Red Mutiny (6 page)

Never a cohesive group, radical Russian intellectuals began to splinter into separate, competing factions near the end of the century, frustrated that the tsarist government maintained its hold on Russia. Several revolutionary leaders, Plekhanov among them, formed the Social Democratic Party to enlighten the workers with propaganda and politicize them with labor strikes, creating a revolutionary vanguard that would grow and grow until they realized the two-stage revolution. While the Social Democrats concentrated on the workers, the Socialist Revolutionaries believed in the power of the peasants to bring about revolution, combining this with terror attacks to undermine the government. Other groups fought strictly for the improvement of the workers' lot, rather than using them as a means of revolution. Still others abandoned their more radical ideas, hoping to establish a parliamentary democracy: liberal reform rather than revolution was their new slogan.

A young firebrand named Lenin would have none of this tempered approach. He dissected his opponents' arguments in his writings and with the sheer force of his personality. Compromise with the bourgeois liberals, which some of his own Social Democrats believed in, was anathema to Lenin, as was compromise with anybody else, for that matter, especially those seeking only reform. Lenin argued that Russia was already prepared for revolution. To lead the workers in overthrowing the tsar and bringing about the socialist state, the Social Democrats needed the leadership of an iron-fisted group of devoted revolutionaries. Otherwise, the revolution would disintegrate. This hard-line view eventually split the Social Democrats into two groups:
the Bolsheviks, who rallied around Lenin, and the Mensheviks, a largely leaderless faction who believed in a more democratic revolution, fearing their rival's path would simply descend into another form of dictatorship.

As an uprooted peasant worker who loathed authoritarian rule and enlightened himself through books and study circles, Matyushenko was an ideal candidate for the revolution's rank and file. Yet the philosophical tracts and competing ideologies discussed in Rostov sounded like empty talk to him. In an abstract way, he understood that the tsar was the source of the oppression he had experienced as a peasant, then as a worker, but he had not yet joined the revolutionary cause. Only after coming face-to-face with the instruments of the tsar's regime did he come to despise it enough to risk his life to see it overthrown. Then, on his twenty-first birthday in May 1900, he received his draft notice.

Bound by conscription laws, Matyushenko returned to his birthplace at the summer's end to receive his seven-year sentence to active service: in the army or the navy, assigned by drawing lots. With no money to bribe his way to an exemption and no faith in "wise old women" to cast a spell that would make the doctors turn him away, he had to accept his obligation. In his village, the evening before they drew lots, the scene was riotous: others of his age drowned themselves in vodka, chased girls, and danced in the streets between the farewell dinners thrown by their families. It was as if the young men were celebrating the last day before their doom. Some in Dergachi were old enough to remember the old twenty-five-year conscription requirement and seeing their fellow serfs led away in chains, funeral chants following them as they left the village. To a young man like Matyushenko, however, even seven years seemed a lifetime. One could have forgiven him for feeling "naked, exposed, and trembling"—one recruit's thoughts on departure day.

The next day Matyushenko and the other men from his village, along with their families, traveled by wagon into Kharkov. The elders had given each of them a quart of vodka and five rubles as sustenance for the days ahead. Many arrived drunk as idiots. At the drafting center, a city clerk called out their names one by one. Mothers
threw themselves on the ground, wailing for their sons. Finally, Matyushenko heard his name, stepped forward, and drew his lot—the navy. Well, he thought, at least he already had some experience on the sea and liked its open spaces.

He arrived at Sevastopol by train, carrying everything he owned slung over his shoulder in a canvas bag. At the base, an officer assigned him to the Thirty-sixth Naval Company of the Black Sea Fleet. Surrounded by former peasants and workers who had known the same brutal life that he had, he gave his oath of allegiance: "I promise and do hereby swear before the Almighty God, before His Holy Gospels, to serve His Imperial Majesty, the Supreme Autocrat, truly and faithfully, to obey him in all things, and to defend his dynasty, without sparing my body, until the last drop of my blood."

