Red Mutiny (5 page)

Then Aleksandr Petrov, a machinist recently expelled from the
Ekaterina II
after its crew disobeyed the order to fire on the fortress, stood to speak. Tall, with a broad, square face, Petrov held his chin high as if he had been born an aristocrat. From a family of clerks in Kazan, the twenty-three-year-old machinist had benefited from a proper education and from older siblings who had versed him in revolutionary politics and songs from a young age. Once conscripted into the navy, he set about agitating sailors, and his battleship was widely known as the "Red Kate" because of his success.

"We see how difficult it is to create a general uprising. After starting in one place, it risks losing momentum by dying down in another," Petrov began, the words coming easily; they had been waiting for years. "The army will only go over to the people's side when they have confidence in the general uprising. For this it's necessary that the uprising engulf a vast region. And don't we have this vast region? The Black Sea?! Who, if not we, the sailors, after launching a revolution in Sevastopol, might carry it over into the Caucasus and from there to Odessa to Nikolayev? Who, if not we, will be able to immediately draw in the army to take part in the revolution?"

Many others echoed his words. Next to Matyushenko, his friend and fellow
Potemkin
sailor Grigory Vakulenchuk called out: "To delay means to fail the revolution. At this very moment, everywhere, workers and peasants are striking out. We must join the common fight."

The debate swayed in their favor, and the sailors swiftly shifted the discussion to tactics. Many agreed that the mutiny should occur right after the fleet came together for maneuvers off Tendra Island later that month. Matyushenko wanted to move sooner. "Why wait for the journey out to sea?" he asked the gathering. "The mutiny must be started immediately. Tomorrow itself!" But he was shouted down for his usual impetuosity. When the discussion turned to the ship that should signal the start of the uprising, Matyushenko pitched the
Potemkin.
But most felt that the battleship
Rostislav
had symbolic strength as the fleet's flagship.

At the meeting's end, the Tsentralka sailors congratulated themselves on their plan of action: when the fleet met on June 21 and the
Rostislav
fired from its main battery, the fleetwide mutiny would begin. "Here's to the tsar meeting his father sooner than he thought!" called out a sailor as the meeting disbanded. The clearing emptied, and the sailors returned! on foot to Sevastopol, Matyushenko among them. Although his ideas had not carried the day, he was glad that the Tsentralka leaders had at last moved to join the revolution in deed. He had set this goal for himself since his earliest days.

In 1879, in a hut with clay walls and a thatched roof, Afanasy Nikolayevich Matyushenko was born. He shared the living quarters, a space only fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with his parents and five siblings. The hut contained a stove for cooking, a large table for eating, and, in the corner, icons to pray before. The family slept on top of the stove and on bare wooden benches that ran along the walls. During the long winters, they squeezed in their pigs, calves, and geese. The door and windows always were shut to keep out the cold, and the air grew almost poisonous with the stench of the animals.

Outside the hut, the village of Dergachi in "Little Russia," or the Ukraine, was like every other peasant community in the empire, run by village elders. The peasants lived a communal existence isolated from the rest of the world. They dressed in the same bast shoes and cotton tunics that peasants had worn for centuries. Roads leading into the village were often mired in mud, and any outsider who did enter found little of interest. The village was stripped of most trees and bushes. The well for drinking water stood near the horse pond. The surrounding fields of wheat, barley, beets, and other crops were divided into thin, overworked strips of land; each village household tilled some. It was a violent, primitive life based on communal responsibility, attachment to the land, and a deep-seated fear of authority, whether held by the elders, the tsar, or God.

Afanasy's father, Nikolai, was born a serf, bound to his landlord until the Emancipation of 1861, one of several reforms initiated by Alexander II in the wake of the Crimean War. The grant of freedom came as a great burden on an already threadbare existence. The redemption payments Nikolai owed to the government for his land were high, and since he was bound to the village council, Nikolai could not sow the crops he wanted. Nor could he leave the village to find other work without the council's permission.

