A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

both the Mensheviks and SRs were strong within their union. But such was the general level of discontent that the protest movement needed little encouragement. The Bolsheviks sent emissaries to the factories to try to defuse the situation; but they were rudely heckled. According to one (rather questionable) report, Lenin himself appeared before a noisy meeting of metalworkers and asked his listeners, who had accused him of ruining the country, whether they would prefer to have the Whites. But his question drew an angry response: 'Let come who may — whites, blacks or devils — just you clear out.' By 21 February thousands of workers were out on strike. Huge demonstrations marched through the streets of the Khamovniki district and, after attempts to disperse the crowds had failed, troops were ordered in. But, as in February 1917, the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and special Communist detachments (ChON) had to be called in which killed several workers. The next day even bigger crowds appeared on the streets. They marched on the Khamovniki barracks and tried to get the soldiers out; but the soldiers were now locked inside and Communist detachments once again dispersed the crowds by force. On 23 February, as 10,000 workers marched in protest through the streets, martial law was declared in the capital.⁴⁷

Meanwhile, the strikes spread to Petrograd. Numerous factories held protest rallies on the 22nd. As in Moscow, the workers called for an end to the privileged rations of the Communists, the restoration of free trade and movement, and, under the influence of the Mensheviks and SRs, free re-elections to the Soviets and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Over the next three days thousands of workers came out on strike. All the biggest metal plants — the Putilov, Trubochny, Baltic and Obukhovsky — joined the movement, along with most of the docks and shipyards. It was practically a general strike. On the Nevsky Prospekt and Vasilevsky Island there were clashes between strikers and troops. Some of the soldiers fired on the workers, killing and wounding at least thirty, but several thousand soldiers, including the Izmailovsky and Finland

Regiments, went over to the crowd. Even the sailors of the Aurora, that floating symbol of Bolshevik power, docked in the city for winter repairs, disembarked to join the demonstrations.

It did not take a genius to realize that this was exactly the same situation that, four years before to the day, had sparked the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which led to the downfall of the tsarist regime. The Bolsheviks were petrified of another mutiny and did everything they could to keep the soldiers in their barracks. They even took away their shoes, on the pretext of replacing them with new ones, to stop the soldiers going out. The city was placed under martial law on the 25th. All power was vested in a special Committee of Defence with Zinoviev at its head. The party boss, who was always inclined to panic in such situations, made a hysterical appeal to the workers, begging them to return to work and promising to improve their economic situation. Meanwhile the Cheka was arresting hundreds of strikers — together with most of the leading Mensheviks and SRs in the city — while thousands of others were locked out of their factories and thus deprived of their rations. All of which was bound to exacerbate the strikes. The workers now called openly for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. On 27 February, the fourth anniversary of the revolution, the following proclamation appeared in the streets. It was a call for a new revolution:

First of all the workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies.

We demand the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and Soviets.

Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to the authorities, bring about the realization of your demands.⁴⁸

That same day the revolt spread across the Gulf of Finland to the Kronstadt naval base: a real revolution now moved one step closer. In 1917 Trotsky had called the Kronstadt sailors the 'pride and glory of the Russian revolution'.* They were the first to call for Soviet power, and they played a key role in the events of October. Yet Kronstadt had always been a troublesome bastion of revolutionary maximalism. Its sailors were Anarchist as much as Bolshevik. What they really wanted was an independent Kronstadt Soviet Republic — a sort of island version of the Paris Commune — as opposed to a

* The term had originally been used by the liberal press to describe Kerensky in 1917.

centralized state. Until the summer of 1918 the Kronstadt Soviet was governed by a broad coalition of all the far-left parties. Its executive was chosen for its competence rather than its party, and was strictly accountable to the elected Soviets (or 'toiling collectives') on the naval base. Such democracy was intolerable to the Bolsheviks. They purged the Soviet of all the other parties and turned it into a bureaucratic organ of their state. The sailors soon became disgruntled. Although they fought for the Reds during the defence of Petrograd, in October 1919, they only did so to defeat the Whites, whom they saw as an even greater evil than the Bolsheviks. Once the civil war was over the sailors turned their anger on the Reds. They condemned their treatment of the peasantry. Many of the Kronstadt sailors came from the countryside — the Ukraine and Tambov were especially well represented — and were shocked by what they found there when they returned home on leave. 'Ours is an ordinary peasant farm,' wrote one of the Petropavlovsk crew in November 1920 after learning that his family's cow had been requisitioned; 'yet when I and my brother return home from serving the Soviet republic people will sneer at our wrecked farm and say: 'What did you serve for? What has the Soviet republic given you?' ' The feudal lifestyle of the Communist bosses was another source of mounting resentment among both the sailors and the party rank and file. Raskolnikov, the Kronstadt Bolshevik leader of 1917, returned to the base in 1920 as the newly appointed Chief Commander of the Baltic Fleet and lived there like a lord with his elegant wife, the Bolshevik commissar Larissa Reissner, complete with banquets, chauffeured cars and servants. Reissner even had a wardrobe of dresses requisitioned for her from the aristocracy. Half the Kronstadt Bolsheviks became so disillusioned that they tore up their party cards during the second half of 1920.⁴⁹

When news of the strikes in Petrograd reached the Kronstadt sailors they sent a delegation to the city to report on their development. When they returned, on 28 February, the crew of the Petropavlovsk, previously a Bolshevik stronghold, raised their own banner of revolt with a proclamation calling for free Soviet elections, freedom of speech, press and assembly (albeit only for the workers and peasants, the left-wing parties and the trade unions), 'equal rations for all the working people', and 'freedom for the peasants to toil the land as they see fit' provided they did not use hired labour. Whereas the workers' resolutions called for the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly, the sailors remained opposed to this. It had been an Anarchist group of Kronstadt sailors who had forcibly closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. Their programme remained strictly Soviet in the sense that they aimed to restore their own multi-party Soviet of 1918. Moreover, unlike the peasant rebels, whose slogan was 'Soviets without the Communists!', they were even prepared to accept the Bolsheviks in this coalition provided they accepted the principles of Soviet democracy and renounced their dictatorship. This helps to explain why—

uniquely among the revolts of 1921 — more than half the Bolshevik rank and file in Kronstadt chose to join the mutiny.

Embarrassed by the loss of this former stronghold, the Bolsheviks tried to claim that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same as those of 1917, that the best proletarian sailors had been lost in the civil war and replaced by 'peasant lads in sailors' suits' who brought with them from their village 'anarchist' and 'petty-bourgeois' attitudes. Yet, as Israel Getzler has shown, this was in fact a case of the Bolsheviks being abandoned by their own most favoured sons. The Kronstadt rebels of 1921 were essentially the same as those of 1917. The majority of their leaders were veteran sailors of the Kronstadt Fleet. Some of them, such as the SR-Maximalist Anatolii Lamanov, chief ideologist of the mutiny, had been prominent members of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917—18. On the two major ships involved in the mutiny, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, 94 per cent of the crew had been recruited before 1918.⁵⁰ In its personnel, as in its ideology, the mutiny was a return to the revolutionary days of 1917.