Free Red Mutiny by Neal Bascomb Page B

worsened still. Pamphlets, which Chukhnin saw after they had been seized, urged sailors to fire on their officers and ridiculed the tsar for finally managing to score a "mighty victory"—not in Manchuria or Port Arthur, but in front of the Winter Palace. In February, Chukhnin lost his patience and delivered a harsh speech to his sailors on life's realities, much as a father might resort to scolding his child after other efforts had failed. Then he had his lecture posted throughout the naval base for good measure.
    He made clear he would brook no compromise nor listen to complaints about service conditions. Any such grumbling was wholly the product of "pernicious traitors and cowards" trying to drive a wedge between the sailors and their love for Tsar Nicholas. Although the speech foretold how the revolution would end in dictatorship ("The radical will promise the people a better life.... This is only the means to get power"), it would have been an empty diatribe, had Chukhnin not believed passionately in its truth. He intended to discipline his sailors until they turned away, as he said in his speech, from the "path of vileness and disgrace of the Russian name."
    Still the sailors refused to toe the line. When Chukhnin sent hundreds of unreliable sailors from the fleet into service in the Far East, they revolted again. While changing trains midway through their journey, the sailors refused to reboard and a riot broke out. Eventually they had to be sent back to Sevastopol. As Chukhnin noted in a letter to the ministry in St. Petersburg, a missive unusual in its bluntness, this cycle of rebellion was rooted not only in revolutionary unrest but also in the fleet's idleness (because of the 1856 Treaty of Paris, Russian warships were restricted from passing through the Bosphorus Strait) and in the worthless officers he had inherited from his predecessor.
    Legend has it that Admiral Nelson could "in ten days' time restore
most mutinous crews," but he had the advantage of good officers at his side. Chukhnin was burdened with the likes of Golikov, whose efforts to enforce discipline and stamp out radicals on the
Potemkin
included barging into sailors' quarters in the middle of the night and demanding to know why a particular hammock was empty—only to discover that the sailor was on duty; bribing his own men to spy on other sailors, then having them arrested for not bringing enough information; inviting musicians on board to sing patriotic songs about obeying one's officers and the tsar; and making a big show of interrogating and then punishing a sailor for possessing an illegal pamphlet even though he was illiterate. Few sailors escaped some kind of punishment from the captain, whether for staining the deck, arriving late for roll call, or simply reading a book that his officers were unfamiliar with. Corporal punishment was not his style, but even for the most minor offense, he would dock a sailor's pay, throw him in the brig for twenty-four hours, make him stand at attention with a fifty-pound bag of sand around his neck, or keep him on duty for three straight shifts.
    Golikov was also prone to speeches that resonated with misplaced romance and sheer stupidity. On April 15, to celebrate the final completion of the
Potemkin,
he gathered his sailors together and said, "It took nine years to build this ship. It was dead all that time, but now is endowed with life, like a man, to have arms, legs, a head, and eyes. You should love and cherish this ship as a mother loves her children." After the defeat at Tsushima, he took the opportunity to opine about a mutiny he had experienced aboard the cruiser
Svetlana,
after which several sailors were executed: "This is what happens to sailors who ignore discipline." Hearing the speech, his engineer officer, Aleksandr Kovalenko, muttered under his breath, "Lord, Lord, is he ignorant." These were Golikov's only words of so-called inspiration to his crew after hundreds of their fellow