At what time was the Kronstadt rebellion. Kronstadt uprising ("mutiny") (1921). Uprising in Kronstadt: slogan, rally

Kronstadt Mutiny

In 1921, the main base of the Baltic Fleet, the key-city citadel of the proletarian revolution, Kronstadt, revolted.

Indeed, what gave rise to the armed uprising of the sailors of the fortress against the Soviet regime?

The answer to this question will not be so easy and simple, given that over the past years, most authors have considered it their duty to at least embellish, if not completely distort the facts. Trying to evaluate events that lie so far in the time period from the moment where we live, we will have to give a sober assessment of the articles and documents that we have at our disposal. A balanced assessment of the essence of the phenomena may not give an absolute guarantee of the veracity and reliability of the events in question, but it will help put forward some versions of the events of those days.

Russia on the eve of the rebellion

Consider the economic and political situation in the country on the eve of the rebellion in Kronstadt.

The main part of the industrial potential of Russia was put out of action, economic ties were broken, there was not enough raw materials and fuel. The country produced only 2% of the pre-war amount of pig iron, 3% of sugar, 5-6% of cotton fabrics, etc.

The industrial crisis gave rise to social collisions: unemployment, dispersal and declassification of the ruling class - the proletariat. Russia remained a petty-bourgeois country, 85% of its social structure accounted for the peasantry, exhausted by wars, revolutions, food requisitioning. Life for the vast majority of the population has become a continuous struggle for survival. It came to strikes in the proletarian centers and mass unrest in the countryside. The arbitrariness of the Bolsheviks, which they carried out under the slogan of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in fact, the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, caused widespread indignation.

At the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921, armed uprisings engulfed Western Siberia, Tambov, Voronezh provinces, the Middle Volga region, Don, Kuban. A large number of anti-Bolshevik peasant formations operated in Ukraine. In Central Asia, the creation of armed detachments of nationalists was increasingly unfolding. By the spring of 1921, uprisings were blazing across the country.

A difficult situation also developed in Petrograd. The norms for issuing bread were reduced, some food rations were canceled, and there was a threat of starvation. At the same time, barrage detachments did not stop their activities, confiscating food brought into the city by private individuals. On March 11, the closure of 93 Petrograd enterprises was announced, and 27,000 workers found themselves on the street.

Lenin said about this period: “... in 1921, after we had overcome the most important stage civil war, and overcame victoriously, we stumbled upon a major - I believe, the biggest - internal political crisis in Soviet Russia. This internal crisis revealed the discontent not only of a significant part of the peasantry, but also of the workers. This was the first and, I hope, the last time in the history of Soviet Russia, when large masses of the peasantry, not consciously, but instinctively, in their mood, were against us.

Uprising in Kronstadt

Unrest in Petrograd, anti-Bolshevik demonstrations in other cities and regions of the country, could not but affect the mood of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt.

The total number of ship crews, military sailors of coastal units, as well as ground forces, stationed in Kronstadt and on the forts, amounted to February 13, 1921, 26887 people - 1455 commanders, the rest were privates.

They were worried about the news from home, mainly from the village - no food, no manufacture, no essentials. Especially many complaints about this situation came from sailors to the Bureau of Complaints of the Political Department of the Baltic Fleet in the winter of 1921.

Rumors about the events in Petrograd reaching Kronstadt were contradictory. To clarify the causes and extent of the unrest, delegations from personnel ships and units stationed in the fortress. On February 27, the delegates reported to the general meetings of their teams on the causes of the unrest of the workers. February 28 sailors battleships"Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" convened a meeting and adopted a resolution, which was submitted for discussion by representatives of all ships and units of the Baltic Fleet.

On the afternoon of March 1, a rally was held on the anchor square of Kronstadt, which gathered about 16 thousand people. The leaders of the Kronstadt naval base hoped that during the meeting they would be able to change the mood of the sailors and soldiers of the garrison. They tried to convince the audience to give up their political demands. However, the participants by a majority vote supported the resolution of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol.

It was decided to disarm the communists who did not agree with the adopted resolution and threatened to pacify the discontented by force of arms.

Immediately after the rally, a meeting of the Bolsheviks was held, at which the possibility of armed suppression of the supporters of the adopted resolution was discussed. However, this decision was not made.

Petrichenko: "Making October revolution in 1917, the working people of Russia hoped to achieve their complete emancipation and placed their hopes on the promising communist party. What did the Communist Party, headed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and others, give in 3.5 years? During the three and a half years of its existence, the communists have not given emancipation, but the complete enslavement of the human personality. Instead of police-gendarmerie monarchism, they received every minute fear of falling into the dungeons of the state of emergency, which many times surpassed the gendarme department of the tsarist regime with its horrors.

The demands of the Kronstadters, in the resolution adopted on March 1, posed a serious threat not to the Soviets, but to the Bolsheviks' monopoly on political power. This resolution was, in essence, an appeal to the government to respect the rights and freedoms proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in October 1917.

Soviet institutions in Kronstadt continued to operate. Proudly believing that the foundation stone of the third revolution had been laid in Kronstadt, the members of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the overwhelming majority of former workers and peasants, were deeply confident in the support of their struggle by the working people of Petrograd and the whole country.

The news of the events in Kronstadt provoked a sharp reaction from the Soviet leadership. The delegation of Kronstadters, which arrived in Petrograd to explain the demands of the sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress, was arrested. On March 4, the Labor and Defense Council approved the text of the government report on the events in Kronstadt, published on March 2 in the newspapers. The movement in Kronstadt was declared a "mutiny" organized by the French counterintelligence and the former tsarist general Kozlovsky, and the resolution adopted by the Kronstadters was "Black Hundred-Socialist-Revolutionary."

Giving such a characterization of the events, the authorities took into account the then socio-political psychology of the masses, and above all of the proletarians. The bulk of the workers were extremely negative about attempts to restore the monarchy. Therefore, the mere mention of a tsarist general, and even one connected with the imperialists of the Entente, could discredit the Kronstadters and their program.

On March 3, Petrograd and the Petrograd province were declared under a state of siege. This measure is more directed against the anti-Bolshevik demonstrations of the St. Petersburg workers than against the Kronstadt sailors.

Without a preliminary investigation, according to the first, not yet verified, report of the Cheka, the decision of the Council of Labor and Defense, which was signed by V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky, " former general Kozlovsky and his associates were outlawed.” This was followed by repressive acts against their relatives. On March 3, arrests were made in Petrograd of persons who had absolutely nothing to do with the events in Kronstadt. They were taken as hostages. Kozlovsky's family was among the first to be arrested: his wife and four sons, the youngest of whom was not even 16 years old. Together with them they were arrested and exiled to Arkhangelsk region all their relatives, including distant ones.

The Kronstadters sought open and transparent negotiations with the authorities, but the position of the latter from the very beginning of the events was unequivocal: no negotiations or compromises, the rebels must be severely punished. Parliamentarians who were sent by the rebels were arrested. The proposal to exchange representatives of Kronstadt and Petrograd remained unanswered. A broad propaganda campaign was launched in the press, distorting the essence of the events taking place, in every possible way propagating the idea that the uprising was the work of the tsarist generals, officers and Black Hundreds. Calls were made to "disarm a bunch of bandits" who had settled in Kronstadt.

On March 4, in connection with direct threats from the authorities to deal with the Kronstadters by force, the Military Revolutionary Committee turned to military specialists - staff officers - with a request to help organize the defense of the fortress. On March 5, an agreement was reached. Military experts suggested that, without waiting for the assault on the fortress, they themselves go on the offensive. They insisted on the capture of Oranienbaum, Sestroetsk in order to expand the base of the uprising. However, all proposals to be the first to start hostilities were resolutely refused by the Military Revolutionary Committee. offered, without waiting for the storming of the fortress, to go on the offensive themselves. They insisted on the capture of Oranienbaum, Sestroetsk in order to expand the base of the uprising. However, all proposals to be the first to start hostilities were resolutely refused by the Military Revolutionary Committee.

