Red Mutiny (15 page)

Matyushenko strode across the deck, murder in his thoughts. As he stood over Gilyarovsky, the stricken officer hissed, "I know you, you scoundrel. You may escape from the ship now, but I'll find you."

"You won't have the chance," Matyushenko said evenly, before shooting him again. "I'm sending you to work as a ship's boy for Admiral Makarov."

Matyushenko lifted Gilyarovsky to the railing; the blood from
the officer's wounds smeared his sailor's jersey. Then he tipped Gilyarovsky's body overboard to join his hero who had died at Port Arthur a year before. Matyushenko had delivered his revenge against the worst of the officers, the one who had shot down his beloved comrade. Now the revolutionary began to focus on taking over the battleship.

"Enough of this slavery!" Matyushenko yelled, rallying the sailors around him. On the quarterdeck stood thirty armed sailor revolutionaries; the officers and their loyal self-seekers had fled to every corner of the ship. Matyushenko wanted them found before they tried to re-establish control or scuttle the battleship. He also sent sailors to check that Denisenko had gained control of the engine room, that Bredikhin had cut the telegraph wires, and that the others had seized the conning tower. They had a plan to execute.

With the officers in retreat and the armory in revolutionary hands, the mass of sailors made the easy decision to support the mutiny. "Hunt them all down!" came a shout from the turret. "The ship's not ours yet." In contrast to their earlier confusion, the crew acted in unison now. They raced across the decks, plunged down hatches, and searched bow to stern for their superiors, some acting out private revenge, some caught up in the bloodlust. A few had bayonets, others revolvers and rifles, but most went on their hunt armed only with clenched fists. Fueled by their recent fear of being shot for refusing to eat, released from the bonds of discipline, and emboldened by their own superior numbers, they were little better than a mob bent on terror and murder. They shouted "Down with the tsar!" and "Freedom!" almost as afterthoughts.

In this midst of this, Vakulenchuk struggled to his feet, but his legs buckled under him. He grabbed for the railing, pulling himself up again, mortally wounded. Before anyone could get to him, Vakulenchuk lost his balance and pitched over the ship's side. A sailor leapt into the water after him. With the help of some others, they managed to haul the injured revolutionary back on board. Weakened from loss of blood, he could not stand. The sailors carried him straight to the infirmary. While he struggled in and out of consciousness, barely hanging on to life, his comrades gained control of the battleship.

***

In his cabin, Lieutenant Aleksandr Kovalenko sat stiffly on his sofa, listening to screams and gunshots. Slim, with a clean-shaven, vulpine face, the twenty-three-year-old mechanical engineer, who had studied at a technological institute in Kharkov before joining the navy, treated well the sailors under his command. He sympathized with the Black Sea Fleet's revolutionary movement, though he could never have admitted it to them, for fear of discovery by his superiors. A Ukrainian nationalist, he wanted Nicholas II overthrown so that his own country could have its freedom. But he suspected the sailors would never see past his epaulettes during their rampage, even if he told them of his political views.

Kovalenko looked around his quarters. Only hours before, he had been alone in his stateroom, enjoying the scent of the field flowers that he had picked on Tendra Island and the open book on his desk before being called to lunch. Now he was shuddering at each gunshot and sitting beside three other fear-stricken officers.

He had been in the officers' wardroom when Gilyarovsky barged in to ask Smirnov if the meat was suitable for eating. With the drums sounding for roll call, Kovalenko breathed in relief that, as an engine-room officer, his presence was not required for the inevitable long speeches about discipline and the navy's strict regulations. He continued his lunch with the other officers not involved in the dressing down of the men: Lieutenant N. F. Grigoryev, Engineer Officer'S. A. Zaushkevich, and the locksmith A. N. Kharkevich, along with the ship's priest and the artillery engineers from St. Petersburg who had come to watch the firing tests. Then they heard a shriek from Gilyarovsky, demanding to know if the sailors meant mutiny, and the concentrated roar indicating that they did. Faces blanched in the wardroom. Father Parmen left immediately, followed by Colonel I. A. Schultz from St. Petersburg. "Something terrible is happening," Grigoryev said, approaching Kovalenko. He agreed, and three
Potemkin
officers followed him to his quarters to decide what to do.