When Afanasy was a young boy, his father couldn't support his family by farming. He became a shoemaker, earning barely enough to eke out an existence. At nine years of age, Afanasy enrolled in a Sunday church school to learn to read, an uncommon (albeit expanding) opportunity for peasant children at the time. Afanasy was headstrong and eager to learn, so his parents gave him the chance to attend the school. He split his free time between reading and fishing, but both activities were taken from him at the start of the great famine of 1891, when grain fields throughout Russia turned to dust, leaving whole villages devastated by starvation and diseases such as cholera and typhus. His father, always a heavy drinker, became a useless drunkard. Afanasy had to work to help feed his family. He was twelve when he began repairing shoes in the dark room after his father had passed out.

At fifteen, Afanasy decided that there had to be more to life. Eight miles southeast of the village, the city of Kharkov was rapidly industrializing and served as southern Russia's transportation hub. He found a job during the day as a janitor, then as an oilman at the steam-engine depot—one of the legions of peasants who followed a similar path in order to survive. There he experienced the life of an urban worker, breathing the black smoke that spewed from factory chimneys. When foremen were displeased with the pace of work, they struck the faces of their men; when the workers left for the day, they were searched, as if they were assumed to be petty criminals. They had few identifiable rights. Most, like Matyushenko, worked six days a week, twelve or more hours a day, and barely took home six rubles a month. (A decent dinner at one of the city's hotels cost two rubles.) At the day's end, men, women, and children left the factories sallow and weary, only to head to overcrowded barracks with low ceilings and lavatory stalls not fit for animals. The conditions crippled one out of seven workers with a serious illness every year.

For his part, Matyushenko returned to his village every night. There he found moments to still be a teenager, reading books he had borrowed from the library near the depot. He also learned to play music. With the spare kopecks he did not give his family, he bought an accordion. After work, he played his new instrument to the delight of his friends, who would sing and dance to the songs.

One night, a village watchman living nearby grew tired of the
accordion. He marched over and confiscated the instrument. Matyushenko tried to fight him, risking arrest, but his father held him back and then pleaded with the watchman not to report the incident. For the rest of his life, Matyushenko remembered his feeling of helpless rage. A few months later, he attempted revenge. Groups of boys were not allowed to gather at night for fear of mischief, and it was the watchmen's job to break up any such gatherings. One summer's night, Matyushenko and several other boys lured a patrol with boisterous singing and then ambushed them with sticks and rocks. The watchmen ran away but later discovered that Matyushenko was the ringleader. They had him arrested and then beat the teenager senseless in a prison cell. When Matyushenko finally awakened, the welts on his face stung to the touch. A deep bitterness welled up within him.

In Kharkov, Matyushenko began to stay after his shift's end to meet with other depot workers and talk about the injustices they saw all around them. Once he even invited them back to his home in Dergachi. The talk around the table turned to how the tsar must be overthrown. Matyushenko's father overheard the discussion from outside the hut and later angrily took his son aside.

"It's not possible that there will be no tsar. It will never happen. Remember, son, just as there is no world without God, there can be no land without the tsar!"

Matyushenko looked at his father and at the rags he wore for clothes. "Do you know the tsar owns more land than anyone in Russia? Do you know there are other countries that are
not
governed by a tsar, and that the people in those countries live better than we do?"

A few months shy of eighteen years, Matyushenko had already left his father and his traditions far behind. There was a world outside Dergachi, and even outside Kharkov, one that he had read about in stories of the French Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, and the adventures of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Like many young men who had come to the city from their villages, he wanted to better himself. He had made friends with people who had suffered terribly, like him, and they had ideas about life that relied on reason and independence rather than blind faith in the tsar's benevolence. Some were willing to fight against rich landlords and factory owners.

In a naive manner, Matyushenko shared this insight with his childhood friends back in the village. Dergachi's elders heard about this blasphemous talk and arranged for his arrest. The village watchmen came to take custody of him on a Sunday afternoon after church. Matyushenko ran into the church's bell tower to escape. His pursuers followed, and he climbed down the rope attached to the bell. His friends screamed, "Fire!" emptying the church directly into the watchmen's path, and Matyushenko slipped away. Unable to return to the village or to go to the Kharkov depot, he left for Odessa. In 1896, he was already on the run, with scarcely a hope of going back.

