Red Mutiny (9 page)

He turned and walked away, placated at least for the moment. His friend had as much reason as he did to hate his officers. One of nine children, Vakulenchuk had worked from a young age at a sugar factory with the rest of his family, eating sugar beet and sleeping on a straw floor at night, until conscripted into the navy. A few years into his service, he received a letter from his mother, telling him that the family was starving. There was nothing he could do to help. "Animals live better this," he shouted, knowing well that other sailors had received similar letters. Soon afterward, he was invited to a sailor study circle; then he met Yakhnovsky. When informed that joining the Social Democrats might land him in jail, get him exiled for hard labor, or even shot, Vakulenchuk said, "If I'm to suffer, I know that it's for the people."

By the time Vakulenchuk received his assignment to the
Potemkin,
the sailors idolized him. Although he could barely read when he entered the navy, he had become one of its most informed radicals, thanks to diligent study and the tutoring of Aleksandr Petrov. He organized study circles of his own, and sailors constantly looked to him for guidance. "Believe Vakulenchuk," a revolutionary named Stefan Bessalayev said to a new conscript when asked what role the artillery quartermaster played on the ship. "Obey his requests and know that he will lead us on the correct path."

Stories of his cleverness and equanimity were legend. In order to protect revolutionary gatherings, he asked the Sevastopol gendarmes if he could lead one of the sailor patrols that looked out for such activities. One afternoon, the mounted police came across a meeting. Vakulenchuk stood forward in his patrol uniform, informing the officers that he had already put the group under arrest. The ruse worked and propelled his authority to new heights among the men, Matyushenko included. Now, with their fight reaching its most critical stage, he was resolved to follow Vakulenchuk because he trusted him above anyone.

As dawn approached on June 13, Matyushenko remained awake.
The ship's movement through the sea made his hammock, attached to the overhead by two hooks, sway back and forth. Dozens of sailors closely surrounded him in the space below the gun deck on the ship's bow. The air smelled of sweat and toil, and over the din of the engines, he could hear his crewmates breath, some shallowly, others deeply, and still others with a steady snore. In the darkness, they looked like bats hanging from the roof of a cave. Their officers enjoyed private cabins with washbowls on the better-ventilated spar deck at the stern, typical of the divide between the sailors and the "stars of the nation," as the officers were considered by St. Petersburg society. Matyushenko's dream of seizing from these officers control of the tsar's most powerful weapon and bringing it to the side of revolution was too big for sleep.

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING
on June 13, the
Potemkin
arrived off Tendra Island. Apart from a black-and-white-banded lighthouse and a ramshackle fishing village, the island was nothing more than a long, thin stretch of deserted beach besieged by the waters of the Black Sea, which stretched to the horizon and beyond.

Connected to the Mediterranean by the Bosphorus Strait and sourced by five rivers, including the mighty Danube, the Black Sea stretches over 262,000 square miles, roughly twice the size of the North American Great Lakes. The kidney-shaped sea is bordered to the south by steep hills and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire; to the southwest by the low cliffs of Romania; to the southeast by the majestic Caucasus Mountains; and to the north by the ferdle steppes of what was the Russian Empire. From the steppe, the Crimean Peninsula juts like a shovel's blade into the sea. Below a depth of six hundred feet, these waters, by a twist of ecology, are anoxic and without sea life—dead. The sea's bottom is a dense black muck, suffused with hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas that smells of rotten eggs. Only the top layer of saltwater sustains sea life.

Called Pontos Axeinos by the Greeks, "the somber sea," its dark, bluish waters had been used as a profitable trading route for centuries in spite of its notoriously tempestuous weather. Beset by strong currents, abrupt storms, soupy fogs, and swirling winds, many travelers yearned for shore after a few hours on its waters. An American correspondent came up with a recipe for the experience of taking a steamer from Constantinople to Odessa during wintertime: "Import a typhoon from the South Seas, mix judiciously with a blizzard from
North Dakota and turn it loose. Add a frosting of snow and sleet, garnish with white-caps, and serve the whole from a tugboat, and you have a fair conception." On these perilous waters that Russia considered its own—regardless of several other bordering countries—the Black Sea Fleet protected the empire's southern borders and the region's rich exports.

