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Episode 10.93: the Kronstadt Rebellion
When the third anniversary of the October Revolution rolled around in November 1920, the Communist regime was simultaneously — and paradoxically — more secure and more insecure than it had ever been. The Red Army had pushed back all the various military threats, so after years of operating under the emergency conditions of wartime, Lenin’s government found itself entering, for the first time, a period of external peace. But as we discussed last week, just as those emergency conditions of wartime evaporated, the justification for the harsh and deeply unpopular policies of war communism evaporated with them. The Communists now faced a new and equally dangerous task: justifying themselves to the people of Russia without being able to point to some outside threat as being even worse. They would now sink or swim on the merit of their own program. But discontentment, disenchantment, and disillusionment with the Communists was bursting forth all across Russia. Workers in the cities, peasants in the countryside, nationalities in the former peripheral parts of the Russian empire, all of them boiled with anger, heated by their own specific list of grievances, and all of them threatened the Communist hold on power.
Then in March, 1921, the Communists faced an unexpected threat from one of their most reliable allies: the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base.
Now as you will recall from the big run of episodes on the revolutions of 1917, the Kronstadt sailors played a major role in all those events. Heavily influenced by the tenants of anarchism and Bolshevism, they were ever eager to use violent means to push the revolution towards radical ends. And as much as anyone, the sailors truly believed the slogan “all power to the Soviets,” a slogan that had driven the conflicts of 1917 all the way to the climax in October. Along with the machine gunners of the Vyborg district, the Kronstadt sailors were the shock troops of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky called them the pride and glory of the revolution. And for the Kronstadt sailors, the revolution meant the overthrow of all forms of authoritarian, dictatorial, and centralized control. They rooted their revolution in the self-organized Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ Deputies. Their own soviet, which they formed after the February Revolution, turned the island base of Kronstadt into a virtually autonomous self-governing island, resistant to all forms of outside authority. Given their deeply held revolutionary principles, there was never any doubt the sailors would support the Communists against the Whites during the civil war, and when the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet were relocated to Kronstadt after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Communists could count on the fleet resting in extremely reliable hands.
But that said. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolshevik declarations of late 1917 and early 1918 — all power to the soviets, worker control of the factories, land to the peasants — were taken both seriously and literally. So they were among those who bore the policy shifts of 1918, 1919, and 1920 to meet the crisis of the Civil War with gritted teeth. They endured the re-professionalization of the military, the return of traditional military discipline, the consolidation of power by the Communist Party and the Communist Party alone, the political commissars appointed by the central government to fan out into all segments of Russian society and call the shots. None of this is what the Kronstadt sailors had anticipated in 1917.
But, there were certainly no major mutinies or rebellions during the civil war, and the sailors fought courageously on the front lines, especially during the crisis year of 1919. So when Petrograd held celebrations on the third anniversary of the revolution in November 1920, the Communist authorities featured the Kronstadt sailors front and center. They were still lauded as the pride and glory of the revolution.
But under the surface all was not well. Most of what had gone on since the heroic days of 1917 contradicted the sailors beliefs about what they were meant to be fighting for. Conflicts between the sailors and the communist commissars grew throughout 1920. For the population around Petrograd — that, is the civilian population, the army garrisons, the Kronstadt sailors — the civil wars were effectively over by the end of 1919, when they successfully pushed back that northwestern White Army that we talked about in episode 10.89. So in their immediate lived experience, the wartime emergency was little in evidence throughout 1920, even as the Polish-Soviet War heated up. So the question looming over the city and over the Kronstadt Naval base is: when are we going to let up on all these authoritarian policies that had only been justified by the wartime emergency?
Now, because the war was pretty much wound down in the northwest by the winter of 1919-1920, the authorities started giving the sailors permission to go unextended furloughs home, to return to their home towns and villages. A large proportion of the Kronstadt sailors were drawn from the Ukrainian peasantry, and the furloughs of 1920 afforded them the opportunity, for the first time, to see the effects of three years of war and revolution. It was the first time they were able to take the temperature of their friends and relatives about the Communist Party and what they were doing. And what they found shocked them. Disruptions to communications combined with outright censorship and propaganda by the government had kept the reality of the economic situation hidden from the sailors on their isolated islands. They discovered the peasants and workers of Russia, their friends and family, held the Communist Party in unconcealed contempt. The principal leader of the Kronstadt Rebellion, a guy called Stepan Petrichenko, who we’ll talk about more here in a second said, “For years the happenings at home while we were at the front or at sea were concealed by the Bolshevik censorship. When we returned home, our parents asked us why we fought for the oppressors. That set us thinking.”
