Potemkin

Just finished “Red Mutiny” a well-written (if sometimes creaky) history of the battleship Potemkin’s eleven day rebellion in the Black Sea in 1905. What marks it for me is the purity of its motives, a rebellion of men who took the ancient despair of the naval ratings throughout the world and attached it to the unspeakable class contempt that was igniting Russia (and soon all of Europe). There was no intellectual, theoretical oversight (Lenin sent a man, but he got lost)…..there was little or no factionalism….just a very few, very passionate, unschooled leaders who saw a direct line from rotten food through tyrannical officers and a heartless Tsar to a new and decent society. It damn near worked….at one point they had two battleships and a couple of gunboats under the control of their "sailor committee” which, believe it or not, made sane, sanitary, tactical decisions. Their leader, one Matyushenko, was incredibly brave, a sound tactician and, most important (despite his soaring rage at his oppressors) a humane man who spared lives and in the end, facing defeat (running out of coal and water) surrendered to the Romanians so that his men would not be executed. They buried their dead, tried not to murder all their enemies.

Interestingly, Matyushenko escaped for awhile to England, France, Switzerland, and even
the United States where he was lionized by but unimpressed by the Trotskys, Lenins, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs who, to him, complicated the mission. He ended up going back to Russia , was almost immediately captured and hung. He was 28. At the end he called himself an anarchist. He brushed aside the priest at the gallows and said, “I am proud to die for the truth.”

There’s something raw and clean about this story,