The lone battleship dropped anchor off Tendra Island, near the northern coast. Golikov sent an ensign with six sailors on a launch to shore to telegraph Sevastopol that they had arrived but would delay firing exercises until the next day because of rough seas. While on the island, the ensign checked into acquiring meat, bread, and vegetables for the ship. He returned to the
Potemkin
with a list of prices, but the supply officer, A. N. Makarov, decided to buy provisions in Odessa, the four-hour journey notwithstanding. He gave no explanation for his decision or whether he was motivated by lower prices or by mutually beneficial arrangements with Odessa's merchants.

At 1
P.M.
, Makarov boarded the
Potemkin's
torpedo boat escort, No. 267 (
Ismail
), commanded by Lieutenant Pyotr Klodt von Yurgensburg. The supply officer brought along with him the
Potemkin's
junior surgeon, Dr. A. S. Golenko, two cooks, and a handful of sailors to carry the provisions. One among them was Pyotr Alekseyev, a sandy-haired orphan from Kazan, who was a revolutionary close to Matyushenko and Vakulenchuk.

The
Ismail
steamed westward toward Odessa, moving low across the water. Armed with two 37-millimeter guns and a pair of torpedo launchers, the small boat, 127 feet long by 11 feet wide, held a crew of three officers and twenty sailors; its quarters were claustrophobic, to say the least. That afternoon, with the additional company and a fierce sun overhead, they could not arrive at Odessa soon enough. Finally at 5
P.M.
, the
Ismail
passed around Langeron Point and entered the busy harbor.

Tugboats and transport vessels crisscrossed the waters as the torpedo boat moved toward one of the quays. The port district hummed with activity. Stevedores loaded and unloaded cargo ships carrying grain, sugar, tallow, canned fish, white iron, leather goods, cork, glue, and jute sacks. Customs officials scooted about, checking ship manifestoes. Merchant sailors gathered on the wharves for one last drink before their captains corralled them onto their ships. Weary travelers
disembarked from steamers, only to be shuffled aboard horse-drawn carriages that rattled thé passengers' bones as they made their way past warehouses and underneath elevated train tracks, out of the port.

Once Lieutenant Klodt docked the torpedo boat, Makarov and his sailors left the
Ismail
to buy provisions. They discovered the city above in the grip of chaos.

Two hundred feet above the harbor on the bluff of a limestone cliff stood Odessa, the Russian Empire's third-largest city and the jewel of the Black Sea. In 1794, only a Tatar trading village named Hadji-bey existed on the site, but Catherine the Great wanted a great imperial city built above the deep harbor and, thanks to efforts of the duc de Richelieu, a future French prime minister, she was granted her wish. Designed with grand parks, chestnut-tree-lined boulevards, and monumental Italianate architecture, Odessa looked more like a sister to Paris than a provincial Russian city.

Connecting the port to the city were the Richelieu Steps—or the
escalier monstre,
as some residents deemed them. With ten landings and 192 granite steps spanning a distance of 465 feet, the designers had not needed optical tricks to give the staircase an appearance of great height, but they had played with perspective nonetheless. As one climbed the staircase, the steps became narrower, from 70 feet wide at the port level to 41 feet wide at its summit, where a statue of Richelieu stood. Looking down from the top step, one saw only landings, whereas looking up from the bottom, one saw only a long line of steps leading to the sky. More than an access route to the city from the harbor, the staircase was also a symbolic gesture to the source of Odessa's wealth and character: the port.

Over the decades since its founding, Odessa had become the El Dorado of the Black Sea. The epicenter of Russian exports and an industrial giant in its own right, Odessa blossomed from a population of a few thousand when Richelieu arrived to half a million people by the nineteenth century's end. The wealthy built mansions along Primorsky Boulevard, which ran in a crescent along the cliffs overlooking the harbor. The city streets were filled with elegant storefronts, fine restaurants, bawdy taverns, and a jumble of residents from across the Russian Empire and around the world.

