Red Mutiny (44 page)

But before these sailors could launch an attack, other crew members forced them away from the guns. Sailors cursed one another, and fights broke out throughout the battleship. Eventually, though, the pennant was lowered. "There's no support for us anywhere," one sailor said in appeal, expressing what many felt. "In Odessa, the
St. George
betrayed us. Here, the army jeers at us, and we've lost our comrades trying to get a handful of coal. The bravest of us will all be killed, one by one, and the rest will be taken when the
Potemkin
's captured."

Another sailor stood forward. "There's only one thing left to do: go back to Romania while we still can move."

Matyushenko listened to these words; he also understood Kirill's demand for revenge. He himself had gripped the hand of a dying sailor on his way to the infirmary only minutes before. But to what end would their shells fall? he asked himself. They might destroy some government buildings, and with some luck, kill the officers who had ordered the ambush on the quay, but their fusillade would also murder many soldiers—men who, Matyushenko believed, were in much the same predicament as he was. There was one main difference between them: the soldiers had not yet learned that attacking a worker or a sailor meant striking their own brother. Matyushenko believed that their deaths could be justified only if the revolution's fate hung in the balance.

And this was far from the case, he realized. The
Potemkin
's revolution was lost. With little more than the workers' tacit support and lacking coordination with revolutionary leaders in the cities, the
Potemkin
was free only to roam the Black Sea, struggling to find coal, water, and food, accomplishing nothing for the cause. This truth crushed Matyushenko, but he finally accepted it.

What could they do now? The engines were on the verge of breakdown, having run continuously since they left Sevastopol twelve days before. The machinists and the stokers charged with keeping them running were exhausted and on the brink of collapse themselves. The rest of the crew was tired and hungry. The strain of braving death almost constantly since the mutiny began had become too much. Now sailor was turning against sailor. On a strictly practical level, Matyushenko knew their ability to engage in battle was deteriorating every moment. Sooner or later the officers' destroyer or the squadron would find the battleship. The sailors who had followed his leadership deserved better than to die needlessly at sea or to face the hangman. Matyushenko knew that most wanted to surrender in Constanza, where there was some hope of freedom.

For once, Matyushenko did not deliver a rousing speech about the need to make sacrifices for the revolution. He did not demand that they continue the crusade and martyr themselves. As much as he was pained to surrender this great battleship, which he had thought could spark the people's revolution, he now resolved to lead the sailors to the safety they had earned. "To Romania!" the crew shouted again. Though he still wished to fight, Matyushenko accepted their calls. "To Romania ... Let's go to Constanza again ... Back to Romania ... It's be better to die there or anywhere else than in front of a naval firing squad ... Romania!"

At 11:30
A.M.
, the engine room raised the steam; the sailors promised to chop up the decks and masts for fuel if they ran out of coal. A half-hour later, they raised anchor. As the
Potemkin
left Theodosia's harbor, Kirill persisted in trying to convince Matyushenko and the battleship's other leaders that they should accept the glory of an "honest death" by heading to the Caucasus. His pleas fell on deaf ears. With the
Potemkin
low on coal and fresh water for its boilers, surviving their flight to Romania and escaping Chukhnin's clutches must serve as their final blow against the tsar.

The sailors steered a course first to the southeast to stay far away from Sevastopol; they'd heard reports of destroyers looking for the battleship. The shoreline of Theodosia, then the mountains looming behind, soon disappeared from sight.

It was a warm evening at Peterhof. While Nicholas rode his horse alone through Alexandria Park, the clouds darkened overhead, threatening a downpour. The humiliating
Potemkin
mutiny looked as if it would never end, despite the tsar's prayers to God and his harsh notes to Vice Admiral Chukhnin, both delivered daily. The battleship might have spared Theodosia by leaving the port earlier that day, but now Nicholas was receiving reports that the mutineers were expected to travel to Yalta or to visit their wrath on his Crimean palace at Livadia, where he had stayed with his father during the final hours before Alexander Ill's death. The admirals also speculated that the sailors might try to connect with revolutionaries in Batumi. No matter. As far as Nicholas was concerned, the
Potemkin
controlled the Black Sea, just as it controlled every conversation in St. Petersburg and every Russian newspaper's front page—his censors had lifted their ban on the story after the release of the official account.

