Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin
Neal Bascomb
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0618592067
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1905, after being served rancid meat, more than seven hundred Russian sailors mutinied against their officers aboard what was then one of the most powerful battleships in the world. Theirs was a life barely worth living -- a life of hard labor and bitter oppression, an existence, in its hopelessness and injustice, not unlike that of most of the working class in Russia at the time. Certainly their rebellion came as no surprise. Still, against any reasonable odds of success, the sailors-turned-revolutionaries, led by the charismatic firebrand Matyushenko, risked their lives to take control of the ship and fly the red flag of revolution. What followed was a violent port-to-port chase that spanned eleven harrowing days and came to symbolize the Russian revolution itself.
A pulse-quickening story that alternates between the opulent court of Nicholas II and the razor’s-edge tension aboard the Potemkin, Red Mutiny is a tale threaded with terrific adventure, epic naval battles, heroic sacrifices, treachery, bloodlust, and a rallying cry of freedom that would steer the course of the twentieth century. It is also a fine work of scholarship that draws for the first time on the Soviet archives to shed new light on this seminal event in Russian and naval history.
For readers of Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, Neal Bascomb's gripping adventure at sea is the story of courage, the power of ideas, and the fragile nature of alliance.
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the Romanian cruiser fired two shots, one a blank, the other with explosive charge, ahead of the Ismail, to warn it off. It turned back and anchored next to the Potemkin again, a grim omen for the sailors waiting for Bucharest's answer. Two hours later, Matyushenko and four committee members boarded a launch to receive their promised answer. Captain Negru had visited the battleship at dawn, once again trying to convince the crew to leave the Potemkin, even though he had yet to hear from his
Nicholas dismounted moments before the clouds finally broke, escaping inside just as the rain descended. The rest of his evening stretched before him: dinner first, then, perhaps, some time in his office riffling through reports about the state of his empire. He simply wanted the damned mutiny to end—was this too much to ask? In St. Petersburg that same evening, the chief of the naval staff stood outside the Admiralty, thronged by Russian and foreign journalists wanting to know exactly when this
the censors again, Nasha Zhizn concluded that the mutiny "shows that the sea of Russian life is restless to its very depths and that the rift between the government and the people has reached deeper into the masses." Its liberal cousin, Russkiye Vedomosti, denied official claims that the Potemkin was merely the result of propaganda efforts of "student-Jews," likening this explanation to blaming the flame for the fire. Loyalist papers tried to hold the line, one opining that "There were no true
utter words that honored the tsar. The scene revealed to him how difficult it would be to break the sailors from their instincts and traditions. "It was strange to hear the patriotic words of this prayer, here now, on a free ship, in the midst of the sea," he remembered. "They were a reminder that, though the old bogeys were thrown down, their power was still unbroken." After the prayer, the committee headed to the admiral's stateroom, where they found a sailor haphazardly banging on the piano,
volunteered, this time to lead the armed guard and speak to the sailors again. The committee hastily deliberated. Those favoring him, the majority, said the doctor had chosen to stay aboard when he could have left with the other officers; he had presented himself well earlier on the St. George; and the sailors would respect his authority as an officer. Only Kovalenko, who could not go again because he needed to prepare the battieship for the potential bombardment of the city, voiced serious