Red Mutiny (40 page)

"You don't know anything, but still you interfere," he spat at Feldmann. "My advice is to go to Evpatoriia.... It's the only place where we can get coal."

"You want to go there
only
because it's close to Sevastopol. Am I right?" Feldmann asked, knowing that Evpatoria was a small town with little trade apart from sheep.

"We're going to Theodosia," the committee concluded.

Kirill and two sailors went to the port to tell Negru of their decision to leave. He also delivered copies of the two proclamations they had written. When Negru asked where they planned to go, Kirill lied. "Turkey," he said, to throw pursuers off their trail. "We hope the Ottoman sultan will welcome us more cordially than the European king." Negru promised to send their proclamations to the city's foreign consuls.

On the
Potemkin,
Matyushenko mustered the crew to win their approval to travel to Theodosia. Over the past two hours, the sailors had grown less sure about leaving Romania. Most knew about the desperate state of their supplies, and many had wearied of the struggle. Resisting this sentiment, Matyushenko rallied the sailors, his speech punctuated by the electrifying movements of his body, as if he felt every word he spoke. Then he concluded his speech: "Every country has its laws, its customs, but there's one feeling that all nations hold sacred—the feeling of responsibility to one's own country. Now, brothers, think a little about how the Romanian people will feel toward you if they see you betray your country—that when you might have saved your homeland from tyrants, you basely surrendered to save your skins."

Once again, he won over the crew. While the sailors readied the battleship for the journey to Theodosia, Captain Negru came aboard to convince them of the futility of their plans. "The cause you fight for is impossible to win with only a single ironclad," he reasoned. "The rest of the Black Sea Fleet hasn't joined you, so what can you hope for in Russian waters?"

"What we mustn't do is to lose hope in our success," Kovalenko said plainly. Then he ushered Negru off the battleship.

When he returned to the port, Captain Negru sealed in an envelope the sailor proclamations that he had promised to deliver to the consuls. He planned to forward them directly to his superiors in Bucharest. Although he admired the sailors for their bravery and for their noble restraint in not attacking his city—telling the foreign minister as much—he dared not embroil Romania in a conflict with the tsar of Russia by distributing the proclamations.

At
1
:20
P.M.
, the
Potemkin
steamed away from Constanza, charting first a course toward Constantinople, knowing well that Captain Banov would telegraph their direction to Sevastopol. Even before the crew lost sight of land, however, their initial excitement at returning to Russia was replaced by a feeling of isolation. Nothing but empty miles of sea lay ahead, except for the promise of meager rations and little rest under the blistering sun. All for the dim hope that they might find in Theodosia the help they needed. The freedom they once enjoyed on the open waters felt now more like a curse.

"D
ESPITE THE OFFER
of political protection, the sailors refused to surrender their weapons and hand over the battleship to authorities.... The
Potemkin
has left the port, heading southeast."

Chukhnin read the secret telegram from Romania only a few hours after his train arrived at Sevastopol on the morning of June 20. The news ruled out any chance of the
Stremitelny
making a quick capture of the battleship in Constanza. But with the
Potemkin
on the run, low on coal and food, and with Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey all having agreed not to aid the sailors, the rebels' ability to sustain their mutiny was growing weaker by the hour. Soon they would be seized or sunk—whether at sea or in a Russian port. Chukhnin's preparations for the mutineers' trial and punishment, in accordance with the tsar's orders, no longer looked so premature. He had already selected a pier in Odessa for their execution—to be conducted, on his orders, in front of the squadron. A hangman and coffins were being arranged. Only the issue of where they would be buried remained unanswered, but state property around Peresyp was likely the best option.

Equally pressing on the vice admiral's mind was the state of insurrection among Sevastopol's sailors. His spies had already learned of a revolutionary plan to break into the base's armory, man the rest of the fleet, and join the
Potemkin.
Chukhnin struck preemptively that very morning. Over two thousand sailors were brought to the fleet's main yard for, they were told, a parade to celebrate Chukhnin's return from St. Petersburg. While the sailors waited, gendarmes locked the gates to the yard. Meanwhile, the officers removed every weapon from the armory and secured them outside the base.

