Dear Julan,
The sailors at the great naval base at Kronstadt on the Gulf of Finland were in the forefront of revolution in Czarist Russia. In both 1905 and 1917, the Red sailors had played a vital role in the revolutionary uprisings and in 1919, during the civil war, they had resisted White Russian attacks on the base. But by 1921, many of those same sailors became disillusioned with the Bolshevik government that was providing Russia not with freedom but with a new form of authoritarianism. In March, 1921, the 10,000 Kronstadt sailors, led by Stepan Petrichenko, rose in revolt, declaring that Lenin and his Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution. The Leninst government mobilized 45,000 men under the command of General Mikhail Tukhachevsky and sent them against the 27,000 seamen and allied soldiers and civilian volunteers defending the naval base. The first governmental attack on March 7-8, 1921 was repulsed, with Soviet casualties of 500 killed and 2,000 wounded. It took two more major assaults before Kronstadt fell to the Bolsheviks on March 18, 1921. Some 600 mutineers were killed, 1,000 were wounded, and 2,500 taken prisoner. Official Bolshevik figures listed 1,912 killed or missing and 1,208 wounded, but other estimates put total government casualties at 10,000. In the repression that followed, April, 1921 to June, 1921, 2,103 of the Kronstadt prisoners were sentenced to death and 6,459 were imprisoned, most of whom died within a year. Kronstadt marked the last really effective resistance to Bolshevik control of Russia. Now it would be free to evolve into an ever more heinous perversion of the socialist ideal-Stalinism. Please rate my response and May God Bless-Major Robert A. Lynn, USMCR
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