On March 5, an order is issued on operational measures to eliminate the "mutiny". The 7th Army was restored, under the command of Tukhachevsky, who was ordered to prepare an operational plan for the assault and "suppress the uprising in Kronstadt as soon as possible." The assault on the fortress was scheduled for March 8.

The offensive launched on March 8 ended in failure. Having suffered great losses Soviet troops retreated to their original positions. One of the reasons for this failure was the small number of attackers, whose forces, together with the reserve, amounted to 18 thousand people. The forces of the rebels numbered 27 thousand sailors, 2 battleships and up to 140 coast guard guns. The second reason lay in the mood of the Red Army soldiers, who were thrown onto the ice of the Gulf of Finland. It came to the direct disobedience of the Red Army. In the offensive zone of the Southern Group, the 561st Regiment refused to obey the order to storm the fortress. In the northern area with with great difficulty succeeded in forcing a detachment of Petrograd cadets to advance, which was considered the most combat-ready part of the troops of the Northern Group.

Meanwhile, unrest military units intensified. The Red Army soldiers refused to storm Kronstadt. It was decided to start sending "unreliable" sailors to serve in other areas of the country, away from Kronstadt. Until March 12, 6 echelons with sailors were sent.

To force the military units to advance, Soviet command I had to resort not only to agitation, but also to threats. A powerful repressive mechanism is being created, designed to change the mood of the Red Army. Unreliable units were disarmed and sent to the rear, the instigators were shot. Sentences to capital punishment "for refusing to carry out a combat mission", "for desertion" followed one after another. They were carried out immediately. For moral intimidation, they were shot in public.

On the night of March 17, after intensive artillery shelling of the fortress, it began new assault. When it became clear that further resistance was useless and would lead to nothing except additional victims, at the suggestion of the fortress defense headquarters, the defenders decided to leave Kronstadt. The government of Finland was asked if it could accept the garrison of the fortress. After receiving a positive response, a retreat to the Finnish coast began, provided by specially formed cover detachments. About 8 thousand people left for Finland, including the entire headquarters of the fortress, 12 out of 15 members of the "revolutionary committee" and many of the most active participants in the rebellion. Of the members of the Revolutionary Committee, only Perepelkin, Vershinin and Valk were detained.

By the morning of March 18, the fortress was in the hands of the Red Army. The authorities concealed the number of dead, missing, and wounded on both sides.

With particular predilection, the punitive organs persecuted those who had left the RCP(b) during the Kronstadt events. People whose “corpus delicti” consisted in surrendering party cards were unconditionally classified as political enemies and tried, although some of them were participants in the 1917 revolution.

There were so many convicts that the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was specially involved in the creation of new concentration camps. The expansion of places of detention was caused not only by the events in Kronstadt, but also by the general increase in the number of those arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, as well as captured military personnel of the White armies.

In the spring of 1922, a mass eviction of the inhabitants of Kronstadt began. On February 1, the evacuation commission began its work. Until April 1, 1923, it registered 2,756 people, of which 2,048 were "crown rebels" and members of their families, 516 people were not connected with the fortress by their activities. The first batch of 315 people was sent in March 1922. In total, 2,514 people were deported during the specified time, of which 1,963 were sent as “crown rebels” and members of their families, 388 as not connected with the fortress.

Conclusion

For many decades, the Kronstadt events were interpreted as a rebellion prepared by the White Guards, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists, who relied on the active support of the imperialists. It was alleged that the actions of the Kronstadters were aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime, that the sailors of individual ships and part of the garrison in the fortress took part in the mutiny. As for the leaders of the party and the state, they allegedly did everything to avoid bloodshed, and only after appeals to the soldiers and sailors of the fortress with a proposal to abandon their demands remained unanswered, it was decided to use violence. The fortress was taken by storm. However, the winners remained the highest degree humane to the vanquished. Only the most active participants in the rebellion, mostly former officers, were sentenced to death. In the future, repressions were not carried out.

The events, documents and articles we have considered allow us to give a different view of the Kronstadt events. The Soviet leadership was aware of the nature of the Kronstadt movement, its goals, its leaders, that neither the Socialist-Revolutionaries, nor the Mensheviks, nor the imperialists took any active part in it. However, objective information was carefully concealed from the population and instead a falsified version was offered that the Kronstadt events were the work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, White Guards and international imperialism, although the Cheka could not find any data on this.

Much more important in the demands of the Kronstadters was the call for the liquidation of the monopoly power of the Bolsheviks. The punitive action against Kronstadt was supposed to show that any political reforms will not affect the foundations of this monopoly.

The party leadership understood the need for concessions, including the replacement of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind, and permission for trade. It was these questions that were the main demand of the Kronstadters. There seemed to be a basis for negotiations. However, the Soviet government rejected this possibility. If the X Congress of the RCP(b) opened on March 6, that is, on the day appointed earlier, the turn in economic policy announced at it could change the situation in Kronstadt, affect the mood of the sailors: they were waiting for Lenin's speech at the congress. Then, perhaps, an assault would not have been needed. However, the Kremlin did not want such a development of events.

The Petrograd Committee of the RCP(b) introduced martial law in the city, the instigators of the workers were arrested. On March 1, sailors and Red Army soldiers of the military fortress of Kronstadt (garrison of 26 thousand people) under the slogan "Power to the Soviets, not to parties!" passed a resolution supporting the workers of Petrograd. Thus began the famous Kronstadt uprising.

There are two main points of view on this event. The Bolshevik approach, where the rebellion is called senseless, criminal, which was raised by a mass of sailors disorganized by anti-Soviet agents, yesterday's peasants, outraged by the results of war communism.

Liberal, anti-Soviet approach - when the rebels are called heroes who put an end to the policy of war communism.

Speaking about the prerequisites for the rebellion, they usually point to the plight of the population - the peasants and workers, who were ruined by the war that had been going on since 1914 - the First World War, then the Civil War. In which both sides, white and red, supplied their armies and cities with food, at the expense of rural population. A wave of peasant uprisings swept across the country, both in the rear of the White armies and the Reds. The last of them were in the south of Ukraine, in the Volga region, in the Tambov region. This allegedly became the prerequisite for the Kronstadt uprising.

The immediate causes of the uprising were:

Moral decay of the crews of the dreadnoughts "Sevastopol" and "Petropavlovsk". In 1914-1916, the Baltic battleships did not fire a single shot at the enemy. During the two and a half years of the war, they only went to sea a few times, carrying out the combat mission of long-range cover for their cruisers, and never took part in combat clashes with German Navy. This was largely due to the design flaws of the Baltic dreadnoughts, in particular, weak armor protection, which led to the fear of the naval leadership to lose expensive ships in battle. It is not difficult to guess how this affected the psychological state of their teams.

Checking the Baltic Fleet in December 1920, the head of the 1st special department of the Cheka, Vladimir Feldman, reported:

"The fatigue of the masses of the Baltic Fleet, caused by the intensity of political life and economic turmoil, aggravated by the need to pump out of this mass the most persistent element, hardened in the revolutionary struggle, on the one hand, and dilute the remnants of these elements with a new immoral, politically backward addition, and sometimes even directly politically unreliable - on the other hand, it changed to some extent for the worse the political physiognomy of the Baltic Fleet. The leitmotif is the thirst for rest, the hope for demobilization in connection with the end of the war and for the improvement of the material and moral condition, with the achievement of these desires along the line of least resistance. Everything that hinders the achievement these desires of the masses or lengthens the path to them, causes discontent.

The negative impact of the "fathers-commanders". Instead of appointing a real military commander to Kronstadt, who would put things in order in the "sailor freemen", where the positions of the anarchists were strong, Fyodor Raskolnikov, L. Trotsky's protégé, was appointed commander of the Baltic Fleet in June 120.

