Kronstadt rebellion
The Kronstadt rebellion was an unsuccessful uprising of Soviet sailors 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. Traditionally, Kronstadt has served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and as a guardpost for the approaches to St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, then Leningrad, and then St. Petersburg again, as it is now) thirty-five miles away.
At the end of the Civil War, Soviet 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 bloodless 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.
War Communism might have saved the Soviet government during the Civil War, but the nation's economy was left in ruins. With private industry and trade proscribed and the newly-constructed (and unstable) 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 unbearable situation led to uprisings in the countryside, such as the Tambov rebellion, and to strikes and violent unrest in the factories. In urban areas, a wave of spontaneous strikes occurred, and in late February a near general strike broke out in Petrograd. On February 26, in response to these events in Petrograd, the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol held an emergency meeting and agreed to send a delegation to the city to investigate and report back on the ongoing strike movement. On their return two days later, the delegates informed their fellow sailors of the strikes, with which they had full sympathy, and the government repression directed against them. Those present at this meeting on the Petropavlovsk then approved a resolution which raised fifteen demands. The demands included free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech, press, assembly and organisation to workers, peasants, anarchists and left-socialists. 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.
Finally, in March 1921, the Kronstadt naval base, celebrated by the Communists as one of the sources of the October Revolution, rose in rebellion against Bolshevik rule. The sailors and other Kronstadt rebels demanded free Soviets and the summoning of a constituent assembly. The Bolshevik Government responded with an ultimatum on March 2. 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 party with a traditional peasant base whose right-wing had sided with White forces; 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). They also argued that the revolt had been organised by ex-Tsarist officers led by ex-General Kozlovsky (ironically, he had been placed in the fortress as a military specialist by Trotsky). This was the official line throughout the revolt.
The rebellion was isolated and received no external support. The Petrograd workers were under martial law and could offer little support to Kronstadt. The Bolshevik government began its attack on Kronstadt on March 7. After 10 days of continuous attacks, during which many Red Army units were forced onto the ice at gunpoint and during which some had actually joined the rebellion, the Kronstadt revolt was crushed by the Red Army, numbering some 50,000 troops under command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky. On March 17, the Bolshevik forces finally entered the city of Kronstadt after having suffered over 10,000 fatalities. 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 sent to Siberian labor camps. A large number of more fortunate rebels managed to escape to Finland. Ironically, the day after the surrender of Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune.
Although Red Army units ruthlessly suppressed the uprising, the general dissatisfaction with Bolshevik rule 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 War Communism with his New Economic Policy.
Further reading
- A History of Russia, N.V. Riasanovsky
- Kronstadt, 1921, Paul Avrich
- Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The fate of a Soviet democracy, Israel Getzler
- The Russian Revolution, W.H.Chamberlin
External links and references
- The initial version of this article appeared on Infoshop (http://www.infoshop.org). There is an extended discussion from an Anarchist point of view in the Anarchist FAQ (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html)
Kronstadt Uprising was also an anarcho-punk band from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK during the 1980s.