremlin invented that the young sailors in rebellion were trying to hijack the frigate and defect to Sweden.
Captured, court-martialed, and convicted , the historical truth would be revealed only two decades later, when the trial documents came to light. In the novel by Tom Clancy (1984) and the film of the same name The Hunt of the Red October (1990), inspired by the events of 1975, the captain of a nuclear submarine (with nuclear missiles) tries to defect, pursued by the Soviet fleet, while NATO believes it to be an attack, and world war almost breaks out. The thriller and the Hollywood film are closer to the official Moscow version than to the heroic action of the Leninist sailors of the Baltic.
This example illustrates to what extent the deficits in the history of revolutions and socialisms are not made up for by serials, novels, or films, in which simplifying, toxic, or fantastic “narratives” of what really happened often proliferate. Historical gaps not only imply ignorance but also mark our visions of the world a.
