Russian Battleship Potemkin - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Romanian government then returned the battleship to the Russian navy. In October 1905 it was renamed Panteleimon (Пантелеймон).

In April 1917 the ship was renamed Potemkin-Tavricheski (Потёмкин-Таврический) once again, however, in May they changed it to Borets za svobodu (Борец за свободу – Freedom Fighter). In 1918 it was captured by the Germans, then recaptured by the White Russians. In April 1919, the interventionists scuttled the ship in Sevastopol, to prevent her falling into Bolshevik hands. After the Russian Civil War, the wreck of the Potemkin was raised from the bottom of the sea and dismantled because of irreparable damage.

The majority of the mutineers chose to remain in Romania after 1905, at least until the revolution of February 1917. Of those who returned to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny, seven men were executed as ringleaders while fifty-six crewmen were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. A number of petty officers from the Potemkin were able to successfully argue that they had acted only under duress, while the crew of the Vekha, a support vessel caught up in the mutiny when it encountered the Potemkin, were acquitted after it was established that they had successfully argued for the release of their own officers.

Amongst the six hundred former crewmen of the Potemkin who remained in Romania in 1905 and generally merged into the local population, was the leader Afanasi Matushenko. Together with four colleagues Matushenko returned to Russia under promise of an amnesty in 1907. He was however arrested and hanged. Another leader, Joseph Dymtchenko, fled Romania in 1908 with thirty-one other sailors and settled in Argentina. At least one sailor, Ivan Beshoff, made it to Ireland via Turkey and London (where he allegedly met Lenin); he set up Beshoff's fish and chips in Dublin. He died on October 25, 1987, aged 102, likely the last survivor of the crew.

Lenin wrote that the Potemkin uprising had had a huge importance in terms of being the first attempt at creating the nucleus of a revolutionary army, especially since a part of the Imperial armed forces had sided with the revolution. Lenin called Potemkin an "undefeated territory of the revolution." The Potemkin uprising had a significant influence on the revolutionizing process in the Russian army and fleet in 1917.