About book Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days On The Battleship Potemkin (2007)
A riveting account of the Potempkin uprising. Also featured is a nice quick character study of Nicholas II, and the policies and traits that lead almost directly to the 1905 revolution, and of course eventually the 1917 revolution, and the later Bolshevik coup. I was interested to not that, comparing this book to the famous silent film "Броненосец Потемкин", the film was fairly accurate. The only difference was that the film ended with the Potemkin steaming through the rest of the Black Sea Fleet, and the presumed success of the revolt (and not showing the eventual betrayals and surrender of the crew, and the partial scuttling of the ship).This book had an interesting tone. The author certainly seemed sympathetic towards the revolutionaries; Afanasiy Matyushenko was definitely the "hero." (I will note here that Matyushenko, and most of the sailor revolutionaries, were absolutely not Bolsheviks, but rather Social Democrats, and similar. Matyushenko specifically scorned Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which led to him being vilified by the early Soviet government, even while they praised the Potemkin mutiny as a whole) But at the same time, Bascomb lays out exactly why so many populist revolutions fail. The revolutionaries are constantly confronted by the fact that the will of most people is rather flexible. It required a great deal of effort to keep the crew resolute (or at least mostly resolute) and the disorder among the civilian revolutionaries ended up being disastrous to the mutiny. The idealism of the revolutionaries led them to expect more out of their fellow sailors than was warranted. Only two other ships successfully mutinied, and both were quickly stifled, one by internal treachery, and one by capture, due to being a training ship without ammunition. The fleet did not rise up together and destroy the Tsarist regime, nor did the army rally to them. It's happened time and time again, throughout history. The Jacobite rebellion, the Irish Rising of 1798, the Irish Easter Rising, even the American Civil War to a certain extent (the failure of Maryland to rally to the South after being invaded, for instance). The people generally want to be left alone. People are scared of the consequences to themselves, and are rarely committed enough to a cause to risk their own lives for an abstract. It takes absolutely outrageous conditions, as in revolutionary France, or the Russian 1917 revolution, to bring about a true popular uprising.The 1905 revolution is still very important. It offered another chance for Nicholas II to help his people, and he spat in their faces again. It's not hard to see the path to the later revolution. And Lenin himself took a lesson from 1905: if a people's revolt were to succeed, he was convinced he would need to be absolutely brutal. And we saw where that led...Quick sidenote: the reader was NOT good. Sounded like he was reading a children's story book rather than a historical account.
Okay, so I didn't read this...I listened to it in the car (which was good, since I heard the Russian names pronounced correctly). Brutalized by Russian Imperial navy discipline and battered by the Russo-Japanese war, the conscripts in the Black Sea Fleet were in no mood for maggoty beef and rose up with the encouragement of revolutionaries in the ranks and in the nearby city of Odessa. This is a vivid recounting of the tragic progression from early success to the inevitable brutal crushing with the sailors mirroring the fault lines in Russian reform (workers vs. peasants, middle class Jews vs. anti-Semetic rural people, socialists and anarchists, feuding ethnic groups, the trouble developing an ideology more sophisticated than ""it is fun to kill officers"" which can be explained to the illiterate and hungry). With interesting diversions into areas like the absolutist architecture of the Richelieu (Odessa) steps, the co-opting of the Potempkin by Lenin and Stalin for their own historical version and the subsequent fates of the mutineers lucky enough to get sanctuary in Romania (a bunch of them moved to New York and became union shop stewards for the Singer sewing machine company!).
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What struck me the most in Neal Bascomb's account of the mutiny is the stupidity and weakness of Tsar Nicholas. He had the goodwill and loyalty of the peasants until his troops fired on the crowd in front of the Winter Palace. He alienated the sailors by treating them with contempt and wasting their lives in the ill conceived and executed war with Japan. Bascomb shows how Lenin tried to hijack the Potemkin mutiny to serve his bolshevik aims while hiding in Switzerland. The author deftly connects all these elements and illuminates an important chapter in Russia's violent and turbulent history.
—Allan
Ryan: Great book. I'm not a history buff and so I was skeptical when a friend recommended this to me, since it documents an event that is little known and happened in the very early 1900s. It was great, though. It was a straight up historical non-fiction, but had been researched so fully by the author that it was rich with dialog and detail gleaned from journals and such. It's about the revolution on board a Russian battleship, during the rule of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas the II. The Russian people were hungry for change at that time, and the conditions were just right to spark a mutiny on board Russia's most powerful battleship.I was impressed by the personal sacrifices that the sailors made by joining in the mutiny. Most had family, wives and children, back at their homes, and by helping with the mutiny they knew they would probably never see their families again. Most did not. However, they were conscious of a much larger purpose, that of inspiring the rest of their fellow Russians to take a bold stand against oppression. It is admirable to have that level of conviction. Just make sure it is for a good purpose, ok kiddies?
—Bybees
This book was a good reminder how, despite the horrors it produced, the Russian Revolution began as an idealistic and hopeful struggle. I was impressed by the restraint that the mutineers on the Potemkin showed throughout their time in control of the battleship, and the deep belief they had in correcting the terrible life they appeared to be doomed to.One passage from a memoir quoted in the book is a good example. It shows both the expectations and the inevitable letdown that revolution promised:"Looking at the sailors, sensing their eagerness, we felt good in our hearts. The nightmare of fear that our efforts would fail was replaced with confidence in our success and victory over our age-old enemy ... Tomorrow we would take over Odessa, establish a fee government, create a people's army, march on Kiev, Khartov, and other cities, join with the peasants in the villages. After that, we would march on the Caucasus, along the shores of the Black Sea. Everywhere we would bring freedom and independence from slavery. Then on to Moscow and finally St. Petersburg."
—Riley
