KRONSTADT REBELLION

The 'Kronstadt rebellion' was an unsuccessful uprising of Soviet sailors, led by Stepan Petrichenko, against the government of the early Russian SFSR. It proved to be the last major rebellion against Bolshevik rule.
The rebellion took place in the first weeks of March, 1921 in Kronstadt, a naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland that served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and as a guardpost for the approaches to Petrograd, ^[1] 35 miles away.

Contents

Causes of the rebellion

Demands are issued

The revolt is put down

Composition of the garrison

Notes

References

Additional external links

See also

Causes of the rebellion

At the end of the Civil War, Bolshevik Russia was exhausted and ruined. The droughts of 1920 and 1921 and the frightful famine during the latter year added the final chapter to the disaster. In the years following the October Revolution, epidemics, starvation, fighting, executions, and the general economic and societal breakdown had taken some twenty million lives. Another million persons had left Russia - with General Wrangel, through the Far East, or in numerous other ways - in order to escape the ravages of the war or to escape one or more of the warring factions. A large proportion of the emigres were educated and skilled.
The economic policy War communism assisted the Soviet government in achieving victories in the Russian Civil War, but it damaged the nation's economy. With private industry and trade proscribed and the newly-constructed state unable to adequately perform these functions, much of the Russian economy ground to a standstill. It is estimated that the total output of mines and factories fell in 1921 to 20% of the pre-World War I level, with many crucial items experiencing an even more drastic decline. Production of cotton, for example, fell to 5%, and iron to 2%, of the prewar level. The peasants responded to requisitioning by refusing to till their land. By 1921 cultivated land had shrunk to some 62% of the prewar area, and the harvest yield was only 37% of normal. The number of horses declined from 35 million in 1916 to 24 million in 1920, and cattle fell from 58 to 37 million during the same span. The exchange rate of the US dollar, which had been two rubles in 1914, rose to 1,200 in 1920.
This situation led to uprisings in the countryside, such as the Tambov rebellion, and to strikes and violent unrest in the factories. In some urban areas, a wave of spontaneous strikes occurred.

Demands are issued

On February 26, delegates from the Kronstadt sailors visited Petrograd to investigate the situation. On February 28, in response to the delegates' report of heavy-handed Bolshevik repression of strikes in Petrograd (claims which might have been inaccurate or exaggerated ^[2]), the crews of the battleships ''Petropavlovsk'' and ''Sevastopol'' held an emergency meeting which approved a resolution raising fifteen demands [1]:
Of the fifteen demands, only two were related to what Marxists term the "petty-bourgeoisie", the reasonably wealthy peasantry and artisans. These demanded "full freedom of action" for all peasants and artisans who did not hire labour. Like the Petrograd workers, the Kronstadt sailors demanded the equalisation of wages and the end of roadblock detachments which restricted both travel and the ability of workers to bring food into the city.
On March 1, a general meeting of the Garrison was held, attended also by Mikhail Kalinin and Commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin who made speeches for the Government. The general meeting passed a resolution including the 15 demands given above. On March 2 a conference of sailor, soldier and worker organization delegates, after hearing speeches by Kuzmin and Vasiliev, President of the Kronstadt Executive Committee, arrested these two and amid incorrect rumors of immediate attack approved formation of a Provisional Revolutionary Committee [2]. The Government responded with an ultimatum the same day. This asserted that the revolt had "undoubtedly been prepared by French counterintelligence" and that the ''Petropavlovsk'' resolution was a "SR-Black Hundred" resolution (SR stood for "Social Revolutionaries", a democratic socialist party that had been dominant in the soviets before the return of Lenin, and whose right-wing had refused to support the Bolsheviks; the "Black Hundreds" were a reactionary, indeed proto-fascist, force dating back to before the revolution which attacked Jews, labour militants and radicals, among others).
Lenin's suspicion of an international conspiracy linked up with the Kronstadt events has been supported by the discovery of a handwritten memorandum preserved in the Columbia University Russian Archive, dated 1921 and marked 'Top Secret.' The document includes remarkably detailed information about the resources, personnel, arms and plans of the Kronstadt rebellion. It also details plans regarding White army and French government support for the Kronstadt sailors' March rebellion. Its title is 'Memorandum on the Question of Organising an Uprising in Kronstadt.'
The memorandum was part of a collection of documents written by an organisation called the National Centre, which originated at the beginning in 1918 as a self identified 'underground organisation formed in Russia for the struggle against the Bolsheviks.' After suffering military defeat and the arrest of many of its central members, the group reconstituted itself in exile by late 1920. General Wrangel, with a trained army of tens of thousands ready and waiting, was their principal military base of support. This memorandum was written between January and early February of 1921 by an agent of the National Centre in Finland.

