Hailed as an important contribution both to history and to sea literature when first published in 1961, Richard Hough's book gives a dramatic blow-by-blow account of the June 1905 mutiny on board the Russian battleship Potemkin. The revolt, immortalised in Sergei Eisenstein's famous film, was considered by the Soviets a glorious moment in the people's fight against a tyrannical czarist government, but for others it was a sordid little rebellion over bad meat.

Hough chronicles events from the first rumblings of discontent to the closing scenes of the uprising that nearly brought about the Russian Revolution twelve years early. His balanced recounting of events, including the killing of many Potemkin officers and a civil uprising in Odessa quelled by the Cossacks who, slaughtered thousands, show the protagonists not as symbols but as human beings reacting under powerful tensions.