Retro Raunch Revisit

JUN 27, 1905: During both the Russo-Japanese War that began in Feb 1904 from rival imperial quarreling over interests regarding Manchuria and Korea, and the first Russian Revolution beginning in Jan 1905 culminating in the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre of peaceful protestors in St. Petersburg, Russian sailors start a mutiny aboard their battleship Potemkin which is harbored at Odessa in the Ukraine as part of the Black Sea fleet. The ship saw its captain Evgeny Golikov, his 2nd-in-Command Ippolit Giliarovsky, surgeon Sergei Smirnov & 4 more of the total 18 officers killed then tossed overboard as the final breaking point from a number of factors such as a series of losses to the Japanese navy, poorly trained raw recruits, sinking morale, refusal to eat borscht made from rotten meat infested with maggots, and disruption from rioting workers & peasant revolts due to strikes from mass political unrest. As the sailors sympathized more with the uprisings, the eventual mutineers organized a 25-man Committee, and having taken control, ignored issued orders from the Admiralty and outran squadrons sent to stop her. They first headed to Crimea to resupply but were ambushed by a port garrison who captured & killed atleast 22 sailors. On Jul 7, Potemkin was given asylum in Romania and as part of negotiations the ship was half sunk. It was towed back to Sevastopol, renamed Panteleimon, saw service during WWI where it was captured by the Germans in May 1918, had its engines destroyed by the British in Apr 1919 and was finally scrapped in 1923. The mutiny was most famously memorialized in a 1925 silent film that recast the events as the predecessor to the 1917 October Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks that forced Tsar Nicholas II out of power and to his abdication. The movie's best remembered/climax scene is the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps by Tsarist troops with a baby carriage rolling down amidst the chaos of the fleeing crowd. For its imagery & intercutting, the sequence is regarded as one of the most influential in cinema history. The last survivor of the mutiny was Ivan Beshoff who died in Oct 1987 at age 102 in Dublin, Ireland.