But what took them from thinking to doing were events closer at hand. The conditions in Petrograd over the winter of 1920-1921 were absolutely miserable, as bad, probably, as the infamous winter of 1916-1917 that had set the whole revolution in motion in the first place — although with the critical caveat that the city was by now far less populated than it had been in 1917, and was no longer the political capital of Russia. But in material terms, it reads exactly like what was going on in 1916 and 1917. Food. fuel, and supply shortages became acute, as dwindling supplies could not reach the cities due to heavy snows and the broken train system that we discussed last week. On January 22nd, 1921, the Petrograd officials cut the already meager bread ration by one third for all inhabitants of the city, and by February, two thirds of the factories in Petrograd closed down due to a lack of fuel, leaving people further unemployed and plunging desperately into the abyss of fatal poverty. The working classes were hungry, freezing, and increasingly bitter.
What really infuriated people is that they weren’t allowed to take matters into their own hands. Communist policy banned trade as a feature of capitalist exploitation, so when the starving and freezing people with Petrograd fanned out from the city to scrounge for food and fuel, selling or trading, whatever they could to get it, they had to dodge a network of armed checkpoints set up to stop quote unquote speculators from carrying manufactured goods or other valuables out of the city, or bringing food into it. The upshot of all this being that while the system of rational communist distribution had completely failed, people were being punished for trying to make up the shortfalls on their own initiative. And we’re not talking about frivolous and unnecessary consumer goods here. We’re talking about enough food so your family doesn’t starve, and enough wood or coal so they don’t freeze. It was, frankly, an insanely diabolical situation that the Communist leadership themselves were right in the middle of recognizing as an insanely diabolical situation that needed to change.
But as these things often go, it took direct action to get the government to recognize the insanely diabolical system that needed to change really needed to change. Because it wasn’t just bad for the people, it was bad for the people in charge. In the last week of February 1921, protests, demonstrations, and strikes erupted throughout Petrograd. Workers walked off the job and out into the streets, demanding an end to the policies of war communism. Local party officials, led by Zinoviev, initially brought down the stick. They banned public gatherings, imposed a curfew, closed factories with high concentrations of vocal protestors, and when that didn’t quell the disturbances, they declared martial law and brought in dependable Red Army companies to patrol the streets and impose order. Thousands. Were arrested, including upwards of 500 union leaders, and every known Menshevik, SR, and anarchist they could find, all of whom were trying to exploit the unrest to their own advantage.
When word of all this reached the Kronstadt sailors, they became incensed on behalf of the Petrograd workers. They had always stood together in solidarity, and on February 26, crews of the two most radicalized ships in the Baltic Fleet, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, voted to send investigators into the city and report back on conditions. As with the furloughs back to their home villages, what they found infuriated them. The factories that were open were working under the watchful eye of armed guards. Military patrols roamed the streets to prevent any kind of further agitation. The jails were bursting with prisoners. Petrichenko said of the industrial districts of Petrograd, “One might’ve thought that these were not factories, but the forced labor prisons of tsarist times.”
On February 28th, the investigators reported back to Kronstadt, and their own long simmering anger finally boiled over. The way the Communist leadership so casually exploited the peasants, mistreated the workers, abused rank and file sailors and soldiers, the way they had built a one-party dictatorship that saw Communist Party officials living fat, warm, and happy while everyone else starved and froze. All of this had been justified, ever so barely justified, by the various wars. But those wars were now all in the past. Unless a major change in course was coming, it was impossible not to conclude that the senior leadership of the Communist Party was betraying the revolution for their own self-interest.
