Red Mutiny; Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin
Jacques Chazaud (Map) Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Second printing [stated]. Trade paperback. The format is approximately 5.625 inches by 8.75 inches. xiii, [1], 386, [2] pages. Decorative front cover. Author's Note. Dramatis Personae. Research Notes and Bibliography. Notes. Index. Neal Bascomb (born 1971) is an American journalist and author. He is known for his books on history. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Miami University with a B.A. in Economics and English Literature. After graduation, he worked as a journalist in London, Paris, and Dublin. He was an editor for St. Martin's Press, and in 2000, he began writing books full-time. His books have ranked on a number of bestseller lists, been optioned for film, and been published in over 15 countries. He has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. The Russian battleship Potemkin was a pre-dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet. She became famous during the Revolution of 1905, when her crew mutinied against their officers. On 27 June 1905, Potemkin was at gunnery practice near Tendra Spit off the Ukrainian coast. The uprising was triggered when Ippolit Giliarovsky, the ship's second in command, allegedly threatened to shoot crew members. Giliarovsky was killed after he mortally wounded Grigory Vakulinchuk, one of the mutiny's leaders. The mutineers killed seven of the Potemkin's eighteen officers, including Captain Evgeny Golikov, Executive Officer Giliarovsky and Surgeon Smirnov; and captured the accompanying torpedo boat Ismail (No. 267). They organized a ship's committee of 25 sailors, led by Afanasi Matushenko, to run the battleship. The true story of the deadliest naval mutiny in history. In 1905, after being served rancid meat, more than seven hundred Russian sailors mutinied against their officers aboard what was then one of the most powerful battleships in the world. Theirs was a life barely worth living -- a life of hard labor and bitter oppression, an existence, in its hopelessness and injustice, not unlike that of most of the working class in Russia at the time. Certainly their rebellion came as no surprise. Still, against any reasonable odds of success, the sailors-turned-revolutionaries, led by the charismatic firebrand Matyushenko, risked their lives to take control of the ship and fly the red flag of revolution. What followed was a violent port-to-port chase that spanned eleven harrowing days and came to symbolize the Russian revolution itself. A pulse-quickening story that alternates between the opulent court of Nicholas II and the razor's-edge tension aboard the Potemkin, Red Mutiny is a tale threaded with terrific adventure, epic naval battles, heroic sacrifices, treachery, bloodlust, and a rallying cry of freedom that would steer the course of the twentieth century. It is also a fine work of scholarship that draws for the first time on the Soviet archives to shed new light on this seminal event in Russian and naval history. For readers of Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, Neal Bascomb's gripping adventure at sea is the story of courage, the power of ideas, and the fragile nature of alliance. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Battleship, Potemkin, Mutiny, Black Sea Fleet, Russo-Japanese War, Grigory Chukhnin, Konstantin Feldmann, Golikov, Semyon Kakhanov, Matyushenko, Tsentralka, Vakulenchuk
ISBN: 9780618592067
[Book #87524]
Price: $32.50