![]() It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.” The czar’s troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. ![]() Of course, as film critic Roger Ebert points out in his “Great Movies” essay, “That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The famous montage massacre was all Eisenstein’s imagination. When Nicholas’s army showed up, they killed around 2,000 protestors…but the slaughter didn’t take place at the Odessa Steps. When the Tsar learned what was going on, he sent his troops to crush the rebellion…and this is one spot where Eisenstein took some liberties. Retribution has been meted out to the commander.” The site of a dead sailor inspired citizens to riot…only the grand revolution didn’t exactly go according to plan. The sailors’ long-term goal was to overthrow Tsar Nicholas II, and in order to stir up the people of Odessa, they openly displayed the body of Vakulinchuk on shore, complete with a note that read, “This is the body of Vakulinchuk, killed by the commander for having told the truth. The citizens of Odessa were engaged in all sorts of strikes and protests, and the Potemkin crew hoped to form alliance with the landlubbers. Then they decided to set sail for the nearby city of Odessa, a port town that was undergoing quite a bit of unrest. Similarly, the mutineers suffered a casualty as well, a man by the name of Grigory Vakulinchuk (who does play an incredibly significant role in the film).Īfter the mutiny was finished, the sailors established their own little government and hoisted a red flag above the ship. Just like in Eisenstein’s movie, the captain, doctor, and a few officers were killed and tossed overboard. So when the borscht incident went down, the mutineers convinced their fellow sailors to seize the moment and take the ship. A small faction of sailors, led by a Ukrainian named Afanasy Matyushenko (not a character in the film), had been planning a revolution for months. Of course, the Potemkin mutiny wasn’t completely spontaneous. Infuriated, the ship’s captain ordered thirty soldiers executed, and that’s when things got crazy. Similar to the film, the crew of the Potemkin refused to eat their borscht since the meat was crawling with maggots. In fact, this is what sparked the famous mutiny in June 1905. Making matters even worse, the officers treated the sailors like dogs, and the food was rotten and covered with worms. And when they actually got off the ship, they were “forbidden to smoke in public, eat in restaurants, attend the theater, ride the tram, or sit in any train compartment other than third-class.” The ships were crowded and disgusting, and the sailors only had six hours of R&R each month. As Neal Bascomb points out in his book, Red Mutiny: the True Story of the Battleship Potemkin Mutiny, these guys were living out a pretty miserable existence. The actual Potemkin was a Russian battleship with a crew of somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred men. Obviously, Eisenstein took quite a few liberties with the story, but for a piece of political propaganda, Battleship Potemkin (1925) is surprisingly faithful to the real-life events. Originally, Eisenstein was supposed to direct a whole series of episodes immortalizing a 1905 workers’ strike, but when that didn’t pan out, the director to decided to make a single film focusing on the real-life Potemkin mutiny. So when the Soviets commissioned him to create a film honoring the Russian Revolution of 1905 (a failed revolution that was something of a practice run for the real deal), Eisenstein jumped at the chance. He wanted to spread the socialist gospel through the power of film. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sergei Eisenstein knew what he wanted to do with his life.
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