The Kronstadt sailors resolve to resume their historical position as defenders of the Revolution and force the Communists into changing course. On the night of February 28th, the committee of sailors drafted a 15 point list of demands, the first of which leveled a broadside at the present regime’s increasingly laughable claim that they represented the people of Russia. It said,
In view of the fact that the present Soviet do not express the will of the workers and peasants, we want to immediately hold new elections by secret ballot, with the election campaign to have full freedom of agitation among the workers and peasants.
The rest of the list is notable for its focus on broad political, legal, and economic reforms: the release of political prisoners from those various other socialist parties, eliminating the system of political commissars, abolishing armed detachments composed exclusively of Communist Party members; they demanded freedom of trade and exchange both for peasants and for workers; and finally, the right of the peasants to freely dispose of their land and the produce of their land.
So the Kronstadt Rebellion was not merely a mutiny of sailors with parochial demands — we want better pay and better rations — they were casting themselves right from the start as the defenders of the people of Russia against the unjust authoritarian conduct of the present Communist regime.
The name that headed the list of signatories to these demands was Stepan Petrichenko, the most charismatic and respected of all the leaders in Kronstadt. Born into a peasant family in Ukraine, Petrichenko only received two years of formal schooling before departing to go out and make his way in the world. He worked as a plumber before joining the Russia Navy in 1912, he served all through World War I without getting blown up, and when the February Revolution hit, he was based on a small Estonian island the Russians had booted the native inhabitants off of and turned into a little navel fortress. Petrichenko himself was influenced by anarchist ideas, and he supported more radical revolutionary ends, and he absolutely welcomed the arrival of the October Revolution. When it did, he and his comrades formed a Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress Builders to take over the little navel fortress they were running. Despite his lack of formal education, Petrichenko was clearly a bright guy who exuded charismatic authority, and so despite being only 25 years old, he was elected chairman of the council.
This island, however, was abandoned by Russia after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Petrichenko was reassigned to Kronstadt, serving on one of those infamously radical ships, the Petropavlovsk, as a senior clerk. He was a leader in calling for the investigation of conditions in Petrograd, and then help draft and sign the 15 point demands that were about to stand as their revolutionary program.
Over the first few days of March, the sailors in Kronstadt held a series of mass meetings at the main public square on the island, drawing about 15 to 20,000 people each. The Petrograd Communist Party sent out representatives to talk the sailors down, but their demeanor read far more as threatening and imperious than understanding and conciliatory. During one of these meetings on March 2nd, 1920, somebody — and we do not know who, and we do not know why — shouted out a warning that the Communists had ordered a large company of armed soldiers to break up the assembly. Now, this was not implausible, and it sent the sailors into a frenzy of activity. They arrested the Communist Party representatives and then promptly elected a provisional revolutionary committee to serve as the Island’s political and military authority. Then, they prepared to defend themselves. Stepan Petrichenko was among the first five elected to the provisional revolutionary committee, and he was then elevated to chairman.
Now, the shouted warning that the Communists were about to attack turned out to be the trigger that moved events from mere protest to armed rebellion. And the funny thing is, it wasn’t true. There was no imminent attack. Now we don’t know if it was a misunderstanding or intentionally made up, and if it was made up, whether it was by a pro-revolt agitator hoping to drive everyone into rebellion, or an anti-revolt agitator, hoping to bring the whole thing crashing down on its own head. All we do know is that it happened. Somebody shouted that the Communists were about to crack down, and whatever their ultimate intentions, the result is that it kick-started the Kronstadt Rebellion.
Now, the other funny thing about all this is that as the sailors are launching their rebellion, the Communists are actually diffusing the situation in Petrograd. Faced with the embarrassing situation of a bunch of workers revolting against the workers’ government — and not actually wanting to preside over there on Bloody Sunday — Zinoviev and the other leaders of the Petrograd Communists announced a number of popular concessions, most especially increased food rations, plus a shuttering of that network of checkpoints around the city, giving permission to the population to go forth and buy, sell, truck, barter, and trade to their heart’s content in the name of securing what they needed to survive. These carrots, plus the ever-present stick of armed soldiers, convinced the workers to abandon their strikes and protests, and so by March 2nd, 1921 — the day that the sailors are going into revolt — the workers of Petrograd were going back to their factories.
