by 20 years. Filmed shortly after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, with the derelict Dvenadsat Apostolov standing in for the broken-up Potemkin, Eisenstein recast the mutiny into a predecessor of the October Revolution of 1917 that swept the Bolsheviks to power. He emphasised their role, and implied that the mutiny failed because Matushenko and the other leaders were not better Bolsheviks. Eisenstein made other changes to dramatise the story, ignoring the major fire that swept through Odessa's dock area while Potemkin was anchored there, combining the many different incidents of rioters and soldiers fighting into a famous sequence on the steps (today known as the Potemkin Stairs), and showing a tarpaulin thrown over the sailors to be executed. In accordance with the Marxist doctrine that history is made by collective action, not individuals, Eisenstein forbore to single out any person in his film, but rather focused on the "mass protagonist". Soviet film critics hailed this approach, including the dramaturge and critic, Adrian Piotrovsky, writing for the Leningrad newspaper Krasnaia gazeta: The hero is the sailors' battleship, the Odessa crowd, but characteristic figures are snatched here and there from the crowd. For a moment, like a conjuring trick, they attract all the sympathies of the audience: like the sailor Vakulinchuk, like the young woman and child on the Odessa Steps, but they emerge only to dissolve once more into the mass. This signifies: no film stars but a film of real-life types. Similarly, theatre critic Alexei Gvozdev wrote in the journal Artistic Life (Zhizn ikusstva): "In Potemkin there is no individual hero as there was in the old theatre. It is the mass that acts: the battleship and its sailors and the city and its population in revolutionary mood." The last survivor of the mutiny was Ivan Beshoff, who died on 24 October 1987 at the age of 102 in Dublin, Ireland. Notes References Sources External links Battleship Kniaz Potemkin Tavricheskiy on Black Sea Fleet A history of the ship, with photos of a model under construction A brief contemporary article by Lenin on the mutiny with the text of the sailors' manifesto Christian Rakovsky, The Origins of the Potemkin Mutiny (1907) Annotated version of Zecca's La Révolution en Russe 1900 ships 1905 Russian Revolution Battleships of the Imperial Russian Navy Captured ships Conflicts in 1905 History of Odesa Maritime incidents in 1905 Shipwrecks in the