The Kronstadt rebellion

On the evening of 7 March 1921 artillery batteries on the northern and southern shores of the Gulf of Finland opened fire on Kronstadt, the naval fortress on Kotlin Island that for more than two hundred years had guarded the approach to Petrograd. The guns of the forts and of two battleships frozen into the harbour ice replied. So began the Soviet government’s reckoning with men whom, only a few years earlier, the Bolsheviks had called the pride of the revolution. Since 2 March the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, the soldiers of the garrison and the workers of Kronstadt had governed the island through their own revolutionary committee, demanding new, free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech for socialists and anarchists, and an end to grain requisitioning. They did not want the Tsar or the White generals back. They wanted soviets without the dictatorship of a single party. After two assaults across the ice that cost thousands of lives, the fortress fell on 18 March. That same month the Bolshevik party abandoned War Communism and banned factions within its ranks.

March 1921, not March 1917

Some chronologies state that on 7 March “rebellious Red Army soldiers and civilians seized” Kronstadt, and that the rebellion lasted until 17 March. This needs some correction. The rebellion did not begin on 7 March but a week earlier. On 28 February the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol adopted a resolution setting out demands to the government; on 1 March a mass meeting of many thousands in the town endorsed it; and on 2 March a Provisional Revolutionary Committee took power on the island. 7 March was the day the authorities began their bombardment, and on the night of 7–8 March the infantry set off on the first assault. The last resistance was broken not on the 17th but on 18 March. Nor were the rebels mostly Red Army soldiers: they were fleet sailors, although part of the fortress garrison and some of the inhabitants joined them.

A country after civil war

By the turn of 1920 and 1921 the Bolsheviks had won the war against the Whites. In November 1920 General Pyotr Wrangel’s army evacuated the Crimea, and peace talks with Poland were already under way in Riga after the war in which the Red Army had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. But military victory had come in a ruined country. Industrial output had fallen to a fraction of its pre-war level, the cities had emptied and transport barely functioned. For three years the regime had held on through the policy later called War Communism: the state took over industry and banned private trade, while food detachments seized grain from the peasants as compulsory deliveries. The peasants responded by sowing less and, increasingly, by revolt. In February 1921 the Cheka recorded more than 150 peasant uprisings across the country, and in Tambov province a regular guerrilla war was already raging.

In January 1921 the government cut the bread ration in the cities by a third. In February most of Petrograd’s large factories closed for lack of fuel. On 24 February workers from the Trubochny Works came out onto the streets, and the strike soon spread across the whole city. The authorities, headed by Petrograd’s party boss Grigory Zinoviev, declared a state of siege, dispersed the demonstrations with military cadets and arrested hundreds of people, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries among them. At the same time they made concessions: they increased rations, removed the roadblocks that confiscated food brought in from the countryside and allowed workers to leave the city to obtain supplies. By the beginning of March the factories were back at work. On the nearby island, however, news of the strikes and the repression had an effect that no one in Petrograd had foreseen.

The Petropavlovsk resolution

In 1917 Kronstadt had been a stronghold of the revolution. Its sailors had taken part in the July Days, and in November 1917 they had helped the Bolsheviks seize power. During the Civil War tens of thousands of the fleet’s sailors fought on every front. Some never returned and were replaced by recruits from the villages, but research suggests that in 1921 most of the crews were still veterans of the revolutionary years. The island then had about 50,000 civilian inhabitants and a garrison of about 26,000 sailors and soldiers, of whom only a small proportion belonged to the Bolshevik party. In the winter of 1920–1921 the ships were short of fuel, food and uniforms, scurvy was spreading, and sailors returning from leave in the villages told of requisitions and hunger at home.

On 26 February the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol sent a delegation to Petrograd to find out what was happening in the city. It came back with an account of factories surrounded by troops and of arrests. On 28 February a meeting of the crews adopted a fifteen-point resolution. It demanded immediate secret elections to the soviets, preceded by a free campaign; freedom of speech and of the press for workers, peasants, anarchists and the left-wing socialist parties; freedom of assembly and of trade unions; the release of socialist political prisoners; the abolition of the political departments in the armed forces and of the roadblock detachments that confiscated food on the roads; equal rations for all working people; and freedom for peasants and small craftsmen to run their own affairs. The rebellion’s slogan became “Power to the soviets, not to the parties”.