But the revolt was now on. On March the third, the now rebels in Kronstadt started publishing a newspaper which would run daily for the length of their rebellion. The first issue concluded an appeal first and foremost to the other residents of the island, which was not an inconsiderable number of people. In total, there were about 25,000 sailors and soldiers, surrounded by about 50,000 civilians serving the various military installations. The editorial said:
Our country is enduring a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, and economic ruin have held us in an iron vise these three years already. The Communist Party, which rules the country, has become separated from the masses and shown itself unable to lead her from her state of general ruin. It has not faced the reality of the disturbances which in recent times have occurred in Petrograd and Moscow.
This unrest shows clearly enough that the party has lost the faith of the working masses. Neither has it recognized the demands presented by the workers. It considers them plots of the counter-revolution. It is deeply mistaken.
This unrest, these demands are the voice of the people in its entirety, of all laborers. All workers, sailors, and soldiers see clearly at the present moment that only through common effort, by the common will of the laborers, is it possible to give the country bread, wood, and coal, to dress the barefoot and naked, and to lead the Republic out of this dead end.
They hoped that this message, which pretty accurately described the situation in early 1921, would hit upon the momentum already building in Petrograd for a general revolt. They did not realize that that moment was already fading. But the anarchist Emma Goldman attended a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on March the fourth, and she reported that some courageous workers and sailors attempted to sway the Soviet, which had been completely co-opted by the Communist Party, in their favor.
“A working man from the Petrograd Arsenal demanded to be heard,” Goldman later wrote. “… he fearlessly declared that the workers had been driven to strike because of the Government’s indifference to their complaints. The Kronstadt sailors, far from being counter-revolutionists were devoted to the Revolution,” that “… we, the workers and sailors protected you and helped you to power. Now you denounce us and are ready to attack us with arms. Remember, you are playing with fire.”
She went onto report:
Then a sailor spoke. He referred to the glorious revolutionary past of Kronstadt, appealed to the Communists not to engage in fratricide, and read the Kronstadt resolution to prove the peaceful attitude to the sailors. But the voice of these sons of the people fell on deaf ears. The Petrograd Soviet, its passions roused by Bolshevik demagoguery, passed the Zinoviev resolution ordering Kronstadt to surrender on pain of extermination.
The next day, Trotsky rolled into town and made good on this resolution to order Kronstadt, to surrender on pain of extermination. He issued a blunt ultimatum, which read:
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore, I command all those who have raised their hands against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. The obdurate will be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The arrested Commissars and other representatives of the government must be liberated at once. Only those who surrender unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic.
At the same time, I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms. Responsibility for the harm that may be suffered by the peaceful population will fall entirely on the heads of the counterrevolutionary mutineers.
This warning is final.
So there was no talk of concessions, or compromise, or reaching a mutually satisfactory resolution. Trotsky’s message was simple: submit or be destroyed.
Kronstadt did not respond to this ultimatum, but instead continued to attack the Communist leadership for using their power to enrich themselves at the people’s expense. They said that Zinoviev and Trotsky, “sit in their soft arm chairs in the lighted rooms of tsarist palaces and consider how best to spill the blood of the insurgents.” On March the sixth, a sailor who was still a member of the Communist Party wrote a short statement for the Kronstadt paper that appealed to his fellow Communists to disown their leadership.
“Comrade, rank and file Communists,” he said, “look about, and you will see that we have entered a terrible swamp led by a little bunch of Communist bureaucrats. Under a Communist mask, they have built warm nests for themselves in our Republic. I, as a Communist, call on you to drive from us those false Communists who incite us to fratricide. We rank and file Communists, in no way guilty, suffer the rebukes of our comrade non-party workers and peasants because of them. I look with horror on the situation which has been created.”
The appeal to disown the party resonated, and hundreds of card-carrying Communists in the Baltic Fleet announced their resignations from the Party. Those Communists who refuse to do so, or who did not flee the island, were arrested and held prisoner, although no harm ever came to them. They were all alive and well at the end of the rebellion. This was in contrast to Kronstadt rebels or sympathizers who fell into the hand to the Chekha, who were generally summarily executed.
