Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Stanislav Smirnov
[REGNUM] At midday on June 20 (July 3, new style) 1905, the Russian St. Andrew's flag was lowered and the Romanian flag was raised over the battleship Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky. Sailors were descending from the gangway - members of the crew of the rebellious ship that had left Crimea for the Romanian port of Constanta. The mutineers were preparing to divide the captured ship's cash register and go home. On June 26 (July 9), a squadron of the Black Sea Fleet arrived from Sevastopol to take back the interned ship. The Russian fleet flag was raised again on the Potemkin, and a priest sprinkled the deck with holy water - to drive out the "demon of revolution".
Thus ended one of the key and incredibly mythologized episodes of the first Russian revolution. Which - both in Soviet historical works and in the public consciousness (including in modern times) - is considered in isolation from the Russo-Japanese War, which seemed to be going on in parallel with the "popular indignation" and independently of it. The rebellion on one of the flagships of the Black Sea Fleet is perceived as something also unrelated to the course of the war in the Pacific Ocean and on the fields of Manchuria. But is this so?
The question is not only abstractly historical (in connection with the 120th anniversary of the uprising and, at the same time, the centenary of Sergei Eisenstein’s brilliant film, which is also celebrated this year), but also relevant.
WERE THERE WORMS?
The drama on the Potemkin began on June 14 (27) and lasted for more than a week. One of the Black Sea Fleet's new acquisitions became the "stage". The main characters and extras were played by more than 700 sailors and 26 officers, led by the commander, Captain 1st Rank Yevgeny Golikov.
The battleship Potemkin, a new combat ship (length - 115 m, width - 22 m) with 305 mm main caliber guns, was built at the Nikolaev shipyard, launched in 1902, and then sent to Sevastopol for completion and testing. In 1905, the battleship went to sea to conduct training firing near Odessa.
Next, we cannot help but refer to Eisenstein's film, which formatted the perception of the riot on the Potemkin. One of the first episodes of the film can shock even now, let alone viewers of 1925. Rotting, wormy meat in close-up, a sailor's face distorted with anger and the title: "Brothers! Worms!"
The sailors, driven to despair by the officers' bullying, start a mutiny. Which, we note, could not be regarded by the command (especially in war conditions) as anything other than a betrayal of the oath.
As always, in reality things were a little more complicated.
The sailors were not kept on a "diet" of rotten meat. Flour, greens and fresh vegetables, as well as 28 poods (almost 459 kg) of meat were purchased in Odessa the day before the riot. With it, "not everything is so clear-cut."
The investigation into the mutiny showed that the beef was bought at a low price and, as they would say now, with an "expiring shelf life." There were no refrigeration chambers then, and some of the meat (the one that was not immediately used in the borscht) was aired. Here is the first alarm bell: for some reason this beef was lying on the spar deck, the upper deck, in the June heat, as if it was being spoiled deliberately.
"MAIDAN" ON BOARD
The ship's doctor unwittingly contributed - and here the film does not sin against the truth - by declaring the borscht edible. But the main thing is that two members of the crew quickly and harmoniously moved the scandal past the point of no return, after which a mutiny began.
They were a native of the Volyn province, artillery non-commissioned officer Grigory Vakulenchuk, and another man with a Little Russian surname, Afanasy Matyushenko from Sevastopol. Both sympathized with the Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and social democrats. Matyushenko also had experience in "protest actions" and was one of the instigators of the riot in the Lazarevsky barracks in November 1904. The command then went to meet the protesters, eased the conditions of service (this was the main demand of the sailors), and forgave the "ringleaders". But from that moment on, Afanasy Matyushenko was taken into the hands of the social democrats.
But let's return to the events on board the Potemkin. From school and Eisenstein's film we remember: Captain Golikov ordered to shoot those who were unhappy with the borscht, in response to this crazy prank almost all the sailors took up arms.
But in reality the situation looked different, judging by the research published in 2008 by military historian and archivist, Captain 3rd Rank Yuri Kardashev. Of the approximately 700 crew members, 71 people (9%) were active participants in the mutiny, 37 people (5%) were opponents, and the remaining 516 were a passive mass, wavering in their actions depending on the circumstances.
