Red Mutiny (17 page)

When Matyushenko stood down from the capstan, the slightly built stoker Nikishkin took his place. Known as "the Preacher" by many sailors for his philosophical ruminations and tendency to weave Gospel tales into revolutionary discussions, he spoke eloquently of how everyone needed to come together in this great struggle. For the first time they would choose their own leaders rather than have leaders imposed on them. The battleship would be ruled by a people's democracy.

As Nikishkin and several other revolutionaries explained, the crew would elect members to a committee that would have complete authority over the
Potemkin.
This sailor committee would hold open meetings that everyone could witness. It would control the ship's funds, uphold order, elect individuals for key positions in the day-today running of the ship, decide on a course of action against the tsar, negotiate with his government, and communicate with revolutionary groups in the ports. Choosing a committee to run the ship was based on the organization of the revolutionary sailor circles, which in part mirrored the communal leadership of the peasant villages, known well by most of the sailors.

Readily agreeing to the plan, the sailors called out potential candidates for election to the committee. Shouts of yes or no decided the matter. Within a half-hour, they had chosen twenty-five members and had elected Matyushenko as chairman. The committee included Pyotr Alekseyev, Stefan Denisenko, Ivan Dymchenko, Aleksandr Makarov, Fyodor Nikishkin, Yvtikhiya Reznichenko, Yfim Bredikhin, Ivan Lychev, Iosif Martyanov, and Frederick Vedenmeyer, among others. Whether they were Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, anarchists or Socialist Revolutionaries, was almost impossible to decipher. As committee member Nikolai Ryzhy recalled, "Not all of us were clear about the differences." Although drawn from every quarter of the ship, the majority were technical specialists—machinists, gunners, telegraph operators—who had been recruited from cities, were already skilled, and were to some degree sympathetic to revolution when they entered the navy, just as Matyushenko had been.

The committee members left for the admiral's stateroom to hold their first meeting. Much had to be discussed. The twenty-five sat around a long boardroom table covered with green felt. Their chairs were intricately carved and as solid as thrones. Most had never before set foot in the room. A bovine portrait of Grigory Potemkin, the battleship's namesake, hung on one bulkhead. Opposite to it could be seen a rectangular outline of dust where Tsar Nicholas's oversized portrait had hung before the sailors tossed it into the Black Sea.

Over one hundred crew members crowded into the room to watch the proceedings, standing against the walls or huddled on the leather divans. A cloud of cigarette smoke soon rose to the ceiling. At the meeting's onset, the mood was light. A stoker turned to his neighbor and joked, "And you, Your Excellency, would you like to have a smoke of Makhorka? This tobacco is too strong for a general's nose, especially nowadays." Laughter echoed throughout the room. Soon enough, the sailors turned to the serious decisions at hand.

First they settled the issue of where to take the
Potemkin.
The battleship required a steady supply of coal and provisions, and they needed a base from which to lead the revolution on land after the other ships in the Black Sea Fleet mutinied, as Tsentralka had planned. Whether or not these mutinies would happen before Vice Admiral Chukhnin sent a squadron of battleships after them, they could not know. Most certainly, however, Chukhnin would eventually send such a squadron. The sailors chose Odessa over Batum, Nikolayev, or the well-defended port of Sevastopol. Given the strikes in Odessa, they hoped to find support among its revolutionary organizations. With the
Potemkin's
guns backing the struggle, the people would be sure to overthrow the local government there.

Then came the question of who would captain the battleship, set course for Odessa, and lead the sailors in the event of a confrontation, whether from land or on sea. Obviously the committee would make
the strategic decisions, but they needed someone with the authority and experience of commanding a battleship to address tactical issues. Some pitched Matyushenko for this role, but he openly acknowledged that as a torpedo quartermaster, he lacked the skills for the position. Nor did any of the sailors on the committee.

As much as Matyushenko hated the thought, he suggested using one or two of the officers to run the battleship under the committee's direction.

"What do we need of officers?" Bredikhin asked. "
"'We
can navigate the battleship."

