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the
Potemkin.
But most felt that the battleship
Rostislav
had symbolic strength as the fleet's flagship.
    At the meeting's end, the Tsentralka sailors congratulated themselves on their plan of action: when the fleet met on June 21 and the
Rostislav
fired from its main battery, the fleetwide mutiny would begin. "Here's to the tsar meeting his father sooner than he thought!" called out a sailor as the meeting disbanded. The clearing emptied, and the sailors returned! on foot to Sevastopol, Matyushenko among them. Although his ideas had not carried the day, he was glad that the Tsentralka leaders had at last moved to join the revolution in deed. He had set this goal for himself since his earliest days.

    In 1879, in a hut with clay walls and a thatched roof, Afanasy Nikolayevich Matyushenko was born. He shared the living quarters, a space only fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with his parents and five siblings. The hut contained a stove for cooking, a large table for eating, and, in the corner, icons to pray before. The family slept on top of the stove and on bare wooden benches that ran along the walls. During the long winters, they squeezed in their pigs, calves, and geese. The door and windows always were shut to keep out the cold, and the air grew almost poisonous with the stench of the animals.
    Outside the hut, the village of Dergachi in "Little Russia," or the Ukraine, was like every other peasant community in the empire, run by village elders. The peasants lived a communal existence isolated from the rest of the world. They dressed in the same bast shoes and cotton tunics that peasants had worn for centuries. Roads leading into the village were often mired in mud, and any outsider who did enter found little of interest. The village was stripped of most trees and bushes. The well for drinking water stood near the horse pond. The surrounding fields of wheat, barley, beets, and other crops were divided into thin, overworked strips of land; each village household tilled some. It was a violent, primitive life based on communal responsibility, attachment to the land, and a deep-seated fear of authority, whether held by the elders, the tsar, or God.
    Afanasy's father, Nikolai, was born a serf, bound to his landlord until the Emancipation of 1861, one of several reforms initiated by Alexander II in the wake of the Crimean War. The grant of freedom came as a great burden on an already threadbare existence. The redemption payments Nikolai owed to the government for his land were high, and since he was bound to the village council, Nikolai could not sow the crops he wanted. Nor could he leave the village to find other work without the council's permission.
    When Afanasy was a young boy, his father couldn't support his family by farming. He became a shoemaker, earning barely enough to eke out an existence. At nine years of age, Afanasy enrolled in a Sunday church school to learn to read, an uncommon (albeit expanding) opportunity for peasant children at the time. Afanasy was headstrong and eager to learn, so his parents gave him the chance to attend the school. He split his free time between reading and fishing, but both activities were taken from him at the start of the great famine of 1891, when grain fields throughout Russia turned to dust, leaving whole villages devastated by starvation and diseases such as cholera and typhus. His father, always a heavy drinker, became a useless drunkard. Afanasy had to work to help feed his family. He was twelve when he began repairing shoes in the dark room after his father had passed out.
    At fifteen, Afanasy decided that there had to be more to life. Eight miles southeast of the village, the city of Kharkov was rapidly industrializing and served as southern Russia's transportation hub. He found a job during the day as a janitor, then as an oilman at the steam-engine depot—one of the legions of peasants who followed a similar path in order to survive. There he experienced the life of an