Red Mutiny (48 page)

Afterward, they all filed out of the palace to the Neva River, where several small steamboats waited to transport them to the Tauride Palace, the seat of the new State Duma. The sun shone brilliantly as they made their way up the river. People lined the banks and covered the bridges, showing support for their new representatives. They slowed down as they passed the infamous Kresty Prison, where many who had fought for this day remained imprisoned. The deputies waved their hats in salute. Finally they arrived outside the expansive neoclassical palace erected by Catherine the Great to honor her lover and favorite general, Prince Potemkin. With great ambition and resolve, the State Duma opened.

Matyushenko and his crewmates were far from forgotten during these momentous events. A day after the signing of the October Manifesto, the Black Sea sailors joined with soldiers and port workers to demand the imprisoned members of
Potemkin'
s crew be released. Led by Lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, who brazenly declared himself to be against the government, they broke into the prison and freed the men. Some were killed in pursuit, and Schmidt was arrested. This was the prologue to a fleetwide mutiny that broke out several weeks later (as Matyushenko had promised and had fought to foment). On November 12, sailors and soldiers alike struck in Sevastopol and marched through the streets. Cowed by the size of the protest, the police and naval officers offered little resistance. Sailors broke into the fortress armory; others took control of several battleships and torpedo boats in the harbor and raised red flags on their masts. The next day, Lieutenant Schmidt, freed from prison, took command of the armored cruiser
Ochakov,
with several former
Potemkin
sailors at his side. They threatened to take over the entire base.

Once again, Vice Admiral Chukhnin appeared to lose the Black Sea Fleet. With little other recourse, he ordered the fortress to fire on the mutinous ships. The bombardment set afire the
Ochakov,
crippled several other ships, killed and injured dozens, and forced the sailors to capitulate. Chukhnin arrested over two thousand sailors and had Schmidt executed for his trouble, but the incident proved that the
Potemkin
's rebellious spirit lived on in the navy. As a military force, it was ruined.

In the aftermath of Schmidt's revolt, Chukhnin again demanded that the Romanian government extradite the "nest of sailor revolutionaries" living in that country, blaming them for the spread of unrest within his fleet. Still the Romanians spurned him. Chukhnin then turned his attention to the court-martial of the imprisoned
Potemkin
sailors. Their continued presence at the base was too much of a threat.

On January 26, 1906, the trial finally opened. The proceedings lasted less than two weeks. Three crew members caught in Theodosia received death sentences, but these were commuted to fifteen years of forced labor after the prosecutors realized the punishment violated a clemency agreement in the October Manifesto. Three others earned lesser sentences of hard labor. Thirty-one sailors were imprisoned for two years, and the court discharged Officers Alekseyev and Golenko from service. As for Konstantin Feldmann, he had escaped from prison before the trial, masquerading as a soldier.

These results hardly satisfied a vengeful Chukhnin, but he could do nothing unless the mutiny's chief instigators returned to Russia and were captured. He would never see that day. The day after the
Potemkin
trial commenced, a Socialist Revolutionary—the daughter of a naval admiral—entered the Black Sea commander's Sevastopol dacha and shot him four times with a Browning pistol before turning the gun on herself. Miraculously, Chukhnin survived. Five months later though, a sailor named Yakov Akimov, employed as one of the dacha's gardeners, slipped a rifle onto the grounds and fired a single shot at the vice admiral, killing him. The tsar declared Chukhnin a national hero and had him laid to rest alongside Russia's most heralded admirals in Sevastopol's St. Vladimir Cathedral. In an adjacent cemetery, Captain Golikov, whose body had eventually washed ashore, was buried. His epitaph reads as follows: "God, have mercy on their souls. They know not what they do."

Matyushenko knew exactly what he had done and what he wanted to do, but by the start of 1906, he had lost his Romanian base of operations. The police there arrested him on suspicion of spreading socialist propaganda. Defying protests staged by over one hundred
Potemkin
sailors that Matyushenko be released, a Romanian court deported him to Austria-Hungary, from whence he traveled through Switzerland to France. Viewing him as a man without a home, wanted by few countries because of his high profile as a revolutionary, the French then sent him away. In June 1906, he stayed briefly in London before immigrating to the United States. He took a job at the Singer Sewing Machine factory in New York and reestablished ties with other Russian revolutionaries. That September, he met with Maxim Gorky, who helped him publish a memoir about the mutiny. Throughout his time in the city, Matyushenko campaigned tirelessly for the tsar's overthrow, gathering a band of devoted followers in his Lower East Side neighborhood, but he longed for action.

