Red Mutiny- Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin by Neal Bascomb

One book leads to another and reading this book was the direct result of reading Boris Gindins “Mutiny- the Real Life Events that inspired the Hunt for Red October”.

This book marks the first time that the subject of the 1905 mutiny aboard Potemkin has been written about utilizing the manuscripts of the various participants of the mutiny as well as declassified Russian Naval records. As a result of this plethora of information we now have the only full account of the events as they unfolded in the Black Sea over 100 years ago.

Beginning with the moldy bread and maggot infested meat, this book takes off like a shot and keeps on coming! The crew is divided at first- and the First Officer has his hands full trying to keep the crew together as Tsar Nicholas II begins the hunt to capture or destroy the Potemkin. The ship anchors at Odessa where they hope to inspire a Revolution ashore and then take the entire fleet.

The Russian fleet tracks and pursues the Potemkin but twice the ship slips away. The unwillingness of the crews on the pursuing vessels to fire on their own comrades thwarts the Russian Tsar in his efforts to regain his prized warship and results in a mutiny on a second ship as well. At the same time- the unwillingness of the Potemkin crew to shell the city of Odessa as threatened, reduces the mutiny to a cat and mouse chase across the Black Sea to Romania, where ultimately the crew slips ashore and the Potemkin is returned to the Tsar.

Mr. Bascomb has taken a myriad of information and distilled it into a compelling read.

Mutiny by Boris Gindin with David Hagberg

This is the story of the real life events that inspired Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October”. The only difference is that there is no submarine.

A Jew raised in the Soviet Union of the 1960’s had very little to look forward to in the way of career choices. Boris Gindin was an exception. His grades in school along with his mechanical abilities and the intervention of an interested teacher helped secure him a slot at the Naval Academy. From there Mr. Yeltsin embarks upon his naval career landing the coveted position as Chief Engineering Officer aboard the Russian FFG (Guided Missle Frigate) Storozhevoy.

The ship’s Zampolit (political officer) has some misgivings about the direction that Russia has taken in respects to the Cold War. The US and Soviet Union were heading toward a thermonuclear confrontation. The crew, composed of mainly young, apolitical men taken from the countryside and conscripted into service, wants no part of it. These misgivings soon boil over into the perceived failures of the Russian Revolution and the Zampolit hatches a plot to take the ship and broadcast his opinions to the world, using the ship as a stage.

When the mutiny finally does happen in the harbor at Riga it splits the officers as well as the men- with Mr. Gindin- despite his ill treatment as a Russian Jew- opting to do the duties he was assigned and in a gripping account recalls how the non mutinous officers were herded below and imprisoned along with the Captain.

Meantime the Soviet government is rushing to destroy the ship while Mr. Gindin, knowing every inch of the Storozhevoy, is able to escape the confinement and the ship is retaken.

If this seems an oversimplified version of the events it is by design. The tension that Mr. Gindin creates throughout the book and the insights he provides into life in the Soviet Union at the time are too complex to detail here- this is a book that simply must be read
in order to capture the real intensity and scope of the mutiny.

This book will lead you to see the analogies in the 1905 Mutiny aboard the Russian ship Potemkin. The reasons, aims and desires of that crew were the same as the Storozhevoy. But that is the next book….