1877–1905
✕ Killed in the Potemkin mutiny
The Tsentralka sailor whose killing ignited the Potemkin mutiny; his Odessa funeral became a mass revolutionary demonstration
'To delay means to fail the revolution. At this moment, everywhere, workers and peasants are striking out. We must join the common fight.'
Born into a Ukrainian peasant family in Volhynia, he was conscripted into the Black Sea Fleet in 1898 and became an artillery non-commissioned officer on the battleship Potemkin. He joined the RSDLP in 1903, helped found the Sevastopol Sailors' Tsentralka (Central Committee), and hid a red flag aboard ship as he prepared the fleet-wide uprising. On 27 June 1905, confronting officers over maggot-infested meat, he was mortally wounded by Chief Officer Giliarovsky's rifle; two days later his funeral in Odessa swelled into a mass political demonstration that the Potemkin answered by shelling the city.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1898Conscripted into the Black Sea Fleet
- 1900Graduates mine-artillery school; assigned as gunner, battleship Potemkin
- 1903Joins RSDLP; helps found the Sevastopol Sailors' Tsentralka
- 1905.06.27Mortally wounded by Chief Officer Giliarovsky during the Potemkin mutiny; dies aboard
Related historical events
The Tsentralka and the planned fleet uprising of 1905
In April 1904 the scattered Social Democratic circles in the Black Sea Fleet were merged into a single underground organisation, which the sailors called the Sevastopol Sailors' Central Committee, or Tsentralka. The Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905 and attended only by Bolshevik delegates, adopted a policy aimed at an armed uprising in Russia; carrying out that decision, the Tsentralka began preparing a general uprising in the Black Sea Fleet set for the autumn of 1905. It established links with RSDLP committees in a number of coastal cities and with Lenin, then in Geneva.
Vakulinchuk, an artillery non-commissioned officer on the Potemkin, was among the central figures in these preparations. He attended a Tsentralka meeting on 10/23 June 1905 and argued for an immediate uprising, maintaining that to delay meant to fail the revolution; his powerful voice and long black moustache added to the effect of his words. On 11/24 June he convinced the Tsentralka leaders to let the Potemkin lead the Black Sea uprising. The red flag he had hidden aboard ship belonged to this fleet-wide design.
The timetable, however, was slipping forward. In early June 1905 unrest among the soldiers of the Sevastopol fortress artillery, and the protests of sailors of the Ekaterina II and Tri Svyatitelya in their support, forced the Tsentralka to move the start of the uprising up to the summer of 1905. At the same time the Tsentralka leadership regarded the Potemkin as the least revolutionary ship in the fleet. Within this setting Vakulinchuk pressed for an uprising while holding that the immediate outbreak was premature, since he wanted to wait until the ship was with the fleet. His death, and the collapse of the fleet-wide plan that followed, fell in this unfinished stage of preparation.