Kronstadt is a naval fortress on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Traditionally, it has served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and to guard the approaches to the city of St. Petersburg (which in the early days of the 20th century was named Petrograd, and then later renamed Leningrad) thirty-five miles away. In March of 1921, Kronstadt was the scene of the first and last popular armed uprising against the rule of the Communist Party. The revolt lasted only 18 days, but could conceivably have provided the spark for a third revolution that would have toppled the young Communist government and created a very different Russia. In October, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup d' etat in Petrograd and overthrew the Constitutional Democratic Party's provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky. Soon afterwards Russia dissolved into civil war. For several years Red (i.e. faithful to the new Bolshevik Communist government, led by Vladimir Lenin) and White (by definition, any cause that wasn't Bolshevik: Monarchists, Socialist Revolutionaries, Constitutional Democrats, Anarchists, and dissident nationalists were all marked as White Guard counter-revolutionaries and petit bourgeois enemies of the State ) armies swept back and forth across the countryside. By the end of 1920, the balance of power had tilted decisively against the Whites and the Civil War was about over. Everywhere in Russia there was privation and hardship caused by civil disorder, foreign military intervention, economic embargoes, and the extreme measures ordered by Lenin under the War Communism policy. Private trading in food and commodities was forbidden, food was expropriated from rural peasants by local Communist authorities to keep the cities supplied, and conscripted and unpaid labour was often used. Meanwhile, the Communists were trying to consolidate their control of the country through local soviets (originally, these were locally elected councils of workers and peasants functioning as interim governments), local bureaucracies, the Cheka (secret police), and, when necessary, the battle-hardened and politically loyal units of the Red Army. In February 1921 the inhabitants of Kronstadt were, like most other city-dwellers in Russia, hungry, cold, and discontented with Communist rule. The sailors at Kronstadt were in sympathy with them: they recognized that winning the war against the Whites was one thing, but that it was also necessary to defend the spirit of the Revolution against the authoritarian and bureaucratic regime the Bolsheviks were building. Their radical credentials were impeccable — detachments of sailors from Kronstadt had been the most reliable revolutionary troops in both the February and October Revolutions, and in 1921 most of the sailors there had personally participated in those events. Popular unrest taking the form of strikes and food riots led to lockouts, arrests, and finally the declaration of martial law on 26 February by the local Communist authorities. A fact-finding delegation of 32 sailors from the crews of the battleships Petropavlosk and Sevastopol, frozen in the ice for the winter at Kronstadt Harbour, went into Petrograd and reported on the situation to a general meeting of ship's crews on 28 February. Stepan Petrichenko, chief ship's clerk of the Petropavlovsk, chaired the meeting and directed the drafting of 15 resolutions, phrased as demands to the Kronstadt Soviet. Among other things, the resolutions asked for such basics as new elections to the local soviets; secret ballots; equalization of votes (elections to the Constituent Assembly in Moscow were so rigged as to make one urban worker's vote worth five peasant votes); freedom of speech and assembly for all workers and peasants; abolition of all Communist political departments, commissars, and food roadblocks (set up to prevent peasants smuggling food into the cities to trade); and giving peasants the right to own land and cattle. None of these things had been permitted under the Tsar, but neither were they permitted under the Communists. When the Kronstadt soviet received these demands, they called a public meeting for 1 March that was attended by over 16,000 people. Mikhail Kalinin (then one of the major leaders of the Communist Party) tried to speak but was shouted off the platform. The 15 resolutions were adopted unanimously by the assembly, and a RevKom (Revolutionary Committee) chaired by Petrichenko was elected. The slogan of the RevKom was, All Power To The Soviets And Not To The Parties. The next day, Pavel Vasiliev (chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet) and Nikolai Kuzmin (Political Commissar of the Baltic Fleet) spoke to the RevKom and threatened retribution. They were arrested and imprisoned, and squads of sailors took control of all Kronstadt's key installations without resistance. This marked Kronstadt's break with Communist authority. On 3 March, Kalinin reported the situation to Zinoviev (the Party boss of Petrograd), Trotsky, and Lenin himself. Realizing the threat inherent in this mutiny, they established a total news blackout and deployed local Red Army units to seal Kronstadt off physically (at this time of year, the Gulf of Finland was frozen over and the island could be reached on foot across the ice). To pacify the workers in Petrograd itself, the Bolsheviks temporarily lifted some food roadblocks and sent a special shipment of clothing, shoes, and meat into the city. They also spread the lie that the uprising was a White plot led by General Alexander Kozlovsky, the artillery commander at Kronstadt (Kozlovsky was a former Tsarist general who joined the Red Army in 1917. In fact, he had been sent to Kronstadt by Trotsky himself as an artillery specialist, and had been commended for his part in the defence of Petrograd when the army of a White general named Yudenich threatened the city in 1920. During the revolt, Kozlovsky served only as the commander of Kronstadt