"This would never have happened if the captain or his second officer hadn't acted so ridiculously," muttered Grigoryev to Kovalenko, while Zaushkevich stepped outside to see what was happening.

"Are you surprised?" Kovalenko asked. "How are they capable of acting with any common sense or conscience when they follow the military traditions of Peter I?"

"So true. But what now?!"

Kovalenko felt his hands shaking and was unable to stop them. "Maybe we should go and try to calm down the crew," he said, thinking out loud.

"We're all beyond words now," Grigoryev stated firmly.

Zaushkevich returned to the cabin. "The crew have guns, and the officers ran away."

"Good Lord," Grigoryev whispered. "All of us will be killed. Can you hear what's going on out there?"

Within minutes, the crazed yells of the crew and the pounding of their footsteps on the steel gangways became louder and closer. The sailors hurled open hatches and then threw them shut upon finding nobody inside. They laughed and cackled and shouted encouragement to one another. In nearby staterooms, they shattered mirrors, splintered furniture, and shot their guns wildly. Closer and closer still—Kovalenko stood petrified, knowing they would be found. With hundreds of sailors on the hunt, there was nowhere to hide. Finally he heard someone come down the corridor. As Kovalenko was about to peer out to see if he passed, a sailor pounded on the adjacent door and lustily shouted a warning: "Every single one of you will be killed! No one will be spared!"

Another voice was heard: "There are no others. Now
we
rule the ship."

Kovalenko stepped away from the door, certain that he was going to die—and soon. It seemed so pointless and so cruelly ironic that he was to lose his life at the hands of men who shared his distaste for the tsar. He felt trapped in a hurricane, with no way to escape or find shelter. Even if his machinists supported him, they made up just a small part of the mob.

"They're going to shoot us," Kharkevich whispered.

"There's only one thing left for us to do ... jump overboard." The thought had just occurred to Kovalenko. Although the shore was miles away, they might be able to make the swim. It was a better choice than facing a mob bent on revenge.

"It's impossible," Grigoryev scoffed.

"I'd prefer to die that way." Kovalenko began unbuttoning his jacket. The others hesitated, then stripped alongside him.

They kicked out the window in his cabin and crossed the corridor
to the
Potemkin
's starboard side. Kovalenko climbed through a porthole, looked over the edge to the water below, and then jumped. When he surfaced, he swam out a few yards to avoid Grigoryev and Kharkevich as they plunged into the sea as well. Zaushkevich changed his mind and tried to make his way down to the engine room, only to be caught on his way.

Within seconds of their jump into the water, sailors above spotted the officers and started shooting at them. The swimmers were helpless in the water, at the mercy of luck and the sailors' aim.

Grigoryev barely even groaned as a bullet hit him. His body went limp almost instantly, blood coloring the water about him. As their dead friend slipped under the water, Kovalenko and Kharkevich swam as fast as they could along the ship's hull toward the stern, where the angle was too steep for the sailors to hit them. Then they moved as far from the battleship as their limbs would take them, hoping each stroke would not be their last.

Back on the
Potemkin,
sailors hunted down the rest of the officers and petty officers. Several had already jumped overboard, like Kovalenko, and were riddled by bullets as they paddled toward the
Ismail.
Barricaded within one of the six-inch gun compartments, Ensign B. V. Vakhtin thought he was safe until the sailors broke inside. They pummeled him with their fists and with a broken-off leg of a table until he lost consciousness. A group of sailors found Father Parmen stumbling down a stairwell and shattered his nose with a rifle butt. They left him crawling for safety toward a latrine. The sailors came upon Dr. Smirnov in his cabin, half-dressed and splattered with blood. He had attempted suicide but did not have the stomach to inflict more than a mild flesh wound with a razor.

"Let me die in peace," he pleaded.

"Why did you say that the meat was good?" they demanded.

"I'm not to blame. I was compelled to say that."

"You ordered us to eat maggots—now you're going to be fish bait," a sailor said. Then they took Smirnov by the arms and dragged him out of his cabin. He begged for his life while the sailors lifted him onto the railing. Then they pushed him overboard with their bayonets. Seeing that he could swim, they shot him for good measure.