The sudden revolt of the Kronstadt sailors was as embarrassing to the Communist Party as the workers’ protests, perhaps even more so. The sailors were after all the pride and glory of the Revolution. Aware that it would be kind of absurd to try to paint the sailors as reactionary.
Counter-revolutionaries the leaders of the Communist Party decided to frame the revolt as they had framed the civil war that their opponents were the puppets of foreign enemies in this. There dear comrades, the Kronstadt Naval base we’re being led treacherously astray by a cabal of anticommunist Russian agents who were based in Paris and backed by the Western capitalist who were still looking for any way to overthrow the socialist revolution.
And there was some circumstantial evidence to support this. Specifically, a few stories had been published in the foreign press about a revolting Kronstadt, in mid February back when no revolt had yet. This led Lenin and Trotsky who read all the foreign papers to conclude that Western reporters had picked up on chatter about plans for the revolt and erroneously published them as if they had already taken place.
So when, oh so coincidentally, a revolt and Kronstadt did break out just a few weeks later, it was easy for the senior communist leadership to connect the dots and conclude the rebellion must’ve been cooked up in Paris, not on the decks of the Baltic. But noted anarchist historian. Paul average makes the very convincing case in his book on the Kronstadt rebellion while there was a group of anticommunist Russian emigres organizing in Paris and who had honed in on Kronstadt as a viable beachhead for making a play back into Russia, there was no actual contact between them and the sailors prior to the explosive event of March 1920.
Now they of course cheered on the rebellion, and eagerly made contact with the rebels after it got going, but all evidence suggests that the Kronstadt Rebellion was a genuinely spontaneous and self-directed affair driven by events around Petrograd, not cooked up in the cafes of Paris. And as for the potential machinations of the Allied government, we know for a fact that the British had long since abandoned regime change in Russia as a worthwhile foreign policy objective, and were in fact literally days away from signing a trade pact with Soviet Russia that will normalize economic relations between the two countries — a fact that Lenin and his colleagues were well aware of, even as they portrayed this latest domestic threat as the work of treacherous capitalist imperialists.
But still, Lenin and his colleagues could not afford to recognize the sailors as being justly motivated by their own revolutionary principles. Nor could they make a respected revolutionary the face of the rebellion. Stepan Petrichenko was not somebody they wanted to wage a war against. So instead their propaganda fixated on General Alexander Kozlovsky, a former tsarist officer who had subsequently joined the Red Army and presently commanded Kronstadt’s artillery batteries.
Kozlovsky sided with the rebels and oversaw the technical details of defending the island, but the Communists portrayed him as a White general in the mold of Denikin and Kolchak, manipulating the sailors into doing his counterrevolutionary bidding. Their initial report on what happened pointed to quote, “a group who appeared on the scene, former general Kozlovsky and three officers whose names have not yet been established. Thus the meaning of recent events was fully explained. This time two tsarist generals stood behind SRs.”
In an address to the party in Moscow, Lenin said that behind the uprising in Kronstadt, “looms the familiar figure of the White Guard generals.” This became a key note that they sounded again and again in the propaganda war: that the rebels and Kronstadt were led by Whites, not by Reds.
While they portrayed the nascent Kronstadt rebellion as the work of sinister counter-revolutionary forces, the Communists could not afford to simply argue their way to victory with words. Even if their brother comrades in Kronstadt were being led astray, there was a very short window to talk them down. At the moment, the waters around the base were frozen solid, preventing supplies and reinforcements from reaching the naval base by sea and keeping their powerful warships locked up in the ice. But the spring thaw was fast approaching, and if the Communists did not quell the rebellion quickly and decisively, Kronstadt might really become the anticommunist beachhead the Communist Party was portraying it as. So they concluded that, however much it might pain them, deploying overwhelming force to crush the rebels might be necessary.
It became necessary finally on March 7th. Kronstadt never did respond to Trotsky’s ultimatum even after the Communists extended their deadline for a reply by an extra 24 hours. The Kronstadt rebels were confident they would be able to hold out long enough for revolutionary fire to catch across Russia, and make the naval base itself, the least of Communist worries. But when the second 24 hours expired, the Communists spent all day on March 7th, preparing, and then on the morning of March 8th, they attacked. But they moved too quickly, and with too few soldiers. They only mustered about 20,000 in all for this first attack, and they faced off against a light number of rebels who were defending a heavily armed fortress, to say nothing of the fact that the Red Army soldiers would have to cross a miles wide plane of ice that afforded them no cover whatsoever from bullets or artillery. Then, if and when they did come within shooting distance of the fortress, many of the Red Army soldiers hesitated to fire on people who were in every way just like them, just regular rank and file soldiers and sailors devoted to the revolution.