As the historian of the Russian fleet Vladimir Shigin notes, one of the key scenes of Eisenstein's film: the preparation of the execution with the removal of the tarpaulin (on which the captain allegedly ordered the bodies to be placed and thrown into the sea) is spectacular, but it relates to pirate films, and not to the real events on the Potemkin. But, judging by the testimony of eyewitnesses, the passive majority was drawn into the mutiny under other circumstances.
After the incident with the borscht, the captain lined up the crew on the poop deck, began to analyze the incident and called the guard - a murmur began among the crew: the sailors were afraid that everyone, including the innocent, could be punished "in bulk" for disobedience. At the same time, one of the officers ordered a tarpaulin from one of the launches to be moved to the deck. This coincided with the "meat" scandal and could have been perceived inappropriately - as preparation for execution. Kardashev believes that the sailors who drank a glass of vodka on an empty stomach could have become indignant.
This is where sailor Matyushenko showed his mettle: first he agitated for the refusal of dinner, forbade his comrades to take borscht from the galley, and then - when almost the entire crew had already gathered on the quarterdeck, including ten unarmed senior officers - the sailor ran out with a weapon to the lined-up team, shouting: “We’ve hanged enough, let’s hang them!”
SHOT FROM BEHIND
As eyewitnesses recalled, several members of the team immediately followed the call.
The first shot was fired by non-commissioned officer Vakulenchuk - he killed artillery lieutenant Leonid Neupokoev, who was trying to disarm the rebels.
According to one version, the propagandized artilleryman did this deliberately. According to another, another absurd accident occurred. A stoker named Nikishin (who apparently also seized one of the guns) who was on the forecastle fired at a flying seagull. The roar was somehow perceived as "officers shooting at brothers", after which Vakulenchuk "in response" dealt with Neupokoyev.
Be that as it may, after the first blood there is no retreat.
In the ensuing melee, Matyushenko personally shot and killed five of the seven officers who fell victim to the riot.
On his conscience are the deaths of senior officer Ippolit Gilyarovsky, senior mine officer Wilhelm Ton. The ship's doctor was thrown overboard. History is silent on who killed Captain Golikov. It is known that the commander tried to hide in the cabin, and when the mutineers began to break down the door, he came out. At first, the crowd discussed whether to "judge or hang" the captain, but someone from behind shouted: "Wait too long! A bullet in the forehead! Disperse!" The body of the shot Golikov was thrown overboard.
In order to understand the further course of the tragedy, it is necessary to place the events on the Potemkin in the context of two related events: the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian revolution.
CONTEXT OF THE UPRISING
During these weeks, the Japanese army was preparing to land on the territory of the Russian Empire - on July 7, 1905, with the invasion of Sakhalin, the last major land operation of the war began.
The Russian Pacific Fleet essentially ceased to exist after the Battle of Tsushima. At the same time, even taking into account the events at Mukden, there was no talk of any collapse of the front in Manchuria. But the unsuccessful outcome of the battle increased unrest in other fleets: many sailors of the Black Sea Fleet were afraid that they would also be sent to fight in the Far East.
In the rear, unrest was spreading, caused not so much by the hardships of war (they were hardly felt), but by the activity of revolutionary parties after the tragic events of 1905, coupled with the publications of the legal and illegal opposition press. Thus, in June, a strike paralyzed one of the industrial centers of the country, Ivanovo-Voznesensk.
It should be noted that uprisings were also "ignited" in the army with enviable regularity. A day after the mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet began, a mutiny began in the Baltic - at the naval base in Libau (now Jelgava in Latvia). At the same time, on June 21, an armed uprising began in one of the largest cities of the Kingdom of Poland - Lodz - under leftist and separatist slogans.
Nervousness about being sent to war, coupled with revolutionary agitation penetrating the fleet, plus objective problems - all this turned at least part of the sailor mass into easily flammable material. Which there was someone to set on fire.
JAPANESE "GRANTS"
All this time, the "Special Institute" (also known as the "Military Mission"), headed by the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, General Motojiro Akashi, was actively working in neutral Sweden since 1904. This residency actively worked with the separatists of the Russian outskirts. From the Akashi mission, tranches were sent to the leader of the Georgian Socialist-Federalists, Georgy Dekanozov (Dekanozishvili), and the leader of the Finnish Party of Active Resistance, Konni Zilliacus.
