The Potemkin Uprising

POTEMKIN

This was a battleship in the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet. This ship’s fame is due to the 1905 mutiny on June twenty-seventh when the crew rebelled against their oppressive officers and horrible living conditions. Many agree that this was the first step towards the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In 1897, Russian engineer Aleksandr Schott studied several Russian battleships and improved on the best elements of each in his design. The Potemkin was the apex of a rebuilding program for the Black Sea Fleet after its complete destruction in the Crimean War. The ship was named for the distinguished eighteenth-century soldier-statesman, Prince Grigory Potemkin. He was the founder of the Ukrainian town of Nikolayev with its three shipyards, and he was counselor to the Empress Catherine the Great. For Catherine's processions through her realm, Potemkin often created false-front villages along the route to hide the dire poverty and misery of rural Russia.

She was built in Nikolayev and her hull was sprinkled with holy water (commissioned) and launched on the twenty-sixth of September in 1900. She was faster, better protected, more technologically advanced, and armed with stronger guns than any other battleship in the Black Sea Fleet.

Her specifications are extraordinary! She had two 10,600-horsepower steam-driven engines, powered by twenty-two boilers, and drove at a top speed of seventeen knots. She weighed 12,600 tons, there were twelve inches of Krupp steel protecting the turrets, nine inches of the same steel was on the belt line, she had two twin-armored turrets (one fore and one aft),

there were four twelve-inch guns that could decimate enemies with 700-pound shells at a range of over six miles.

Along her 371 foot side, there was a secondary battery of sixteen six-inch quick-firing guns, fourteen three-inch twelve-pound guns, five eighteen-inch torpedo tubes, an assembly of machine guns, mine-laying equipment, and two torpedo launch crafts....