So the attack on March the eighth was a total failure, leaving hundreds of casualties and a feeling Kronstadt that this was all going to work out, that history was on their side. The same day they routed this first attack, the Kronstadt newspaper published an editorial called What We Are Fighting For, which very helpfully offers an accounting of… what they were fighting for.
“Carrying out the October Revolution,” it read, “the working class hoped to achieve its emancipation. The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement to the human personality. The Communists who brought to the laborers instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chamber of the Chekha. With their horrors, they have many times exceeded the gendarme government to the tsarist regime. The Communist authorities have replaced the hammer and sickle, glorious arms of the laboring state, in fact with bayonets and prison bars. It has become evermore sharply visible, and now is completely apparent, that the Russian Communist Party is not a defender of the laborers. Having achieved power, it fears only to lose it, and for this end all means are allowable: slander, violence, fraud, murder, and revenge on the families of the rebels.”
So this is clearly a revolt driven by disillusionment with the Communist regime. But we do need to pay attention to some subtleties in all of this, because we have seen in the various peasant revolts we’ve talked about, including the ones still ongoing in the Tambov region, the common rallying cry “Soviets without Communists.” this is a slogan that is sometimes taken to be the Kronstadt program, but it’s really not. Their slogan, which they used as a masthead for their newspaper, was “all power to the Soviets, but not the Parties.” They absolutely wanted the establishment of a true soviet republic representing the interests of the workers and peasants who would elect from amongst themselves the delegates who would then rule on their behalf. But their anger with the Communist Party tended to extend to all parties. They wanted to get rid of the influence of political parties entirely. They believed that the problem with the present order was that the Communist Party had co-opted the soviets, and we’re now running it for the benefit of their party, not for the benefit of the people. And it was really that kind of party interest above local worker and peasant interest that really rankled them. And in an editorial, they wrote, “we stand for power to the Soviet, but not the parties. For the freely elected representation of the toilers, the Soviets that have been captured and manipulated by the Communist Party have always been deaf to all our demands and needs. The only reply we have ever received has been shooting.”
So the fact is, the Kronstadt sailors planned to stay aloof from all party influences. They rejected all party apparatuses. And despite many accusations that they were being run by the SRs or the anarchists, the truth is they rejected their party power too, especially as the Kronstadt rebels saw the SRs as fronts for bourgeois democracy, which they also happened to despise. So the ousted SR leader, Victor Chernov, still claiming to be the legitimate chairman of the Constituent Assembly, sent a message to Kronstadt after the rebellion got going. He said:
The Chairman of the Constituent Assembly Victor Chernov sends his fraternal greetings to the heroic comrades-sailors, Red Army men and workers, who for the third time since 1905 are throwing off the yoke of tyranny. He offers to aid with men and to provision Kronstadt through the Russian cooperatives abroad. Inform us what and how much is needed. I am prepared to come in person to give my energies and authority to the service of the people’s revolution. I have faith in the final victory of the laboring masses. Hail to the first to raise the banner of the people’s liberation. Down with despotism from the left and the right!
But the Kronstadt rebels politely declined this offer. They refused all attempts by the SRs to turn the Kronstadt Rebellion into a rebellion in favor of the SR Party program — specifically the SRs trying to get them to demand for the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. This turns out to be a huge difference between the Kronstadt Rebellion and the rebellions we talked about last week in the Tambov region. Their demands included first and foremost the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly, which the peasant SRs still wanted to revive, and which the sailors in Kronstadt still took pride in having helped disband in 1918.
