Kronstadt Rebellion (1921): Sailors Rise Against the Bolsheviks

The Kronstadt rebellion was an uprising in March 1921 by the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt, Soviet Russia’s main naval base in the Gulf of Finland. The sailors, once celebrated by the Bolsheviks as the vanguard of the revolution, demanded freely elected soviets and civil liberties for socialists. The Red Army crushed the revolt by storming the fortress across the ice, but the shock helped push Lenin to abandon War Communism for the New Economic Policy.

Background

Kronstadt, on Kotlin Island about 30 kilometres west of Petrograd, guarded the sea approaches to the former capital. Its sailors had played a prominent part in the revolutions of 1917, supporting the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Trotsky had called them the pride and glory of the revolution.

By early 1921 the Reds had essentially won the Russian Civil War, but the country was exhausted. Under War Communism, the state requisitioned grain from peasants, banned private trade and controlled industry. Output had collapsed, cities were starving and peasant revolts had broken out in several regions. In February 1921 strikes swept Petrograd; the authorities responded with martial law and arrests, together with some concessions on food.

The Petropavlovsk resolution

Delegates from the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol visited Petrograd and returned with reports of the repression. On 28 February the crew of the Petropavlovsk adopted a resolution of 15 points. It called for new elections to the soviets by secret ballot, freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, anarchists and left socialist parties, freedom of assembly and of trade unions, the release of socialist political prisoners, the abolition of Communist political departments in the armed forces, equal rations for all working people and the right of peasants to work their land as they wished, provided they did not hire labour.

On 1 March a mass meeting of around 15,000 people in Kronstadt’s Anchor Square adopted the resolution. Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet head of state, who had come to calm the sailors, was shouted down. The next day a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, chaired by Stepan Petrichenko, a clerk on the Petropavlovsk, took control of the base. The rebels did not seek to restore the old order; their slogans called for soviet power without the monopoly of any single party.

The assault

The Bolshevik government denounced the revolt as a counter-revolutionary plot organised by White émigrés and a former tsarist general, Alexander Kozlovsky, who was serving at Kronstadt as a military specialist. Trotsky, as Commissar for War, issued an ultimatum on 5 March, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky was placed in command of the attacking forces. The government was anxious to strike before the spring thaw melted the ice, which would have made the island harder to reach and could have opened it to help from abroad.

The first attack, on 7–8 March, saw infantry advance across the open ice under fire from the fortress guns and failed with heavy losses; some units refused to fight. The Tenth Party Congress, meeting in Moscow from 8 March, sent around 300 delegates to stiffen the troops. A second, much larger assault of around 50,000 men began before dawn on 17 March, with soldiers in white camouflage. After fierce street fighting, Kronstadt fell, and the last resistance ended on 18 March.

Aftermath

About 8,000 rebels, including Petrichenko, escaped across the ice to Finland. Red Army losses were heavy, and figures range from official counts of several thousand casualties to estimates of over 10,000. Of the rebels captured, according to figures cited by historians from Soviet records, over 2,000 were sentenced to death and several thousand more to imprisonment, many in camps from which few returned.

The same Party Congress adopted two key decisions. It replaced grain requisitioning with a tax in kind, the first step of the New Economic Policy that allowed private trade and small business. It also banned organised factions within the Communist Party, tightening one-party rule even as the economy was liberalised.

Legacy

Kronstadt became a lasting symbol in debates on the left. For anarchists and many socialist critics, it showed that the Bolsheviks had turned against the workers and sailors who made the revolution; the fortress fell on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, an irony noted at the time. Soviet histories long repeated the official account of a White conspiracy. In January 1994 a decree by Russian President Boris Yeltsin rehabilitated the rebels and condemned the repression.

Timeline

• 1921, February: Strikes and protests break out in Petrograd.
• 1921, 28 February: The Petropavlovsk crew adopts its 15-point resolution.
• 1921, 1 March: A mass meeting in Kronstadt endorses the resolution.
• 1921, 2 March: The Provisional Revolutionary Committee takes control.
• 1921, 7–8 March: The first Red Army assault fails.
• 1921, 8 March: The Tenth Party Congress opens in Moscow.
• 1921, 17 March: The main assault captures the fortress.
• 1921, 18 March: The last resistance ends.
• 1994, January: The rebels are officially rehabilitated.

Why it matters

The Kronstadt rebellion was the last major armed challenge to Bolshevik rule from within the revolutionary camp. Its suppression, together with the ban on factions and the turn to the New Economic Policy, set the pattern of Soviet rule: economic concessions combined with no political pluralism. It followed the dramatic upheavals that began with the February Revolution of 1917.