That afternoon, Chukhnin resolved to speak to the battleship crews that had returned from Odessa. As in Nikolayev, he believed if he reasoned with the sailors, they would see the evils of mutiny and resist the "deceptions" cast by the revolutionaries. Before he departed for the
Rostislav,
his staff attempted to dissuade him from going.

"The crews despise you," one of his officers dared say. "You're putting yourself in danger."

"I'm performing my duty," Chukhnin replied. "I have to see in person the fleet's condition. Whether something happens to me today rather than tomorrow is all the same to me."

On the deck of each ship, surrounded by guards, the vice admiral spoke as though he had nothing to fear. He delivered his patriotic defense of autocracy, and the crews responded with pledges of obedience. During one speech, some sailors were even moved to tears by Chucknin's call to honor duty and country. Nevertheless, Chukhnin had seen enough of mutiny to reinforce his words with action.

He brought in additional troops from Odessa to guard the fortress against rebellion. Nearly one thousand sailors were arrested, many with only tenuous ties to revolutionary groups—or none at all—and imprisoned in the fortress. After quickly running out of cells there, Chukhnin established a floating prison aboard the
Prut
—a symbolic move that was not lost on many. He also ordered that a couple of thousand reservists be sent away from Sevastopol on leave.

The next morning, June 21, when the
Sinop's
crew was on the verge of revolt following the arrest of a number of sailors, Chukhnin had the ship surrounded with several battleships and sent an infantry unit aboard with orders to randomly execute every tenth man unless the crew gave up the instigators. They named sixteen men straight away, and the revolt died down.

If Lieutenant Yanovich showed the same kind of decisiveness when he met the
Potemkin,
the ship, the threat it posed, and its role as the last rallying point for rebellious sailors in Sevastopol would be eliminated. Delayed by repairs in Odessa, the
Stremitelny
reached Constanza long after the
Potemkin
had left. The destroyer's entry in the harbor prompted a Romanian cruiser to fire a warning shot across its bow, not to mention a maelstrom of diplomatic complaints from Bucharest at the surprise presence of another Russian ship in Romanian waters. Undeterred, Chukhnin redirected the
Stremitelny
toward the large Bulgarian port of Varna where the mutineers might travel to resupply—they had to be running low on coal. The naval command dismissed the report that the battleship was destined for Constantinople; they suspected this was a ploy to deceive their pursuers. Until the
Potemkin
was sighted, however, Chukhnin could only guess at its destination and hope the destroyer would soon be near enough to stop it. After two fruitless days at sea, Yanovich was also eager for this opportunity.

While naval officials in Sevastopol and St. Petersburg speculated on the
Potemkin'
s next move, the Ministry of the Interior finally released news to the public about the mutiny through its mouthpiece,
The Official Messenger.
"A regrettably shameful event, and one without parallel in the annals of the Russian navy" was the author's preface to the government account, before describing the mutiny in a dry, matter-of-fact way. According to this source, the sailors took over the battleship because of some bad meat and then mercilessly killed their officers before traveling to Odessa. Thirty individuals in civilian clothing were in charge of the
Potemkin,
and they had ordered a barrage on the city without provocation. Brief mention was made of the
St. George
and
Prut
mutinies, merely in terms of how expeditiously the rebellions were suppressed. The thousand-word chronicle, published to minimize the
Potemkin's
effect on the populace, was extraordinary for what it did not mention: the fires, the riots, and the many dead in Odessa; the revolutionary declarations made by the sailors; the absolute disarray of Chukhnin's fleet; and the fact that the battleship now roamed the Black Sea at will. No Russian newspaper had yet been allowed to publish a story on the
Potemkin,
and government censors promised to remain strict and vigilant on how these details—and their significance—would be revealed in the days that followed.

