"DESPITE 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."
Even the Japanese, who had the most to gain from a tsar hobbled by mutiny, sympathized with Nicholas rather than with the sailors. A Japanese official told the newspaper Fiji Shimpo, "We have lately heard that a mutinous spirit was rife among the Russian troops. This, combined with the disgrace of the Black Sea, makes us fear that the Russian government might be overthrown.... Then we should have nobody with whom to negotiate. It is sincerely to be hoped, both for the sake of Russia and Japan, that the trouble will end soon."
With worldwide political and public opinion leveled against the Potemkin sailors, with Russian liberals disavowing their actions, with additional Black Sea Fleet mutinies disbanded, and with Chukhnin marshaling resistance against the battleship throughout the region, the crew had only their exiled revolutionary leaders—men such as Lenin and Martov—to look to for assistance. These leaders were found wanting. Their representatives in major Russian cities printed leaflets referencing the mutiny, but they merely used the Potemkin to further their own propaganda. "The ironclad Knyaz Potemkin has raised our red revolutionary flag.... Comrades, now it's our turn. We must, we have to perform our duty in support of our Lodz, Warsaw and Odessa comrades. After Bloody Sunday, all of Russia pays careful attention to what is happening here," the Social Democrat's St. Petersburg committee proclaimed, in its effort to recruit workers to strike against mobilization.
In Geneva, the revolution's intellectual leaders busied themselves interpreting the Potemkin's significance to their larger struggle against the tsar. But beyond Vasilyev-Yuzhin's improbable mission, which was arranged by Lenin, they were incapable of coordinating any help for the sailors in the various Russian ports to which the battleship might next travel.
Lenin did write a letter to the International Socialist Bureau, urging it to appeal to workers everywhere to protest against sending any European warships into the Black Sea to sink the Potemkin. Apart from that, he devoted his time and prodigious work ethic to the internecine conflict within the Social Democratic Party. Specifically, he issued a vindictive attack on a recent Menshevik conference for its lack of organization. Later that same day, Lenin ran across an editorial in the Paris newspaper Le Matin that chastised all Social Democrats for the same problem: "One cannot overstate the lack of organization of the revolution. The revolution gains possession of a battleship, an event unique in history, but it does not know what to do with it."
On the afternoon of June 21, the Potemkin and the Ismail steamed sluggishly across the Black Sea, their crews worn down by the heat and the lack of food. Nowhere was the situation worse than down in the Potemkin's engine room. Day and night, the machinists and stokers were at the mercy of the humid, slack-choked air and constant noise while they kept the battleship running on its 370-mile journey to Theodosia, though at half its normal speed. Because of the lack of fresh water (the onboard distillery provided only enough for drinking), they used saltwater for the boilers, which corroded and clogged the pipes. Only a few boilers could be used at a time, so the sailors could clean the others. The walls were searing to the touch as the men crawled inside with rags and scouring brushes; their work merely delayed the inevitable ruin of the boilers.
When these sailors ascended from the engine room to the open decks, they could barely stand or speak. "We haven't the strength," one machinist gasped, in a report to the ship's leaders. "Our arms are weak. Every moment we feel we will drop." Still, they managed to keep the engines going, using their two- to three-day supply of coal sparingly.
The machinists and stokers found little cheer among the other sailors. A few sang songs or played cards to entertain themselves between watches, but the lightheartedness they had enjoyed on the voyage to Constanza was now gone. Eight days had passed since the men had eaten a proper meal, and the cooks were left with only four bags of dried bread and some porridge to feed them. Some sailors deserted their duties, and ensigns Alekseyev and Kaluzhny holed up in a stateroom; idleness allowed their fears to fester as they imagined dying in a squadron attack. The battleship's slow progress to Theodosia also cut at the crew's spirit. Many were terrorized by the thought of being caught on the open sea by their pursuers, namely, the rumored torpedo boat manned by officers. The previous night had been spent in complete darkness; the ship's searchlights were turned off so as not to give away the Potemkin's position.
Alone on the Black Sea, with nothing but rolling waves in every direction, the sailors experienced a deep sense of isolation. On their first day in Odessa, they had been greeted like heroes by the workers, but since then, they had no contact with the people for whom they might sacrifice their lives to help. The flush of success they had felt when the St. George came to their side had been dashed by betrayal. This disappointment deepened as the sailors realized that a fleetwide mutiny was unlikely to occur. The flight to Romania had provided a glimmer of hope, but now it too had been extinguished.
While in Constanza, the crew still had two choices, as Feldmann later described it: "To surrender under the protection of the Romanian authorities or to enter on a war to the death with tsarism. We chose the latter." This irrevocable decision weighed heavily on every crew member during the two-day journey to Theodosia.
Preying on this collective feeling of doom, the petty officers quietly turned some sailors against the revolutionaries. They sowed doubts, telling the crew that the battleship needed repair or it would soon lose its fighting ability, making it an easy target to capture or—worse—to send to the bottom of the sea. At every opportunity and about every issue, whether cleaning the boilers or raising festive banners along the yardarm, they bitterly complained about Matyushenko and the ship's other leaders. When Kirill overheard two petty officers discussing how the tsar would show no mercy to the sailors, he threatened to have them thrown overboard, knowing how poisonous their talk had become. If the majority of the crew lost faith, the mutiny was finished.
Standing on the bridge, Matyushenko discounted the crew's troubled mood. In Constanza, they had clearly expressed that they would rather starve than relinquish the Potemkin, and the sailor committee had chosen their new course of action after an open debate. In the morning, the sailors had shown continuing resolve when they came across a Turkish coal ship. Although the Potemkin's coal stock was dangerously depleted, they held true to their promise not to attack foreign vessels, letting the ship pass. Like Kovalenko, who often joined Matyushenko to observe the men, he was less inclined to see the crew's increasingly beleaguered appearance than he was to recall how eagerly they had congregated to hear the discussion at committee meetings or speakers such as Nikishkin discussing the revolution's goals.
That afternoon, machinist Denisenko, who had been laboring mightily to keep the engines running, came to the bridge to speak with his friend.
"What do you think of our chances?" Matyushenko asked, keen as always to talk about the fight ahead.
"When we arrive in Theodosia, it'll be clear enough," Denisenko said.
"I think we should go to Batumi next," Matyushenko replied. "We can land along the coast, and other comrade-revolutionaries will join us. There are lots of Armenians in the city, and many of them are socialist. We'll really go to it against the tsar, taking towns, one by one, until we reach St. Petersburg."
Denisenko protested that this plan was premature, but Matyushenko cut him off mid-argument, his face reddened and jaw clenched. It was obvious that he did not want to hear any doubts. In his view, their single battleship could still triumph over the tsar. He could not stand to believe otherwise.
Before the sun set that evening, the snowcapped mountains of the Caucasus came into view on the horizon. At a great distance, they seemed almost to float in the sky. The sailors stood mesmerized by the sight. Soon, however, the peaks vanished in the encroaching darkness, and feelings of isolation returned.