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The October Revolution of 1917 almost failed due to the absence of the beacon.
For in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd, which the Bolsheviks had occupied in the meantime, there were neither functional artillery nor lamps to give the comrades in front of the Winter Palace the signal for a decisive attack.
Then the sailors of the armored cruiser "Aurora" took action and fired a blind shot.
Thus the soldiers of the Kronstadt naval base became “the glory and pride of the revolution”, as Leon Trotsky put it.
Having risen to become commander in chief of the Red Army, a good three years later Lenin's comrade had the thankless task of eliminating these elite soldiers of the Bolsheviks.
For they had dared to remind the communists of "all the great and bright promises" with which they had put their way into power.
The crew of the armored cruiser "Aurora" (around 1917)
Source: picture-alliance / RIA Novosti
The Kronstadt sailors' uprising, which shook Soviet power in Russia in February and March 1921, is often described as an attack “from the left”.
This suggests that the Soviet government had to defend itself in the civil war not only against “right-wing” whites - Tsarist generals, citizens, kulaks, Cossacks - but also against radical revolutionaries for whom Bolshevism was not enough.
It was not for nothing that they were defamed as "mutineers".
In fact, however, the sailors demanded free elections, freedom of expression and assembly, the release of political prisoners and the end of terror against dissenters, albeit not from a bourgeois but from a council perspective.
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After more than three years of civil war, only the dictatorship and the torture chambers of the Cheka remained of the great promises of the revolution, as the secret police founded in 1917 was called, which now numbered around 137,000.
The armies of the Central Powers and the foreign expeditionary corps had been repulsed, attempts to separate many nations from Ukraine to Central Asia had been brutally ended and the white armies had been annihilated.
At the same time, the Bolsheviks had used the war to expand the one-party state and to bring all possible competitors into line or to liquidate them.
At the same time, a central economic control system was introduced, which deprived the workers of their last say and made the farmers subject to fixed delivery quotas.
As a result, industrial production and crop yields collapsed dramatically.
Famines were rampant, which ended up killing several million people.
In the countryside, farmers formed gangs and violently opposed the requisitions by the state.
In the province of Tambov, for example, a real uprising developed.
The industrial proletariat, that is, those on whose behalf the Bolsheviks pretended to act, rose.
After the bread rations had been cut by a third in January 1921, mass strikes and party withdrawals broke out in Moscow, Petrograd and other cities.
For a long time it was no longer a question of better supply, but also of the reintroduction of free trade, new elections for the councils (Soviets) and an end to repression and the Soviet dictatorship in general.
"The Snake": Depiction of the dramatic supply situation in Russia in 1921
Source: picture alliance / Heritage Imag
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This development was also observed very closely in Kronstadt.
The fortress in the Gulf of Finland was once built by Tsar Peter the Great to cover the seaside of St. Petersburg.
During the First World War, Kronstadt served as the base for the Baltic fleet.
Inactivity and the lifestyle and sadism of the officers turned the ships - like those of the German deep-sea fleet - into revolutionary powder kegs that exploded in February 1917.
The sailors murdered their officers and sided with the revolution, first in the revolt against the Tsar in February, then in October (according to the Julian calendar) in the uprising against the Provisional Government.
The sailors were young, most of them could read and write, and they had joined the Bolsheviks early on.
But they formed their own soldiers' council, kept their distance from the Petrograd party hierarchy and despised their new commander, who indulged in a luxurious lifestyle with his wife.
In turn, his people were “the embodiment of the devil, the terrifying specter of anarchy, the nightmarish rebirth of the Paris Commune on Russian soil”.
“All power to the Soviets - no power to the party”: Kronstadt sailors
Source: picture alliance / Ria Novosti / S
The sailors closely followed what was happening in their neighborhood.
Martial law was declared on Petrograd on February 24th.
On February 27, there was a proclamation of the workers who “did not want to live according to the decrees of the Bolsheviks, but wanted to determine their own fate” and, in addition to the “release of all arrested socialists”, the “freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who work “Demanded.
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The sailors followed suit the next day, but with the hint that they would continue to be willing to cooperate with the Bolsheviks in a new council coalition to be elected.
The demand “All power to the Soviets - no power of the party” showed that Kronstadt was not embracing the ideal of a bourgeois but of a proletarian revolution.
The battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" in the port of Kronstadt (1921)
Source: Wikipedia / Public Domain
When Mikhail Kalinin, as the top functionary of the Communist Party and formal head of state, tried to appease the sailors, he was booed.
Lenin raged, ridiculed the sailors as "peasant boys in sailors' uniform" and charged Trotsky with solving the problem by force.
He threatened the "mutineers" that they would be "shot down like rabbits" if they did not surrender immediately, and after the ultimatum had expired, he instructed the experienced General Mikhail Tukhachevsky to carry out the attack.
Time was pressing because the ice in the Gulf of Finland was already beginning to thaw.
On March 8, 13,000 Red Army soldiers stormed over eight kilometers towards the island, only protected by heavy snowfall.
Around 24,000 sailors and soldiers were holed up there behind fortress walls and barbed wire barricades, and the grenades of the two battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" hit gullies in the ice.
In order to prevent his soldiers from deserting, Tukhachevsky had to use Cheka commandos with machine guns, writes the British historian Orlando Figes.
"When the snowstorm subsided, it became apparent that the huge ice surface was covered with corpses."
Red Army soldiers during the storming of Kronstadt in March 1921
Source: Wikipedia / Public Domain
On the same day, the Kronstadters formulated their political testament in a resolution: "Working Russia, which was the first state to raise the red flag of labor liberation, is overflowing with the blood of those who were tormented to death in the glory of communist rule."
The sailors should find out soon too.
On March 17, 30,000 Red Army soldiers stormed to the island again after heavy artillery preparation.
2,000 men are said to have died on both sides, at least as many defenders were shot immediately, others ended up in the first camps of the Gulag.
Several thousand were able to flee to Finland, whose government has insisted that the piles of corpses be removed from the ice in order to prevent a hygienic disaster.
Kronstadt after the conquest by the Red Army
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
That was the end of the last great opposition movement against the Soviet regime.
At the 10th Party Congress of the Communist Party, which was meeting in Moscow at the same time, Lenin drew the conclusions.
On the one hand, with the “New Economic Policy” (NEP), he announced a departure from the socialist maximum program and allowed farmers and businesses to profit-oriented production.
At the same time, with the prohibition of fractionism, all party groups independent of the Central Committee were eliminated and with it the remnants of internal party freedom.
A general secretariat was set up to enforce this.
Its first boss was Josef Stalin.
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