But the sailors in Kronstadt did hope their revolution would catch on nationwide and be joined by everyone, workers and peasants and sailors and soldiers and toilers everywhere, just not these damned Party men. “Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution,” they wrote in What We Are Fighting For, “which is breaking the last fetters from the laboring masses. This new revolution stirs the laboring masses of both east and west, being an example of the new socialist construction, opposed to the bureaucratic Communist.” They explicitly called what they were doing the Third Revolution, and absolutely planned for March 1921 to take its place alongside February 1917 and October 1917 as a victorious revolt by the people against a cruel authoritarian elite.
But the Communists were very good at working the levers of the press and propaganda. And despite Kronstadt’s high hopes, the reality was their message was not breaking through. The Communists used their own newspapers and radio broadcasts to continue to pound the message that Kronstadt was a rebellion driven by Whites and foreigners, not genuine Russian revolutionaries. A Moscow radio broadcast which alluded to the plot picked up early in the foreign press said, “…That the mutiny by former General Kozlovsky was prepared by the spies of the Entente, like so many earlier White Guard rebellions, is visible from the report of the bourgeois French newspaper which two weeks before the mutiny printed a telegram from Helsinki.” This telegram allegedly proved the complicity of the Entente powers in the Kronstadt Rebellion.
The Communists also dropped leaflets by plane into the Kronstadt Naval Base to turn those closest to the rebels against them. It read:
To the deceived people have Kronstadt now. Do you see where the scoundrels have led you? You’ve gotten what you asked for. From behind the cover of the SRs and Mensheviks, former tsarist generals have already peered out with barred teeth. Kozlovsky, the tsarist general, and other notorious White Guards control all these Petrichenkos like puppets on a string. They are deceiving you. They have told you that you are struggling for democracy. Not even two days have passed and you see that in fact your struggle is not for democracy, but for tsarist generals. They tell you fairytales, speaking as if Petrograd stood behind you, as if Siberia and the Ukraine supported you. All this is a shameless lie. In Petrograd the last sailor turned from you when it became known that the tsarist General Kozlovsky was running things. Siberia and the Ukraine stand firmly for Soviet power. Red Petrograd laughs at the pathetic labors of a little bunch of SRs and White Guards.
This leaflet concluded ominously: “You are completely surrounded.”
On March the 10th, the Kronstadt rebels responded with an article titled, To the Soldiers Fighting on the Communist Side. It laid out the grim state of Russia in early 1921, saying:
Communist rule has reduced all of Russia to unprecedented poverty, hunger, cold, and other privations. The factories and mills are closed, the railway is on the verge of breakdown. The countryside has been fleeced to the bone. We have no bread, no cattle, no tools to work the land.
We have no clothing, no shoes, no fuel. The workers are hungry and cold. The peasants and townsfolk have lost all hope for an improvement of their lives. Day by day, they come closer to death.
The communist betrayers have reduced you to all of this. In place of the old regime, a new regime of arbitrariness, insolence, favoritism, theft, and speculation has been established, a terrible regime in which one must hold out one’s hand to the authorities for every piece of bread, for every button. A regime in which one does not belong, even to oneself, where one can not dispose of one’s labor, a regime of slavery and degradation. Soviet Russia has become an all-Russian concentration camp.
But as I said, these messages were not breaking through to the mainland. And by the second week of March, 1921 Kronstadt was not the spearpoint of a vast revolution, but an isolated outpost, increasingly doomed to be stormed and captured.
They continued to hold out however, and fended off another attack by the Red Army on March 10th and 11th with very little damage to the base. But they would not be able to hold out much longer, and no one was coming to save them. As Paul Avrich notes in his book on Kronstadt, that they may have made the same fatal error the Paris Commune had made 50 years earlier — and it was almost exactly 50 years earlier. The showdown over the National Guard cannons had happened on the morning of March 18th, 1871. Analysis of the failure of the Paris Commune, including analysis offered by Lenin, had it that the failure of the Communards to go on the offensive at the outset of their revolution, to catch their enemy flat footed and instead sit back defensively was a huge mistake. It allowed Adolphe Thiers to build up forces for an overwhelming attack that ended in Bloody Week. This was a mistake that Kronstadt now apparently repeated. Who knows how differently things would have gone had the sailors marched out into Petrograd on March the third, before the Communist authorities were really prepared to meet them? It’s a question that will never be answered because it is a scenario built for alternate history fan fiction, not historical nonfiction.
