Red Mutiny (22 page)

The battleship responded by semaphore: "Do not go into the harbor.... Stop the engine and stand at anchor.... Captain to come aboard the
Potemkin.
"

Surprised by the
Potemkin's
presence, but aware that it might have
something to do with the reported strikes in the city, Eikhen complied. He dropped anchor 160 yards off the
Potemkin
's stern and then went by boat to report to its captain. A few minutes later he climbed onto the battleship's deck in his full dress uniform, expecting to be greeted by an officer. There was none in sight. He thought some emergency situation had occurred until fifteen sailors surrounded him with rifles. Confusion and then horror seized him.

"You're under arrest." Matyushenko stepped forward.

Eikhen was speechless. Two sailors grabbed him by the shoulders, and he finally stammered, "My men are always very comfortable."

"Hand over your saber," Matyushenko said, brandishing a revolver. Reznichenko was by his side, holding a rifle.

"Let me go to my ship, brothers," Eikhen said, struggling against the sailors. "I won't try to run away, you know. I have a woman with a baby on board."

"Your wife?" Reznichenko asked.

"No, someone's else's."

The crew roared with laughter.

"It's the wife and child of your second officer, Gilyarovsky," Eikhen explained. The sailors grew sober at the news. "Brothers, let me go to her. She must be protected from insult."

"Are we criminals? Have no fear ... we're not like you. She will not be touched," Matyushenko said. He and Reznichenko pointed their guns at the colonel. "Now you'd better go along with us, or—"

Eikhen dropped his saber to the deck with a clang. In disgrace, he was led to the wardroom where the other officers were being held. Along the way, Ensign Alekseyev sidled up to him and whispered the obvious: "There are troubles on the battleship."

When the colonel had disappeared, Matyushenko asked his signalman to send another message to the transport ship: "Commander of the
Vekha
requests the officers to come on board the
Potemkin
"

Minutes later, two officers and the ship's doctor approached the
Potemkin
in another boat. Also surprised by the sailors, they were promptly arrested. Another signal instructed the
Vekha
to position itself close to the
Potemkin
's port side. Then Matyushenko led a host of armed guards onto the transport ship. Devoid of officers, the
Vekha
easily fell into their hands. Their deception had worked: the
Potemkin
took control without firing a shot.

The
Vekha's
sailors told Matyushenko that Eikhen and the other officers treated them decently and asked him to spare their lives. Considering their words, he went back to the
Potemkin
to see the officers. Perched on stools, they looked pitiful and scared as Kirill and Feldmann preached to them about the revolution's inevitability and how they would be "judged for all their crimes." Matyushenko told Kirill, who, he had realized, was a gifted speaker, to go to the
Vekha
and convince its sixty sailors to join their fight. The ship's leaders would decide what to do with these officers—as well as, finally, their own—that night. As for Gilyarovsky's wife and young daughter, they would be brought into Odessa as soon as possible. Fearing the woman might go into shock or become hysterical, the sailors decided not to tell her about her husband's death until she was safely on shore and no longer afraid for her or her daughter's life.

When the committee reassembled, the sailors were buoyant. Their revolutionary squadron now numbered three ships. The
Potemkin
was stocked with coal and provisions and the crew was more unified in purpose than ever before. Matyushenko led the discussion on the fate of the officers. Except for the declaration they had sent to the French consul, stating that nobody would be harmed if the city's authorities did not interfere with the
Potemkin
's activities, Odessa was largely forgotten for the moment. As Matyushenko had told the city's revolutionaries, the sailors first needed to look to the sea before turning to an assault on land.

But events in Odessa, set in motion by the ship's arrival and the impact of Vakulenchuk's bier, had taken on a life of their own.