At that moment, Matyushenko stepped into a different world, one designed, as fellow Black Sea sailor Ivan Lychev wrote, to "dislodge every last bit of humanity from one's soul." First he became acquainted with how he was to be addressed over the next seven years: by the Russian
ty,
or "you," commonly used to get the attention of young boys or animals, instead of the formal
vy.
His father, a former serf, was once addressed in this way by his master. Then Matyushenko learned how to address officers according to rank: "Your Honor," "Your Excellency," "Your Most High Radiance," and so on, up the chain of command. To spare himself punishment, he had to answer his superiors with exactly prescribed phrases in a loud voice: "Quite so, Your Honor," "Not at all, Your Honor," "Glad to serve you, Your Honor." Minor violations were met with a rifle butt to the head, a slap across the face, or an order to stand guard with a heavy sack hung from the shoulders for eight hours before running barefoot up and down a ship's rope ladder until the feet bled. If really angered, an officer could always order a discreet flogging or fifteen days of isolation in a dank, unlit cement cell. In the Russian navy, discipline meant fearing the corporal's staff more than the enemy itself.

The four-month training regimen consisted of long days and nights of marching, performing parade-ground drills, learning basic naval skills, and memorizing useless details and military ranks of the tsar's extended family. Sailors said they aged decades in this short span of time. Those from provinces unfortunate enough not to speak Russian
bore a heavier weight; they were struck mercilessly until they learned what was "right" and "left;" Some understood only after a visit to the naval hospital.

Any hopes that new sailors such as Matyushenko had of finding relief in the barracks or mess halls were sadly dashed. The food amounted to gruel. "Breakfast of porridge, boiled in large iron kettles, lies there during the day fermenting into thick layers," grumbled a sailor in a letter home. "It is prepared from rotten grain, salt and water and gives one heartburn.... The bread cracks teeth, and its taste makes one's eyes burn." At dinner, the borscht, absent of all but the worst cuts of meat, if there was any at all, was likened to pigs' slop. If a sailor complained about the food, the unit doctor prescribed heavy doses of castor oil. As for the crowded, grotesquely maintained barracks, one never enjoyed a moment of privacy.

In the six hours per month that Matyushenko had off duty, he found himself restricted by rules seemingly intended to degrade him. First, he had to beg for a pass to leave the base, placing himself at the whim of whoever was on duty. Once in Sevastopol, he was forbidden to smoke in public, eat in restaurants, attend the theater, ride the tram, or sit in any train compartment other than third class. If he were to meet a girl in one of the few places he was allowed entrance to and they wanted to marry, regulations prohibited this throughout his entire term of service.

Then there were the "dragons," as Matyushenko quickly took to calling his officers. Almost to a rule, they came from noble families, though most were old naval families who had earned their tides through service. The navy typically attracted the worst of this lot, the ones who had failed to be accepted into a better-paying, more prestigious career outside the military. Those who chose to become officers often looked to the navy as a refuge from a changing Russia. In this branch of the military, strong, autocratic principles and old traditions still rigidly held sway. Naturally, there was plenty of room for womanizing, gambling, flagrant drunkenness, duels over injured honor, and outright theft, usually at the sailors' expense. Many officers were boorish tyrants with a cruel streak. They treated their sailors as serfs or as "wild animals" in need of taming, or sometimes a combination of the two.

Matyushenko weathered the four months of training, followed by
a specialized course in torpedo machinery, and then he attended an advanced school for the same specialty near St. Petersburg. In 1902 he was promoted to quartermaster and assigned to the battleship
Potemkin,
then under construction at a Black Sea shipyard. Considered a fine, faithful sailor by his superiors, they selected him to serve on Nicholas II's 337-foot private yacht, the
Polar Star,
which the tsar used on his annual vacation in the region.

Since the day he arrived in Sevastopol as a new conscript, however, another Matyushenko was boiling up from within. A revolutionary was being forged under the strain of the persecution that he felt himself subjected to and witnessed around him, the persecution of those whom the officers called "scum" and "scoundrel" and "dirty peasant." Just like the radical intellectuals jailed in the tsar's prisons, Matyushenko found that the fight against Nicholas II had become personal and white hot. He despised how peasants and workers were robbed blind, then marched out to serve the regime that had done the stealing; he loathed how the officers who punished sailors for nothing expected obedience in return and how the tsar ordered his own troops to fire on their brothers and sisters. Then Matyushenko found a way to channel his fury when he met Ivan Yakhnovsky, a fellow sailor who was organizing his own fight against the tsar's navy with a printing press hidden in his father's basement and an ability to inspire.