In Nicholas's conservative staple,
Novoye Vremya,
the publisher A. S. Suvorin had delivered a blistering editorial about the mutiny:

The sons of Russia are tearing apart their own mother—lying, cutting, and shredding her with dull knives to prolong her suffering. This is what we have lived long enough to see, the disgrace and dishonor.... Nobody could have imagined this, neither here nor abroad, nor in Japan, which could not have hoped that such a despicable treason would come to its aid, that this revolution would use any means to achieve its purpose.... The
Potemkin
treason is mindless, pointless, poor in its shame and monstrously gruesome in its actions.

The reactionary newspaper
Moskovskiye Vedomosti
mirrored these sentiments, then went on to blame the "foreign Jewish press" for exaggerating the
Potemkin'
s significance.

Most other Russian newspapers were far less dismissive of the incident, though it was unlikely that Nicholas ever read them. The widely circulated, progressive
Russkoye Slovo
used the mutiny and Chukhnin's failed attempts to capture the battleship as proof that government reform was critical: "Fear is the sole basis of discipline in the army and the navy, and it will prove as poor an instrument for keeping the rank and file loyal to the throne as it has in the suppression of discontent among the people. The government should learn the lesson that the soldiers and sailors are beginning to awaken as the people have already awakened."

The liberal daily
Nasha Zhizn
was even more pointed: "It was sufficient that two or three agitators appeared and gave a few speeches for normal obedience to yield to open, bloody rebellion. It is obvious this catastrophe was set in motion by society's structure; it is obvious ignorance and passivity can no longer be the basis of social order, and fear is a poor instrument for command. Radical reforms are needed to create harmony between the people's aspirations and the government's actions." This editorial, coming after several reports about the Odessa riots, earned
Nasha Zhizn
a visit from an official of the Interior Ministry, who temporarily locked the newspaper's doors.

What the censors could not squash were the conversations on the streets of St. Petersburg about Cossacks seen firing on a crowd of workers outside the Putilov factory. Nor could they stop the rumors—of a palace coup, of rampant sedition in the army in the Far East, of the tsar's intention to call for a representative assembly soon, of the tsar's outright refusal of the same, and of the tsar's plan to accept, or to reject, peace with Japan. The Black Sea mutiny added fuel to this flurry of speculations, as if the
Potemkin,
much as Bloody Sunday had done before, made the rot in the tsar's regime impossible to ignore. Now everyone was waiting for the push that would topple him from power. "Is it revolution?" was the question on people's lips as well as in newspaper editorials.

As Nicholas neared the Lower Palace, the
Potemkin
infected his thoughts, as it had continually over the past week and a half. The battleship was alone, he reasoned, to reassure himself, without support and far away on the Black Sea; its sailors presented no imminent threat to his hold on power. Nicholas dismounted moments before the clouds finally broke, escaping inside just as the rain descended. The rest of his evening stretched before him: dinner first, then, perhaps, some time in his office riffling through reports about the state of his empire. He simply wanted the damned mutiny to end—was this too much to ask?

In St. Petersburg that same evening, the chief of the naval staff stood outside the Admiralty, thronged by Russian and foreign journalists wanting to know exactly when this would happen. "We can't tell you," Admiral A. A. Wirenus said. "The whole affair is in the hands of Vice Admiral Chukhnin."

"Do you think he'll dispatch the squadron again?" a reporter asked.

"We don't know what he'll do.... The situation is grave. The ship is not in the hands of her crew, but under the control of the Revolutionary Committee that went on board at Odessa. They've issued a high-sounding manifesto to the powers. They want to be considered insurgents.... They know their heads are forfeit and they'll stop at nothing."

Wirenus then concluded that he wished a destroyer like the
Stremitelny
would torpedo the
Potemkin,
making a grim example of the sailors by sending them to the bottom of the Black Sea.