Trotskyist propaganda. Raskolnikov practically did not deal with official affairs, and he devoted the time devoted not to drinking to spreading the ideas of Trotskyism. Raskolnikov managed to draw the Kronstadt party organization of about 1.5 thousand Bolsheviks into the "discussion about trade unions." On January 10, 1921, a discussion of party activists took place in Kronstadt. Trotsky's platform was supported by Raskolnikov, and Lenin by the commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin. Three days later, a general meeting of the Kronstadt communists was held with the same agenda. Finally, on January 27, Raskolnikov was removed from his post as commander of the fleet, and Kukel was appointed temporarily acting.

Strangely, emigre and Western newspapers began to publish reports about the uprising that had allegedly already begun in Kronstadt 3-4 weeks before it began.

In Paris, on February 10, 1921, the message of the Russian "Latest News" was, in fact, a completely usual newspaper duck for that time and the emigre press:

"London, February 9. (Correspondent). Soviet newspapers report that the crew of the Kronstadt fleet rebelled last week. They captured the entire port and arrested the chief naval commissar. The Soviet government, not trusting the local garrison, sent four red regiments from Moscow. According to rumors, the rebellious sailors intend to start operations against Petrograd, and a state of siege has been declared in this city. The rebels say that they will not surrender and will fight against the Soviet troops ".

Dreadnought "Petropavlovsk"

Nothing of the kind was observed in Kronstadt at that moment, and the Soviet newspapers, of course, did not report any rebellion. But three days later, the Parisian newspaper Le Matin ("Morning") published a similar report:

Helsingfors, February 11. It is reported from Petrograd that, in view of the latest disturbances of the Kronstadt sailors, the military Bolshevik authorities are taking a whole series of measures to isolate Kronstadt and prevent the Red soldiers and sailors of the Kronstadt garrison from infiltrating into Petrograd. The delivery of food to Kronstadt has been suspended until further orders. Hundreds of sailors were arrested and sent to Moscow, apparently to be shot."

On March 1, a resolution supporting the workers of Petrograd was issued, with the slogan "All power to the Soviets, not to the communists". They demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom of speech, assembly and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing handicraft production with their own labor, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of products their economy, that is, the elimination of the food dictatorship. To maintain order in Kronstadt and organize the defense of the fortress, a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) was created, headed by the sailor-clerk Petrichenko, in addition to which the committee included his deputy Yakovenko, Arkhipov (engine foreman), Tukin (master of the electromechanical plant) and Oreshin (manager third labor school).

On March 3, Petrograd and the Petrograd province were declared under a state of siege. The Kronstadters sought open and public negotiations with the authorities, but the position of the latter from the very beginning of the events was unequivocal: no negotiations or compromises, the rebels must lay down their arms without any conditions. Parliamentarians who were sent by the rebels were arrested.

On March 4, the Petrograd Defense Committee presented an ultimatum to Kronstadt. The rebels were forced to either accept it or defend themselves. On the same day, a meeting of the delegates' meeting was held in the fortress, which was attended by 202 people. It was decided to defend. At the suggestion of Petrichenko, the composition of the Military Revolutionary Committee was increased from 5 to 15 people.

On March 5, the authorities issued an order for operational measures to eliminate the uprising. The 7th Army was restored under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was ordered to prepare an operational plan for the assault and "suppress the uprising in Kronstadt as soon as possible." The 7th Army is being reinforced with armored trains and air detachments. More than 45 thousand bayonets were concentrated on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.

On March 7, 1921, artillery shelling of Kronstadt began. On March 8, 1921, units of the Red Army stormed Kronstadt, the assault was repulsed. A regrouping of forces began, additional units were pulled together.

On the night of March 16, after an intensive artillery shelling of the fortress, a new assault began. The rebels noticed the attacking Soviet units too late. So, the fighters of the 32nd brigade were able to approach the distance of one verst to the city without firing a single shot. The attackers were able to break into Kronstadt, by morning the resistance was broken.

During the battles for Kronstadt, the Red Army lost 527 people killed and 3285 people wounded. The rebels lost about a thousand people killed, 4.5 thousand (of which half were wounded) were taken prisoner, some fled to Finland (8 thousand), 2103 people were shot by the verdicts of revolutionary tribunals. Thus ended the Baltic Freemen.

Uprising features:

In fact, only a part of the sailors raised the rebellion; later, the garrisons of several forts and individual inhabitants from the city joined the rebels. There was no unity of sentiment, if the entire garrison had supported the rebels, it would have been much more difficult to suppress the uprising in the most powerful fortress and more blood would have been shed. The sailors of the Revolutionary Committee did not trust the garrisons of the forts, so over 900 people were sent to the Rif fort, 400 to Totleben and Obruchev each. Commandant of the Totleben fort Georgy Langemak, future chief engineer of the RNII and one of the "fathers" "Katyusha", categorically refused to obey the Revolutionary Committee, for which he was arrested and sentenced to death.

On the deck of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" after the suppression of the rebellion. In the foreground is a hole from a large-caliber projectile.

The demands of the rebels were pure nonsense and could not be met in the conditions of the just ended Civil War and Intervention. Let's say the slogan "Soviets without communists": Communists made up almost the entire State Apparatus, the backbone of the Red Army (400 thousand out of 5.5 million people), command staff The Red Army for 66% of the graduates of the courses of painters from workers and peasants, appropriately processed by communist propaganda. Without this corps of managers, Russia would again sink into the abyss of a new Civil War and the Intervention of fragments would begin white movement(only in Turkey, the 60,000-strong Russian army of Baron Wrangel was stationed, consisting of experienced fighters who had nothing to lose). Along the borders were the young states, Poland, Finland, Estonia, which were not averse to chop off more Russian land. They would have been supported by Russia's "allies" in the Entente. Who will take power, who will lead the country and how, where to get food, etc. - it is impossible to find answers in the naive and irresponsible resolutions and demands of the rebels.

The rebels were mediocre commanders, militarily, and did not use all the possibilities for defense (probably, thank God - otherwise much more blood would have been shed). So, Major General Kozlovsky, commander of the Kronstadt artillery, and a number of other military experts immediately suggested that the Revkom attack the Red Army units on both sides of the bay, in particular, capture the Krasnaya Gorka fort and the Sestroretsk area. But neither the members of the Revolutionary Committee nor the ordinary rebels were going to leave Kronstadt, where they felt safe behind the armor of battleships and the concrete of the forts. Their passive position led to a quick defeat. During the fighting, the powerful artillery of the battleships and forts controlled by the rebels was not used to its full potential and did not inflict any special losses on the Bolsheviks. The military leadership of the Red Army, in particular Tukhachevsky, also did not always act satisfactorily.

Both sides did not hesitate to lie. The rebels published the first issue of Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, where the main "news" was that "There is a general uprising in Petrograd." In fact, unrest in the factories in Petrograd subsided, some ships stationed in Petrograd, and part of the garrison hesitated and took a neutral position. The vast majority of soldiers and sailors supported the government.

Zinoviev, on the other hand, lied that White Guard and British agents penetrated Kronstadt, throwing gold left and right, and General Kozlovsky raised a rebellion.

- The "heroic" leadership of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee, headed by Petrichenko, realizing that the jokes were over, at 5 o'clock in the morning on March 17, they left by car across the ice of the bay to Finland. Following them rushed a crowd of ordinary sailors and soldiers.

The result of the suppression of the rebellion was the weakening of Trotsky's position: the beginning of the New Economic Policy automatically pushed Trotsky's positions into the background and completely discredited his plans to militarize the country's economy. March 1921 marked a turning point in our history. The restoration of statehood and the economy began, an attempt to plunge Russia into a new Time of Troubles was stopped.