According to a Swiss tourist of the time, in Odessa "the Russian
jostles against a Turk, a German against a Greek, an Englishman against an Armenian, a Frenchman against an Arab.... Everything surges and mixes together: the dress coat, the swallow tail coat of the West European mixes together with the kaftan and robes of the Orient ... the high towering cap of a Persian and the turban of an Anatolian and the fez of a Morean and a Dutch sailor in a wide-brimmed low hat."

Despite its cosmopolitan, festive air, the city had deep-seated troubles that surfaced after two years of recession brought on by the Russo-Japanese War. Impressive colonnaded mansions lined the cliff-tops, but hidden in the outlying districts stood the homes of the poor, who worked the ports, rail depots, granaries, workshops, and factories.

Isaac Babel, the famed Russian writer who was a ten-year-old living in Odessa in 1905, later described these back streets. "Could we even grace with the name of a town the place where we then were and the streets we beheld? It was a great open space without houses filled with carts and oxen rolling in the dust in company with a mob of Russian and Polish peasants, all sleeping together in the sun in a temperature of 98 degrees." Long neglected and now facing the closure of many factories and worse poverty, these workers turned their anger on the factory owners and the police who protected those owners.

Rather than address the problems caused by the war, fundamentally the source of Odessa's economic difficulties, people attempted to scapegoat the Jewish townspeople, adding to the tension. Overall, those of the Jewish faith accounted for
35
percent of the city's population. Although thousands had found success through running small shops and trading enterprises, they were far from the potent force accused of strangling opportunity for everyone else. Nearly half of all Jewish families had trouble putting food on the table. With each passing day, however, threats of violence rose against their community. Similarly, police and military officials blamed the Jews for leading the city's revolutionary movement—whose influence on striking workers they overestimated. As a result, superiors gave their officers carte blanche to quash unrest with indiscriminate force.

In fact, the situation in Odessa mirrored those unfolding in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities throughout the empire. Many Jewish individuals certainly played a role in revolutionary organizations, but they were by no means dominant. Furthermore, the revolutionaries were often playing catch-up with and second fiddle to workers looking for improved wages, shorter hours, better factory conditions, and legal rights, yet who were generally apolitical—they simply wanted a better life. Also, the revolutionary movement had limited supporters, and they were splintered among various groups. In Odessa, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks fought for control of the Social Democrats (and the roughly one thousand workers sympathetic to their views in the city), while squabbling with their offshoot, the Jewish Bund. All three groups faced serious rivalry from Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists. These revolutionary groups all battled liberal leaders who spoke to the workers of a certain amount of change, but not a thoroughgoing restructuring of society. Above all else, nobody was in control.

Throughout the first half of the year, strikes had escalated in strength and frequency. Although Odessan revolutionaries called for workers to show solidarity with those killed on Bloody Sunday, they were met with skepticism. A few weeks later, however, Odessan workers began to strike for their own concerns. In early February, pharmacist assistants and workers in tailoring and printing shops appealed to their bosses for more money. These efforts were followed by walkouts in sugar refineries and on the docks. By April, leatherworkers, bakers, machinists, and rail-depot mechanics demanded better conditions. For the most part, management tried to negotiate meager concessions with strikers at the urging of city officials, who feared a repeat of St. Petersburg's troubles. Then in May, strikers called for a general assembly of workers to express their concerns to the city government, a move that revolutionary groups encouraged because of its political significance. Odessa's mayor rejected the petition because an assembly represented a little too much liberty of expression, in his opinion. In the next couple of days, ten thousand workers walked off their jobs. Yet a lack of organization among workers and the bullying of strikers by city officials kept the situation in check throughout May.

Their frustrations peaking, workers began to call for a general strike on Monday, June 13. After learning of their plans, the mayor lured thirty-three of their representatives into the police station under the pretense of opening negotiations with the factory owners. Then, to prevent the planned strike, the police arrested these representatives. This move sent Odessa's outlying districts into an uproar. Hundreds marched to the station, chanting, "Down with the police!" and "Long live the general strike!" earning the release of the jailed workers.