On 1 March about 15,000 people gathered in Anchor Square in Kronstadt. Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and formally head of state, came over from Petrograd. He tried to calm the crowd but was jeered, and the meeting adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution almost unanimously. Kalinin returned safely to the mainland. The next day, 2 March, a meeting of some three hundred delegates from the ships, units and workplaces was to prepare elections to a new soviet. When a rumour spread that armed communists were approaching the building, the delegates elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee headed by the Petropavlovsk’s ship’s clerk, Stepan Petrichenko. The committee took over the town, the forts and the ships without a fight. It arrested several hundred local communists but executed none of them.

The ultimatum

From the outset Moscow branded the rebellion a counter-revolution. Its propaganda announced that the revolt was led by a former Tsarist general, Alexander Kozlovsky – in reality the fortress’s artillery commander, who advised the committee but did not lead it – and that émigrés and French intelligence stood behind it. Russian émigrés did try to raise money and food for the island, and Wrangel offered troops, but the committee accepted no help from the Whites and none of it reached the island before the fortress fell. A White colonel who wrote a report for émigré organisations in April 1921 admitted that the rebellion had broken out spontaneously and against their plans.

On 2 March a state of siege was declared throughout Petrograd province. Zinoviev took charge of a Defence Committee, and the sailors’ families were held as hostages. Leon Trotsky, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, and the Red Army’s commander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, arrived in Petrograd. On 5 March (4 March according to some sources) Trotsky demanded immediate and unconditional surrender. Leaflets dropped over the island warned that those who resisted would be “shot like partridges”. That same day an order of the Revolutionary Military Council re-formed the 7th Army and gave its command to the 28-year-old Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who six months earlier had led the Western Front against Warsaw. Attempts at mediation failed because the two sides could not agree on the make-up of a commission that was to visit the island.

The authorities were pressed for time. On 8 March the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party was due to open in Moscow, and within a few weeks the ice in the gulf would melt. Kronstadt, with its forts, its ships and its 135 guns, would then be out of the infantry’s reach, and the fleet could threaten Petrograd. The rebels, meanwhile, ignored the advice of their military specialists: they did not attack the mainland or break up the ice around the island, but waited for the government to agree to talks or for the revolt to spread across the country. Their garrison of about 13,000 men was joined by some 2,000 civilian volunteers. They were short of ammunition, food and warm clothing.

The first assault

The bombardment began on 7 March. On the night of 7–8 March, in a snowstorm, units of the 7th Army set out across the ice from the north, from Sestroretsk, and from the south, from Oranienbaum – today the town of Lomonosov. At their head marched cadets from the military schools in white camouflage smocks. Behind them came Cheka detachments with machine guns, ready to shoot those who fled and deserters. On the open ice the attackers had no cover. Shells from the forts smashed the ice and many soldiers drowned. Some units refused to advance, and some soldiers went over to the rebels. By midday the assault had collapsed. The announcements of imminent victory that the authorities issued that same day proved premature.

The defeat laid bare the state of the army. The soldiers of the 7th Army, mostly peasants, did not want to shoot at sailors whose demands they understood. Two regiments of the famous 27th Rifle Division, which had fought the forces of Admiral Alexander Kolchak and the Poles, refused to take part in the fighting and were disarmed. Over the following days artillery and aircraft pounded the island, while smaller attacks on 10, 12 and 13 March ended in losses. Tukhachevsky brought up reinforcements, including regiments of cadets and picked communists. Some three hundred delegates to the Tenth Congress, among them members of the opposition within the party, volunteered to raise the soldiers’ morale. One of them was Kliment Voroshilov, commissar of the southern group. By 16 March the 7th Army had grown to about 45,000 men. The command also prepared to use poison-gas shells against the ships, but according to Russian researchers the order was not carried out because of the weather.

The final assault

On the afternoon of 16 March the artillery began a heavy preparatory bombardment. During the night of 16–17 March columns advanced across the ice from the north and the south, and from the east against the Petrograd Gate. Fog and darkness allowed them to get closer than a week before. In the north the forts fell one after another, some after fierce fighting, others almost without resistance. One garrison greeted the cadets with the cry: “Comrades, don’t shoot, we’re for Soviet power too!” In the south the attack broke down under machine-gun fire, and one brigade lost more than half its men. From the east, however, troops forced their way into the town and began street fighting, with shots fired from windows and rooftops, and women carrying ammunition to the defenders and dressing the wounded. In the afternoon a rebel counter-attack nearly drove the attackers out. They were saved by reinforcements from Petrograd and by artillery firing from Oranienbaum.