95 years ago, Trotsky and Tukhachevsky drowned in blood the uprising of the Baltic sailors who stood up for the St. Petersburg workers

March 18, 1921 forever became a black date in the history of Russia. Three and a half years after the proletarian revolution, which proclaimed Freedom, Labour, Equality, Brotherhood as the main values of the new state, the Bolsheviks, with cruelty unprecedented under the tsarist regime, dealt with one of the first actions of the working people for their social rights.

Kronstadt, who dared to demand re-elections of the soviets - "due to the fact that real soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants" - was covered in blood. As a result of a punitive expedition led by Trotsky and Tukhachevsky, more than a thousand military sailors were killed, and 2103 people were shot without trial by special tribunals. What was the fault of the Kronstadters before their "native Soviet government"?

Hatred for snickering bureaucracy

Not so long ago, all archival materials related to the “case of the Kronstadt rebellion” were declassified. And although most of them were collected by the victorious side, an unbiased researcher will easily understand that the protest moods in Kronstadt have aggravated to a large extent due to the outright nobility and rudeness of the party bureaucracy that has snickered.

In 1921 economic situation was the hardest in the country. Difficulties are understandable National economy destroyed by civil war and Western intervention. But the way the Bolsheviks began to fight them outraged the majority of workers and peasants who had given so much for the dream of welfare state. Instead of " partnerships» the authorities began to create the so-called Labor armies, which became new form militarization and enslavement.

The transfer of workers and employees to the position of mobilized was supplemented by the use of the Red Army in the economy, which was forced to participate in the restoration of transport, fuel extraction, loading and unloading and other activities. The policy of war communism culminated in agriculture, when the surplus appropriation discouraged the peasant from the minimum desire to grow a crop, which would still be completely taken away. Villages were dying, cities were emptying.

For example, the population of Petrograd decreased from 2 million 400 thousand people at the end of 1917 to 500 thousand people by 1921. The number of workers at industrial enterprises during the same period decreased from 300 thousand to 80 thousand. Such a phenomenon as labor desertion has gained gigantic proportions. The IX Congress of the RCP (b) in April 1920 was even forced to call for the creation of penal work teams from the captured deserters or to conclude them in concentration camps. But this practice only exacerbated social contradictions. The workers and peasants more and more often had a reason for discontent: what were they fighting for?! If in 1917 a worker received 18 rubles a month from the "damned" tsarist regime, then in 1921 - only 21 kopecks. At the same time, the cost of bread increased several thousand times - up to 2625 rubles per 400 grams by 1921. True, the workers received rations: 400 grams of bread per day for a worker and 50 grams for a member of the intelligentsia. But in 1921, the number of such lucky ones dropped sharply: in St. Petersburg alone, 93 enterprises were closed, 30 thousand workers out of the 80 thousand that were available at that time were unemployed, which means that they were doomed, along with their families, to starvation.

And next to it, the new “red bureaucracy” lived well and cheerfully, having invented special rations and special rations, as modern bureaucrats now call it, awards for effective management. The sailors were especially outraged by the behavior of their "proletarian" Commander of the Baltic Fleet Fyodor Raskolnikov(real name Ilyin) and his young wife Larisa Reisner, who became the head of the cultural enlightenment of the Baltic Fleet. “We are building a new state. People need us,” she declared frankly. “Our activity is creative, and therefore it would be hypocritical to deny yourself what always goes to people in power.”

Poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky recalled that when he came to Larisa Reisner in the apartment of the former naval minister Grigorovich, which she occupied, he was amazed by the abundance of objects and utensils - carpets, paintings, exotic fabrics, bronze Buddhas, majolica dishes, English books, French perfume bottles. And the hostess herself was dressed in a dressing gown, stitched with heavy gold threads. The couple did not deny themselves anything - a car from the imperial garage, a wardrobe from the Mariinsky Theater, a whole staff of servants.

The permissiveness of the authorities especially excited the workers and military personnel. At the end of February 1921, the largest plants and factories in Petrograd went on strike. The workers demanded not only bread and firewood, but also free elections to the Soviets. Demonstrations, by order of the then St. Petersburg leader Zinoviev, were immediately dispersed, but rumors about the events reached Kronstadt. The sailors sent delegates to Petrograd, who were amazed by what they saw - factories and plants were surrounded by troops, activists were arrested.

On February 28, 1921, at a meeting of the battleship brigade in Kronstadt, the sailors spoke in defense of the Petrograd workers. The crews demanded freedom of labor and trade, freedom of speech and press, free elections to the Soviets. Instead of the dictatorship of the communists - democracy, instead of appointed commissars - court committees. The terror of the Cheka - stop. Let the communists remember who made the revolution, who gave them power. Now it's time to return power to the people.

"Silent" rebels

To maintain order in Kronstadt and organize the defense of the fortress, a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) was created, headed by sailor Petrichenko, in addition to which the committee included his deputy Yakovenko, Arkhipov (machinery foreman), Tukin (master of the electromechanical plant) and Oreshin (head of the labor school).

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRK) of Kronstadt: “Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin has been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the whole people, of all working people.

However, the VRC did not go further than this, hoping that the support of "the whole people" would solve all the problems by itself. Kronstadt officers joined the uprising and advised to immediately attack Oranienbaum and Petrograd, capture the Krasnaya Gorka fort and the Sestroretsk area. But neither the members of the Revolutionary Committee nor the ordinary rebels were going to leave Kronstadt, where they felt safe behind the armor of battleships and the concrete of the forts. Their passive position subsequently led to a quick defeat.

"Gift" to the Tenth Congress

At first, the position of Petrograd was almost hopeless. The city is in turmoil. The small garrison is demoralized. There is nothing to storm Kronstadt with. The chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Lev Trotsky, and the "winner of Kolchak" Mikhail Tukhachevsky urgently arrived in Petrograd. To storm Kronstadt, the 7th Army, which defeated Yudenich, was immediately restored. Its number is brought up to 45 thousand people. A well-functioning propaganda machine begins to work in full force.

Tukhachevsky, 1927

On March 3, Petrograd and the province were declared under a state of siege. The uprising is announced as a conspiracy of unfinished tsarist generals. Appointed chief rebel General Kozlovsky- chief of artillery of Kronstadt. Hundreds of relatives of the Kronstadters became hostages of the Cheka. Only from the family of General Kozlovsky, 27 people were seized, including his wife, five children, distant relatives and acquaintances. Almost all received camp terms.

General Kozlovsky

The rations were urgently increased for the workers of Petrograd, and the unrest in the city subsided.

On March 5, Mikhail Tukhachevsky is instructed to “suppress the uprising in Kronstadt as soon as possible by the opening of the Tenth Congress of the CPSU (b).” The 7th Army was reinforced with armored trains and air detachments. Not trusting the local regiments, Trotsky called in the proven 27th division from Gomel, setting the date for the assault - March 7th.

Exactly on that day, artillery shelling of Kronstadt began, and on March 8, units of the Red Army launched an assault. The advancing Red Army soldiers were driven into the attack by barrage detachments, but they did not help either - having met the fire of the Kronstadt guns, the troops turned back. One battalion immediately went over to the side of the rebels. But in the area of Zavodskaya Harbor, a small detachment of Reds managed to break through. They reached the Petrovsky Gates, but were immediately surrounded and taken prisoner. The first Kronstadt assault failed.

Panic broke out among the partymen. Hatred for them swept the whole country. The uprising is blazing not only in Kronstadt - peasant and Cossack revolts are blowing up the Volga region, Siberia, Ukraine, North Caucasus. The rebels smash the food detachments, the hated Bolshevik appointees are expelled or shot. Workers are on strike even in Moscow. At this time, Kronstadt becomes the center of a new Russian revolution.

