The source of the fracture between the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt sailors was that the latter did not fit the Bolshevik notion of “advanced” workers, i.e. schooled in Marxism, disciplined, productivist and loyal to the vanguard party. To the extent they had a specific ideology it was a localist, libertarian socialism. Their proximity to the labour movement of Petrograd kept them politically attuned and their military skills gave them enormous leverage when it counted. In his introduction to Ida Mett’s classic work on the uprising, Murray Bookchin characterised the social milieu of the Kronstadt base, noting that “Its living traditions and its close contact with ‘Red Petrograd’ served to anneal men of nearly all strata into revolutionaries”.4 Right up to 1921 no one questioned this. In October 1920, five months before the rebellion, the sailors of “Red Kronstadt” led the third anniversary celebrations of October 1917 in Petrograd.
Yet Petrograd was now lost to the Bolsheviks. Jonathan Aves records that by early February 1921 “strikes were becoming an everyday occurrence”, so much so that the Bolsheviks responded with a military clampdown and mass arrests.5 General Strikes also broke out in Moscow, Saratov and Ekaterinoslavl. These were not simply work stoppages. They were mass social unrest that encompassed “factory occupations, ‘Italian Strikes’, demonstrations, mass meetings, the beating up of Communists and so on”.6 Striking railway workers sent emissaries along the tracks to spread the action. The strikers’ demands expanded to holding free Soviet elections in which other socialist parties could stand. Red Army units sent to crush the railwaymen refused orders to fire on them and were replaced by reliable RCP detachments.
On 23rd February Moscow was placed under martial law, with RCP units putting factories under 24-hour guard.7 After a General Strike in Saratov was suppressed it too was placed under martial law. Petrograd had been under unofficial martial law for some time. In Avrich’s estimation, in February 1921 “an open breach occurred between the Bolshevik regime and its principal mainstay of support, the working class”.8
The sailors had their own specific grievances. On 15th February, 1921 the Second Conference of Communist Sailors of the Baltic Fleet, composed of 300 delegates, passed a resolution which condemned the work of the Political Section of the Baltic Fleet (Poubalt) and decreed, “Poubalt has not only separated itself from the masses but from the active functionaries”. In the latter half of 1920 over 20% of RCP members in the Fleet resigned from the party. The resolution stated, “The cause is to be found in the very principle of Poubalt’s organisation. These principles must be changed in the direction of greater democracy”.9 The RCP ignored the sailors. As a result they turned against those who had been their idols and leaders in 1917–Trotsky and their former leader Raskolnikov, now a senior party figure with a lifestyle to match. In February 1921 a further 5,000 sailors left the RCP in protest.
Alexander Berkman, who had arrived in Russia with Emma Goldman in late 1919, was in Petrograd at the time, desperately trying to maintain his faith in the revolution. He recorded in his diary that on 23rd February a strike broke out at the large Trubotchny Mill. Even though Zinoviev sent RCP students to break the strike, it spread to the Baltisky and Laferma tobacco factories, the Skorohod shoe factory, the Baltic and Patronny metal plants, and on 28th February to the enormous Putilov Works itself. The strikers’ economic demands included more efficient food supply, the withdrawal of roadblocks around the city and freedom to travel outside the city to a radius of 30 miles. Their political demands included freedom of speech and the press, and the freeing of working-class and socialist political prisoners. The response was immediate. On 24th February an RCP-convened “Committee of Defence” declared a “state of siege” in Petrograd, imposing an 11pm curfew and a total ban on any political meetings indoors or outdoors. Strike leaders were arrested.
On 26th February the Kronstadt sailors sent emissaries to Petrograd to investigate. They found factories surrounded by troops. One of the sailors’ leading activists, Chief Quartermaster of the battleship Petropavlovsk Stepan Petrichenko, an experienced seaman who had joined the navy in 1912 and played a key role in 1917, wrote, “One might have thought that these were not factories but the forced labour prisons of Tsarist times”.10 On 28th Februaru they returned to the naval base with a report of the suppression of the strikes. After hearing the report, the sailors of the Petropavlovsk called a mass meeting and passed a resolution which would function as the core programme of the Kronstadt rebellion.
The resolution demanded new Soviet elections by secret ballot and accompanied by free election propaganda; freedom of speech and of the press for all workers and peasants, as well as for “anarchists and left socialist parties”; freedom of assembly for trade union and peasant organisations; the organisation by 10th March of a conference of nonparty workers from Kronstadt, Petrograd and the Petrograd District; immediate liberation of all political prisoners from the socialist parties and those belonging to workers’ and peasants’ organisations; election of a commission to investigate the cases of all detained in prison and concentration camps on political charges; equalisation of rations for all workers; granting of “freedom of action” to peasants on their own land; and abolition of all political sections within the armed forces.11
Aside from one, none of the grievances even touched on navy matters. They were written to reflect the needs and wishes of the mass of workers and peasants. Bookchin concluded that “the demands of the Kronstadt sailors were not formulated in the fastness of an isolated island in the Gulf of Finland; they were developed as a result of close contact between the naval base and the restless Petrograd workers, whose demands the 15-point programme essentially articulated”. They were, in fact, no more than the minimum the Bolsheviks had promised Russian workers and peasants when they assumed power in October 1917. They also, though there had been no collusion between them, chimed perfectly with the “industrial” demands of the Workers’ Opposition. Between them the Kronstadt sailors and the Workers’ Opposition proposed a programme of renewed working-class democracy that sought to lessen and eventually supersede the one-party dictatorship of the RCP.
The Kronstadt sailors set up a “Provisional Revolutionary Committee” consisting of militant sailors of long service (i.e. service began before 1917), with a remit to administer both the town and the fortress of Kronstadt. Petrichencko was elected Chair. Amongst the Committee were Arkhipov, Chief Engineer of the battleship Sebastopol; Ossosonov, a boilerman of the Sebastopol; Perepelkin, an electrician on the Sebastopol; Romanchenko, a dock maintenance worker; Valk, a sawmill worker; Pavlov, a worker in the Marine Mining Shop; Kilgast, a Harbour Pilot; Boikev, head of the Building Section of the Kronstadt Fortress; Koupolov, the head male nurse at Kronstadt; and Yakovenko, the liaison telephonist to the Kronstadt Section.
The first thing the Committee did was submit a proposal to the Anchor Square assembly to hold new Soviet elections. On 2nd March a conference was held to conduct the elections, with 300 delegates attending, two from each ship, military unit, factory and trade union. The procedures were scrupulously democratic. Communists were not allowed to dominate proceedings or to weight the delegates in their favour. On 3rd March the Revolutionary Committee started to publish its own newspaper. In the first edition, Petrichenko wrote, “The task of the Committee is to organise in the city and fortress, through friendly and cooperative effort, the conditions for fair and proper elections to the new Soviet”.