Senior signalman Vedenmeyer, a skinny, redheaded sailor, countered that the officers were harmless as long as they were always under the committee's control. Among those in the stateroom, he was most adamant on this position.

Matyushenko also raised the point that the crew, half of whom were raw recruits, were trained to take orders only from officers. They might look skeptically at—or rebel outright against—obeying someone beside whom they had slept and eaten for months. The committee knew that support for the revolutionary fight was not unanimous. They had overheard conversations indicating that some wanted to surrender and repent; others wished to flee to safety. No, the sailors needed an authority figure, an officer, to lead them and maintain discipline. Again, this person would be subject to the elected committee's direction.

"It's impossible to rely blindly on any of the officers," Reznichenko said, sensing the majority leaning toward this option. "Don't forget: they're the sons of noblemen. If they aren't controlled, they'll turn on us."

The committee took a vote of hands, deciding in favor of selecting an officer. They chose Ensign Alekseyev as captain and Senior Boatswain F. V. Murzak as his second in command. A couple of hours before, this ensign, who had curly blond hair, had pleaded for his life next to Golikov, lamenting that he was no less a sailor than any of them. He was spared then and now elevated to a new position by the committee because he had shown himself even-handed in his treatment of sailors (given the crew's estimation of his fellow officers, this was high praise). Before the war, Alekseyev had been in the navy reserves, serving on a merchant ship as a captain's assistant; therefore,
he was not viewed as the typical career officer. His education at a navigation school would also prove useful. Murzak had been drafted into the navy over a decade before as a second-class sailor and had climbed the ranks from there. As committee member Lychev later described him, "Murzak was a typical sea wolf. He loved the sea and his job ... and he knew the ins and outs of the battleship and what needed to be done."

Two hours into the meeting, the committee disbanded so they could ready the ship for departure. "But what of the flag?" a sailor asked. "How can we go to Odessa flying the tsar's colors?"

"True," Matyushenko said. "We should decide."

The stateroom erupted. "Destroy the tsarist flag! Down with it!"

"We're now in a state of revolution," Matyushenko agreed.

"I know!" another committee member said abruptly. "Vakulenchuk brought a flag. He hid it somewhere."

Fifteen minutes later the committee gathered on the main deck with the rest of the crew. They had spoken with Vakulenchuk, who lay dying in the infirmary, and found out where he had concealed the flag. In a solemn moment, a sailor stripped the St. Andrew's flag from the mast. While he slowly raised a simple red flag in its place, the sailors sang the "Marseillaise": "Arise, children of the fatherland / The day of glory has arrived!" The words drifted across the deck and over the open sea.

Soon thereafter, with the steam raised in the engine room, Ensign Alekseyev ordered the sailors to weigh anchor. Matyushenko stood at his side in the conning tower, keeping a watchful eye on him. The young officer had agreed to serve as captain only after hearing that the alternative was to join Golikov in the sea. Saving his own skin seemed to be his motive in helping the sailors.

As the
Potemkin
began to cut across the water, Matyushenko watched the sailors move about their tasks as they always had done, but now they were men acting on their own behalf. Nonetheless, he worried whether the sailor committee could maintain the crew's loyalty, given the awesome responsibility they had taken on. Betrayal was possible from many quarters, particularly from the petty officers, whose allegiance to the tsar had been cemented by long naval service (and better pay and privileges). After the meeting in the stateroom, Matyushenko had even given a revolver to Denisenko, who was
charged with running the engine room. "You might need this if it's hard to control your men," Matyushenko warned, knowing well that they had chosen a course, as had others throughout history, from which there was no return. "Don't surrender."

The French coined the word
mutinerie
in the sixteenth century to describe a revolt of troops against lawful authority, but its origin dates back to the earliest known wars. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of a widespread military revolt that occurred after Augustus Caesar's death. Three legions in Rome, many of whose soldiers were gray-haired and wrecked after years of campaigning, staged a mutiny and pillaged the countryside. "You'd do better to dip your hands in my blood," their commander threatened at the mutiny's beginning. "It is less of a sacrilege to kill me than to fail your emperor." Although mollified temporarily by this speech, the soldiers continued to resist for several weeks until Caesar's successor, Tiberius, stepped in. He had Praetorian soldiers assassinate the leaders of the mutiny in their camp.