By year's end, he made his way back to France and organized a revolutionary group among the Parisian unemployed. His patience for debates and socialist tracts had worn even thinner, and he began to favor the anarchist views of his friend Arbore-Ralli. "Is there such a thing as a force for good?" Matyushenko wrote him from Paris. "Can a law be written to reflect what my heart and reason desire? My unfettered reason, my conscience, my pure desires—these are laws."

In January 1907 he prepared to return to Russia. He could not stand being away from his homeland, and more acutely, at a distance from his fight against the tsar. His comrades warned him not to go, sure that the manhunt pursuing him had not ended. But Matyushenko was determined. "I can't stay. I'm suffering here bitterly," he told one. In Geneva, he obtained a fake passport and a weapon. Unbeknownst to him, the Russian secret police already suspected that he might be coming.

Since the mutiny's end, Okhrana had continued the pursuit of Matyushenko as one of Russia's most wanted criminals. Although his trail had often gone cold, they had tracked him down over the past two years as he moved from country to country—Romania, Switzerland, France, Austria-Hungary, England, and the United States—but they were unable to win his extradition. Then, in May 1907, a report from a police agent in Paris informed Okhrana that Matyushenko was rumored to be heading to Russia. On June 6, his photograph was widely disseminated to border guards and police, with instructions to do everything possible to arrest him.

Still Matyushenko slipped undetected across the Russia-Romania border at the Dunay River, disguised as a fisherman. He arrived in Odessa on June 28 and rendezvoused with some revolutionaries. By chance, the house was under surveillance. The following day, Matyushenko left for the neighboring Black Sea port of Nikolayev, with the police following. They had no idea who he was, but since he kept the company of men who might have been involved in the recent theft of fifty thousand rubles from a Russian steamship, they considered it worth keeping an eye on him.

While Matyushenko was speaking to a sailor on a park bench in Nikolayev, the police moved in and arrested him. The report stated that he was found carrying a pistol, two spare cartridges, a notebook, a pamphlet titled "The Soldier," as well as papers that gave his name as Fedorenko from Poltava. It would be ten days before the police realized, from the word of an informant, that the documents were forged and that they had, in fact, captured Matyushenko himself.

The subsequent interrogation succeeded in revealing little more than the sparest of facts about his background. He admitted to being born on May 2, 1879, into a peasant family in a village near Kharkov, Ukraine. He had three brothers and two sisters. He had two years of schooling. He worked as a machinist before serving in the Russian navy. He was single and said he did not know if his parents were alive. The colonel whose job it was to interrogate Matyushenko must have marveled at him. Could this be the man who had brought the Black Sea Fleet to its knees?

On October 11, Matyushenko was delivered to the Sevastopol prison. One of the inmates recalled seeing him for the first time: "Two dozen guards, with revolvers and bare sabers, conducted a man in a black suit. His calm and clear gaze bore witness to his iron will and unshakable resolve. A whisper was heard in the ensuing silence: It's Matyushenko ... Matyushenko ... Matyushenko."

He was forbidden visitors; nor could he receive or send messages—such was the fear that he could incite a rebellion on command. A week after his arrival, he was put on trial, charged with killing an officer. No fewer than one hundred guards conveyed him from his cell to the courtroom and back again. He offered no defense, pleading guilty to the charge. His sentence was death. The October Manifesto had banned executions of revolutionaries, but the tsar wanted this
one
hanged, despite a public outcry, and the judges ordered it so. Matyushenko refused to appeal and, as a reward, was allowed to smoke a cigarette.