By late afternoon, more than ten thousand Odessans had filled the port and jammed the piers before Kakhanov's cordon was in place. They came from nearly every sector of the population: workers from the poor outlying districts of Peresyp and Moldovanka—many accompanied by their families as if they were on an outing, secondary-school and university students, dockworkers, merchant sailors, shopkeepers, a scattering of liberal professionals, and the
bosyaki
("barefoot ones")—a ragtag collection of day laborers, the homeless, and vagrants. Throughout the morning and most of afternoon, a celebratory, peaceful air had prevailed, as if everyone were savoring a day of freedom filled with raucous speeches, courtesy of the
Potemkin'
s
protection. But as the day wore on, a scattering of individuals, drunk on either alcohol or a feeling of invincibility, sometimes both, began to stir up trouble: a few fights, some petty thefts at the warehouses. Mostly, however, all was well.

Then, a few minutes after 5
P.M.
, a merchant sailor, Nikita Glotov, made the mistake of jeering at a speaker who had jumped up on a barrel to better address the crowd as he called for the tsar's downfall.

"And just who then will be our overlords?" Glotov taunted. "Ah, you Jews! You're all Jews, I say."

Several women struck Glotov with their parasols, but his ranting continued. Someone yelled that the sailor was actually a spy sent by the police to incite a pogrom. Then suddenly a shot rang out, followed by three more. Glotov collapsed, and a mob threw his lifeless body into the water. At the port entrances, the police and Cossacks held back and did not respond, seemingly oblivious to the first blush of violence.

As the crowd at the scene of Glotov's murder scattered, the collier
Emerans
returned to the port and docked. After helping load coal onto the
Potemkin,
the stevedores had celebrated with some vodka and become rowdy. Their presence added to the mood of lawlessness. Meanwhile, some vagrants looted a bonded warehouse and opened crates filled with bottles of spirits. Several workers and sailors tried to stop them from passing out the bottles, shouting, "It's freedom we need, not vodka," but few listened. A speaker standing atop a coal pile declared, "Comrades, there are heaps of clothing made by your hands in this port. They belong to you!" Some cheered his words. "Now. Are you feeling hungry?" He then pointed to a row of warehouses, inviting them to start the plunder.

The first curls of smoke from a burning warehouse rose at about the same time the
Potemkin
captured the
Vekha,
at 7
P.M.
When a fire crew tried to enter the port, they were beaten back by stones. Hundreds started breaking into warehouses to steal silks, jewelry, sacks of sugar, vodka—anything they could get their hands on and carry away. Mostly, the
bosyaki
carried out the theft and vandalism, but others participated as well. With each passing hour, the crowd became more unruly. Some were getting wildly drunk, feeling increasingly empowered by the police's absence.

More and more warehouses were ransacked, and by 10
P.M.
several
buildings were on fire. Panic began to spread throughout the port. Many had already tried to leave the area but found their escape routes, including the Richelieu Steps, blocked by Cossacks and police. Some returned to the quays; others tried to force their way through and were met with blows to their chests and heads from rifle butts. Those who persisted were shot. Trapped in the port, the crowd became desperate to get away, pushing against the soldiers and calling them bloody monsters. Tempers mounted and raced out of control. Those who managed to slip through the cordon brought news of the port's desperate situation. Workers and revolutionaries on the city side of the blockade confronted the police on the streets and attempted to break through. The city was spiraling out of control.

General Kakhanov resisted every request from the police and from the port commander to move on the docks and quell what was nothing short of a riot. He even refused to push for more fire crews to extinguish the mounting blazes. Having received an official statement from St. Petersburg that Odessa was in a "state of war," Kakhanov, the city's senior military commander, had the authority to do as he pleased to retain control of the city. He had settled on his course of action. Since the Black Sea Fleet would not arrive until the next day, as he learned by telegram from Sevastopol, he had to buy more time, even if the price was death and mayhem in the port. Kakhanov was certain that if he suppressed the hostilities there, the
Potemkin
would launch an attack on Odessa. His primary purpose was to save the city and protect his troops. If the crowds wanted to loot warehouses and kill themselves in an orgy of destruction, so be it. The fact that many innocents were caught behind the port's cordon did not color his thoughts. As his assistant, General K. A. Karangozov, had coldly explained to a staff member earlier that day, "Let them gather in the port. We won't let them out. Then we'll shoot everyone."

