The Kronstadt mutiny is brutally crushed by Red Army troops
One hundred years ago, on 17–18 March 1921, Red Army troops crossed the frozen Gulf of Finland to crush the Kronstadt mutiny – the Russian Revolution’s last major event. Pitched battles ensued in which thousands died, ending in the mutineers’ bloody defeat and a wave of mass executions.
When the mutiny broke out, Russia was in a dire position. The country had reeled through four years of revolution and civil war. Forced grain requisitioning had alienated the peasants. Food shortages roused mass demonstrations in cities. On 1 March 1921, a group of sailors and citizens from Kronstadt (a fortified naval base on Kotlin Island, founded to defend the nearby city of St Petersburg) passed a resolution blaming the communist monopoly of power. Re-election of all local governing councils (soviets) was demanded, as well as freedom of expression for workers and peasants and the dismantling of the communist control system. In response, Lenin and Trotsky blamed former officers, condemned a “new White-Guard plot” and ordered an armed response.
The mutiny and its violent suppression triggered a momentous “carrot and stick” response. Economic concessions were made to the peasants and artisans in the form of the New Economic Policy; grain requisitioning ended and private trade was permitted – for a time. Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s structure was further centralised, and opposition factions, even within the party, were banned; these developments paved the way for Stalin’s rise.
Four years before the mutiny, the Kronstadt sailors had been a leading revolutionary force. After the fall of the tsar they had resisted the authority of the “bourgeois” Provisional Government throughout 1917 and sent armed detachments to Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) to support Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. As a result, the use of brute force to crush “Red Kronstadt” in 1921 carried great symbolic importance: the revolution had “devoured its children”.
Outside Russia, opponents of the communist government, on the left and the right, attacked its actions. Decades later, The God that Failed, an influential 1949 collection of essays by lapsed communists, made Kronstadt part of Cold War rhetoric. In his essay, the American journalist and historian Louis Fischer applied “Kronstadt” to any action, like Stalin’s purges or the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, which shook outsiders’ support for the USSR. Later “Kronstadts” would be the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The mutiny triggered a momentous ‘carrot and stick’ response from the Kremlin