Red Mutiny (20 page)

After eating, Kirill returned to the forecastle. The coaling had been completed. More boats bearing gifts docked at the battleship's side. Some teenagers had come aboard and were touching the guns and climbing through the hatches as if the
Potemkin
was a playground, a situation that troubled the sailors, who felt possessive about their battleship. Kirill looked back to the port, where people continued to arrive in droves. At that moment, Dymchenko approached and invited him to a special meeting that had just been called.

At noon, Matyushenko stood at the head of the long table in the admiral's stateroom, surrounded by the sailor committee. He introduced each member to the leaders of Odessa's revolutionary parties, who were seated on stools and chairs about the room.

A couple of hours before, when sailor Alekseyev had alerted the Odessans to the mutiny, the revolutionary joint commission (a body of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Bundists, and Socialist Revolutionaries formed during the May strikes) met to decide how best to persuade the mutinous sailors to take over the city. Once they finished arguing over this, they commandeered some fishing boats and went to inform the
Potemkin
leaders of their plan.

"Will the workers follow you?" Matyushenko asked at the meeting's start, before the Odessan revolutionaries had so much as a chance to speak.

Sailor Reznichenko added, "Are they making political demands? Do they want the autocracy overthrown?"

"Yes," one of the Odessans, a Bolshevik, answered. "But they've no weapons."

Another jumped in with the joint commission's plan. "We propose to launch an assault with four hundred armed sailors as the spearhead, backed by workers and soldiers. The
Potemkin
will support the attack by firing from the sea. First, we'll take over the railroads, preventing more government forces from coming into the city. Then we'll move on the rest of Odessa."

Matyushenko listened to the plan, unconvinced. Kirill, who had slipped into the meeting during the introductions, sensed his skepticism. Although junior to those on the commission, Kirill interrupted. "There's panic in the city. The authorities have lost their heads. They
have no artillery, few troops, and the situation is favorable to a sudden attack. If we miss this opportunity, we allow our enemy to organize and strengthen themselves."

Swayed by his argument, a few sailors echoed Kirill, saying, "We mustn't lose this moment."

By instinct, Matyushenko wanted to act against the tsar's forces quickly and decisively, but the words of their former leader tempered his reaction now. Vakulenchuk had always told Matyushenko that the sailors could achieve their victory only by acting with the other battleships in the fleet, as Tsentralka had originally planned. Alone, they were lost. They needed to wait for the planned mutiny and then act together as one. If Vice Admiral Chukhnin sent a squadron after the
Potemkin
before this occurred, they had to be prepared for battle; the four hundred sailors (over half the crew) who were on land would be sorely missed. What's more, the ship's crew, who knew little about making a land assault, would not stand a chance against infantry troops trained for exactly that type of action. It was too big a risk.

Matyushenko explained this to the Odessans and pointedly concluded, "We must look toward the sea right now, not toward the shore."

The members of the joint commission sat back, stunned. How could the sailors refuse
them,
the revolution's rightful leaders? With the workers and the battleship's guns behind them, their victory would be assured. Could the sailors not see? At the very least they should send arms to the workers and begin bombing government buildings. That was their duty to the cause.

Despite protests, most of the sailor committee agreed with Matyushenko that they must await the Black Sea Fleet's arrival before they took any action. One member also explained to the Odessan revolutionaries that the only reliable force of sailors that could advance on the city were those committed to the mutiny. "If we go ourselves," he said, "then those left on the
Potemkin
may take the ship to Sevastopol instead of supporting us. The only option is to wait for the rest of the fleet. When it's joined us, we can take over the whole Black Sea."

As the committee got set to take a vote, a sailor entered the stateroom and approached Matyushenko. The crew wanted to know, he said, what fate was being decided for them. There was talk of abandoning the battleship to escape punishment, and many were nervous about the presence of so many civilians on deck. Were they relinquishing control to people who had risked nothing in the taking over of the
Potemkin?

"Gather everyone together," Matyushenko ordered. Then he told the Odessan revolutionaries to leave the ship before the situation worsened.

