Mutiny on the Black Sea

June 27, 1905. It’s the last morning of Ippolit Gilyarovsky’s life. He wakes up in a battleship on the Black Sea. The Potemkin. He’s a despised Russian naval officer who doesn’t care that his sailors are refusing to eat their lunch of rotten borscht. They’ll do it because he says so. And if they don’t, he’ll hang them. Why did these sailors, many of them peasants accustomed to abuse from high-born men like him, decide on this day to rise up instead and mutiny? And how would their rebellion help take down the Czar of Russia?

Special thanks to our guests; Neal Bascomb, author of Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin and Russian Revolution; and historian Dr. Mark Steinberg of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities.

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