I was just reading the
Buryatia/Sablin 'Lets Play' over at Sufficient Velocity, and suddenly, a fridge horror/sadness realisation same to mind...
In OTL, we only knew about
Sablin's mutiny on board the Storozhevoy in 1975 because as he attempted to sail the ship from Riga to Leningrad, the ship sailed near international waters, alerting the Swedish navy, which witness the entire thing
(With the Soviets trying to later unconvincingly cover it all up as a 'training exercise' which they forgot to inform everyone else about). And even then, everyone at the time thought that Sablin was trying to defect to the West
(With the idea inspiring Tom Clancy's novel and later movie, "The Hunt for Red October"). It wasn't until after the end of the Cold War when records were declassified, that we learn about the fact that Sablin was not trying to defect to the West, but instead, he was trying to spark a second October Revolution against the Soviet government whom he saw as being corrupted and detached from the people. With many of the exact details of the mutiny coming from
Boris Gindin, a member of the crew who took part in the mutiny and later immgrated to the United States to tell Sablin's side of the story in a book that he authored in 2009....
In the TNO TL, with the rest of the world having very little knowledge of what exactly is going on in the mess that is the Russian anarchy, if anyone else besides Buryatia unites the Russian Far East, it is almost certain that Sablin and his band of idealistic revolutionaries hanging out at their opera house HQ will simply be utterly forgotten within a few years at most, with no one to morn or remember what they fought for.
(1) If they managed to overthrow Yagoda over in Irkutsk first before getting defeated themselves by someone else, they will simply be remembered as a historical footnote, something along the lines of 'Generic post-USSR communist warlord no.5', maybe with a side-note about how their leadership were all unusually young . Perhaps if they managed to get to the regional unification level first and established contact with the outside world (Especially if they try to gain the recognition from OFN), maybe they will become something similar to Che Guevara, with leftist students in the West putting their faces of t-shirts and stuff.
(2) If their initial mutiny got crushed by Yagoda, onyl for Irkutsk to later get defeated by someone else... Sablin and his buddies will simply be utterly forgotten by history. After all, who would even be interested in what a failed rebellion against a failed warlord fought for? Even those that lived though the event will simply lump it together with the generic chaos and violence of the Russian Anarchy of that period pre-unification.
(3) If the mutiny got crushed by Yagoda, and for him to later reunite all of Russia as the new USSR... Sablin will get utterly slandered by the NKVD's propaganda machine as nothing but a gang of upstart traitors, perhaps even making-up 'evidence' of them being spies loyal to the facist warlord Rodzaevsky, with them being compared to the likes of the Aryan Brotherhood.
In other words, Samara's capitulation pop-up message would be very fitting for any senario in which Sablin gets defeated:
'The traitors will never get to tell their side of the story.' If they don't at least reach the regional unification level first before getting defeated, any trace of hopes, dreams, idealism, and positive contribution that Sablin and his brand of would-be revolutionaries fought for will simply be wiped away from the pages of history forever, and they will forever be either forgotten, or remembered as traitors.