The Revolt of the Potemkin

Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, although made as Communist propaganda to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the mutiny in 1905, is an undoubted film classic. One of its sources was Constantine Feldman's memoir which Faber Finds are reissuing one hundred years after Constance Garnett's translation was first published. Of course this isn't objective history but it is a vivid first-hand account of the unrest in Odessa and of the mutiny itself, the twelve days when the Potemkin flew the red flag of revolution and ruled the Black Sea. Feldman's memoir is a rare book that should be better known; it's scale is smaller but it stands comparison with John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, his eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution.