Overview

Hailed as an important contribution both to history and to sea literature when first published in 1961, Richard Hough's book gives a dramatic blow-by-blow account of the June 1905 mutiny on board the Russian battleship Potemkin. The revolt, immortalised in Sergei Eisenstein's famous film, was considered by the Soviets a glorious moment in the people's fight against a tyrannical czarist government, but for others it was a sordid little rebellion over bad meat. Hough chronicles events from the first rumblings of discontent to the closing scenes of the uprising that nearly brought about the Russian Revolution twelve years early. His balanced recounting of events, including the killing of many Potemkin officers and a civil uprising in Odessa quelled by the Cossacks who, slaughtered thousands, show the protagonists not as symbols but as human beings reacting under powerful tensions.

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9781557503701

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Reviews

It began with maggots in the shipboard meat supply. A few days later it had become the most famous naval mutiny of the Twentieth Century. This is the story of the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea - -the same story immortalized in the great Eisenstein propaganda film - -and it is told in a way which attempts valiantly to be objective. But one wonders whether the true details, if not the spirit, of the Potemkin story will ever be disclosed. For here is the bitterest kind of situation, the kind which brought the main Revolution to a head scant years later. Here are the Red heroes - -Malushenko - the oppressors - -Captain Eugene Golikov - -and here too is the terrible suppression of demonstrations by the Cossacks in the near-by port of Odessa. The author's facts in the main seem accurate. His descriptive and narrative powers are good. But his greatest virtue is that he lets us see the protagonists not as symbols of one side or another, but as harassed human beings reacting under powerful tensions. As such, the book is an important contribution both to history, and to sea literature. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Richard Alexander Hough (1922 - 1999) was a British author and historian specializing in maritime history.

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