On January 22, 1905, workers in St. Petersburg marched on the Winter Palace in appeal to Czar Nicholas II. Troops fired on the crowd, and the resulting massacre (known afterwards as Bloody Sunday) touched off a year of violence across Russia. The nation was convulsed by riots, strikes, mutinies and peasant revolts. All this the czar met with brutal force, eventually suppressing the incipient revolution. The upheaval of 1905, however, foreshadowed the 1917 revolution, which toppled the czar but ultimately traded tyranny for tyranny.
In 1925, the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made a film that concentrated on two violent incidents of the unsuccessful revolution. Battleship Potemkin is a through-composed musical adaptation of Eisenstein’s silent film. The story follows the friendship of two sailors, Vakulinchuk and Alyosha, and their miserable working conditions aboard the Potemkin. Their Captain Golikov is slowly starving and working the men to death. Vakulinchuk tries to rally the men to mutiny, while Alyosha only wants to return home to his wife Catherine and young daughter, Sonia.