Finally, after another week’s standoff, the Communists launch their final assault on Kronstadt on March 17th. This time they prepared fully 50 to 60,000 troops to take back the island. After an intense artillery barrage, they attack from three directions: from the north, from the south and from the east. The rebels, who by now numbered just about 15,000, didn’t have much hope of withstanding anything. The two sides fought each other with heavy casualties on both sides all through March 17th, but on March 18, the Red Army forces had battled their way inside, and they controlled all the major structures on the island. By noon on March 18th, the last rebel surrendered. Which was probably a smart decision, because Trotsky had just approved a plan to use chemical weapons — specifically, dropping gas shells on the base — if the rebels continued to resist.
Aside from this heavy fighting, the last days of the Kronstadt Rebellion were marked by a mass exodus across the ice to Finland. Petrichenko and the other leaders of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee all escaped on the 17th before the naval base fell, and about 800 others followed before the end of the final assault. While the Red Army was mopping up and securing things, they could not contain a further mass exodus of something like 8,000 refugees who crossed the ice over into Finland. Those left behind had been ordered to sabotage everything they could, but when the crews found out that all their leaders had deserted, they disobeyed their final orders and instead arrested their officers and surrendered to the Communists.
It is very difficult to say what the final casualty numbers of all this were. The American consulate estimated that about 10,000 Communist troops were killed, wounded, or missing in their attempts to retake the island. On the rebel side, the most reasonable number is about 5 or 600 dead with about a thousand wounded. The Communists took about 2000 prisoners, with 13 of them singled out and accused of being the ringleaders of the rebellion, even though the real ringleaders of the rebellion, had escaped to Finland. The 13 were summarily executed a few days later. In the ensuing weeks and months, hundreds of other prisoners were summarily executed — they were simply taken out in batches and shot without any trial. The rest of the prisoners who survived were either moved to prison camps in Siberia, or thrown in other prisons where they were mistreated and died of hunger or disease. Those that made it to Finland in their thousands would be given aid by the Red Cross and become something of an international cause célèbre. Petrichenko himself remained in Finland, and even engaged in some plotting with agents representing Pyotr Wrangel to combine their efforts to overthrow the Communists once and for all, but this all came to nothing. He stayed in Finland until World War II, at which point he was repatriated to Russia, promptly arrested, and died in a labor camp two years. Stalin had many defects of character; a short memory was not one of them.
In the final analysis. The Kronstadt Rebellion was a failure in just about every way, but one. The sailors went down as eternal martyrs to the creeping authoritarianism of Communist Russia. As Leninism gave way to Stalinism, critics of the regime increasingly pointed to Kronstadt as a major fork in the revolutionary road, when the idealistic dreams of 1917 gave way to the bitter realities of the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of what they had actually fought for in March of 1921, almost nothing came of their demands. The Communists did not restore autonomy and authority of local soviets, nor did they restore freedom of speech or assembly or the press. They did not free any socialists or anarchist prisoners, and in fact, in political terms, the rebellion led the Communist Party to secure even more dictatorial power for itself. They started working not just on permanently suppressing Mensheviks and anarchists and SRs, but even opposition elements inside the Communist Party.
Then, they set about blotting out the memory of the Kronstadt Rebellion entirely, to make sure that it was memory holed into oblivion and nobody would talk about it. Not without a twisted sense of humor, they rechristened the two battleships that had been hotbeds of the rebellion, the Marat and the Paris Commune, seizing for themselves the historical legacy that the sailors of Kronstadt appeared to be the true embodiment of.
The Kronstadt rebellion did have one immediate impact on the Communist regime, though that impact can be a bit overstated. As the rebellion unfolded, the Communist Party met for its 10th Party Congress in Moscow, and it was at this Congress that Lenin announced the end of some of the most hated parts of war communism. Now, as we will discuss next week, Lenin came into the Congress with plans to do just that, and so while we can’t say that the Kronstadt Rebellion caused the change in policy, it very clearly cemented its necessity. Lenin understood that the Communist Party needed to find a new way forward, or they would be overthrown.
What they needed to secure their political position was a new economic policy….