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After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sergei Eisenstein knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to spread the socialist gospel through the power of film. So when the Soviets commissioned him to create a film honoring the Russian Revolution of 1905 (a failed revolution that was something of a practice run for the real deal), Eisenstein jumped at the chance.

Originally, Eisenstein was supposed to direct a whole series of episodes immortalizing a 1905 workers’ strike, but when that didn’t pan out, the director to decided to make a single film focusing on the real-life Potemkin mutiny. Obviously, Eisenstein took quite a few liberties with the story, but for a piece of political propaganda, Battleship Potemkin (1925) is surprisingly faithful to the real-life events.

The actual Potemkin was a Russian battleship with a crew of somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred men. As Neal Bascomb points out in his book, Red Mutiny: the True Story of the Battleship Potemkin Mutiny, these guys were living out a pretty miserable existence. The ships were crowded and disgusting, and the sailors only had six hours of R&R each month. And when they actually got off the ship, they were “forbidden to smoke in public, eat in restaurants, attend the theater, ride the tram, or sit in any train compartment other than third-class.”

Making matters even worse, the officers treated the sailors like dogs, and the food was rotten and covered with worms. In fact, this is what sparked the famous mutiny in June 1905. Similar to the film, the crew of the Potemkin refused to eat their borscht since the meat was crawling with maggots. Infuriated, the ship’s captain ordered thirty soldiers executed, and that’s when things got crazy.

Of course, the Potemkin mutiny wasn’t completely spontaneous. A small faction of sailors, led by a Ukrainian named Afanasy Matyushenko (not a character in the film), had been planning a revolution for months. So when the borscht incident went down, the mutineers convinced their fellow sailors to seize the moment and take the ship. Just like in Eisenstein’s movie, the captain, doctor, and a few officers were killed and tossed overboard. Similarly, the mutineers suffered a casualty as well, a man by the name of Grigory Vakulinchuk (who does play an incredibly significant role in the film).

After the mutiny was finished, the sailors established their own little government and hoisted a red flag above the ship. Then they decided to set sail for the nearby city of Odessa, a port town that was undergoing quite a bit of unrest. The citizens of Odessa were engaged in all sorts of strikes and protests, and the Potemkin crew hoped to form alliance with the landlubbers.

The sailors’ long-term goal was to overthrow Tsar Nicholas II, and in order to stir up the people of Odessa, they openly displayed the body of Vakulinchuk on shore, complete with a note that read, “This is the body of Vakulinchuk, killed by the commander for having told the truth. Retribution has been meted out to the commander.” The site of a dead sailor inspired citizens to riot…only the grand revolution didn’t exactly go according to plan. When the Tsar learned what was going on, he sent his troops to crush the rebellion…and this is one spot where Eisenstein took some liberties.

When Nicholas’s army showed up, they killed around 2,000 protestors…but the slaughter didn’t take place at the Odessa Steps. The famous montage massacre was all Eisenstein’s imagination. Of course, as film critic Roger Ebert points out in his “Great Movies” essay, “That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar’s troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.”

In addition to sending troops to slaughter the civilians, Tsar Nicholas also sent a naval fleet to take on the Potemkin. In the film, after a thrilling standoff, the Potemkin sailors convince the other ships to also mutiny and join their cause. In real life, well, the sailors weren’t so successful. While it’s true they did convince at least one ship to switch sides, a series of unfortunate events—including betrayals by sailors loyal to the Tsar—quickly crushed these secondary secessions.

Beaten, the Potemkin eventually ended up in Romania where the sailors surrendered to the Romanian government. As for the Potemkin itself, Afanasy Matyushenko ordered his men to sink the ship, but it was later dredged up and returned to service in the Russian navy. And perhaps this is where Eisenstein took the most creative liberties with his propaganda. Instead of sparking a naval rebellion, many of the Potemkin sailors were handed over to the Russians and executed. As for Matyushenko himself, he managed to evade his captors for a while, but he was eventually hung in 1907.

Of course, this dark and dismal ending probably wouldn’t have gone over well with the Soviet censors so Eisenstein made a few tweaks here and there. After all, the director himself wanted Battleship Potemkin to inspire people around the world to join the socialist cause…not shirk away in the face of danger. While the film isn’t exactly 100% faithful to actual events, it does make for an incredibly rousing story, even ninety years after it was initially released.