Late that night, Lieutenant Yanovich was searching along the Crimean coastline for the
Potemkin.
Given the battleship's low coal supplies, the mutineers would have been foolish to stray too far into the open sea.

Delayed by a boiler breakdown on the way to Yalta, Yanovich and the other officers had arrived at Theodosia earlier in the day, eager for battle, only to find that the battleship had already gone. They had missed the
Potemkin
by a mere six hours. Officers of the
Stremitelny
were equally surprised when, arriving ashore, they were detained by soldiers; the garrison commander, Pleshkov, had believed they came from another ship of mutineers. Once the misunderstanding was resolved, and in spite of the crew's exhaustion, the destroyer loaded on more supplies, and Yanovich renewed his chase.

The
Stremitelny
thrust onward at full speed into the early hours of June 24. At 4
A.M.
, its lookout spotted the faint lights of a vessel to the south. Although the darkness was almost complete, Yanovich could tell that it must be a warship of some sort. He altered the
Stremitelny'
s course to intercept it. A few minutes later, he sighted three funnels; their spacing and height suggested they belonged to the
Potemhin.
No other battleships were asail in the area, he knew, so the ship in his sights could not be part of Chukhnin's second squadron.

It had happened. He had finally found the mutinous warship, Yanovich thought. He ordered his crew to their battle stations. Quickly, the torpedo tubes were positioned for attack, and the
Stremitelny
steamed a direct path toward the battleship. With the
Potemkin'
s six-and twelve-inch guns, along with its battery of quick firers—weapons whose primary purpose was to repel destroyers—Yanovich and his crew knew they had only the slimmest chance of success in sinking the
Potemkin.
Indeed, it was likely they would perish in the effort.

As they closed in, the battleship in their sights changed course, beating a retreat toward Theodosia; but it was no match for the
Stremitelny's
speed. An instant before Yanovich gave the order to fire torpedoes, however, he approached close enough to discover that his desired target was actually the old training vessel
Pamyat Mercuriya.
It was evading the
Stremitelny
because its captain believed that the
Potemkin's
torpedo boat was pursuing him. Since Yanovich, in his rush to leave Sevastopol, had forgotten to bring the naval codebooks with him, the two ships had been unable to identify each other by wireless telegraph.

Sending a message through the semaphore operator, Yanovich requested to come aboard; his hopes of attacking the mutineers had been dashed once again. He and several officers rowed across to the training vessel to see if it had received any recent reports on the
Potemkin.
They had not. Keen to return to his pursuit, Yanovich bid the captain farewell. When he stepped out of the cabin and looked across at his ship, he could barely make it out—it was all but lost in a pall of steam. The coal in the furnaces had finally crippled the destroyer. Pykhtin and the other stokers barely escaped through a hatchway after the pipes burst.

The
Pamyat Mercuriya's
captain offered to help Yanovich repair the
Stremitelny,
but Yanovich declined. The destroyer needed more than simple repairs. They would have to return to Sevastopol. His hunt was over.

T
HE POTEMKIN STEAMED
through the darkness; the only sounds to be heard on the battleship were the steady din of the engines and the bow cutting through the waves. The sailors had extinguished all exterior lights. Once or twice a cabin door creaked open, sending a sliver of light across the deck, but then the door was quickly shut again. With clouds concealing the stars and the moon, the darkness seemed impenetrable. One sailor likened the
Potemkin
to a black sea monster moving through the gloom.

Distressed that some sailors, led by the petty officers, might attempt to take over the
Potemkin
before it reached Romania, Matyushenko patrolled the decks with a loaded revolver. Sadly, the mutiny had come to this end, sailor pitted against sailor. On the battleship's stern, he could only vaguely make out the
Ismail's
outlines, though it followed close behind. Soon after the ship had left Theodosia, some sailors on the torpedo boat had tried to rush the helm, planning to surrender at Sevastopol. Their attempted coup had failed, so now the
Potemkin
was towing the torpedo boat to ensure that it stayed with the battleship.