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Vasili Sakhnovsky was born on 1 March 1886 in Dorogobuzh, Smolensk Governorate, Russian Empire [now Smolensk oblast, Russia]. He was a director and writer, known for The Adventures of the Three Reporters (1926), Krestovik (1927) and Anna Karenina (1953).
- Director, Writer, Additional Crew
- March 1, 1886
- Vasili Sakhnovsky
- February 26, 1945
Actor: Anna Karenina. Vasili Sakhnovsky is known for Anna Karenina (1967), Sled (2007) and Palach (2015).
- Actor
- Vasili Sakhnovsky
Vasili Sakhnovsky. Actor: Anna Karenina. Vasili Sakhnovsky is known for Anna Karenina (1967), Sled (2007) and Palach (2015).
Jun 3, 2020 · Vasili Sakhnovsky as Seryozha (as Vasya Sakhnovsky) Anatoly Kubatsky as Camerdiner Kapitonich. Yuri Volyntsev as Vronsky’s brother-soldier. Film Review for Anna Karenina. When adapting any classical work of literature, a director can shine like a beacon of creative light if understands the work and organically adds his own touches to it.
- Overview
- 'We’re gonna blast them now!'
- What’s happening?
Temperament matters.
Especially when nuclear weapons are involved and you don’t—you can’t—know what the enemy is up to, and you’re scared. Then it helps (it helps a lot) to be calm.
The world owes an enormous debt to a quiet, steady Russian naval officer who probably saved my life. And yours. And everyone you know. Even those of you who weren’t yet born. I want to tell his story...
It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.
The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?
This actually happened.
Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn’t surface without being exposed. The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”
Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, “thus,” wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, “starting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.”
But it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.
He was 34 at the time. Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. He was Savitsky’s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba—and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.
What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this “guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”
Arkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man, simply talked Savitsky down.
The Russian crew couldn’t tell what was going on above them: They’d gone silent well before the crisis began. Their original orders were to go directly to Cuba, but then, without explanation, they’d been ordered to stop and wait in the Caribbean. Orlov, who had lived in America, heard from American radio stations that Russia had secretly brought missiles to the island, that Cuba had shot down a U.S. spy plane, that President Kennedy had ordered the U.S. Navy to surround the island and let no one pass through. When Americans had spotted the sub, Savitsky had ordered it to drop deeper into the ocean, to get out of sight—but that had cut them off. They couldn’t hear (and didn’t trust) U.S. media. For all they knew, the war had already begun.
We don’t know how long they argued. We do know that the nuclear weapons the Russians carried (each ship had just one, with a special guard who stayed with it, day and night) were to be used only if Russia itself had been attacked. Or if attack was imminent. Savitsky felt he had the right to fire first. Official Russian accounts insist he needed a direct order from Moscow, but Archipov’s wife Olga says there was a confrontation.
She and Ryurik Ketov, the gold-toothed captain of a nearby Russian sub, both heard the story directly from Vasili. Both believe him and say so in this PBS documentary. Some scenes are dramatized, but listen to what they say...
As the drama unfolded, Kennedy worried that the Russians would mistake depth charges for an attack. When his defense secretary said the U.S. was dropping “grenade”-size signals over the subs, the president winced. His brother Robert Kennedy later said that talk of depth charges “were the time of greatest worry to the President. His hand went up to his face [and] he closed his fist.”
The Russian command, for its part, had no idea how tough it was inside those subs. Anatoly Andreev, a crew member on a different, nearby sub, kept a journal, a continuing letter to his wife, that described what it was like:
For the last four days, they didn’t even let us come up to the periscope depth… My head is bursting from the stuffy air… Today three sailors fainted from overheating again… The regeneration of air works poorly, the carbon dioxide content [is] rising, and the electric power reserves are dropping. Those who are free from their shifts, are sitting immobile, staring at one spot… Temperature in the sections is above 50 [122ºF].
- Robert Krulwich
Three reporters and an office girl are trying to stop a bacteriological strike by some powerful western business leaders against the USSR. Сast and Crew. Stars. Boris Barnet. Vladimir Fogel. Natalya Glan. Igor Ilyinsky. Sergey Komarov. Ivan Koval-Samborsky. Natalya Rozenel. Anel Sudakevich. Mikhail Zharov. Dmitri Kapka. Full Cast. Directors.
Vasili Sakhnovsky Active - 1926 - 1926 | Birth - Mar 1, 1886 | Death - Feb 26, 1945 | Genres - Action-Adventure , Comedy , Crime , Romance , Science Fiction | Subgenres - Silent Film
