The Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film, produced during the Soviet era, depicts the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin from the year 1905, prior to the Soviet takeover of the state and seen as a foreshadowing of the wider revolution that was to come. In the film, the mutineers/rebels are depicted as heroes, embodying the spirit of the fight against Tsarist oppression that the good comrades of the Soviet world wanted to project. The Cossacks (themselves a symbol of Russian tradition that the Soviet era comrades despised) and the Tsarist cavalry are depicted as brutal thugs, slaughtering the innocent people of Odessa for daring to show support for the mutineers. As Odessa was one of the most open cities for Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement, the slaughter of people can be seen also as a persecution of Jews, especially since the Soviet Revolution was largely Jewish in nature and Eisenstein himself was Jewish. Thus, there is a natural sympathy between the filmmaker and the subject. Old World Russia was not beloved by Revolutionary Russia, and the film suggests that the reason was a lack of respect for Russia’s common people—the working class, the everyday soldiers treated worse than dogs by the authorities. It is essentially Orwell’s Animal Farm without the irony. It is Soviet idealism, typical of the Soviet film era (Neff). This paper will discuss the merits of Eisenstein’s film with respect to causality and context and how historically accurate the film was.

When Lenin’s words are quoted on screen in the beginning of Battleship Potemkin it is a signal from the director that the film is meant to be an homage to revolutionary spirit of Lenin: “Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, rightful, just, and truly great war… In Russia this war has been declared and begun” (Eisenstein). Eisenstein was both commemorating the 20th anniversary of the mutiny on the battleship and the Russian Revolution itself (Neff). The speech given by Vakulinchuk, one of the leaders of the mutiny in real life, echoes the Revolutionary ideals and indicates that there was indeed a revolutionary spirit already in the air by 1905, a dozen years before the 1917 Soviet takeover. Thus, by rooting the revolution in the context of the Potemkin mutiny and in an imagined slaughter of innocent Odessans (i.e., Jews), Eisenstein subconsciously links the persecution of Jews with the Russian Revolution as though to indicate that Revolution was the Jews’ moment of glorious revenge.
What the film does not show is that in real life the most well-trained and experienced naval officers of the ships in the Black Sea Fleet had been replaced by unformed recruits and incapable officers when the Fleet’s best were transferred to the Pacific to fill the gaps left by losses sustained from the Russo-Japanese War of the same time. This would explain the rather pitiful and shabby treatment of the unhappy sailors on the Potemkin: their usual commanders likely would have handled the situation much better instead of escalating the conflict as the officers in the film (and in real life) did. The difference is that the film makes no mention of the officers being inexperienced and lacking in formation or of the recruits themselves also lacking in discipline and commitment to their orders and station. A revolution was already ongoing in 1905 and mutiny was actually being planned for several ships in the fleet (Bascomb). In Eisenstein’s film the behind the scenes strategy of the Revolutionaries is not fully realized—rather, the film makes it seem as though the uprising on the battleship were a purely spontaneous affair. In real life, it was orchestrated by the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Organization of the Black Sea Fleet (Bascomb).
The event that triggered the uprising was indeed a dispute over borscht as shown in the film. However, the film is very sympathetic with the men, showing the rotten meat that the unsympathetic officers expected the men to eat. The viewer sees the maggots crawling all over the meat and sees the repugnant expression of the cook, who regrets having to serve this trip to the sailors. In real life, however, it is likely that the refusal to eat was partly due to the revolutionary spirit in the air, partly due to the machinations of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Organization, and partly due to the rough and unformed nature of the recruits. The officers who responded, though, also played a part. The second in command, Giliarovsky, escalated the situation beyond the bounds of propriety by threatening to shoot the sailors who would not eat. This response, totally out of proportion to the offense and completely egregious, spurred on whatever mutinous spirit was skulking about the battleship and all but guaranteed a revolt. When that spirit broke out into the open and Vakulinchuk killed Giliarovsky, the mutiny was underway. Seven officers were killed in the mutiny (Bascomb). In the film, the mutineers conduct a clean sweep of the offensive authoritarians—the bourgeois officers and their Orthodox priest: all are turned into fish food. Indeed, the film makes a point to object to the Christian Lord’s Prayer when the men are festering, thinking about the rotten meat being pushed upon them, and one of them sees a plate that reads “Give us this day our daily bread”—a line from the Our Father of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches (Eisenstein). The man reads it and smashes the plate—it is an obvious act of religious and social significance, and another subtle jab by the Jewish director at the Christian Establishment that ruled Russia at the time. The dragging out of the ship’s priest from his hole where he is hiding once the mutiny begins is an indication of the spirit behind the film and behind the revolution it was celebrating and honoring.