Bloody Assault

On March 8, Lenin made a closed report at the congress about the failure in Kronstadt, calling the rebellion a threat that in many ways surpassed the actions of both Yudenich and Kornilov combined. The leader suggested that some of the delegates be sent directly to Kronstadt. Of the 1135 people who came to the congress in Moscow, 279 party workers headed by K. Voroshilov and I. Konev left for battle formations on Kotlin Island. Also, a number of provincial committees of Central Russia sent their delegates and volunteers to Kronstadt.

But in the political sense, the action of the Kronstadters had already brought important changes. At the Tenth Congress, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy - free trade and small-scale private production were allowed, the surplus appropriation was replaced by a tax in kind, but the Bolsheviks were not going to share power with anyone.

From all over the country, military echelons were drawn to Petrograd. But two Omsk regiments rifle division rebelled: “We don’t want to fight against our sailor brothers!” The Red Army soldiers left their positions and rushed along the highway to Peterhof.

Red cadets from 16 Petrograd military universities were sent to suppress the rebellion. The fugitives were surrounded and forced to lay down their arms. To restore order, special departments in the troops were strengthened by Petrograd Chekists. Special departments of the Southern Group of Forces worked tirelessly - unreliable units were disarmed, hundreds of Red Army soldiers were arrested. On March 14, 1921, 40 other Red Army soldiers were shot in front of the line to intimidate them, and on March 15, another 33. The rest were lined up and forced to shout “Give Kronstadt!”

On March 16, the Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks ended in Moscow, Tukhachevsky's artillery began artillery preparation. When it finally got dark, the shelling stopped, and at 2 o'clock in the morning the infantry moved in marching columns across the ice of the bay in complete silence. Following the first echelon, the second echelon followed with a regular interval, then the third, reserve.

The Kronstadt garrison was desperately defending itself - the streets were crossed with barbed wire and barricades. Aimed fire was fired from the attics, and when the chains of the Red Army came close, the machine guns in the basements came to life. Often the rebels launched counterattacks. By five o'clock in the evening on March 17, the attackers were driven out of the city. And then the last reserve of the assault was thrown across the ice - the cavalry, which chopped into cabbage the sailors drunk with the specter of victory. On March 18, the rebellious fortress fell.

The Red troops entered Kronstadt as an enemy city. That same night, without trial, 400 people were shot, and in the morning revolutionary tribunals began to work. The former Baltic sailor Dybenko became the commandant of the fortress. During his "reign" 2103 people were shot, and six and a half thousand were sent to camps. For this he received his first military award- Order of the Red Banner. And a few years later he was shot by the same authorities for ties with Trotsky and Tukhachevsky.

Features of the uprising

The demands of the rebels were pure nonsense and could not be met in the conditions of the just ended Civil War and Intervention. Let's say the slogan "Soviets without Communists": The Communists made up almost the entire State Apparatus, the backbone of the Red Army (400 thousand out of 5.5 million people), the command staff of the Red Army for 66% of the graduates of the courses of painters from workers and peasants, appropriately processed by communist propaganda. Without this corps of managers, Russia would again sink into the abyss of a new Civil War and the Intervention of fragments of the white movement would begin (only in Turkey, the 60,000-strong Russian army of Baron Wrangel was stationed, consisting of experienced fighters who had nothing to lose). The young states, Poland, Finland, Estonia, were located along the borders, which were not averse to chop off the still light brown land. They would have been supported by Russia's "allies" in the Entente.

Who will take power, who will lead the country and how, where to get food, etc. - it is impossible to find answers in the naive and irresponsible resolutions and demands of the rebels.

On the deck of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" after the suppression of the rebellion. In the foreground is a hole from a large-caliber projectile.

During the fighting, the powerful artillery of the battleships and forts controlled by the rebels was not used to its full potential and did not inflict any special losses on the Bolsheviks.

The military leadership of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, also did not act satisfactorily. If the rebels were led by experienced commanders, the assault on the Fortress would have failed, and the attackers would have washed themselves in blood.

Zinoviev, on the other hand, lied that White Guard and British agents penetrated Kronstadt, throwing gold left and right, and General Kozlovsky raised a rebellion.

The result was the weakening of the positions of Trotsky-Bronstein: the beginning of the New Economic Policy automatically pushed Trotsky's positions into the background and completely discredited his plans for the militarization of the country's economy. March 1921 marked a turning point in our history. The restoration of statehood and the economy began, an attempt to plunge Russia into a new Time of Troubles was stopped.

Rehabilitation

In 1994, all participants in the Kronstadt uprising were rehabilitated, and a monument was erected to them on the Anchor Square of the fortress city.

For many decades, the history of the Civil War and other events that followed the October 1917 coup were romanticized by all means of Soviet propaganda. In 1936, the masters of "the most important art for us" created the film "We are from Kronstadt", dedicated to the events of fifteen years ago. From numerous posters pasted all over the vast country, the fighters for Soviet power courageously looked at the White Guard invisible executioners, bristling with bayonets, to whose chest the rebels tied massive boulders in order to give the bodies of their victims negative buoyancy. The Kronstadt mutiny of 1921 in the mass consciousness became one of the milestones of the heroic struggle of the new world with the old. Now, after more than nine decades, one can calmly and without emotions try to figure out what happened on the Baltic island naval base in fact.

Economic situation

Start

Any uprising begins with its organization. On February 28, a meeting was convened on the battleships and a resolution was adopted, in the text of which the sailors designated as their goal the establishment of truly people's power, and not party dictatorship.

The newspaper Izvestia VRK (the abbreviation stood for "Provisional Revolutionary Committee", it included fifteen elected representatives) published accepted document It happened on March 2nd. The Kronstadt rebellion was led mainly by sailors (9 people), as well as a nurse, a school director and four representatives of the proletariat. They also elected the chairman of the RVC, he became Stepan Petrichenko, a sailor of the Baltic Fleet. When the Bolsheviks received information that the head of the committee was a member of the Social Revolutionary Party, and that there was a general among the participants in the riot (A. N. Kozlovsky commanded the artillery of the base), they immediately announced a White Guard-SR conspiracy.

Meanwhile, six hundred of the most devoted VKP(b) communists were arrested and isolated. They were not shot, they only took away good boots, giving out bast shoes in return. Approximately a third of all party members (about three hundred) supported the rebels. Lenin and Trotsky understood that the rebellion threatened not just the loss of an important outpost in the Baltic Sea. If it is not suppressed, the whole of Russia may flare up. 1921 became a fateful year.

Information war

The potential developed in the first days of the uprising was not further developed due to the limited thinking of its leaders. The determined members of the Military Revolutionary Committee tried to insist on an offensive initiative (direction - Oranienbaum and Sestroretsk and further expansion of the bridgehead), but they did not find support. But the danger of such a development of the situation was well understood in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks began preparations for a possible siege of the city, carrying out a series of events that today would be called elements of an information counterattack. On March 2, the Soviet press organs briefly described the Kronstadt rebellion as "Black Hundred-Social Revolutionary", organized by the White Guard General Kozlovsky with the support of the French special services with the aim of restoring tsarism. All this from beginning to end was untrue, but it had an effect on the general population, who were anti-monarchist during the years of the Civil War. So the year 1921 in the history of Russia (and possibly the whole world) marked one of the first cases of successful manipulation of mass consciousness.

Martial law was introduced in the entire metropolitan province.

indecisiveness

The Kronstadters naively believed that the Bolshevik Politburo, frightened by such a massive manifestation of discontent, would not suppress it by force, but would begin a political dialogue. In addition, they felt their considerable military potential, after all, the Baltic Fleet, no joke. But in this matter, the organizers of the uprising showed a clear overestimation of their own strength. Kronstadt in 1921 was not distinguished by its former combat capability. Discipline left much to be desired, unity of command was undermined by the reforms of the armed forces, many military specialists fled, many naval officers were physically destroyed by revolutionary sailors in the previous years of the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. The coastal batteries were not able to conduct effective fire, the ships, frozen into the ice, lost their maneuver. The rebels, not the Bolsheviks, took the first steps towards establishing a negotiating process. The parliamentarians were immediately arrested and subsequently shot. Immediately, repressions began against the families of the rebels.