The revolt is put down

The Petrograd workers were under martial law and could offer little support to Kronstadt.^[3] The Bolshevik government began its attack on Kronstadt on March 7.^[4] Some 50,000 troops under command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky took part in the attack.^[5]
There was a hurry to gain control of the fortress before the melting of the bay as it would have made it impregnable for the land army.
Many Red Army units were forced onto the ice at gunpoint and some actually joined the rebellion.^[4] On March 17, the Bolshevik forces finally entered the city of Kronstadt after having suffered over 10,000 fatalities.^[5] Although there are no reliable figures for the rebels' battle losses, historians estimate that thousands were executed in the days following the revolt, and a like number were jailed, many in the Solovki labor camp.^[5] A large number of more fortunate rebels managed to escape to Finland. These people caused the first major refugee problem for the newly-independent state of Finland. Among the refugees was Petrichenko himself, who lived in Finland as a refugee until he was returned to Soviet Union after the Second World War in 1945.^[9] He died on a prison camp in Soviet Union later in the same year.^[10] Official Soviet figures claim approxmiately 1000 rebels were killed, 2000 wounded, 2500 captured, and 8000 defected to Finland, while the Red Army lost 527 killed and 3285 wounded.^[11]
The day after the surrender of Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune.
Although Red Army units suppressed the uprising, the general dissatisfaction with the state of affairs could not have been more forcefully expressed. Against this background of discontent, Lenin, who also concluded that world revolution was not imminent, proceeded in the spring of 1921 to replace the War Communism economic policy with his New Economic Policy.
The Anarchist Emma Goldman, who was in St. Petersburg at the time of the rebellion, criticised Leon Trotsky for his role in the suppression of the rebellion, arguing that this made his later criticism of Stalin's regime hypocritical.^[12] Trotsky, however, responded that Goldman's criticisms were mainly perfunctory, and ignored the differing social composition between the pro-Bolshevik Kronstadt Uprising of 1917 and the mainly "petty bourgeois" Kronstadt Uprising of 1921.^[13]

Composition of the garrison

Defenders of the Bolshevik policy, such as Abbie Bakan, have claimed that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same sailors as those who had been revolutionary heroes in 1917. ^[14]
However, Israel Getzler presents detailed evidence that the vast majority of the sailors had been in the Navy since 1917: ^[15]
Tony Cliff, defending Bolshevik policy, states that "the number of industrial workers in Russia, always a minority, fell from 3 million in 1917 to 1,240,000, a decline of 58.7%, in 1921-22. So was there a decline in the agricultural proletariat, from 2,100,000 in 1917, to 34,000 only two years later (a decline of 98.5%). But the number of peasant households (not individuals which is many times greater) had risen with the parcelization of land from 16.5 million in early 1918 to over 25 million households by 1920, an increase of some 50%." ^[16]
Supporters of this view claim that the majority of the sailors in the Baltic Fleet stationed at Kronstadt were recent recruits of peasant origin. Petrichenko, a leader of the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921, was himself a Ukrainian peasant.^[17] He later acknowledged that many of his fellow mutineers were peasants from the south who were in sympathy with the peasant opposition movement against the Bolsheviks. In the words of Petrichenko: "When we returned home our parents asked us why we fought for the oppressors. That set us thinking." ^[18]

Notes

1. Now Saint Petersburg.
2. Kronstadt, 1921, Paul Avrich ISBN 0-691-08721-0, Princeton University Press
3. Orlando Figes, ''A People's Tradegy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924'' (New York: Viking Press 1997), 760.
4. Figes, 763.
5. Figes, 767.
6. Figes, 763.
7. Figes, 767.
8. Figes, 767.
9. Kronstadtin kapina 1921 ja sen perilliset Suomessa (Kronstadt Rebellion 1921 and Its Descendants in Finland) by Erkki Wessmann.
10. "Kapinallisen salaisuus" ("The Secret of a Rebel"), Suomen Kuvalehti (a Finnish magazine, http://www.suomenkuvalehti.fi/), page 39, issue SK24 / 2007, 15.6.2007
11. Pukhov, A. S. ''Kronshtadtskii miatezh v 1921 g.'' Leningrad, OGIZ-Molodaia Gvardiia.
12. "Trotsky Protests Too Much" by Emma Goldman
13. "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt by Leon Trotsky.
14. "A Tragic Necessity" by Abbie Bakan
15. Getzler (2002), pp. 207-208. Mawdsley and Saul present similar evidence.
16. Cliff, vol. 3, p. 143.
17. Lincoln, p. 498.
18. Lincoln, p. 495.

References

★ ''Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy'', Israel Getzler ISBN 0-521-89442-5, Cambridge University Press 2002

★ ''Kronstadt, 1921'', Paul Avrich ISBN 0-691-08721-0, Princeton University Press

★ ''The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics'', Evan Mawdsley, London, 1978

★ ''Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917'', Norman Saul, Kansas, 1978

★ ''A History of Russia'', N.V. Riasanovsky ISBN 0-19-515394-4, Oxford University Press (USA)

★ ''The Russian Revolution'', W.H.Chamberlin ISBN 0-691-00816-7, Princeton University Press

★ ''Lenin: A Biography'', Robert Service ISBN 0-330-49139-3, Pan

★ ''Lenin'', Tony Cliff, London, 4 vols., 1975-1979

★ ''Red Victory'', W. Bruce Lincoln, New York, 1989

★ ''Kronstadt'', V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, ISBN 0-87348-883-0

★ ''The Unknown Revolution'', Voline, Free Life Editions, New York, 1974

★ ''The Kronstadt Commune'', Ida Mett

★ ''Reaction and Revolution: The Russian Revolution 1894-1924'', Michael Lynch

Additional external links

★ Alexander Berkman ''The Kronstadt Rebellion''

★ Kronstadt and the Stock Exchange by Leon Trotsky

★ On the Kronstadt Revolt by Vladimir Lenin

★ Kronstadt 1921 Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution - Spartacist English Edition No.59 (International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist))

★ Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt by Leon Trotsky

★ The Kronstadt Izvestia Online archive of the newspaper brought out by the rebels, including their list of demands

★ Ida Mett's pamphlet of the Kronstadt Commune Originally published by Solidarity, UK

★ The later Storozhevoy mutiny described from a Trotskyist point of view

★ There is an extended discussion from an Anarchist point of view in the Anarchist FAQ

★ ''The Truth about Kronstadt,'' translation of the 1921 book ''Правда о Кронштадте'' published in Prague by the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Volia Rossii, and 1992 thesis, by Scott Zenkatsu Parker

See also

★ Russian anarchism