"classics" of Marxism, Potemkin also forged a link between two different Engelses, the topographer of The Condition of the Working CIass in England and the crypto-vitalist briefly visible in Dialectics of Nature. Beyond Ihis, Potemkin was also a great leap backward over troubling memories of Kronstadt I92t, an attemptto resurrectthe heroic image of the Red Sailor, the exemplary proletarian militant from the "heart of the battleship." And, on reflection, nowhere is this resurrection more troubling than in the fi na I shot of the fi I m, when the fraterna I shouts and waves of the crews give wayto the onrushingjuggernaut ofthe triumphal battleship, bearing bow and keel down upon the suddenly submerged spectator. The horizon is no longer the c lassica I lim it of mutinous f light, but rather, in a reprise of the very origins of cinema, a huge machine rushes forward into the beam of light cast by the projector. With this convergence and reversa I of a I I the vectors of the fi m, th is cinematic recapitulation of the ancient maritime punishment of keelhauling, one thinks again of Trotsky's reflections on his own imprisonment in 1905: I
The whole of history is an enormous machine in the service of our ideals.
ltworks
with barbarous slowness, with insensitive cruelty, but it works. We are sure of it. But when its omn ivorous mechanism swallows u p our life's blood for fuel, we feel like calling out with all the strength we still possess: "Fasterl Do it faster!"61
this we can contrast a text written by Rosa Luxemburg, who had, after all, invented the trope of "the battleship of the revolution."62 The following was
To
61
7905, p.357.
62
Rosa Luxemburg, fhe Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions [1906], trans. Patrick Lavin (NewYork: Harye(, I97t\, p. 12. The contextwas a polemic against the Russian anarchists and the "counterrevolutionary lumpenproletariat," whom she referred to as "sharks swarm[ing] in the wake of the battleship of the revolution."
63
Rosa Luxemburg, "Against Capital Punishment," trans. William L. McPherson, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters, (NewYork: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 399. Here she was to agree-from her grave-with a moral criticism made by the Kronstadt mutineers. ln a key statement, the rebels spoke bitterly ofthe restoration of capital punishment"that desecration of human dignity"-in the Soviet Union. "Socialism in Quotation Marks" [1921] in Kronstadt 7927, p. 245. ls there any historical irony left in the fact that Russian president Boris Yeltsin, now reponsible for more than 24,000 civilian deaths in what he has termed the "armed mutiny" in the rebel republic of Chechnya, has "rehabilitated" the Kronstadt mutineers? See Serge Schmemann, "Yeltsin Extols 1921 Rebellion, Denouncing lts Repression by Lenin," New York Times, 11 January 7994, p. A4. See also Steve Erlanger, "Yeltsin Blames
written after her own release from a German prison in 1918, two months before her assassination by rightists: Aworld mustbeturned upside down. Buteachtearthatflows, when itcould have been spared, is an accusation, and he comm its a crime who with brutal inadvertency crushes a poor earthworm.63
BOXED IN
But the chief thing about lvlelville's crew is that they work. C.L.R. James6a
Walker Evans' marvelous definition of photography: never under any circumstances is it done anywhere near a beach.
Army as He Defends War in Chechnya," New York
John Szarkowski6s Then came the sti rri ng news.
M uti ny i n the Ka i ser's fl eet I You ng sons of th e bou geoisle who had been sporting sailor's caps now left them at home.
Times,77 February 1995, p.41.
r
Jan Valtin66
When the threat of mutiny was anatomized, it was resolved into a rogue's gallery of more or less brutish physiognomies. This is a long history. We can think of lsaac Cruikshank's 1797 cartoon depictingthe Nore Delegates chosen to represent the mutinous sailors of the British fleet: a committee of
FISH
STORY
C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live ln (NewYork: C.L.R. James, 1953), p.23.
lnterview by Jerome Liebling, excerpted in lvlaren Stange, "Photography and the lnstitution: Szarkowski atthe Modern," Massachusetts Review, vol. 79 no. 4 (Winter 1978), p. 698. JanValtin lRichard Krebs], Outof the Night(NewYorlc Alliance Books, 1940), p. 10.