Red Mutiny (7 page)

Much of Tsentralka's work—and the strength of the movement—was focused on improving the sailor's lot: higher pay, better food, shorter conscription terms, abolition of salutes, and juries made up of their peers in courts-martial. Matyushenko, however, mostly spoiled for a fight. His loyalty as a Social Democrat was, at best, questionable. He followed his emotions, not ideological tracts. "To me every party looks good," he wrote. "The harder a party beats on the regime, the better it looks to me."

In those days, the revolutionary sailors spoke of Matyushenko's revolutionary fervor, raw temper, and inability to remain indifferent to injustice. Once when a petty officer was overzealous in berating a sailor, Matyushenko went instantly crimson in the face, his dark eyes narrowed, and his wiry frame tightened as if he was ready to throw a fist. No fear of authority or punishment held him back as he defended the sailor, speaking fast and harshly to the petty officer about treating the men under his command fairly. His fellow crew members loved Matyushenko for these qualities, but they did not speak of him as their leader.

For the rebels aboard the
Potemkin,
Matyushenko's close friend Grigory Vakulenchuk played that role, particularly after the life-and-death decision on the morning of June 10 to mutiny. Matyushenko
might be the one to turn to if things got rough ("he would go through fire for his brother sailor," said one), but Vakulenchuk had the respect of all the men around him. With his distinguished black handlebar mustache, stentorian voice, and preternatural calm, he was a natural leader. Though near the end of his conscription term, he still risked himself for the other sailors. In effect, Matyushenko was Vakulenchuk's second in command.

When Matyushenko and the others returned to the naval base after the Tsentralka meeting, they had much to prepare before the fleetwide maneuvers a week and a half later. Apart from strategizing how to take over the ship—from seizing guns to manning the conning tower and engine rooms—they had, most important, to spread further propaganda among the sailors. Crew members sympathetic to their cause numbered 200 at most. Only 50 of these were absolutely reliable. Of the 763 sailors aboard the
Potemkin,
the majority were raw recruits, indifferent, or blindly faithful to the tsar's authority. By instinct they would follow their officers and petty officers (these former sailors, who had reenlisted and been promoted, were called "self-seekers" because their loyalties most often lay with their superiors and their own advancement). Therefore, the revolutionaries had to convert as many sailors as possible to their cause before departure from Sevastopol. Immediately setting to the task, stoker Fyodor Nikishkin, one of the better agitators,: called for "Bible meetings" throughout the ship's crew.

The next day, June 11, the
Potemkin
's captain, Yvgeny Golikov, informed his crew that they would be leaving early to test the ship's guns before fleet maneuvers. Then came another surprise. On the quarterdeck he announced the names of forty sailors to be removed from the
Potemkin
for reassignment; this came on the heels of a major reshuffling of the Black Sea Fleet's crews earlier that spring to disrupt revolutionary activities. He also dispatched a young officer who was sympathetic to that cause; someone must have betrayed their plans. Fortunately, of those expelled, the officers missed all but one of the
Potemkin'
s revolutionary leaders. Matyushenko and Vakulenchuk remained, although they worried about what Golikov might have planned for the ship once they departed. He obviously knew something was brewing.

Late that evening, in the dark of night, Vakulenchuk sent notes around the base barracks to his fellow Tsentralka leaders. From Yakhnovsky and other revolutionaries he had learned to write in cipher and glue messages inside book bindings. In this most important matter, the notes must not be seen by prying eyes. In them he urged that the
Potemkin
be elected to start the mutiny instead of the flagship
Rostislav,
much as Matyushenko had wanted. Taking this responsibility would help inspire more
Potemkin
sailors, and it would be critical to the fleetwide uprising for participants to see that the
Potemkin,
the most formidable battleship among them, was on their side. The strength of its guns outweighed the importance of a symbolic flagship.

By morning, Vakulenchuk and Matyushenko had their answer: the
Potemkin
would launch the revolt. Their orders were to prepare an advance list of officers and petty officers who might resist and to assign a sailor to deal with each in the mutiny's opening moments. The uprising should occur after the change of the watch at 1
A.M.
and, most important, only after the entire fleet came together. Once they took over the ship, their orders then instructed that they "weigh anchor, move beyond the horizon, inform the rest of the crew of the event, and wait for daybreak. If any ships do not join the
Potemkin,
open fire on them." After the revolutionary squadron was formed, it would capture Sevastopol, marshal its forces, and move to bring down the tsar.