During the night of 17–18 March resistance collapsed. Petrichenko and the members of the committee fled across the ice to Finland, followed by some 8,000 people, roughly half the defenders. The crews of the battleships, ordered to blow up their ships together with the imprisoned communists, refused, arrested their officers and surrendered. By noon on 18 March the Red Army controlled the island, and the last pockets of resistance were broken in the afternoon. That same day Petrograd celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, which had been crushed by the French government. The anarchist Emma Goldman, who had come to Russia to help build a new world, later wrote that on that day the Internationale sounded like a funeral march.

Losses and repression

The casualty figures are uncertain. According to Soviet data the attackers lost 527 killed and 3,285 wounded, but other tallies give far more dead, and the American consul in Vyborg estimated the Red Army’s total losses at about 10,000 killed, wounded and missing. Some fifteen delegates to the party congress were killed in the fighting. On the rebel side, according to Soviet figures, about a thousand people were killed and more than four thousand taken prisoner. Some of the prisoners were killed on the spot in reprisal.

Then came the reckoning. On 20 March the first thirteen rebels, proclaimed the ringleaders of a conspiracy, were shot, although none of them had sat on the revolutionary committee. There were no public trials. Cases were dealt with by tribunals and Cheka commissions. According to archival data published in the 1990s, 2,103 people were sentenced to death and 6,459 to labour camps. Many prisoners died of hunger and disease in camps in the north. From the spring of 1922 the island’s inhabitants were deported. The refugees in Finland ended up in internment camps; those who trusted the promises of an amnesty and went back usually landed in the Gulag. The battleship Petropavlovsk was renamed Marat and the Sevastopol became the Parizhskaya Kommuna, to erase the memory of the rebellion.

The congress, the NEP and the ban on factions

The Tenth Party Congress sat in Moscow from 8 to 16 March, while the fighting went on. Vladimir Lenin spoke of Kronstadt as a greater danger than Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Kolchak put together, because the rebellion showed that the very people in whose name the regime ruled were turning against it. On 15 March the congress adopted a resolution replacing compulsory grain deliveries with a tax in kind. A peasant who had paid the tax could keep or sell his surplus. This was the beginning of the New Economic Policy, the NEP, which restored small-scale trade and private production. Lenin had been preparing this turn before the rebellion, but Kronstadt and the peasant uprisings hastened it and won over the waverers.

Economic concessions went hand in hand with political tightening. On the last day of the congress a resolution “on party unity” was adopted, banning the formation of factions within the party on pain of expulsion. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, until then persecuted but partly tolerated, were arrested and exiled en masse in the following months, and in 1922 the Socialist Revolutionary leaders were put on trial in a show trial. Not one of Kronstadt’s political demands was met. As the American historian Paul Avrich wrote, the rebels achieved the opposite of what they had fought for: a harsher dictatorship and less self-government.

The long shadow of Kronstadt

Kronstadt was the last great revolt against the Bolsheviks in European Russia. It showed that a party which had come to power under the slogan “All power to the soviets” would not surrender that power even to soviets elected by those who had once been the revolution’s most loyal soldiers. The ban on factions, adopted in the days of the assault, became a few years later the tool with which Joseph Stalin dealt with Trotsky, Zinoviev and his other rivals: from then on any opposition could be presented as an attack on party unity. The methods of March 1921 – hostages, detachments that shot at their own soldiers and mass executions without trial – were used by the Soviet state on a far greater scale in the decades that followed. In the spring of 1921 Tukhachevsky went on to direct the suppression of the Tambov rebellion. In 1937 he himself was shot, together with many of the commanders who had marched with him across the ice in 1921. Petrichenko, who later worked for Soviet intelligence in Finland, was handed over to the USSR after the war and died in 1947 while being transferred between a labour camp and a prison.

The rebellion was also one of the events that cost part of the Western left its illusions about Soviet Russia. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman soon left and described what they had seen. In the language of Western intellectuals “Kronstadt” later came to mean the moment when someone stopped believing in communism. For others that moment came only with the Great Terror or with Stalin’s pact with Hitler of August 1939.

The fortress itself played an important part in the Second World War. During the siege of Leningrad Kronstadt shielded the city from the sea, and the guns of the Baltic Fleet’s ships shelled the German forces. On 23 September 1941 German dive-bombers – among them, according to his memoirs, Hans-Ulrich Rudel – hit the former Petropavlovsk, now the Marat, in harbour; she settled on the bottom but went on firing as a floating battery. The participants in the rebellion were not rehabilitated until 10 January 1994, by decree of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin.