Kronstadt rebellion

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Kronstadt Rebellion
Part of Kronstadt Rebellion
Date March, 1921
Location Kronstadt, Kotlin Island, Russia
Result Rebellion Defeated
Bolshevik Victroy
Casus belli Anger over War communism economic policy
Combatants
Soviet Sailors Red Army
Commanders
Stepan Petrichenko Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Strength
c. 50,000
Casualties
Thousand killed in battle and executions that followed Over 10,000

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. Traditionally, Kronstadt has served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and as a guardpost for the approaches to Saint Petersburg, 35 miles away. Saint Petersburg was named Petrograd from 1914 to 1924 (and therefore during the rebellion), and then Leningrad until 1991 when its original name was restored.

Contents

[edit] Causes of the rebellion

Red Army troops attack Kronstadt
Enlarge
Red Army troops attack Kronstadt

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.

[edit] 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 strikes and insurrection in Petrograd, also printed in the Kronstadt Isvestia, the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol held an emergency meeting which approved a resolution raising fifteen demands [1]:

   
“
  1. Immediate new elections to the Soviets. The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda.
  2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
  3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.
  4. The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.
  5. The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.
  6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.
  7. The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.
  8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.
  9. The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
  10. The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. The abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.
  11. The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.
  12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.
  13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.
  14. We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.
  15. We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.
   
”

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.

[edit] The revolt is put down

The Petrograd workers were under martial law and could offer little support to Kronstadt.[1] The Bolshevik government began its attack on Kronstadt on March 7.[2] Some 50,000 troops under command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky took part in the attack.[3] 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.[6] 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.[7] Official Soviet figures suggest only 527 people died during the battle; they are generally considered unreliable.[8]

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 has criticized Leon Trotsky for his role in the suppression of the rebellion, arguing that this makes his later criticism of Stalin's regime hypocritical.[9] 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.[10]

[edit] 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. [11]

However, Israel Getzler's book Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy and others (including Evan Mawdsley's and Norman Saul's) present evidence that undermines that claim:

   
“
 ... that the veteran politicized Red sailor still predominated at Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, both renowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195, having joined in the years 1914-16. Only some 137 sailors or 6.8% were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5% are likely to have been drafted into the fleet before 1918. Over 80% were drawn from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine, and 9% from Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland.
...

Nor, as has so often been claimed, did new recruits, some 400 of whom Yasinsky had interviewed, arrive in numbers large enough to dilute or even 'demoralize' Kronstadt's Red sailors. As Evan Mawdsley has found, 'only 1,313 of a planned total of 10,384 recruits had arrived' by 1 December 1920 and even they seem to have been stationed in the barracks of the Second Baltic Crew in Petrograd. (Getzler 2002)
   
”

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%." (Cliff, vol. 3, p. 143)

By 1921, more than three-quarters of the sailors in the Baltic Fleet stationed at Kronstadt were recent recruits of peasant origin (Avrich, p. 134). But even if the issue of the changing composition of the Kronstadt forces is put aside, the Kronstadt sailors who survived were also influenced by the crisis in the countryside. Petrichenko, a leader of the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921, was himself a Ukrainian peasant. 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." (Lincoln, p. 495)

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

  1. ^ Orlando Figes, A People's Tradegy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (New York: Viking Press 1997), 760.
  2. ^ Figes, 763.
  3. ^ Figes, 767.
  4. ^ Figes, 763.
  5. ^ Figes, 767.
  6. ^ Figes, 767.
  7. ^ Kronstadtin kapina 1921 ja sen perilliset Suomessa (Kronstadt Rebellion 1921 and Its Descendants in Finland) by Erkki Wessmann.
  8. ^ "Kronstadt Uprising" at Spartacus Educational.
  9. ^ "Trotsky Protests Too Much" by Emma Goldman
  10. ^ "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt by Leon Trotsky
  11. ^ "A Tragic Necessity" by Abbie Bakan

[edit] Additional external links

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