Battleship Potemkin Mutiny
The 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship over rotten meat that became the era's symbol of collapsing tsarist authority.
It started with maggots in the meat. In June 1905, with the Russian Empire reeling from a lost war against Japan and a wave of strikes and uprisings, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, pride of the Black Sea Fleet, refused to eat borscht cooked from meat visibly crawling with maggots. When a senior officer threatened to shoot the men who objected, the sailors seized the ship's rifles instead. They killed seven officers, including the captain, threw the bodies overboard, and ran the red flag up the mast. The most famous naval mutiny of the century had begun over lunch.
Eleven days under the red flag
The rebellion was led by the sailor Afanasy Matushenko after an officer shot dead his comrade Grigory Vakulenchuk. The crew elected a committee and steamed for Odessa, a city already convulsed by a general strike. They laid Vakulenchuk's body on the quayside as a rallying point, and huge crowds gathered. The tsarist response was brutal: troops fired on the population, and hundreds were killed in the streets of the city. When the government sent a loyal squadron to crush the mutiny, its sailors refused to fire on their comrades and let the Potemkin steam through the line untouched. It was the most alarming sign yet that the armed forces, the regime's last line of defense, were no longer reliable. But the mutineers had nowhere to go. Low on coal and food, and unable to spark the fleet-wide revolt they had hoped for, they surrendered after eleven days at Constanta in Romania, where most of the crew took asylum. The revolt was put down, but it had exposed a crack in the throne's foundations that 1905 papered over and 1917 would blow wide open.
The myth that outran the mutiny
For most people the Potemkin is not the real ship but Sergei Eisenstein's silent film, Battleship Potemkin, commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution and released in 1925. It is a masterpiece of editing and propaganda in equal measure, and it plays fast with the facts. Its most celebrated sequence, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, in which tsarist soldiers march down a grand staircase gunning down civilians while a baby carriage tumbles through the carnage, never happened. There was real slaughter in Odessa in 1905, but not on those steps and not as Eisenstein staged it. He invented the scene, and it became one of the most influential three minutes in cinema, copied and parodied for a century. The Soviet state was glad to let the drama stand in for the history. The mutiny itself was a chaotic, doomed revolt over rotten food; the myth is a clean parable of the people against the tsar. Both are worth remembering, but they are not the same thing.