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...…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…