Ivan Yakhnovsky had a square forehead and chin, brooding eyes, and an air of stoicism. As a metal caster at a locomotive-manufacturing plant in Kharkov (where his family had moved after facing starvation as peasants), he had joined a Social Democrat study circle, learned the art of agitation, and participated in several worker strikes, one resulting in his arrest. In summer 1902, he was drafted into the navy. His friends suggested going underground in Kharkov, but he had a different idea: enter the navy and bring sailors into the revolutionary struggle.

He found the fleet primed for his efforts. The Russian navy required many more literate, better-skilled individuals than the army did because of the complex technology involved in the modern battleship's operation. The navy needed machinists, boilermakers, pipe fitters, electricians, and telegraphers, not simply absent-minded deck hands. With this in mind, they specifically recruited workers from the
cities (though they still drew many peasants because of the sheer number of sailors required). Often these workers had already been exposed to propaganda and were sympathetic to the revolutionaries, particularly since their officers treated them as peasants who had not seen a light bulb before their conscription. Furthermore, the nature of basic training, forcing conscripts to subjugate their individuality to work together, unified the sailors and gave them a common identity. Ironically, this perfectly laid the groundwork for revolutionary goals.

By this time, Matyushenko was unable to hide his disgust and must have been easy to spot as a potential agitator. He openly befriended several workers connected to revolutionary parties in Nikolayev. At the slightest provocation, he launched into tirades about "What truth could exist in our society under the existing rules when [the sailor] is considered to be a mere animal." Matyushenko also stood out because others looked to him as their protector. Whenever the sailors had to stand guard during the winter without a proper coat or boots, Matyushenko found the money, often his own, to buy them.

Soon after his arrival in the navy, Yakhnovsky formed a study circle and Matyushenko was one of the first to join. Matyushenko energetically took to the fight, often without concern for arrest while recruiting sailors. He would boldly walk into the lower decks where sailors slept and ask, "Is there anyone here from Kharkov?" If there was no reply, he turned to the nearest sailor to see where he was from. "Podol, really? My dear brother, I'm looking for someone from that area! How long have you been here?" Conversation came easily to him, and soon he would gather a group around him. Then he would begin to mention the harsh treatment of the sailors. After receiving a few nods in agreement, he would bring out illegal literature that could have gotten him hanged. "He was that brave," Yakhnovsky said.

Within months, the former Kharkov agitator and his first recruits developed a network of study circles, five to seven sailors in each, across the fleet. They smuggled illegal pamphlets and newspapers aboard in sacks of sugar or wrapped around their calves, later concealing them in lifeboats and under weapons caches until they were distributed. Often sailors would awaken to find pamphlets stuck under their pillows. They held meetings in the engine rooms, while swimming, and under the guise of prayer sessions. They devised signals to alert sailors of an approaching officer: a cigarette tossed into a
water bucket or a rapid series of coughs. Even as the Black Sea Fleet command tried to stamp out their activities, the circles expanded. The leaders of each were connected through Tsentralka, which held group meetings, recruited speakers, coordinated dissemination of literature, cooperated with revolutionary groups in Sevastopol, and directed the overall activities of the sailors. By the time Yakhnovsky was arrested in mid-1904 and shipped off to prison, the revolutionary movement within the fleet had taken on a life of its own. The war with Japan and the arrival of Chukhnin, the Black Sea Fleet's new commander who instituted a harsh crackdown in discipline, only furthered their efforts.

Throughout, Matyushenko maintained his bold recruiting methods, somehow managing to never even come under suspicion. But the sailors knew his views. Some Tsentralka leaders feared his strident hatred of the regime. Nothing else seemed to matter to him, and if a sailor talked of anything but revolution, Matyushenko challenged his dedication or even accused him of being a spy.