The foreign press offered no such hesitancy, and Black Sea events dominated front pages and editorial sections around the world, featuring dramatic reading for the seventh straight day. On June 21 the headlines proclaimed: "Rebels Defiant:
Knyaz Potemkin
Sails Once More" (.
Manchester Guardian
); "Mutiny Rules in Russia" (
Chicago
Daily Tribune
); "The Tsar Without a Fleet" (
Vorwärts
), "Will Try to Torpedo Rebel Battleship"
(Los Angeles Times).
European and American newspapers provided exhaustive reports, detailing how a revolutionary committee ran the
Potemkin,
the cowardly manner in which Krieger retreated to Sevastopol, the mutinous battleship's refusal to surrender in Constanza, the
Stremitelny'
s hunt, fears in Odessa that the
Potemkin
would circle back to wreak more damage on the city, and how, according to the London
Times,
"the government of the Tsar is stooping to beg the Sultan of Turkey and the King of Romania to be good enough to do for him the police work which he is no longer able to do for himself."

Running side by side with these articles were stories about the Japanese threat to Sakhalin Island, the thousands of workers who had gone on strike in St. Petersburg, and Nicholas IPs hastening approach to the negotiating table. To the average newspaper reader, Russia appeared on the brink of collapse and the
Potemkin
looked to be pushing it over the edge.

On the other hand, international public opinion had made a notable turn against the sailors. In the first reports of the uprising, the sailors' actions were framed in relation to their atrocious treatment and living conditions, and, more important, the necessity for substantive political reform to prevent revolution. Over the past few days, however, except in socialist journals such as
L'Humanité,
which viewed the sailors as heroes, the
Potemkin
crew suffered many scathing attacks. "They are practically pirates, and their predicament only offers limited avenues for escape," the
Chicago Daily Tribune
opined. "Their situation being desperate, a desperate course may well be expected of them." The editorial page was similarly harsh, impugning everything from the crew's intelligence to their navigational abilities. It concluded, "They ran their necks into the halter for no particular purpose, unless it was to kill some harsh officers and have a few days of unbounded freedom and vodka."

This was one of many newspapers that replaced the term
mutineers
with
pirates
and
criminals
to denote the sailors. The
New York Times
argued that the sailors should be hanged for their dearth of patriotism. Its competitor, the
New York Herald Tribune,
warned of what could happen if a mutinous fleet was to prey on the civilized world. The London
Times
ran an article on the Russian navy dominated by an interview with a tsarist officer, who likened commanding one of its battleships to "coming into a cage of wild beasts." In
Le Figaro,
an editorial pilloried the sailors: "They were willing to do anything, except to do their duty! It is not good either for Russia or for civilization that the question be put—like an absurd and brutal dilemma—between absolutism and anarchy."

International political leaders shared this disdain for the sailors. Although the
Potemkin
's crew opposed a regime these leaders thought corrupt, the tsar was considered the lesser evil when compared to a battleship whose very presence in Odessa had wrought the chaos and destruction they feared most from revolutionaries. In addition, mutiny, by its very nature, was anathema to any government. A successful mutiny would only prove to be a dangerous example. The Romanians had already tried to win the battleship's surrender by refusing aid to the sailors—putting Constanza at tremendous risk. The Bulgarians promised to do the same, and the Turkish sultan was prepared to use his navy and land-based artillery against the
Potemkin
if it came into the Bosphorus Strait. Worried that his military might follow suit, he had instituted strict censorship on the mutiny in Turkish newspapers.

Notwithstanding the British Parliament's debate over sending warships into the Black Sea, powers outside the region could not interfere directly to stop the
Potemkin.
Instead they endeavored to eliminate what they believed was the cause of not only the mutiny but also Russia's surge of unrest: the war with Japan. Almost daily, President Roosevelt cabled Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London, requesting assistance in convincing the tsar to pursue peace vigorously so he could better deal with his domestic crisis. George Meyer, the American ambassador in St. Petersburg, alerted Roosevelt of the urgency in a letter written on June 20: "Heretofore, I have thought Revolution improbable, but the events of last week (the increasing strikes, the disturbances at Lodz, the Marines revolting at Libau, the successful mutiny at Odessa, which resulted in the officers being killed and the vessel,
Potemkin,
captured) have entirely changed the aspect of affairs."