But over the next two hours, the riotous tempest escalated to a level that Kakhanov had never anticipated. The city streets became the site of pitched battles. When some Cossacks tried to disperse striking workers, a homemade bomb was thrown at their feet, severely wounding six in the patrol. The police were taking gunfire from the rooftops, and more and more people flowed from the city center toward Primorsky Boulevard, breaking into fights with soldiers and police who had shut off access the port. Yet this disorder could not compare to the nightmare—obscured by billowing clouds of black smoke—now raging below, at the bottom of the steps.

An inferno ravaged the port. A wall of flame ran a half-mile alongside the water and expanded every minute. Fires leapt from warehouse to lodging quarter to warehouse to port office to storefront. The supports of the elevated railway were being consumed, as were the wagons on the tracks above. Goods stacked in crates on the quays served as fuel for bonfires, and the decks of several barges and steamships docked in the harbor also burned. Even the surface of the water became a blaze after explosions of fuel dumps on the quays released flammable liquid into the harbor itself.

The thousands trapped in the port faced confusion, panic, and death. Smoke enveloped the entire area, searing the lungs and blinding the eyes. The fires sent shockwaves of heat that stopped people in their tracks. Some had already passed out from drink when the flames overcame them, but many died after escaping one fire, only to find themselves encircled by another. Their terrible screams cut through the smoke and darkness. Others were caught on ship decks, in warehouses, or under falling debris. Smoke and stampedes killed many more. Attempts to escape from the port by the Richelieu Steps and other exits were met with police resistance, but thanks to luck, cunning, or a merciful soldier, many did manage to get away. These fortunate ones looked as if they had emerged from hell: eyes filled with terror, faces blackened with soot, bodies wracked by fits of coughing. While they tried to recover, the police arrested them and led them away.

At midnight, Kakhanov finally decided that he could not allow the fires to rage unchecked. He needed to move with force into the port, clear away the crowds, and send in the fire crews. His troops also had to ruthlessly crush the rebellions blossoming in the streets. Let the
Potemkin
fire its guns; it was out of his control. As of yet, the sailors had taken no belligerent actions; the battleship remained far out in the harbor. If he did nothing, the inferno might raze the entire city. Kakhanov remained unsympathetic to the hundreds dying and injured in the port. In his view, they had brought this on themselves—and many more would die, once he got started. But the economic and physical damage had to be contained. From the reports he received from his men, the port railway station and the great warehouses of the
Russian Company were in ruins, and thieves had already stolen or torched millions of rubles in goods.

Kakhanov gave the order: attack.

From every port entrance, soldiers and Cossacks advanced on those pushing to get through the cordon. On the Richelieu Steps, fifty Cossacks urged their horses down the long flight of steps jammed with people. They cut down anyone in their way, slashing men and women, young and old alike, with their sabers and whips; their ferocity was spiked by the deaths of several of their own comrades over the past three days. The sheer mass of people on the narrow steps at the staircase's top slowed their charge, as did those who resisted by throwing stones. Another party of Cossacks dismounted and formed a line at the edge of the steps. Then they began to discharge their rifles, at close range.

Hysteria gripped the crowd on the steps. Stumbling over those wounded or killed by the first shots, people surged down the steps; at the same time those below, trying to flee the inferno, surged up. Many were unable to move; even if they could, they were not sure which way to go. The Cossacks drove down the steps, taking advantage of the confusion to send round after round of gunfire into the muddled mass of bodies. Shrieks of the terrified and the dying filled the night. Every three steps, the dismounted troops dropped to one knee, chambered another round in their rifles, and then fired together on command. Those hit often tumbled down the cobbled steps until they reached the next landing. Gaining momentum, the Cossacks fixed bayonets and stormed downward in their polished black boots, stabbing those who had yet to flee, their sabers jangling at their sides. At the base of the steps, the soldiers reassembled and then headed toward the piers, slashing and shooting at will.

The same scene was played out in other parts of the port. Gunfire sounded from every direction. In the city streets, soldiers positioned snipers on rooftops to kill any protestors who attacked their positions. People watching the massacre from their balconies were at risk of being mistaken for armed revolutionaries and were told to stay away from their windows. Many crouched in the back of their apartments, praying that the madness would soon end. They were to have a long wait.