s guns — the real leader of the uprising was Petrichenko.). Trotsky went to Petrograd and there began assembling as many loyal Red Army troops as he could find, under the tactical command of Tukhachevsky, the leader of the Communist armies that had fought against Poland the year before. On the afternoon of 7 March, the mainland coastal forts whose guns could be trained on Kronstadt began a bombardment of the island that would last for ten days. That night, Tukhachevsky ordered a simultaneous attack from north and south by several thousand Red Army troops. It was launched in a snowstorm and the soldiers had to be forced onto the ice at gunpoint by commissars and Cheka detachments. The attack failed in the face of intense artillery and machine-gun fire from the fortress, and hundreds of Red troops died or deserted. On the night of 12-13 March, Tukhachevsky tried another night attack from the south with 3,000 kursanti (fanatically loyal officer cadets from Red Army military academies). The rebels used their artillery to break up the ice in front of the attackers and they were again turned back. By 16 March, about 45,000 loyal troops, including thousands more kursanti and even several hundred civilian Communist volunteers who had come from the Tenth Party Congress then underway in Moscow, had been assembled on the mainland to the north, south and east of Kronstadt. That night, Tukhachevsky ordered a mass attack from all three directions. Clad in white capes for camouflage, the Red troops streamed out towards the island across ice that was already starting to thaw. The fortress searchlights picked them out and hundreds died on the ice, but this time the attack was successful. Most of Kronstadt s heavy guns were in fixed casements that pointed westward away from Petrograd, the starving and exhausted defenders were low on ammunition and spread too thinly, and the eastern section of the island was almost unfortified. The attackers forced the eastern gates and entered Kronstadt town. Fierce street fighting continued through the night and all through the next day. Tukhachevsky wrote in his memoirs: "It was not a battle, it was an inferno.... The sailors fought like wild beasts. I cannot understand where they found the might for such rage. Each house where they were located had to be taken by storm." By the night of the 17th, Kronstadt was under Communist control again. Ironically, the following day was the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, and in Moscow Lenin denounced the memory of Thiers and Gallifet, the French politicians who had sent government troops in to wipe out the Communards who had instigated a similar popular revolt against a brutal and corrupt government. About 8,000 rebels managed to escape across the ice to Finland. Exact records of casualties do not exist but it is known that about 600 sailors were killed in the fight for the fortress itself and that as many as 900 were executed soon afterwards. Thousands more were imprisoned and died soon afterward — some of the first camps in what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn later named the Gulag Archipelago were built to receive the rebels of Kronstadt — and the remainder were dispersed to crew ships in the Black and Caspian Sea Fleets or the Siberian Flotilla. The total number of Red Army casualties is also unknown but may have been as high as a total of 10,000 killed and wounded. Different Outcome? Could the outcome have been different? The Kronstadt rebels knew that there was a groundswell of popular discontent with the new order, and that their vision of a democracy made up of self-governing local soviets with no entrenched political parties could conceivably spread to the point where the Communists would have to share power, if not be overthrown entirely. Petrichenko and his advisors therefore thought it necessary to keep moral ascendancy over the Communists. However, in so doing, they made several serious tactical errors. Marx himself said, "The defensive is the death of the insurrection," and the rebels soon surrendered the initiative to the Bolsheviks. Once the island was under control of the sailors, they took no further action to spread the revolt to Petrograd. For example, on 2 March Petrichenko ordered the arrest of only a few leading Party members, and allowed over 300 loyalists to escape to the mainland. Nine hundred tons of grain, enough to feed Kronstadt for months, lay unguarded in nearby Oranienbaum for several days and they never tried to take it. No agitators were sent out into the countryside or Petrograd itself to spread the news. The rebels thought that public opinion would work in their favour, and so did nothing to spoil the impression that they were peaceful dissidents. However, public opinion flows from available information — no communique from Kronstadt was ever printed or distributed except within Kronstadt itself, and the sailors broadcasts on the wireless sets on the ships, their only link to the outside world, went unheeded by a population that did not own radio receivers. These were tactical errors that could have been avoided by being proactive and refusing to passively accept the quick and brutal Communist response. There was also the question of timing. If the revolt had taken place just one month later, the ice in the Gulf of Finland would have melted and the island fortress would have been impregnable. The Kronstadt fortress and the ships stationed there contained over 27,000 soldiers and sailors, enough to sally against the Red garrisons in Petrograd and Oranienbaum. The ships of the Baltic Fleet, free of the winter ice, could have easily reduced the mainland coastal forts and dominated Petrograd itself, allowing the revolt to continue and spread its influence. The end result could have been yet a third revolution against a weakened Communist party and a new political order — a union of soviets and not a Soviet Union. Back to Cry Havoc #19 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com