The next evening, the guards carried a coffin into the courtyard. Word spread throughout the prison that Matyushenko would be hanged the following morning. Yefim Bredikhin was one of those who heard the news. A fellow
Potemkin
sailor, he had also recently been caught in Moscow. He had been transferred to Sevastopol and sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor. He was unable to sleep; like many others whose cells looked out onto the prison courtyard, Bredikhin began burrowing a spy hole in the wall underneath his cell window. At 5:30
A.M.
, a guard came to his door. Matyushenko wanted to bid him farewell.

Bredikhin followed the guard through the prison corridors to the sentry's room. He was instructed not to say a word during the meeting. Then they led him through several locked doors to Matyushenko's cell. He found his friend surrounded by naval officers of various ranks, there to observe him in his last hours as if he were some kind of rare animal. Leaning against the far wall of his barren cell, Matyushenko eyed the officers steadily, his face stripped of emotion. Bredikhin felt tears well up in his eyes. Matyushenko stepped toward his comrade and hugged him close, whispering into his ear, "It's not worth crying." He handed Bredikhin the golden cross from around his neck, the one given to him at his baptism. Engraved on the cross were the words
SAVE AND PRESERVE
. When Bredikhin asked Matyushenko to whom he should give the cross, the guards grabbed his shoulders and dragged him out of the cell. He realized too late that he should not have spoken.

Minutes later, Matyushenko, wearing a heavy wool coat, was led to his death. When he stepped into the prison courtyard, all was quiet. Two companies of Cossacks and dragoons guarded the grounds, and a number of naval officers had come to watch the execution. The sun had yet to rise, and the single electrical light cast the long shadow of the hangman on the courtyard wall. The makeshift gallows consisted of a heavy pole fixed in the ground and a table. A naval captain read out Matyushenko's crimes against the state. It took over an hour. Twice, Matyushenko spat to his side, but otherwise he stood still. At the end of the reading, he called out to the sailors in the guard, "Farewell, comrades!" When he tried to speak again, the captain screamed at him to be quiet. Calmly, Matyushenko asked, "Why are you yelling?" A priest came over to offer a final absolution, but Matyushenko brushed him aside and walked straight to the gallows.

The sky began to fill with light.

There were four hangmen, each with their collars up to hide their faces, fearing reprisal for executing a man who was hero to so many. The judge at the trial had told the lead executioner, a broad-shouldered mammoth, that he should take special care with Matyushenko, as he was dangerous. The hangman had replied, "I've dealt with some that were ripping their chains to shreds; I can handle this one."

But Matyushenko did not have to be wrestled into position. He stepped onto the table, still in his chains and manacles, and told those officers who were gathered around him, "Hang me, you cowards. But know, the time will come when it will be you hanging from the lampposts in the street."

The lead executioner stepped up on a stool to loop the noose around Matyushenko's neck. He brought up the slack in the rope secured to the pole, stepped down, and without pausing, kicked the table out from underneath Matyushenko. The rope went bolt straight.

Drums rolled. Matyushenko twisted and swayed several feet from the ground for the next fifteen minutes. The drums stopped.

The hangmen brought down Matyushenko. They struggled to take off the manacles because he had wrenched out several of his joints during his struggle for breath. Finally, they put his twenty-eight-year-old body into the coffin and carried him away to the same makeshift cemetery where the sailors of the November 1905 mutiny had been buried.

Alone outside Matyushenko's former cell, Bredikhin had neither heard the charges nor seen the hanging. In their brief exchange, Matyushenko had managed to pass him a note. It simply read, "Today the sentence will be carried out. I am proud to die for the truth, as a revolutionary should."

In the end, the
Potemkin
mutiny and the struggles of 1905 failed to remove Nicholas from the throne. That would take another twelve years and a river of blood.

Seventy-two days after the State Duma opened its first session, the tsar ordered its dissolution after the deputies made demands, including the freeing of all political prisoners, for which he would not stand. Nicholas still held the reins of control and, despite his October Manifesto, he still believed in his divine right to rule the Russian Empire as he pleased. New duma elections were held; new deputies were elected; and this new body was soon dissolved as well. By 1908, Nicholas had effectively broken every key promise of reform. A lack of coordination among the opposition, the army's sustained loyalty, and feints at political change that quieted the masses and further drove the wedge between liberals and socialists—these had kept Nicholas in power.