The cause of the mutiny is depicted in the film as being an inhumane approach towards the sailors, who are just average, healthy, stocky, decent human beings who just want be treated decently for once in their lives. After one of the men is harassed by an officer, Vakulinchuk wakens and delivers a speech to rouse the men to take action, to think of their comrades ashore who are fighting the oppressive regime. These comrades ashore are later shown in an epic scene that has been revered throughout the past century: the massacre of the Odessans and the baby carriage rolling down the steps scene. De Palma paid homage to the scene in his film The Untouchables with the railway station scene in which a shootout takes place as a baby carriage is lost and tumbles down the steps. Eisenstein’s mastery of the medium is revealed in this scene, with one over-dramatic sequence after another—but captivating nonetheless. The act ends with the Russian soldiers slicing the baby stroller to bits and the pained bloody face of an Odessan screaming in horror as she is shot through the eye. The staircase scene is brutal and horrific and reinforces the idea in the film that the revolution is needed—such a cruel and tyrannous regime would never be respected or beloved in real life.
Yet in real life the Tsarist regime was respected and loved by those who were not revolutionaries. The point Eisenstein was trying to make was that the regime was persecuting the salt of the earth—but the ship and the setting, while grounded in real life, is skewed to portray the rebels and the Odessans as more sympathetic, the authorities as more brutal by nature and breeding.
The problem with the Odessa staircase segment is that in real life it never happened. There was no brutal massacre on the staircase—nothing of the sort ever happened. The mutiny happened. The Odessans were on strike. But the massacre and the cause and effect were twisted by Eisenstein (Osborn).
What Eisenstein also leaves out is that the heroic ending wherein the sailors of the Potemkin are permitted to sail away by other mutineers aboard other battleships sent to stop was not really the end of the story. The actual Potemkin was permitted to depart but it was not permitted to dock anywhere. The mutineers were all eventually killed or arrested. It was not a glorious ending at all. The other ship that saw a mutiny faired even worse.
In conclusion, the film The Battleship Potemkin is a piece of Soviet propaganda through and through. Though recognized as a brilliant piece of filmmaking, shocking and dramatic in turns, from the perspective of history it is completely slanted, telling the events from the perspective of a Soviet twenty years later, filling the film with small details and offensive caricatures of Old World Russia that simply were not true. Eisenstein misrepresents the facts about Potemkin, the facts about what happened at Odessa when the soldiers arrived, and the facts about what happened to the so-called heroes aboard the ship when the left the port. The film plays up the ideals of the Revolution but is as truthful in its depiction of what happened as Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both are fantasies that take as their starting point a real time and place where real people existed and acted, where real movements and events serve as the backdrop. Both use that real history as a canvas upon which to project their own ideas about life.
Works Cited
Bascomb, Neal. Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Battleship Potemkin.
Neff, Taylor. "Propaganda on the Big Screen: Film in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1936." The FGCUStudent Research Journal 3.2 (2017).
Osborn, Andrew. “Potemkin: the mutiny, the movie and the myth.” The Independent, June 14, 2005. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/potemkin-the-mutiny-the-movie-and-the-myth-225737.html