March 1, 1921 - Kronstadt Rebellion BeginsPictured - Bourgeois or Bolshevik, all bosses hang!The Rus
March 1, 1921 - Kronstadt Rebellion BeginsPictured - Bourgeois or Bolshevik, all bosses hang!The Russian Civil War was over. “The last of the hostile armies has been driven from our territory,” Lenin told the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party on March 8, 1921. The Reds had driven Yudenich back from the outskirts of Petrograd, expelled the Black Baron and his White army from Crimea, shot Admiral Kolchak and thrown his body under the ice floes of the Angara River. With the counterrevolutionary threat ended, the Bolsheviks marched on the breakaway states of the Russian Empire, like Poland and Georgia. Tiflis, modern-day Tbilisi, fell on February 25. Lenin claimed that the “regathering of the Russian lands” was finished. It is therefore ironic that the last and greatest threat to Bolshevik power came now, at Lenin’s apparent moment of triumph, in Petrograd rather than the provinces, and not from the political Right, but from the Left.During the October Revolution and the civil war, the Bolsheviks had found their vanguard in the black-jacketed sailors of Kronstadt, the naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of Petrograd, which guarded the city by sea. In Tsarist Russia, where sailors were banned from streetcars and forbidden from walking on “the sunny side of the street,” among other indignities, Kronstadt had long been a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment. The sailors had joined with striking workers in 1905, and again in 1910. In 1917 they massacred their officers and helped storm the Winter Palace, before serving as an elite unit on battlefields throughout Russia. By 1921, however, the sailors’ revolutionary commitment had pushed them away from the Bolshevik Party. The constant withering of democracy during the war had caused party membership on Kronstadt to plummet. Meanwhile, the Russian economy had collapsed, and famine had become so widespread throughout Russia that reports of cannibalism were not uncommon. Coal shipments to Kronstadt had virtually ceased, and the sailors grew enraged as they sat in the cold and read letters from their families detailing starvation brought on by Bolshevik requisitioning.The fury against injustice and inequality that had toppled the Tsar and Kerensky now threatened to do the same to Lenin. Across the bay in Petrograd, mill-workers went on strike, demanding that the Bolsheviks “answer before the representatives of the people for their deceit.“ The brutal handling of the strikers compelled the sailors to meet on February 28 onboard the deck of a battleship, presided over by a bright young Ukrainian sailor named Stepan Petrichenko. They formulated their own set of principles for Russia, including freedom of speech and assembly for peasants and workers, new elections, and equal rations for all. In a mass meeting on March 1 all sixteen thousand members of the garrison voted for the resolution. It may as well have been a declaration of war. The sailors and gunners of Kronstadt had challenged the Bolshevik Party’s legitimacy, and left alone they threatened to be the spark which could turn the discontent throughout Russia into another wave of revolution. On the evening of March 1 the Bolsheviks arrested a delegation of thirty sailors sent to Petrograd, who were never seen again. The next day the Kronstadt fortress formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee with Petrichenko as its head. By the end of the week the headlines of the Kronstadt newspaper Izvestiia trumpeted their demands throughout Russia.ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES! DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTION FROM THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT!THE POWER OF THE SOVIETS WILL LIBERATE THE TOILING PEASANTRY FROM THE COMMUNIST YOKE! VICTORY OR DEATH! -- source link
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