Overall, during the war years, the "Special Institute" spent about 1 million yen (86 million modern dollars) on work with oppositionists and revolutionaries throughout the Russian Empire. Finn Zilliacus organized two conferences of the Russian opposition with Japanese "grants."
The first one gathered in Paris. It was attended by liberals from the "Union of Liberation" (led by the future leader of the Kadets and head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government Pyotr Milyukov ), as well as leftists. Socialist Revolutionaries arrived, including the head of the Combat Organization Yevno Azef (who reported on the progress of the event to the St. Petersburg Police Department), as well as Belarusian, Latvian, Transcaucasian and Polish nationalists and socialists.
Soon the Finnish "dispatcher" of Japanese "grants" organized the Geneva Conference - under the formal leadership of Georgy Gapon, who had "relocated" abroad, and with the participation of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed by Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin. At that time, Ilyich lived in the same Geneva.
The reports of a direct meeting between Lenin and Akashi are disputed by many historians. As is the version that it was with Japanese money that the Bolshevik leader in January 1905 established the publication of the newspaper Vperyod in Geneva, the successor to Iskra, which, along with the Socialist Revolutionary and liberal newspapers, fanned the flames of rebellion in the empire.
It is known that the Menshevik leader Julius Martov was against contacts with the Japanese. However, the Socialist Revolutionaries and people from the entourage of priest Gapon seized the opportunity. Money was received through General Akashi to purchase weapons (16 thousand rifles, 3 thousand revolvers, 3 million cartridges, as well as 3 tons of dynamite and other explosives), which were planned to be delivered by sea and "landed" at several points in the Grand Duchy of Finland. For these purposes, the steamship "John Grafton" was purchased in London.
The project involved Finnish and Latvian separatists, Socialist Revolutionaries (the group of Pyotr Rutenberg, the future liquidator of double agent Azef) and Bolsheviks led by the future People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR Maxim Litvinov. The Grafton, having reached Finland from Britain, ran aground on the shore on September 8, 1905, and sank, which was very unfortunate for the cause of the revolution. The weapons were only partially removed from the sides, and the crew fled. The remaining "barrels" were raised from the bottom a few weeks later by an expedition led by the outstanding Russian diver, Second Lieutenant Pavel Gurdov. But weapons, "grants" and subversive literature were also supplied to the revolutionaries in other ways.
The mutinous heavily armed battleship was a much more valuable acquisition for the revolution than the steamship Grafton. It was not for nothing that Vladimir Ilyich seriously intended to move from Switzerland to Romania in order to coordinate the uprising from close range.
SHOTS FIRED AT ODESSA
At first glance, the spontaneously rebellious sailors had no plan of action, other than an unformed desire to support the revolution. That was how history was presented in Soviet textbooks. But the mutineers quickly developed a plan: to take the battleship to Odessa, where anti-government rallies were taking place at that time, and spread the rebellion to other ships of the Black Sea Fleet.
Here two people who have remained in the shadows until now enter the story.
These are two members of the Odessa "United Commission" (created by two city groups of the RSDLP, Bolshevik and Menshevik, to coordinate protests) - Mensheviks Konstantin Feldman and Anatoly Brzhezovsky. In other sources, the Polish surname is rendered in Russian - Berezovsky. The Bolshevik part of the commission was in contact with Geneva.
According to one version, Feldman and Berezovsky-Brzhezovsky secretly got on board in Sevastopol, as part of a group of repair workers; according to another, they got on the ship when the Potemkin approached Odessa on June 27, and the Social Democrats from the United Commission began “relationships” with the anarchist Matyushenko.
It is known that it was Comrade Feldman who proposed the bombing of Odessa, after which two shots were fired at the city from 152 mm guns with high-explosive and armor-piercing shells. He also insisted that the crew land troops and join the uprising. At the suggestion (actually the order) of the revolutionaries, the Andreevsky flag was lowered on the battleship and the red flag was raised.
This episode marked the end of Eisenstein's film. But the real story of the rebellion was just beginning.
The Odessa commission had serious plans. During the revolution, small "republics" were proclaimed all over the country, from Georgian Guria to Chita, but more interesting prospects were opening up here.
