Battleship Potemkin: History vs. Soviet Propaganda

Introduction: Revolutionary Context and Eisenstein's Purpose

Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film, produced during the Soviet era, depicts the mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin in 1905 — an event that predated the Soviet takeover and was widely seen as a foreshadowing of the wider revolution to come. In the film, the mutineers are depicted as heroes embodying the spirit of resistance against Tsarist oppression, an image the Soviet establishment was eager to project. The Cossacks and the Tsarist cavalry, by contrast, are portrayed as brutal thugs who slaughter the innocent people of Odessa for daring to show solidarity with the rebels.

Because Odessa was one of the most open cities for Jews within the Pale of Settlement, the massacre depicted can also be read as a persecution of Jews — a reading reinforced by the fact that the Soviet Revolution drew heavily on Jewish intellectual leadership and that Eisenstein himself was Jewish. There is, in other words, a natural sympathy between the filmmaker and his subject. Old World Russia was not beloved by Revolutionary Russia, and the film suggests the reason was a fundamental lack of respect for the common people — the working class, the everyday soldiers treated worse than dogs by the authorities. It is essentially George Orwell's Animal Farm without the irony: Soviet idealism in its purest cinematic form, typical of the Soviet film era (Neff).

This paper examines the merits of Eisenstein's film with respect to causality and context, and asks how historically accurate the film actually was.

Lenin's Words and the Revolutionary Spirit of 1905

When Lenin's words are quoted on screen at the beginning of Battleship Potemkin, they signal the director's intent to pay homage to the revolutionary spirit Lenin embodied: "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 simultaneously commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the mutiny on the battleship and honoring the Russian Revolution itself (Neff).

The speech delivered by Vakulinchuk — one of the actual leaders of the mutiny — echoes Revolutionary ideals and indicates that a revolutionary spirit was already present in 1905, a full dozen years before the 1917 Soviet takeover. By rooting the revolution in the context of the Potemkin mutiny and in an imagined slaughter of innocent Odessans, Eisenstein subconsciously links the persecution of Jews with the Russian Revolution, as though suggesting that the Revolution represented a moment of long-overdue justice.

The Real Causes of the Mutiny: What the Film Omits

What the film does not show is that, in reality, the most experienced and well-trained naval officers of the Black Sea Fleet had been transferred to the Pacific to fill gaps left by losses sustained during the Russo-Japanese War, leaving the fleet in the hands of inexperienced recruits and incapable officers. This context goes a long way toward explaining the shabby and inhumane treatment of the sailors aboard the Potemkin: seasoned commanders likely would have handled the growing unrest far more competently rather than escalating the conflict as the officers in the film — and in real life — did.

The film makes no mention of the officers' inexperience, nor of the recruits' own lack of discipline and commitment to their orders. It also obscures the fact that a revolution was already underway in 1905 and that mutiny was being planned across several ships in the fleet (Bascomb). Rather than acknowledging the behind-the-scenes strategy of the Revolutionaries, the film presents the uprising on the battleship as a purely spontaneous affair. In reality, it was orchestrated by the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Organization of the Black Sea Fleet (Bascomb).

Conclusion: Propaganda as Historical Fantasy

Battleship Potemkin is a piece of Soviet propaganda through and through. Though widely recognized as a brilliant work of filmmaking — shocking and dramatic in equal measure — from a historical perspective it is completely slanted, telling its story from the vantage point of a Soviet filmmaker two decades after the fact, filling the screen with telling details and offensive caricatures of Old World Russia that simply were not true. Eisenstein misrepresents the facts about the Potemkin mutiny, distorts what happened on the Odessa waterfront when soldiers arrived, and conceals the grim fate of the so-called heroes who sailed away from port.

The film plays up the ideals of the Revolution but is no more truthful in its depiction of events than Quentin 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 real movements unfolded. Both use that authentic history as a canvas on which to project their makers' own ideas about life, justice, and the world they wish had existed.

Works Cited

Bascomb, Neal. Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

Eisenstein, Sergei. The Battleship Potemkin. 1925.

Neff, Taylor. "Propaganda on the Big Screen: Film in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1936." Student Research Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017.

Osborn, Andrew. "Potemkin: The Mutiny, the Movie and the Myth." The Independent, 14 June 2005, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/potemkin-the-mutiny-the-movie-and-the-myth-225737.html.