The X Congress of the RCP(b) was scheduled to begin on March 8. The split consciousness of the leadership of the insurgent sailors manifested itself in some expectations of change and softening of the Bolshevik policy towards the peasants. To some extent, they were justified, at the congress it was decided to replace the surplus tax with a tax in kind (that is, not all, but only a part, began to be taken away from the peasants), but the Leninist leadership did not want to recognize this measure as forced. On the contrary, the leader of the world proletariat formulated the promising party policy as a merciless desire to “teach this public a lesson” so that it would not even dare to think about resistance for several decades. Lenin did not look further, but in vain ...

On the Kronstadt ice...

Three hundred delegates to the Congress began to prepare for a punitive campaign against the rebellious island. In order not to walk on the ice alone, they decided to take with them the 7th army of Tukhachevsky, which urgently needed to be restored and reorganized. On the day of the expected opening of the Congress, the red troops, supported by artillery, went on the attack. She choked. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion on the first attempt failed for three reasons, including the lack of strategic talents of the “red Bonaparte”, poor preparation, expressed in the lack of attacking forces (18 thousand bayonets against 27 thousand defenders) and low morale. The Red Army soldiers of the 561st regiment generally refused to shoot at the rebels, for which they were severely punished. To improve discipline, the Bolsheviks used the usual methods: selective executions, detachments and accompanying artillery fire. The second assault was scheduled for March 17th.

This time the punitive units were better prepared. The attackers were dressed in winter camouflage, and they managed to covertly approach the positions of the rebels on the ice. There was no artillery preparation, it was more problems than good, polynyas were formed that did not freeze, but were only covered with a thin crust of ice, immediately sprinkled with snow. So they proceeded in silence.

rout

The attackers managed to overcome a ten-kilometer distance by the predawn hour, after which their presence was discovered. A counter battle began, which lasted almost a day. There was no way for the attackers and defenders to retreat, the battle was fierce and bloody. Each house was taken with huge losses, but no one reckoned with them. In the memoirs written later, the participants in the assault, who later became prominent military leaders, honestly noted the exceptional courage of both sides. On March 18, the rebellion was suppressed, the majority of the participants in the uprising of the Kronstadt garrison were captured or killed. About a third of the personnel (approximately 8 thousand) were able to escape across the ice to the adjacent Finnish territory, including almost the entire VRK. Three instigators (Valk, Vershinin and Perepelkin) did not have time to evacuate and were arrested. The real losses of the parties were not disclosed.

Results and losses

The Kronstadt uprising of 1921 completely dispelled the illusions of a significant part of the population of Soviet Russia about the possibilities of real people's self-government. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other members of the leadership of the CPSU (b) managed to quite intelligibly explain to the broad masses the futility of resistance to the new government by harsh forceful methods. Despite the secrecy of information about human losses, they can still be estimated from indirect data. The garrison was about 27 thousand. 10 thousand people fell under the tribunal (2103 were shot), eight more were able to escape from the "proletarian retribution". Consequently, the number of dead rebels against Soviet power is approximately 9 thousand people.

The losses of the attacking side, as a rule, are greater than those of the defending side. Considering that there were two assaults, and the first of them was extremely unsuccessful, it can be assumed that up to 20 thousand soldiers of Tukhachevsky's 7th Army were killed during the punitive expedition.

1921 in the history of Russia became new page Soviet party mythology with the same actors, as in previous "heroic" times. The legendary hero of the Civil War, sailor Dybenko, who became famous for many outstanding atrocities and no less epic cowardice, took part in the suppression of the rebellion. It was he, according to official historians, who smashed the Germans near Narva on February 23, 1918. In fact, the echelon with its valiant army was hardly able to be detained in the Middle Volga region. In Kronstadt he managed to distinguish himself.

28.2.1921. - The Kronstadt uprising against the communists began

The victory of the Kronstadt uprising

(February 28 - March 18, 1921) against the Bolsheviks happened in the citadel of such "pride of the revolution" as the Baltic sailors were - and this forced the Leninist party to abandon the policy of war communism, starting a new economic policy (NEP).

The uprising in Kronstadt was connected with the aggravated internal situation in Soviet Russia at the end of the so-called civil war. As the Russian White armies were forced to retreat under the onslaught of the Red Army of the internationalists, a significant part of the peasantry and workers intensified their resistance to the occupying power of the Judeo-Bolsheviks and attempted to liquidate it on the ground.

At the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921. armed uprisings of peasants, largely anti-Jewish, engulfed Western Siberia, Voronezh province, the Middle Volga region, Don, Kuban, Ukraine, Central Asia. In addition to the predatory requisitioning, the peasants were outraged by the robbery and closing of churches.

The situation in the cities became more and more tense. There was a shortage of food, many plants and factories were closed due to a lack of fuel and raw materials, and workers found themselves without wages. A particularly difficult situation at the beginning of 1921 developed in large industrial centers, primarily in Moscow and Petrograd. The decree of January 22, 1921, on the reduction of the workers' ration by a third, caused workers' strikes. Street performances began in some cities. True, unlike the peasant uprisings, in the cities the protests were mostly of a left-wing socialist nature under the slogans: "For Soviets without Bolsheviks!"

On February 24, the following factories went on strike in Petrograd: Trubochny, Laferm, Cartridge and Baltic. Part of the Petrograd garrison refused to oppose the workers. There were clashes between workers and cadets sent to suppress strikes. On February 25, the frightened Bolsheviks created the Petrograd Defense Committee under the leadership of Zinoviev (Radomyslsky). Reliable units from the provinces, removed from the fronts, were brought up, and labor movement managed to suppress.

These events, however, influenced the mood of the sailors of the red Baltic Fleet. Even at the main base of the fleet, in the fortress city of Kronstadt, where ship crews, coastal units and auxiliary units of sailors with a total number of over 26 thousand people were stationed, the massacre of socialist workers aroused indignation. It became obvious that, in fact, under the slogan of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the Communist Party was established ... The slogan of the uprising was: "Power to the Soviets, not to the parties!"

In Kronstadt, the sailors began to agitate for re-elections of the soviets and set up committees independent of the Bolsheviks. To clarify the situation in Petrograd, they sent their representatives there. Returning to Kronstadt, on February 27, the walkers reported to the general meetings of their teams about the reasons for the unrest of the workers, as well as the sailors of the battleships Gangut and Poltava, who were stationed on the Neva. The next day, the sailors of the battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" adopted a resolution, which was submitted for discussion by representatives of all ships and military units of the Baltic Fleet. The main requirements of the resolution were:

“In view of the fact that real soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately re-election of soviets by secret ballot ... Freedom of speech and the press ... Release all political prisoners of the socialist parties, as well as all workers and peasants, Red Army soldiers and sailors imprisoned in ties with workers' and peasants' movements... Abolish all political departments, since no party can enjoy privileges to propagate its ideas and receive funds from the state for these purposes... Abolish communist combat detachments in all military units, as well as in factories and factories, different duties on the part of the communists... Give the peasants full right to act over the whole land as they wish... Allow free handicraft production by their own labor... We ask all military units, as well as fellow military cadets, to join our resolution. ..".

Thus, the resolution did not contain calls for the overthrow of the government as such, but was directed against the dictatorship of the Communist Party - which for the Bolsheviks was one and the same.

On March 1, on the Anchor Square of Kronstadt, with the participation of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Kalinin and the commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin who arrived there (who tried to dissuade the sailors from political demands), a rally was held that gathered about 16 thousand people. Its participants overwhelmingly supported the sailors' resolution. The slogans of the sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress repeated almost verbatim the political demands of the Petrograd workers. 30 parliamentarians were sent to Petrograd to negotiate with the authorities, but they were arrested there. Immediately after the rally, a meeting of the Bolshevik Party Committee of the Communists of the fortress took place, at which the question of the possibility of armed suppression of the protesters was discussed.

