1867–1906
✕ Executed
The revolutionary naval officer who raised the red flag over the Black Sea Fleet and demanded a constitution from the Tsar
Schmidt's telegram to Nicholas II: "...demands Your Majesty to immediately call a meeting of the Constituent Assembly, and no longer obeys orders of Your ministers. Commander of the Fleet P. Schmidt."
Born into a family of Imperial Russian Navy officers, he emerged in the tide of the 1905 Revolution as the leader of the Sevastopol naval mutiny. He raised the red flag on the cruiser Ochakov, proclaimed himself Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, and sent a telegram to Nicholas II demanding the convening of a Constituent Assembly. The mutiny was crushed in ninety minutes and he was shot on Berezan Island, but his name was immortalized as "Lieutenant Schmidt" in streets, ships, and monuments across the Soviet Union, and in Boris Pasternak's poem.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1886Graduated Naval Cadet Corps, commissioned michman
- 1888–92Resigned; civilian pursuits including ballooning in Paris
- 1892Re-enlisted in the Imperial Navy
- 1895Promoted to lieutenant
- 1904Recalled to active duty for the Russo-Japanese War
- 1905.10Arrested for revolutionary speech in Sevastopol; freed by crowd pressure
- 1905.11Led Ochakov mutiny, proclaimed himself Commander of the Black Sea Fleet
- 1906.3.19Executed by firing squad on Berezan Island
Related historical events
From Officer to Revolutionary: Schmidt's Trajectory and the Ochakov Mutiny
Scion of a naval family. Pyotr Schmidt was born into an Imperial Navy clan: his father, a rear admiral, had fought in the defence of Sevastopol, and his uncle was a full admiral and member of the Admiralty Council. Graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps in 1886, he was commissioned as a michman, but his early career was turbulent. In 1897 he was removed from his ship at Vladivostok for refusing to take part in suppressing a strike and for reporting a commander implicated with poachers; that same year a naval hospital in Nagasaki diagnosed him with "schizophrenia with megalomania." He then served in the volunteer and merchant fleets until the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War recalled him to active duty in 1904.
The Ochakov mutiny and "Schmidt's oath." In the 1905 Revolution he organized in Sevastopol a "Union of Officers, Friends of the People" of which he was the sole member, styled himself a non-party socialist, and agitated among sailors and officers. He envisaged the autonomy of Russia's South as a presidential republic under himself, and after eight people died in an abortive prison assault he delivered at their funeral the so-called "Schmidt's oath": "We vow never to yield to anyone even an inch of the human rights we have won." On 14 November 1905 (old style) he boarded the cruiser Ochakov with the mutineers, raised the red flag, proclaimed himself Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, and telegraphed Nicholas II demanding a Constituent Assembly. The mutiny was crushed within a day.
An ambiguous legacy. At his February 1906 court-martial he claimed he had joined the rising only to avert a massacre of the privileged classes and non-Russians and to channel the mutiny constructively. Lenin hailed the Sevastopol events as marking "the complete collapse of the old, servile order in the army," yet according to the memoirist Rostkovskaya, by the time of the uprising Schmidt had moved away from republicanism and was a "constitutional monarchist." Refusing to plead insanity, he was shot on Berezan Island on 6 March 1906 (old style) alongside three sailors. This contradictory figure was burnished into the Soviet myth of the "Red Admiral," but that very ambiguity made him a subject of literary imagination from Pasternak's poem to Ilf and Petrov's satire.