The new emperor understood that mutiny challenged one critical foundation of the state: the legitimate control of military power. By contesting the state's command of the military, a mutiny contested its very survival. Therefore, no effort was too swift or too forceful when it came to suppressing a rebellion and treating its participants to the harshest of consequences, both on land and, especially, at sea. When sailors overthrow their officers and take over a ship, they become, in effect, a state unto themselves.

In the sixteenth century, during Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, several of his officers attempted to mutiny off the coast of Brazil. Magellan crushed the revolt. One officer was stabbed to death, a second beheaded, a third left to die on an uninhabited island. In 1790 the Royal Navy sent a twenty-four-gun frigate halfway round the world to scour Tahiti's shores in order to capture the mutineers of the famous HMS
Bounty.
The ones they found were brought back to Portsmouth, England, and condemned to hang in the port for everyone to witness, as a warning. In 1852, on the U.S. brig-of-war
Somers,
the captain skipped an official court-martial and hanged three young sailors at sea. They had merely conspired to act against their officers. Short of a death sentence—and sometimes worse—other
punishments for mutinous sailors included receiving 500 lashes from a cat-o'-nine-tails in weekly sessions of 125 each, so the convicted would suffer every stroke rather than die; being keelhauled, by which a sailor was dragged underwater from one end of the ship to the other against the sharp barnacles on the bottom of the ship's hull; or having
MUTINY
scored across the forehead and then being passed from ship to ship across the entire fleet to be flogged on each.

Some mutinies ended peacefully and redressed the sailors' complaints, but these were rare exceptions. In 1910, Afro-Brazilian sailors led the "Revolt of the Lash," seizing several Brazilian battleships and demanding that use of the whip be ended. They won their ban, though hundreds of sailors were later executed in revenge for their insubordination. Over a century before, in 1797, at the height of British naval prowess, sailors on sixteen of His Royal Majesty George Ill's ships refused an order to sail. They sent ashore their officers with a petition to Lord Richard Howe, demanding better pay and food and less harsh disciplinary measures. Howe avoided bloodshed with a mass pardon of the sailors and an agreement to improve their conditions. Only a few months later, however, a British admiral hanged a mutineer and gleefully announced, "Discipline is preserved!"

The law was clear. The British navy's Articles of War, the standard at the time, promised a court-martial and death to anyone participating in "any mutinous assembly upon any pretence whatsoever" or merely by "uttering words of sedition or mutiny." Striking an officer or failing to report traitorous words could lead to the same punishment. Russia's code of military discipline mirrored these articles but added a higher level of mutiny labeled "manifest insurrection." The minister of war defined this as an uprising of eight or more sailors that used or threatened to use force against an officer. The Russian military deemed this the most heinous crime, and though they could not improve on capital punishment, the tsarist government would likely suppress this kind of mutiny with particular relish and ferocity.

The sailors of the battleship
Potemkin
had already committed manifest insurrection and had killed seven naval officers. By flying the red flag of revolution, they added treason to their crimes.

As the
Potemkin
steamed westward toward Odessa, Matyushenko and Nikishkin went down to the infirmary to check on Vakulenchuk.
They found several sailors huddled around their comrade, holding vigil. With eyes closed and every breath labored, Vakulenchuk lay on a cot at the brink of death. Next to him, Ensign Vakhtin groaned miserably, suffering from the beating he had taken. Dr. A. S. Golenko, the assistant ship's surgeon, had been assigned to care for them, but he could do little for Vakulenchuk but bandage his wounds and hope that the sailors did not blame him for the inevitable.

Aware of his approaching death, Vakulenchuk asked a friend since his first days in the navy to promise to take the eighty rubles he had saved and send half to his father. The other half was to be distributed among the poorest sailors.

With despair in his eyes, Matyushenko looked at Vakulenchuk and then came to his side. "Grisha," he said softly.