Afanasi Nikolayevich Matushenko

The Potemkin mutiny

On 14 June 1905 (O.S.; 27 June N.S.), as the crew protested over the spoiled meat, Matushenko led the group of sailors demanding that the command be told about the maggoty meat; he urged a unanimous refusal of dinner and forbade the sailors to take borscht from the galley. He was among the first to call the sailors to arms and was elected chairman of the ship's committee and of its executive committee on the first day of the rising, becoming head of the mutineers. The Sevastopol record adds that the sailors set up the ship commission as the supreme authority on the ship and elected him its chairman, that he served as torpedo-machinery quartermaster first class and was soon promoted to feldfebel (sergeant-major), and that he enjoyed great influence and authority among the sailors. Russian Wikipedia states that on 15 June he directed the seizure of the steamer Vekha at Odessa, that on 16 June he took the arrested officers ashore, and that on 17 June, during the encounter with Admiral Krieger's squadron, he stood in the conning tower and directed the ship. To the last day he agitated for a landing at Odessa and a march on Sevastopol, opposing surrender in Romania, but he failed to win over the majority of the crew. Accounts of the officer deaths differ: Russian Wikipedia and the Sevastopol record say he personally killed five of the seven officers killed on the battleship, while the recollection of V. A. Posse cited in Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedia says he personally killed two or three of his superiors during the mutiny. The surrender date also conflicts: Russian Wikipedia's person article gives 24 June 1905 without stating a calendar, the same Wikipedia's mutiny article gives the voyage as 14 June to 25 June O.S. (8 July N.S.), Ukrainian Wikipedia gives 25 June O.S. (8 July N.S.) at Constanta, and Britannica gives only 8 July. Britannica also has the ship sail to Constanta, then on to Feodosiya, where it failed to acquire supplies as well. These dates and outcomes are presented as attributed alternatives.

Political views and exile

According to Russian Wikipedia, Matushenko's political views were not clearly defined: some sources place him near the Social Democrats, others describe him as a sailor of anarchist-SR inclination, and the Police Department and Black Sea Fleet command considered him an SR. In Geneva in August 1905 he negotiated with Georgy Gapon, met Lenin, Gorky, Rakovsky and Posse, turned down approaches from the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the SRs and Gapon, and answered them in the SR newspaper Revolutionary Russia on 1 August 1905 that he stood outside all parties.

Rakovsky's 1907 memoir records that a general Black Sea Fleet rising was planned for July, to be signalled by two rockets from the Catherine II, and that the incident of the spoiled meat provoked a premature, isolated revolt. Accounts of the exile route differ. Russian Wikipedia places him in Romania, then Switzerland and the USA (June 1906 - March 1907, working at the Singer factory), then in France until police pressure forced him back to Switzerland; he was arrested at Constanta in March 1906 and expelled. The Nick Heath account on libcom gives a different sequence: Romania, then Switzerland, then London in June 1906, where he met anarchists including Peter Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker, then the Singer factory in New York, then Paris at the end of 1906, organising among the unemployed in an anarcho-syndicalist group, and Russia in June 1907.

Return, trial and execution

On 28 June 1907 he returned to Russia with a passport in the name Fedorchenko and a cargo of bombs, landing at Odessa, and on 3 July he was arrested in Nikolaev. The indictment was presented on 16 October 1907 and the trial held the next day, stripping him of military rank and all rights and sentencing him to death by hanging. Ukrainian Wikipedia records that the courtroom was surrounded by a hundred-strong convoy, that he refused defence counsel and took the whole guilt for the rising on himself without naming any comrade, and that he declined to petition for clemency. Russian Wikipedia records that defence lawyers protested that the Manifesto of 17 October amnestying political crimes had abolished death sentences for acts committed before 17 October. The sentence was carried out at dawn on 20 October 1907 in the yard of the Sevastopol prison. Hrono.ru and Ukrainian Wikipedia equate 20 October O.S. with 2 November N.S., while Russian Wikipedia's person article gives only 20 October without stating a calendar; the two dates are the same execution.

Nationality attribution and commemoration

Nationality attribution is split. English Wikipedia frames him as a Russian sailor while giving the Ukrainian form of his name, and Russian Wikipedia describes him as a Black Sea Fleet sailor without an ethnic label. Hrono.ru uses no 'Russian sailor' phrasing, giving only a Kharkov-province peasant's son in the Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainian attribution is carried by Ukrainian Wikipedia, which calls him a Ukrainian public and political figure and a non-commissioned officer of the Black Sea Fleet; it also states that he took part in the Ukrainian national-cultural movement and belonged to the Kharkiv Ukrainian Student Hromada, a membership not recorded in Russian-language sources. The entry states each attribution with its source rather than settling on one. His state citizenship was that of the Russian Empire, and no retrieved source documents naturalisation during his exile.

Soviet reference works held that he could not rise to the level of a revolutionary leader for lack of clearly defined political views. The Sevastopol record states that from 19 December 1925 he was an honorary deputy of the Sevastopol city Soviet.