Red Mutiny : Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin / Neal Bascomb

Boston & New York : Houghton Mifflin, 2007. First Edition. Hardcover. In 1905 after being served rancid meat, more than 600 Russian Navy sailors mutinied against their officers aboard what was then the most powerful battleship in the world. Theirs was a life barely worth living--a life of hard labor and bitter oppression, an existence similar in its hopelessness and injustice to 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 Matiushenko, risked their lives to take control of the ship and raise 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 to freedom that would steer the course of the twentieth century. It is also a fine work of scholarship that draws on the long-closed Soviet archives to shed new light on this seminal event in Russian and naval history; 386 pages; Description: xiii, 386 p. , [8] p. Of plates : ill. , map ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-333) and index. Subjects: Bronenosets ""Potemkin"". Russia --History --Revolution, 1905-1907