March 2 in the House of Education of Kronstadt (formerly the Engineering School) gathered a meeting of representatives of the ships. The main issue at the meeting was the question of re-elections of the Kronstadt Soviet, whose term of office was expiring. The newly elected composition was mixed, but the Communists were in the minority. By a majority vote, the meeting expressed no confidence in the communists, urging them to voluntarily relinquish power. The chairman of the executive committee, Vasiliev, and commissar Kuzmin, who were present at the meeting, declared that the communists would not voluntarily give up power in Kronstadt, and threatened reprisals. At that moment, word got around that armed communists were heading for the meeting place. In this regard, the participants decided to transform the newly elected Presidium of the Council of five people into the Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) to maintain order in the city, headed by the elected chairman of the meeting, the clerk from the battleship "Petropalovsk" S.M. Petrichenko.

Power in Kronstadt without a single shot passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Committee, which the Bolshevik cells of the military and civilian organizations of Kronstadt could not resist and fled. A mass exit of ordinary communists from the Communist Party began. Considering that in Kronstadt the first stone had been laid in the foundation of the "third, truly people's revolution," the members of the Revolutionary Committee were confident in the support of the working people of Petrograd and the whole country. On March 3, the Revolutionary Committee, passing off wishful thinking, informed the Kronstadters that a "general uprising" was taking place in Petrograd.

Meanwhile, the reaction of the Petrograd workers to the events in Kronstadt was passive. On March 3, Petrograd and the province were declared under a state of siege. This measure was directed specifically against possible demonstrations by the St. Petersburg workers, and not against the Kronstadt sailors. The Bolsheviks transferred enough punitive units to the capital. All members of the party of the city and province were actually in the barracks. In the district committees and executive committees, round-the-clock duty was carried out, armed communist and Komsomol detachments were organized, units special purpose patrolled the streets at night, guarded the strategic facilities of the city and the most important institutions - bridges, railway stations, telegraph and telephone lines, warehouses; going out on the streets after 9 pm was prohibited. The order emphasized that "those guilty of failure to comply with the said order are subject to liability under the laws of wartime", and all patrol and guard services were ordered to unconditionally use weapons in case of resistance. Under such conditions, any open action against the Bolsheviks would mean armed clashes with a certain defeat. There was also disinformation. Therefore, even that part of the Petrograd workers who sympathized with the Kronstadters was unable to support them.

The Kronstadters sought open and transparent negotiations, but the position of the authorities from the very beginning was unequivocal: no negotiations or compromises. They arrested not only the sent parliamentarians, but also the Kronstadt families living in Petrograd and other localities as hostages. The Bolshevik leadership was informed about the socialist character of the Kronstadt movement, its aims and leaders. Nevertheless, the Kronstadt movement was declared a "mutiny", allegedly organized by French intelligence and the former tsarist general Kozlovsky (who commanded the artillery of the fortress), the resolution adopted by the Kronstadters - "Black Hundred-Socialist-Revolutionary".

Propaganda literature and an order were also sent to all military units, to the ships of the Baltic Fleet, in which all commissars were ordered to be on the ground; gatherings in the presence of strangers were prohibited; all those seen in agitation against the Soviet regime were ordered to be arrested. The Bolsheviks believed that in the same vein - "you are being deceived by the White Guards and the international imperialists!" - they can also influence the Kronstadts, so they resorted to scattering leaflets over Kronstadt: on March 12 alone, seaplanes of the Baltic Fleet dropped 4.5 pounds of propaganda literature over the fortress.

On March 4, when Kronstadt was isolated from the outside world, the Bolsheviks issued an ultimatum to the "deceived Kronstadters" with the threat of an assault. The rebels decided to defend themselves. Military experts suggested that the Revolutionary Committee, without waiting for the storming of the fortress, go on the offensive themselves - to capture Oranienbaum and Sestroretsk in order to expand the base of the uprising. However, the Revolutionary Committee did not dare to do so.

Kronstadt was indeed an impregnable fortress - but only from the side of a possible enemy - from the west. From the eastern rear it was impossible to return artillery fire on the batteries of Lisiy Nos, Sestroretsk and Krasnaya Gorka, which began shelling Kronstadt on the morning of March 7. The order to eliminate the rebellion "as soon as possible" was given to the 7th Army under the command of M.N. Tukhachevsky. The assault on the fortress was scheduled for March 8. It was on this day, after several postponements, that the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) was to open. It was not a coincidence, but a propaganda and political calculation.

The collapse of the terrorist policy of "war communism" was obvious, the Kronstadt uprising became the last weight on the scale of the new economic policy: a respite in the war between the Communist Party and the Russian people. The NEP, announced at the Tenth Congress by Lenin, proclaimed the replacement of the surplus appropriation with a tax in kind and the permission of free trade. The same was demanded by the Kronstadters. However, the exemplary reprisal against Kronstadt was supposed to demonstrate that the party was switching over to the NEP not out of weakness under the pressure of popular uprisings, as the people could interpret it (which it was), but "in connection with the end of the civil war" - from a position of strength and his thoughtful program. Therefore, the punitive assault on Kronstadt was supposed to take place just on the opening day of the Tenth Congress, when Lenin was to announce the NEP.

However, the hope for a quick defeat of the uprising on the opening day of the Tenth Congress did not come true. Having suffered heavy losses, Tukhachevsky's troops retreated. One of the reasons for this failure lay in the mood of the Red Army: it came to direct disobedience and speeches in support of Kronstadt. Unrest in the military units intensified, the Red Army (for example, in the 236th Orsha regiment) refused to storm the fortress "against their own." The authorities were afraid that the uprising would spread to the entire Baltic Fleet. The unreliable red units were disarmed and sent to the rear, the instigators of disobedience were publicly shot. As always, punitive international troops were brought in to suppress the uprisings. It was also decided to send part of the delegates and guests of the congress (about 300 headed by Voroshilov) near Kronstadt directly to the troops as additional commissars.

Artillery shelling of Kronstadt continued from 8 to 16 March. Cadets, Bashkir, Chinese and other international units were thrown into unsuccessful attacks. On the night of March 16, after a powerful artillery shelling of the fortress, its last assault began simultaneously from the south, north and east. When it became clear that further resistance was useless, its defenders decided to withdraw across the ice from Kronstadt to Finland. About 8 thousand people managed to cross the border, and almost all members of the Kronstadt Military Revolutionary Committee and the defense headquarters.

By the morning of March 18, the fortress was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. According to Soviet data, the red units during the assault lost 527 killed and 3285 wounded. Mass extrajudicial reprisals began against the remaining sailors and the population of Kronstadt. The very stay in the fortress during the uprising was considered a crime. Then several dozen open trials were organized for demonstration purposes, including those against the sailors of the battleships Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk.

By the summer of 1921, only the Presidium of the Petrograd Gubchek, the Collegium of the Special Department for the Protection of the Finnish Border of the Republic, the Extraordinary Troika of the Kronstadt Special Department for the Protection of the Finnish Border, and the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the Petrograd Military District had sentenced 2,103 people to shooting and 6,459 people to various terms of punishment. In addition, in the spring of 1922, the mass eviction of the inhabitants of Kronstadt began as unreliable.

In exile, Petrichenko, together with the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper "Will of Russia", published the book "The Truth about Kronstadt", written from a socialist position - which was what this rebellion really was. Therefore, in the Russian emigration, he caused mixed feelings. Left-liberal circles tried to help the rebels by collecting money and food in the hope of delivering it through Finland. The monarchists reacted to the uprising in Kronstadt as a showdown among the revolutionaries.