Some called the plan reckless, premature, and doomed to fail, but the alternative to sailors like Matyushenko—a torturous existence, death in the Far East, and continued oppression of their countrymen—was far worse to endure.

D
OWN IN THE BOWELS
of the
Potemkin,
the men shoveled coal into the furnaces and raised the steam. The cavernous engine room was illuminated by electric lights, but most of the machinists moved in the shadows cast by the enormous boilers and piston-rod engines, their uniforms soiled black, their eyes stinging from the slack in the coal. A mix of oil and water slicked the decks, and the noise made conversation a matter of hand gestures and shouts directly in the ear. As for the heat, the scattering of fans only helped concentrate blasts of moist, scalding air. Outside the engine room, sailors clambered about the decks, following the barked orders of their watch officers as they prepared for departure on Sunday afternoon, June 12, 1905. Finally the command came to weigh anchor.

"Anchor is starting!" Its chain ground through the hawsehole. "Anchor away!" Sailors hosed off the silt that clung to the chain. "Anchor in sight.... Anchor is clear." Then a screech of metal against metal. "Anchor secured!"

Bells rang in the conning tower, alerting the captain that the battleship was ready. Fifty-one years old, with a cone-shaped beard and the short, thick neck of a bulldog, Captain First Rank Yvgeny Golikov appeared at ease, speaking with his officers and the few visitors who had come from St. Petersburg to witness the testing of the ship's guns. But he was far from calm, aware of the stirrings of a rebellion among his crew—perhaps even plans for a mutiny.

He had received an anonymous letter alluding to the rebellion, and another fleet captain had found a leaflet aboard his ship, warning him: "Remember, the hour of revenge is coming. Our hands won't
shake when we tighten the loop around your neck." Golikov had tried to expel all the discontented, revolutionary-minded sailors his officers had targeted, but it was a scattershot approach, since they had little information about who was in charge. The day before, Golikov had asked for a shore leave to avoid the fleet maneuvers, but Chukhnin denied his request on insufficient grounds. Meanwhile, three of Golikov's warrant officers suspiciously took sick leave only hours before departure, suggesting they knew exactly what awaited them if they went on the voyage. There was nothing Golikov could do other than keep a close watch on his men and take the
Potemkin
to Tendra Island.

"Low ahead.... Right full rudder" came his command from the conning tower.

Slowly the battleship began to move forward, its screws churning through the water and causing a dull vibration through the hull. Signalmen exchanged protocols with the Black Sea Fleet command. Drummers and buglers played on the quarterdeck. Those not on duty gathered along the rails and waved their caps in farewell. A crowd had assembled along the quays of Sevastopol to watch the battleship's departure. Wives and lovers blew kisses goodbye to their men. Children watched in awe as the behemoth cut through the water, the bronze double-headed eagles on the bow looking to spy the way. As the
Potemkin
gathered more speed, the white and blue-crossed St. Andrew's flag on the mast went stiff in the breeze, and water began to slap against the sides of the ship. The three square funnels belched thick dark clouds of smoke into the clear blue sky.

The
Potemkin
steamed out of the harbor and past the Khersonessky Lighthouse, on a northwest course for Tendra Island. A torpedo boat followed in escort, looking like a child's toy compared to the
Potemkin's
massive black hull. Soon the white houses of Sevastopol disappeared from view, then Konstantin Fort, and finally St. Vladimir Church faded into the blur of green hills cradling the city on the Crimean Peninsula. As the battleship ventured farther into the Black Sea, squalls blew, clapping canvases and whistling through the handrails. The winds strengthened and violent waves crashed against the ship. The
Potemkin
drove easily forward, unperturbed, a titan in the water.

***

Named after the beloved minister of Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin Tavrichesky, the 12,600-ton battleship was a triumph of modern shipbuilding and without peer in the Russian navy.

