Potemkin (Russian battleship)
- In full:
- Kniaz Potemkin Tavricheskiy
Potemkin (Russian battleship), Russian battleship built for the Black Sea fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy. It is best remembered for a 1905 mutiny by its sailors, one of the events of the Russian Revolution in the same year. The mutineers took the ship to Odesa, Ukraine, but the mutiny eventually failed. The Potemkin was salvaged and later saw action in World War I before being scrapped. The Potemkin remains in popular memory thanks to the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, a film that covers some of the events of the mutiny and which remains popular to this day.
Design
The Potemkin was built at a shipyard in Mykolayiv, Ukraine, and was completed in 1903. It was named after Catherine the Great’s favorite minister, Grigory Potemkin. The ship weighed 12,600 tons and had an armament of four 12-inch guns in two twin turrets accompanied by sixteen 6-inch guns and fourteen 12-pounders. The Potemkin had a top speed of 16.5 knots.
The 1905 mutiny
The mutiny on the Potemkin was one of the key events during the 1905 uprising against tsarist rule in Russia. On June 27, 1905, during artillery maneuvers at sea, the sailors of the Potemkin, numbering more than 700 and already displeased at their living conditions and poor treatment from superiors, protested over the quality of their meat rations. The meat was then inspected by the ship’s doctor and declared fit for human consumption. Unhappy, the sailors refused to eat the meat, an act then considered direct disobedience. A confrontation followed, and several senior officers, including Capt. Evgenii Golikov and first officer Ippolit Gilyarovsky, were either killed or thrown overboard. Afanasy Matyushenko, a torpedo quartermaster, took command of the Potemkin.
The ship set course for Odesa, which was then witnessing mass protests against tsarist rule. Thousands of Odesans gathered to support the sailors. Odesa was already in a state of martial law, and the violence worsened when the mutineers went ashore. Tsarist Cossack troops fired on the crowd to disperse them. On June 30 the Potemkin went back to sea. A squadron of the Black Sea fleet spotted the Potemkin, but these ships chose not to fire for fear of mutiny from their own crews. One of these vessels, the battleship St. George, did witness a mutiny, but it was soon quashed.
The Potemkin then sailed to Constanța, Romania, where a request for supplies was refused. The ship went on to Feodosiya, Ukraine, but failed to acquire supplies there as well, returning to Constanța on July 8. The sailors surrendered the ship to Romanian authorities, but not before opening its sea cocks and flooding it with water. Some of the sailors were eventually captured by Russian authorities and taken back to Russia, where they were tried, followed by either execution or exile in Siberia.
Aftermath and legacy
The mutiny on the Potemkin was an unplanned event sparked by the poor quality of the meat on board. Before the mutiny, revolutionaries had been planning to seize a series of ships in July of that year with the intent of using them to drive the revolution. The unplanned mutiny, however, led to other ships’ crews being unprepared for coordinated action. Mutinies did arise on some other ships, but the now-warned authorities were able to quell them. The debate continues on whether the Russian Revolution would have successfully taken place in 1905 if the Potemkin’s crew had stuck to the original plan.
The Potemkin was eventually salvaged, returned to Russia, renamed the Panteleimon (for an Orthodox saint), and returned to active duty. It accidentally sank a Russian submarine in 1909. It later fought against the Ottoman Turkish navy at the Battle of Cape Sarych during World War I.
The ship was demoted in 1916, as advances in naval technology had rendered it obsolete. When the German army captured Sevastopol in May 1918, it took over the Potemkin, which was then handed over to the Allies after Germany’s defeat and the end of the war. In 1919 the ship’s engines were destroyed by the British to prevent the ship from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks. In 1923 the Soviets turned the ship into scrap metal. Ivan Beshoff, the last survivor of the Potemkin mutiny, died in 1987 at the age of 104.
The Potemkin became a part of public consciousness after the release of the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin by director Sergei Eisenstein. The film would become a symbol of the socialist revolution and has been hailed as a masterpiece of international cinema. Battleship Potemkin covers some of the events of the mutiny and ends with the Potemkin leaving the port of Odesa. The film would, ironically, be banned by Joseph Stalin for many years for fear it might incite a riot against his regime.