However, despite such ideological limitations of the leaders of the uprising, it was an important episode of the civil war - that is, the conquest of Russia by the Jewish Bolshevik Communist Party. The episode, which, despite the military defeat of the anti-Bolshevik side, ended with its political victory, albeit temporary: the collapse of the policy of "war communism". Let's finish with a quote with an assessment of the field-revolutionary anti-Bolshevik resistance from the book "To the Leader of the Third Rome" (ch. III-6).

Thus ended the years of war communism (1918-1921), in which Russia lost about 15 million people - 10% of its population. This was the price that the popular resistance paid for the attempts to overthrow the communist regime. Unfortunately, these attempts were unsuccessful. But they saved the honor of Russia in a revolutionary catastrophe. The feat of the Russian volunteers and thousands of peasant uprisings will forever remain proof that the Russian people did not "choose" the godless power, but resisted it to the last possible ...

But the power of the Bolsheviks was recognized and supported by the West. Even during the civil war (in April 1920), representatives of the Entente met in Copenhagen with Commissar Krasin (the organizer of the Bolshevik bank robberies) for trade negotiations. Lloyd George received Krasin in London and was delighted with him as "an intelligent and honest man." This was at a time when Wrangel's army was advancing in Northern Tavria. The Soviet-British trade agreement - the first between the Bolsheviks and a democratic country - was signed on March 16, 1921 - during the days of the Kronstadt uprising. Then, in the midst of hundreds of peasant uprisings in Russia, negotiations took place at a series of conferences in 1921-1922 (in Cannes, The Hague, Lausanne), which soon led to the diplomatic recognition of the illegal communist regime by the main European countries.

The ensuing "NEP" with the distribution of the richest concessions to foreign firms can also be better understood in view of the foregoing. Russian valuables went abroad in whole ships - in exchange for goods and equipment. Thus, the wealth confiscated from the people, accumulated by Russia throughout its history, helped the Bolsheviks, with the help of Western democracies, to strengthen themselves in the war against the Russian people. Lloyd George then said his famous phrase: "You can also trade with cannibals."

Reference

Petrichenko Stepan Maksimovich (1892-1947), senior clerk of the battleship Petropavlovsk, chief executive Kronstadt rebellion. Originally from the Poltava region. He served as a sailor from 1914. He was a member of the RCP (b) from 1919, but quickly dropped out. He sympathized with the anarchists of Old Man Makhno. After the suppression of the rebellion with thousands of its participants, he left for Finland.

He worked at sawmills, became a carpenter. He went to Riga and visited the Soviet embassy there, was recruited as an agent of the GPU. Reported on the situation in Finland. In 1927 he traveled through Latvia to the USSR. In 1937, he refused to cooperate with Soviet intelligence, but then continued again. Several reports were received from Petrichenko about Germany's preparations for a war against the USSR.

In 1941, Petrichenko was arrested by the Finnish authorities. In September 1944, on the basis of an armistice agreement between the USSR, Great Britain and Finland, Petrichenko was released, and in April 1945 he was again arrested and handed over to Soviet authorities. On November 17, 1945, a special meeting under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Petrichenko S.M. "for participating in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization and belonging to Finnish intelligence" was sentenced to ten years in the camps. He died on June 2, 1947, during his transfer from the Solikamsk camp to the Vladimir prison."
The material of the book was used: S.N. Semanov, Kronstadt rebellion, M., 2003

Discussion: 15 comments

Thank you for reminding us of those events, we should not be Ivans who do not remember our kinship. It was only in 2009 that I learned from my cousins that my grandfather was a participant in the Kronstadt rebellion and fled across the ice to Finland and then returned to his village. I would like to contact the archives and make inquiries about my grandfather. Excuse me for asking you questions, but more detailed information is not published on the Internet. Can you please tell me which archive I can apply to? Relatives, due to their advanced age, do not remember much, and I think that my grandfather did not talk much about those years. My address [email protected]

Lydia: "Thank you for reminding me of those events, we should not be Ivans who do not remember our relationship. I only found out in 2009 ..." - I, too, until the age of 50, one might say, did not know who the father and mother were, in what country I live, fooled to amazement. Looks like most people around are the same...

yes, there are many dark spots in our history and one can never judge any events unambiguously ...
but to consider the requirements of the Kronstadt sailors and apply them a little to adjust to today's authorities is much more relevant ... only now the authorities want to distribute state property to those whom the sailors tried to re-elect, which means that in general to drive the bulk of the people into slavery

Here is what the sailors demanded:
"one. Since the present Soviets no longer reflect the will of the workers and peasants, immediately hold new, secret elections and, for the electoral campaign, allow full freedom of agitation among the workers and soldiers;
2. Grant freedom of speech and press to the workers and peasants, as well as to all anarchist and left-socialist parties;
3. Guarantee freedom of assembly and coalitions to all trade unions and peasant organizations;
4. To convene an supra-Party conference of workers, Red Army men and sailors of St. Petersburg, Kronstadt and the St. Petersburg province, to be held no later than March 10, 1921;
5. Release all political prisoners belonging to the socialist parties and release their imprisonment of all workers, peasants and sailors who were arrested in connection with the workers' and peasants' unrest;
6. To check the cases of other prisoners of prisons and concentration camps, elect an audit commission;
7. Eliminate all political departments, since no party has the right to claim special privileges for the dissemination of its ideas or financial assistance for this from the government; instead, set up commissions for culture and education, to be elected locally and funded by the government;
8. Immediately disband all barrage detachments;
9. Establish equal food rations for all workers, with the exception of those whose work is especially dangerous with medical point vision;
10. Eliminate special communist departments in all formations of the Red Army and communist security groups at enterprises and replace them, where necessary, with formations that will have to be allocated by the army itself, and at enterprises - formed by the workers themselves;
11. Give the peasants complete freedom to dispose of their land, as well as the right to have their own livestock, provided that they manage with their own means, that is, without hiring labor;
12. Ask all soldiers, sailors and cadets to support our demands;
13. Ensure that these decisions are disseminated in the press;
14. Appoint a traveling control commission;
15. Allow the freedom of handicraft production, if it is not based on the exploitation of someone else's labor force.

Thank you for the article.

I can't find the main slogan

It is written in the article: The slogan of the uprising was: “Power to the Soviets, not to the parties!”

It's the same as Bandera in Ukraine rose against the red plague, so there was an uprising in Russia, only much earlier than the Tambov uprising against the Bolsheviks than the OUN-UPA Bandera. In those days, the Jewish occupation power destroyed the people by the millions!

in general, I liked the article only that this place of execution of the Kronstadts was not indicated, first the officers and after the communists. This place is the bank of the ravine behind the Cathedral. And the last rebellion was in 1948 on the "Lensovet" when the ship entered the Neva and the crew put forward demands for the release of political prisoners and, in fact, a change of power, for which part of the team was shot and the rest were sent to camps, among them was my father

Yesterday I was in Kroshtadt and stood at the ravine where the red beasts shot the Russians - it is interesting that in the accursed Putyatia the "eternal flame" burns in the middle of the Masonic pyramid - a monument to punishers and executioners, but there is no monument to the victims of the Bolshevik terror and a monument to the rebels.

truly great people opposed the Bolsheviks-Satanists !!! thank God that their filthy power has come to an end ...

the slogan was against the Bolsheviks and the Jews, why is it hushed up?

Yes, they got it right. Because of all sorts of Petrichenkos, how many people died during the assault. And you don’t be a cattle and have your own opinion, and don’t listen to what homegrown historians pour into your ears. hello from communist

Even Hitler did no greater evil than the communists. since the age of 17, these scoundrels have been destroying their people and everything sacred .... They have no conscience, no honor, only stories ... But they will answer to God for their atrocities !!!

The two pillars solely on which the Soviet Power rested are Lies and Violence.