March 1, 1921
Kronstadt is German for “city of the crown,” or royal city... State city.
It was not given this name by chance. In 1704, a year after St. Petersburg was founded, Peter I ordered that a fortress be built on Kotlin Island, 29 kilometers from the future capital. The objective was to defend the capital from attack by sea, which is why Kronstadt became a “State city” and one of the mightiest fortresses along the Baltic coast.
Today, 10 years after the “secret” military city was opened to anyone who cares to visit, we can still see traces of the Petrine era here – in the symmetry of the streets, laid with the same degree of geometric precision that marks St. Petersburg’s center, and in the eighteenth-century ramparts and harbors. You can also find traces of Kronstadt’s nineteenth-century heyday, when this little island was the main base of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
This was, and remains, a military city, with everything ship-shape, as neat as a securely-buttoned naval tunic. “Arriving in Kronstadt, you will first be struck by the neatness and cleanliness, the quiet and tidiness all around. One immediately senses the fortress city, the military port,” is how the historians Zasosov and Pyzin described the town at the start of the twentieth century. And this is how it looks now, with its military academy, yacht club, naval organizations, docks and bulwarks.
Yet today life has quieted down in Kronstadt. Most of its 45,000 residents have to work in Petersburg. There are fewer naval vessels than in the past, and commercial vessels have yet to make an appearance. The levee that authorities are hoping will defend Petersburg from floods joined Kronstadt with the mainland, and a ferry travels back and forth. Getting here from Palace Square or St. Isaac’s cathedral does not seem like a great hardship. Nevertheless, Kronstadt remains a special world of sailors, where life flows at a calm and measured pace. It is hard to imagine that one of the most tragic and bloody events of the 1920s took place here.
This quiet and orderly island was the site of the famous Kronstadt Rebellion, which erupted when sailors who had reached a state of desperation rose up against the infant Soviet State. In fact, as the year 1921 began, all of Russia was on the brink of catastrophe. The hungry years of World War I had been followed by 1917, which swept away centuries of tsarist rule – and with it the familiar framework of life. The sailors of the Baltic Fleet had been at the forefront of the revolutionaries. Socialist parties enjoyed great influence – the “revolutionary sailor” was one of the iconic figures of this troubled time. Baltic Fleet sailors took part in meetings and demonstrations in turbulent Petersburg; all the leftist agitators were in contact with them and the naval ships that entered the Neva River in October of 1917 played a major role in the Bolsheviks’ successful takeover.
But three and a half years had passed. In that time, Russia had lived through the dreadful bloodshed of civil war, famine, the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic and an epidemic of typhoid fever. Matters were made even worse by the “utopian” and – as would have to be the case in any Utopia – merciless policies of the Bolsheviks, who were in a hurry to attain Communism. In the name of this cause, they were expropriating almost all of peasants’ harvests, annihilating the cash economy, and sending to NKVD torture chambers whomever did not care to travel such a bloody and thorny path toward the Communist Promised Land.
In February 1921, the workers of Petrograd, who were literally dying of hunger, were on the brink of revolt. Rumors reached the Kronstadt sailors that demonstrations were being put down by force in the “Cradle of the Revolution” (Petrograd).
On March 1, 1921, thousands gathered in Kronstadt’s Anchor Square and refused to submit to the Communists, electing their own revolutionary committee. A paradoxical situation was developing. Among these rebels were many sailors and soldiers who had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917. They were still inclined toward revolution and certainly had no desire to restore the monarchy. They were prepared to support the socialist parties, but not the Communists, who had managed during the short period of their rule to bankrupt the country and bathe it in blood.
The Bolsheviks did not immediately appreciate the danger of the situation, despite the fact that, during the Civil War, the Kronstadt forts had opposed the Reds on several occasions. But the influence of the “revolutionary sailors” proved too great to ignore. So eventually they sent Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Central Executive Committee, i.e., the head of all the Russian Soviets (councils), and a man with impeccable peasant credentials. It was presumed that he would have an easy time calming the Kronstadt sailors and soldiers, most of whom were once peasants themselves. But how do you calm hungry people who know that, throughout the country, their relatives and loved ones are dying of hunger, and are being forced to hide the meager remains of their harvest from ubiquitous food expropriation brigades?
Kalinin, who tried to give a speech to the sailors, was run off the island in disgrace. Other means were brought to bear. Some of the delegates attending the Bolshevik’s 10th Party Congress in Moscow made an urgent trip to Petrograd and, maneuvering over the thin March ice, led an attack on Kronstadt. The onslaught of the armed fanatics, supported by artillery bombardment, crushed the revolt.
The exact number of casualties is not known, although virtually no prisoners were taken during the assault. Still, if we add in the many residents of Kronstadt who were executed after the uprising, then it is likely that more than two thousand were killed. Most of the rebellion’s leaders who lived fled to Finland, but hundreds of dead and wounded bodies covered the frozen Gulf of Finland. There were so many that, when spring arrived and the ice started to melt, there was a threat of contaminated water in the city – no one had bothered to clear away the bodies of the “mutineers.”
Later, Eduard Bagritsky, a poet who romanticized the revolution, wrote, “Youth led us on a fiery march/Youth threw us onto the ice of Kronstadt.” Apparently, the poet was not referring to those who perished under the artillery fire of March 1921, trying to defend their right to live like human beings.
Today all is quiet and peaceful in Kronstadt. The Naval Cathedral, which memorializes those who perished at sea, and which was built at the start of the twentieth century with charitable contributions, still overlooks Anchor Square, where the Kronstadt rebellion began. After the revolution, the cathedral was closed and converted first into a sailors’ club and later into a museum dedicated to the history of the fortress. There is nothing to recall those who perished 85 years ago, but they are here. Kronstadt cannot brush them aside.
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