The Ukrainian Singers of Plymouth on Battleship Potemkin

Reflection: Battleship Potemkin, Propaganda, and the Long Arc of Imperial Storytelling

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is rightly regarded as one of cinema’s great achievements. Its rhythmic editing, emotional precision, and unforgettable imagery—most famously the Odessa Steps—have shaped global film language for a century. Yet it is precisely because the film is so moving, so expertly engineered to stir moral exhilaration, that it deserves critical scrutiny. 

Beauty and manipulation coexist here, and the film’s artistry is inseparable from its political purpose.

The Film as Political Weapon

Potemkin was commissioned by the young Soviet state to craft a heroic origin myth. Eisenstein dramatized a minor 1905 mutiny into a sweeping moral parable of pure revolutionaries rising against faceless tyranny. The Odessa Steps massacre—central to the film’s emotional charge—never happened. It was created to supply the new regime with a foundational legend: violence sanctified by righteous cause, unity without dissent, history marching toward liberation. Behind this uplifting fiction lay a profoundly different reality.

Potemkin’s emotional logic—that violence in the name of a “liberating” cause is heroic—becomes a cultural foundation for these later atrocities.

Part of a Much Older Imperial Tradition

Although born of the Soviet moment, Potemkin sits inside a centuries-long Russian imperial narrative:

• Tsarist empire: Violence framed as “rescuing” Slavs or “civilizing” the steppe.

• Soviet empire: Conquest presented as “liberation from capitalism” or “brotherhood of nations.”

• Putin’s Russia: Aggression justified as “protecting Russian speakers,” “denazification,” or restoring historical destiny.

Across these eras, the structure remains the same: the center as moral authority, peripheries as dependent, and violence as redemptive.

Eisenstein elevated that narrative with unprecedented emotional force.

The Ukrainian Singers of Plymouth, 2025