If we are to believe the report of an eyewitness of the events, journalist Stanislav Orlitsky (though it was written after the suppression of the revolution, in 1907), one of the members of the Bolshevik-Menshevik "Commission" Sergei Zuckerberg literally stated the following: "The sailors are on our side. And since the battleships are ours, the entire south will be ours. Here a Southern Republic is being created with Crimea and the most fertile lands of Volyn and Podolia... Let the old, uncultured, oppressive Moscow perish from internal strife...".
In any case, the speeches of the “committee members” (as the members of the “United Commission” were also called) featured a name that all of Russia would recognize within a few months.
This was an officer of the Black Sea Fleet, Lieutenant Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt, the son of the hero of the defense of Sevastopol and at the same time a man with a strange biography, either a “non-party socialist” thirsting for a feat, or a nervous patient, possessed by delusions of grandeur (in any case, he had been a patient in psychiatric clinics more than once).
But in June 1905, at the height of unrest in Odessa, Schmidt found himself involved not in a political but in a quasi-criminal scandal.
This, like the story of the mutiny on the cruiser Ochakov, which gave birth to a rich mythology (and at the same time the "children of Lieutenant Schmidt" Ilf and Petrov), will require a separate story. For now, let us note that during the Potemkin adventure, the strange officer did not have time to "come in handy."
Thanks to the energetic measures taken by the fleet commander, Vice-Admiral Grigory Chukhnin, and other commanders, naval and army, the revolutionary rebellion in Odessa and on the Black Sea Fleet ships was suppressed at the cost of half the city's annual budget. For the "reprisal" Admiral Chukhnin was shot by a Socialist Revolutionary terrorist in 1906, but the moment for a large-scale uprising was missed.
THE INGLORIOUS FATE OF THE INSTIGATORS
Upon learning of this, the battleship's crew was at a loss. Many realized the criminality of what they had done, but it was too late. Having assessed the situation, the Potemkin-Tavrichesky weighed anchor and headed for Romania, where the crew asked for political asylum. The Romanian authorities put forward their own conditions: the sailors surrender as military deserters, although without extradition.
At first, this did not suit the mutineers, and for some time the Potemkin, pursued by the government squadron, chaotically scurried around the Black Sea (Constanza, Feodosia, Constanza again) in search of at least some way out. The way out was the "relocation" of the mutineers, whose well-being was ensured by the plundered ship's cashbox.
It is not only a matter of glorification in the Soviet era. In 1905, a mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet after the destruction of the Pacific Fleet damaged Russia's international position. Japan, which was at war, did not hide its joy. Britain demanded that Turkey (in violation of the London Convention of 1841, the predecessor of the current Montreux Convention) allow warships into the Black Sea in order to "safeguard merchant ships." Romania "bravely" refused to extradite war criminals from the Potemkin to St. Petersburg, and Turkey did not help Russia put pressure on Bucharest.
As a result, additional arguments emerged in favor of ending the war with Japan as quickly as possible (which the American mediators insisted on) – it was necessary to pacify our own south.
But if globally Operation Potemkin was almost successful for our opponents, the immediate executors did not gain laurels. Matyushenko, for whom the Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks fought, went on a European tour, giving interviews. But his career ended quickly.
The instigator of the rebellion was sent to Russia for terrorist work, arrested in Odessa with a load of bombs and executed by sentence of a military field court in Sevastopol in October 1907.
Already in July 1905, the trial of the rebels began in Odessa - those who landed in Feodosia during the riots and were later arrested. Three were sentenced to death, which was replaced by 15 years of hard labor by imperial decree. Three more received shorter terms of hard labor, the rest were sentenced to prison companies.
The officers who survived the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin-Tavrichesky became the object of revenge after October 1917. In particular, in 1918, midshipman Boris Vakhtin was arrested by the Bolsheviks and killed in Sevastopol.
What followed is well known: the glorification of the uprising in Soviet times and an uncertain attitude in modern times.
In post-Soviet Ukraine, the mutiny on the Potemkin is interpreted as a Ukrainian uprising in "Ukrainian" Odessa against "Russian imperialism," in which "Panas Matyushenko" turns out to be the main hero. Perhaps, in modern Russia, a mutiny in wartime should no longer be perceived as a positive event in national history.
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