Ever since the Minoans of Crete ruled the seas with twenty-oared galleys in 1500
B.C.,
battleships had been slowly evolving. Minoan sailors carried spears for fighting, so vessels fitted with rams marked a significant advance in early naval warfare; the sleek fleets of the ancient Greeks followed, their two-hundred-oared triremes operating in tactical formation. Then Alexander the Great contributed stone-throwing catapults to sea battle. By the time Peter the Great founded the Russian navy in the 1690s, three-rigged warships with batteries of cannons were squaring off in battles that could determine whether an empire rose or fell. In the nineteenth century, wooden-hulled men-of-war gave way to steam-driven ironclads, and then those built of steel. Decade after decade, rulers built bigger ships with greater destructive force. By the time Nicholas II ascended to the throne in 1894, the essential relation between naval might and a nation's strength, codified by Alfred Thayer Mahan in his famous treatise
The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
had gained universal favor. Nicholas doubled the expenditures his already profligate father had allocated to the navy, giving Russia the world's (third-strongest fleet (albeit a distant third behind England and France) before the war with Japan had begun.

The battleship
Potemkin
was the apex of a rebuilding program for the Black Sea Fleet after its complete destruction in the Crimean War. In 1897, Russian engineer Aleksandr Shott studied several Russian battleships, including the American-made
Retvizan,
and improved on the best elements of each in his design for the
Potemkin.
Although it would most likely be used to attack land-based forts around the Black Sea, the battleship was designed to handle itself equally well in sea battles. Built in Nikolayev, its hull was sprinkled with holy water and launched on September 26, 1900—the same year as the light cruiser
Aurora,
a ship that would play its own role in the coming revolution. Over the next several years, the
Potemkin
was outfitted with engines, guns, and operating equipment.

It was faster, better protected, more technologically advanced, and armed with stronger guns than any other battleship in the Black Sea Fleet. Its two 10,600-horsepower steam-driven engines, powered by twenty-two boilers, drove at a top speed of seventeen knots. Twelve
inches of Krupp steel protected its turrets, nine inches of the same its belt line. In terms of firepower, it outclassed the USS
Maine
and HMS
Illustrious
of the same period. Its two twin-armored turrets, fore and aft, carried four twelve-inch guns that could decimate enemies with seven-hundred-pound shells at a range of over six miles. Along its 371 feet, it boasted a secondary battery of sixteen six-inch quick-firing guns, fourteen three-inch twelve-pound guns, an assembly of machine guns, torpedo tubes, mine-laying equipment, and two torpedo launch craft. The
Potemkin
was an armed fortress, and with its three yellow funnels sitting forward amidship, it looked like a terrible beast, crouched and eager to attack.

In October 1903, it took its first sea trials. Two months later, Captain Golikov took command and shepherded the ship to completion in April 1905. The ship's log specifically records two bad omens during this period: first, a towline ripped the double-headed eagles, the symbol of the Romanov family, from the ship's bow; second, Nicholas's portrait fell off the wall in Golikov's cabin, shattering the glass in the frame. It is unknown whether Golikov took much meaning from these omens, but the captaincy of the
Potemkin
was to be his final post and the journey to Tendra Island his final voyage.

While the battleship moved out of Sevastopol, Golikov turned to his second officer, Ippolit Gilyarovsky. "Once away from the revolutionary dockworkers, we'll manage to get rid of these heretics in our own ranks." How little he understood the crew after two years at their command. Neither as stringent a disciplinarian as his fleet commander, Vice Admiral Chukhnin, nor as vicious as his second officer, Gilyarovsky, Captain Golikov was, in a word, middling.

Born into a high-ranking noble family from Moldova (his father was an architect and state councilor), Yvgeny Golikov joined the Naval Cadet School at eighteen years of age in 1872. At that time, professors continued to glorify the age of the sail, looking down on steam-driven warships and the "mechanics" who drove them. He studied mathematics, navigation, three languages, and leadership techniques—a curriculum as frozen in time as the Table of Ranks that Peter the Great had instituted for nobles in 1722. Graduating a guarde-marine, he was promoted to ensign after the typical two-year period and then found himself on board a mine-cutter in the Russo-Turkish War in
1877, guarding a supply bridge over the Danube. It was the only action he would see.