Mutiny on the Black Sea

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

June 27, 1905. It’s the last morning of Ippolit Gilyarovsky’s life. He wakes up in a battleship on the Black Sea. The Potemkin. He’s a despised Russian naval officer who doesn’t care that his sailors are refusing to eat their lunch of rotten borscht. They’ll do it because he says so. And if they don’t, he’ll hang them. Why did these sailors, many of them peasants accustomed to abuse from high-born men like him, decide on this day to rise up instead and mutiny? And how would their rebellion help take down the Czar of Russia?

Special thanks to our guests; Neal Bascomb, author of Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin and Russian Revolution; and historian Dr. Mark Steinberg of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, Original Podcast.
0:04.5	History this week, June 27th, 1905.
0:13.3	I'm Sally Helm.
0:17.3	It is the last morning of Epoly Giuliarovsky's life.
0:23.3	He wakes up in a battleship on the Black Sea, the Potemkin.
0:26.9	It's sunny, hot, hotter than June is supposed to be in this part of the world.
0:33.3	Giuliarovsky probably notices the unusual weather as he steps out onto the deck.
0:38.6	He's spent many days on the ocean as an ordinary sailor in the Russian Navy,
0:43.2	and he's now a strict executive officer, a harsh enforcer of the rules.
0:48.4	And, in the eyes of those he commands, the most despised officer on the ship.
0:56.8	By afternoon, the air is still, the sun beating down on the Potemkin.
1:02.6	And Giuliarovsky has heard rumors of a problem.
1:06.4	He has spies among the sailors on the ship.
1:09.4	He makes it his business to know what's going on and to put down any insubordination.
1:14.9	He decides to put in a surprise appearance on the moustache, where the sailors are sitting down to a lunch of
1:22.4	borscht, a classic Russian soup, sour, red, usually made of beets and beef and cabbage.
1:29.8	Except, when he gets there, he finds that the soldiers are not eating their borscht at all.
1:36.6	In fact, they are refusing to eat anything except bread.
1:40.1	Because they say, the meat in the borscht has gone bad.
1:44.8	It was stinking outside on the Spardak earlier.
1:47.9	They smelled it, and they won't have it.
1:50.4	They're shouting, beating their bowls on the tables, telling the cooks to throw at the disgusting borscht overboard.
	...

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