Further, the fullest use of this route demands the control of the main railways, and since the supply of coal to such railways and to the Black Sea ports from Germany would be impossible, it is essential to Germany to possess the more important mining districts in the Don coalfields.
All this, Germany intends to accomplish by one means or another...."
When the German ultimatum was received in Moscow on the tenth of June, this staggering problem, by many regarded as insoluble, was solved by Lenin in one of his lightning decisions: while it was impossible as yet to fight the Germans, it was equally unthinkable to give them the fleet.
Comrade Vakhrameyev was sent from Moscow to Novorossiisk, as a representative of the Soviet Government.
He laid before a meeting of delegates and commanders from the Black Sea fleet the only Bolshevik reply to the German ultimatum: The Council of People's Commissars to dispatch an open radiogram to the Black Sea fleet, ordering it to proceed to Sevastopol and surrender to the Germans; the Black Sea fleet, however, was not to comply with this order, but to scuttle its ships in the Novorossiisk roads.
The Soviet fleet—two dreadnoughts, fifteen destroyers, and a few submarines and auxiliary vessels, condemned to idleness by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty—was at anchor outside Novorossiisk.
The delegates from the fleet came ashore and heard Vakhrameyev out in grim silence—his proposals sounded like suicide to their ears.
But they could see no other way out, for the fleet had neither coal nor oil.
Moscow was threatened by the Germans, Denikin was approaching from the east, the periscopes of German U-boats were already tracing lines of foam over the roadsteads, German bombers were gleaming against the azure sky.
The delegates argued long and hotly.... There was only one way out to scuttle the ships.... Faced with such a terrible decision, however, the delegates resolved that the destiny of the fleet be put to the votes of all its crews.
Monster meetings were held in the harbour of Novorossiisk.
It was hard for the sailors, gazing at the steel-grey giants, anchored there, the dreadnoughts Volya and Svobodnaya Rossia, the fast destroyers, renowned in battle, the intricate network of turrets and masts, towering over the harbour and the crowds of people, to realize that all this formidable property of the Revolution, this floating, sailors' native land, was to sink to the bottom of the sea without a shot being fired, without the slightest resistance.
The Black Sea sailors were not men to accept self-destruction calmly.
Frantic words were uttered, breasts smitten, singlets torn from many a tattooed chest, caps with fluttering ribbons trampled underfoot....
Dense crowds of sailors, returned soldiers, and all the varied types making up the population of the coast, thronged the waterfront in agitation from sunrise to sunset, when the sombre purple waters of that accursed sea, no longer theirs, turned crimson in the dying rays of the sun.
Commanders and ships' officers held divergent views: the majority were secretly in favour of going to Sevastopol and surrendering to the Germans; but there was a minority, headed by Senior Lieutenant Kukel, commander of the destroyer Kerch, which realized the inevitability of the catastrophe and its enormous significance for the future.
These said:
"We must commit suicide. We must close for a time the history of the Black Sea fleet, without sullying its pages...."
At these vast meetings, as noisily spectacular as hurricanes, one set of resolutions would be passed in the morning—another in the evening.
The best reception was accorded to speakers who, flinging their caps on the ground, exclaimed:
"Comrades, to hell with those Moscow fellows!
Let them drown themselves!
We're not going to surrender our ships.
We'll fight the Germans to the last round...."
The harbour reverberated to the thundering "hurrahs."
The confusion reached its peak when, four days before the expiration of the term mentioned in the ultimatum, two delegates arrived hotfoot from Ekaterinodar: Rubin, Chairman of the Black Sea Republic Central Executive Committee, and, representing the army, Perebiinos, a giant of frightful aspect, with four revolvers stuck in his belt.
They both—Rubin in a lengthy speech, and Perebiinos in a thunderous bass, and shaking a revolver—asserted that the fleet wasn't going to be either surrendered or scuttled, that those fellows in Moscow didn't know what they were talking about, and that the Black Sea Republic would supply all the oil, shells and food the fleet needed.
"Our Goddam position at the front," yelled Perebiinos, accompanying his words with a stream of invectives, "is so Goddam good, that next week we'll be drowning that son-of-a-bitch Denikin and his cadets in the Kuban.... Don't scuttle your ships, mates—we need to feel at the front that we have a powerful fleet behind us.
If you scuttle them, mates, I categorically declare in the name of the entire Kuban-Black Sea revolutionary army that we won't stand such treachery, if you drive us to desperation we'll march with forty thousand men on Novorossiisk, and we'll sikewer every man of you on the ends of our bayonets, mates...."
After this meeting, all was chaos, heads reeled.
Crews left their ships and ran off at their own sweet will.
Suspicious characters made their appearance in the crowd in ever greater numbers. In the daytime they shouted with the loudest: "Fight the Germans to the last round!" but at night they stole in small groups on to the half-deserted destroyers, ready to pounce, to throw the crew overboard, to loot.
Semyon Krasilnikov arrived on board the destroyer Kerch during this time.
Semyon was polishing the brass base of the compass.
The whole crew had been at work since morning, scraping, washing, cleaning up the destroyer, which was moored close to one of the piers.
A hot sun was rising from behind the scorched foothills.... The flags drooped in the hot, windless air.
Semyon rubbed away at his brasses, trying not to look towards the harbour.
The crew were furbishing up the destroyer for its death.
In the harbour the huge funnels of the dreadnought Volya were sending out clouds of smoke.
The guns, their tarpaulins removed, gleamed.
Black smoke rose into the sky.
Ship, smoke, the brown hills, and the cement works at their base, were reflected in the mirrorlike surface of the bay.
Semyon, squatting on his bare heels, rubbed diligently at the brass.
He had stood watch that night, and the thought that he had better not have come, rankled in his breast.
He should have listened to his brother and Matryona.... Now they would laugh at him:
"So that's how you fought the Germans!" "You've sold the fleet, brothers!" they would say. And how was he to answer them?
Was he to say: "I cleaned and polished and sank the Kerch with my own hands?"
A motor launch, with a signalman semaphoring from its bows, cast off from the Volya, visiting each of the ships in turn.
The destroyer Derzky slipped her moorings, taking the Bespokoiny in tow, and made slowly for the roads.
Still more slowly, like convalescents, the destroyers Pospeshny, Zhivoy, Zharky and Grozny followed in their wake, crawling over the smooth surface of the bay.