When the clock struck noon in his office, General Kakhanov, the military governor of Odessa, knew he had a decision to make. Few options were available to him, together with a haunting multitude of risks.

The sight of the
Potemkin
in the harbor had mystified him as much as it had the rest of the city. By protocol, the navy was to alert the port before a battleship's arrival, but no word had been received. Rumors of a mutiny on the battleship reached him at daybreak. The very thought was outlandish, yet at 8
A.M.
, Odessa's police chief informed him that it was true. A sailor, part of the detachment sent to deposit a crewmate's body on the pier, slipped away and notified a gendarme of the mutiny. Less than an hour later, Mayor Dmitry Neidhardt hurried into Kakhanov's office. A former officer of the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment, the spineless Neidhardt had neither the experience nor education for his position, but he had the tsar's favor, and his brother-in-law Pyotr Stolypin was the governor of Saratov (and future interior minister). Neidhardt told Kakhanov that he was leaving for St. Petersburg by express train to inform Tsar Nicholas of the situation—apparently, the telegraph system would not appropriately convey the news. The mayor asked the general to take command of the city and declare a state of martial law—though only the tsar could grant Kakhanov the power to do so. Nevertheless, Kakhanov took preliminary steps along that course, calling for more troops from garrisons within his military district, including an artillery brigade. His attempt to short-circuit the flow of Odessans to the port by sending fifty Cossacks to remove the dead sailor's body had proved Kakhanov's worst fears: the sailors were prepared to bombard the city.

At 10:30
A.M.
the head of the commercial port, Brigadier General Pereleshin, stormed into his office, demanding that a larger force of
troops be sent to disband the thousands gathering on his piers. His senior assistant, Gerasimov, had gone to the
Potemkin,
demanding to know who was in charge, only to be humiliated and turned away by Matyushenko. Before dismissing Pereleshin, Kakhanov asked him whether he had considered that the battleship might let loose a barrage of destruction on the city.

Even before the
Potemkin
arrived, Odessa had been descending into chaos. Two days of strikes had crippled the city. Kakhanov's troops were at siege with tens of thousands of workers; both sides had suffered losses and many more would die. Shops were shuttered. Factories were closed. People jammed the railway stations, fighting over tickets to get out of the city. Outright chaos was just a misstep away.

Now a mutinous battleship threatened Odessa with ruin. Revolutionaries had been spotted approaching the
Potemkin
—to plan a coordinated attack, Kakhanov suspected. From his window, he watched as more people descended the Richelieu Steps to the port where, he had been informed, propagandists were inciting the crowds to attack his troops and to start a citywide uprising. Kakhanov had been warned that other mutinies in the Black Sea Fleet could be expected.

Whether these mutinies ever occurred, the Sevastopol naval base was a day's journey away, and a squadron to combat the
Potemkin
would need time to assemble. In the meantime, the city could be bombarded by almost fifty tons of high explosives within the space of one hour, half from the ship's main battery, the other half from its assortment of secondary guns. One hour. Fifty tons. The
Potemkin
could launch this firestorm from more than five miles out, far surpassing the accuracy of the field artillery that Kakhanov had only just ordered. Furthermore, if the sailors somehow managed to lead a concerted assault on the city by land, he had too few troops to repel them.

Kakhanov felt trapped in a terrible corner. Responsible for one of the Russian Empire's most important and populous cities, he was at the mercy of sailors whom he believed to be scarcely better than beasts. As he saw it, he had two choices: first, quell the developing uprising in the port, thereby inviting an attack that would ruin the city; second, close off access to, or exit from, the port, corralling the unrest away from Odessa's center, and then wait for the sailors to leave or for the navy squadron to arrive. There was no question—he had to choose the latter. Kakhanov sent the order to his officers:
cut off the port from the rest of the city; any attempts to break through the line in either direction should be resisted with whatever force necessary.

At 12:30
P.M.
, Kakhanov telegrammed the tsar, informing him of the mutiny and outlining the measures he was taking to protect Odessa. He had set the stage for slaughter.