Down in the coal-hold area, the revolutionary Denisenko had arrested the chief mechanical engineer Lieutenant N. Y. Tsvetkov, stopping him from flooding the ship's lower compartments. "Where are the rest of the officers?" Tsvetkov asked the engineer. "Killed," said Denisenko. Tsvetkov handed over his saber. "Well, whatever happens, so be it. Let them do with me whatever they want."

Torpedo officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Ton refused to surrender. At the mutiny's height, he appeared on the quarterdeck, brandishing a revolver and walking straight toward Matyushenko. "Drop your weapons, you fools," Ton shouted. "You'll all be shot for this."

Several men, their rifles aimed at Ton's chest, screamed for the officer to be thrown overboard. Matyushenko signaled with his hand for the sailors to be calm. Ton then asked to speak with him, privately. Although Matyushenko respected his supervising officer, who was a fair disciplinarian, he did not trust the gun at his side. Matyushenko demanded that Ton put the revolver away before they spoke. Ton hesitated, then put the gun in his belt. The sailors still pointed their rifles at him. The moment gave Matyushenko a chance to catch his breath after the rush of events in the mutiny's first minutes. Waving off the sailors, he followed the torpedo officer to the side of the gun turret. Matyushenko told Ton to surrender and to take off his epaulettes if he wanted to be spared.

Ton replied bitterly, "You fool. You didn't give them to me and therefore you will not remove them."

Without another word, Ton drew his revolver, and before Matyushenko could knock the barrel aside, Ton fired two shots point-blank at him. Somehow—both missed Matyushenko. One struck a sailor's arm. The other hit a sailor in the right temple, killing him. Reflexively, Matyushenko and nine other sailors turned their rifles on Ton. Their gunshots threw him backward into the turret wall. After he slid down to the deck, his chest a pulpy mess, a group of sailors tossed him over the ship's side.

"We haven't found the captain yet," Matyushenko said, so focused on what they still had to do that his hair's-breadth escape from death left him unshaken. With Golikov still on the loose, they had not yet won the battleship. "Has anyone seen him?"

"We want the captain," the men yelled together before they spread out to look for him. "We want the captain!"

Then a sailor shouted that the
Ismail
was swinging around toward them. Some began firing at the
Ismail's
bow with their rifles, fearing it might torpedo the
Potemkin
at close range. Matyushenko rushed down to the gun deck with several revolutionaries, including Yfim Shevchenko and Sergei Guz. They knew the
Ismail
had not been stocked with torpedoes for the training exercises, but it must be prevented from getting away and alerting Sevastopol of the mutiny.

"Man the guns and put a shot across her bow," Matyushenko told the gunner, already beginning to assert command of the crew. "That'll soon stop her. They can't be allowed to escape."

Lieutenant Pyotr Klodt von Yurgensburg stood on the torpedo boat
Ismail's
deck. With a pair of binoculars he watched sailors rush across the main and upper decks of the
Potemkin,
and he vacillated about what he should do. Officers and petty officers pitched into the water, some already dead, others swimming for their lives toward the
Ismail
as sailors picked them off from above as if they were doing target practice. In the distance, he could also hear the crew's bloodcurdling screams as they overtook the battleship. Still Klodt did nothing, too scared to even think straight.

The
Ismail
had been anchored a stone's throw from the
Potemkin
when Klodt heard Golikov order the guards to the deck. "What can we do with such commanders?" Klodt asked his second officer, dismayed at why the battleship's captain needed armed guards in order to speak with his sailors. "Does he plan on arresting or killing them?" His crew wondered too as the situation deteriorated on the battleship, sailors first shouting for mercy, then in defiance.

With the first gunshots on the
Potemkin,
Klodt had panicked. The forty-one-year-old gunnery officer was a baron of Swedish nobility. His father was a famous painter, his grandfather an even more famous sculptor whose work was prominently displayed throughout St. Petersburg. Klodt ought to have followed in their creative footsteps, as he was an indecisive, weak-kneed leader, out of his depth on this, his first voyage commanding the
Ismail.
A more experienced, willful officer would have realized that without torpedoes to sink the mutinous battleship, the
Ismail
was best served by retreating out of the
Potemkin'
s range while the sailors were focused on taking over the
ship. If the mutiny succeeded, then Klodt could steam away to notify the Black Sea Fleet command. With a top speed of twenty-five knots and an ability to hug the shore, the
Ismail
could easily elude the
Potemkin
and reach Sevastopol within eight hours.