Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev (30 June 1926-28 August 1998) was a Soviet Navy captain who commanded the ill-fated Soviet submarine K-19 during the Cold War.
Biography[]
Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev was born in Nizhni Novgorod, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1926, and he was drafted into the Red Army in 1943. He joined the Black Sea Fleet during the late 1940s after graduating from the Frunze Higher Naval School, and he was given command of his own submarine in 1954 and was appointed to command the newly-commissioned K-19 in 1958. On 4 July 1961, water pressure caused his submarine's reactor to begin to overheat during an exercise near Greenland; the explosion of the submarine would damage a nearby NATO base and could cause a nuclear war with the United States. Eight crewmen sacrificed themselves to save the reactor core, and the K-19 was towed back to harbor. Zateyev was subsequently employed on shore and never held another naval command, and he retired in 1986. He died in 1998.