N
ICHOLAS BEGAN
his day as usual on June 15. He prayed, ate breakfast, and arrived in his study by 9
A.M.
The morning papers offered little welcome news.
Novoye Vremya
editorialized that his government had lost its moral bearing and was clearly resordng to violent suppression to stay in power. He put aside the newspaper to read the latest reports from his ministries and telegrams from the war's front in Manchuria: typical fare on a typically hot, quiet June day at Peterhof. An hour into his routine, an aide brought an urgent message from General Trepov, the deputy minister of the interior:

Your Imperial Majesty, I have received a ciphered report from Odessa that the battleship
Potemkin
has arrived there from Sevastopol and put ashore, at 4
A.M.
[
sic
], a sailor's body bearing a message on his chest that the sailor was an innocent victim of his captain. In revenge, the sailors killed every officer. At the same time, the sailors state they will support the uprising in Odessa with their guns.

The report originated from an Okhrana agent in the city. In his message to the tsar, Trepov, who was one of the autocracy's most vigorous defenders and widely known for his strong-arm tactics, urged Nicholas to declare martial law in Odessa.

At first, Nicholas simply refused to accept the report's accuracy. A mutiny in his navy? Every officer killed? One of his battleships supporting the revolutionaries? The thought itself was beyond imagination.

The Romanovs had always considered the military their most
prized institution, owing the greatness of their empire to its many conquests. But for Nicholas, the military was also an object of personal affection. As a child, he had attended countless parades and reviews, always wearing a miniature uniform of one of the regiments in attendance. He watched in awe as the soldiers snapped to attention and raised their swords and bayonets when his father passed down their lines. Later, as a young man, he served as a colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment, savoring the camaraderie with the other officers and the many ritualized traditions. At the time, he wrote to his mother that he was as happy as he had ever been. As the tsar, one of his ministers once declared, Nicholas "regarded himself as a soldier—the first soldier in the Empire." He even took it upon himself, when a new infantry uniform and kit were commissioned, to go on a forty-kilometer hike and personally test it. He further showed his affection for the military by choosing former generals, such as Trepov, for many of his government's highest positions.

Therefore, a mutiny within his beloved military was a bitter, personal betrayal. Over the past two years, a handful of minor incidents had flared up—a few soldiers or sailors refusing commands—but nothing of the magnitude Trepov would have him believe had occurred on the Black Sea.

Beyond his own romance with the military, Nicholas was well aware that his soldiers formed the bulwark of his state, especially against insurrection within its borders. Although the War Ministry occasionally complained, he had little choice but to use soldiers to put down revolts, since the police were incapable of managing them alone. If Nicholas lost the military's allegiance, he was doomed. He could hardly bear to contemplate that this had happened.

Alone in his study, Nicholas received more distressing telegrams every hour. There was no escaping the truth. His disbelief soon turned to anger. He approved an
ukaz
declaring martial law in Odessa, as Trepov had suggested. The tsar also instructed Trepov to strictly censor any information related to the mutiny or the uprisings in Odessa. Until the situation was in hand, the Russian people were not to know of the
Potemkin.
To General Kakhanov, he responded, "Immediately take the most severe, resolute measures to suppress the revolts both on the
Potemkin
and among the population of the port. Each hour of delay may cost rivers of blood in the future." In a telegram from the naval minister, Admiral Avelan, which came last and offered the same information provided by Trepov and Kakhanov, Nicholas handwrote on the page, "Where is the chief commander? I am
sure
he could deal with the mutiny and
severely
punish the rebellious crew." Nicholas expected Vice Admiral Chukhnin to deal quickly with the disgrace and have its instigators killed. Indeed, he was depending on him.

On the banks of the Neva River, adjacent to the Winter Palace, stood the Admiralty Building. A colossal structure running almost a quarter-mile in length and crowned by a soaring gold spire, this "maritime acropolis"—as its architect boasted—spoke of the navy's prominent place within the empire. Behind its walls, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet was meeting with a host of other admirals in a week-long conference to deliberate on the navy's future expansion.