Several months later, after working in Odessa's port, Matyushenko signed up to be a coalman on a steamboat traveling to Vladivostok. It was a dirty, thankless job deep within the recesses of the ship, but at least he was traveling, witnessing life beyond his village. The steamboat stopped in Turkey, Egypt, and other ports along the way before reaching its destination in the Far East. After his arrival in Vladivostok, Matyushenko spent two years in the port city, working as a machinist assistant on the railroad. He endured debilitating work hours and conditions similar to those in Kharkov.

As Matyushenko matured, he increasingly resented being treated as ignorant chattel with no self-worth. He was now very well read, had learned many new skills since leaving Odessa, had seen more of the world than most, and felt that he deserved some respect from his bosses. But nothing changed: he had no rights or means to redress grievances. He shared the disgust of the worker who said, "We're not even recognized as people, but considered as rubbish that could be thrown out at any moment." In 1898, Matyushenko decided to return to Dergachi to see his family. He traveled by train across Siberia and the breadth of the Russia. On his arrival at his home village, the bitterness he first felt after his beating years before had hardened into a hatred of the poverty and repression he witnessed everywhere.

After a brief visit, he left his family again and moved to Rostov-on-Don, taking a job as a dockworker. He soon found those who felt the way he did: workers who spoke of revolution. They invited him to join a study circle—a more organized but clandestine form of the discussion groups he had known in Kharkov, where they read Marx and pamphlets by exiled intellectuals between toasts of "Down
with the tsar!" and "Long live socialism!" The circle's leader was Vladimir Petrov, a future Bolshevik leader. With the aim of bringing Matyushenko fully to their side, they indoctrinated him in the history of revolutionary thought, pushing Social Democrat views as the best path to revolution.

Russia had been moving along this path since a handful of nobles attempted to install a constitutional government after Alexander I's death in 1825. These nobles, who plotted "between the claret and champagne"—as Pushkin characterized it—were executed for their trouble. In the eighty years that followed, a cast of Russian revolutionary leaders emerged. Primarily intellectuals, they steeped themselves in the study of European philosophical movements (and the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848) and then laid plans to remove the tsar and create a social Utopia.

Early radicals such as Sergei Nechayev, who at age nine had worked in a factory, called for a dedicated group of revolutionaries to seize control of the government and then see to the people's well-being. Rivers of blood would have to flow, since a revolutionary needed to "destroy everyone who stands in his way," as Nechayev wrote. He embodied this ruthlessness: when a member of his organization argued against his putschist strategies, Nechayev and three others pummeled, strangled, and then shot him.

But by the time his imprisonment for this crime ended, Nechayev's ideas had lost favor. Another set of intellectuals—this time inspired by Aleksandr Herzen, an exiled Russian writer—turned to a bottom-up approach to realizing social revolution. They divined that the source of the people's freedom was the Russian peasant. In the early 1870s, students bent on revolution journeyed to the countryside to persuade the peasants to take up their cause, but they found them hostile (occasionally physically so) to outsiders. Some radical leaders returned to violence as the means to gain power; others found enlightenment in Karl Marx's
Capital.
Its focus on the industrial working class (the proletariat) as the force that could bring about a socialist state had a profound effect, particularly given the failure to marshal the peasants to the cause.

But Russia had not yet evolved into the mature capitalist state that,
according to Marx's theory, must precede the people's liberation. Radical intellectuals, once again, tailored his ideas into a plan for action in Russia. In 1895, Georgy Plekhanov paved the way with his theory of a two-stage revolution. First, the proletariat would ally itself with the middle-class bourgeoisie, who were advancing the capitalist state, to fight against the tsar. Once the workers had gained democratic freedoms—namely, the ability to organize and speak freely—and the market economy had sufficiently developed, then the revolution's second stage would occur, leading to a socialist state. There would be no need for the terror campaigns and wide-scale executions propounded by Nechayev.