Without the Kronstadt sailors October 1917 may have turned out differently. The Kronstadt sailors were an active support base for the Bolsheviks. Trotsky summed up their importance by labeling them “the pride and joy of the revolution.”

By early 1921 Trotsky’s view of the sailors had changed. The Kronstadt sailors had to be crushed. The authoritarian government could not allow dissent and the Kronstadt sailors were a major source of dissent. They had first voiced economic concerns and then they aired political concerns. Helene Carrere d’Encausse writes that the sailors took up the slogan “The Soviet without the Communists.” On February 28, 1921 sailors drafted a resolution, according to Victor Sebestyen, that included “free elections to a new parliament, free trade unions independent of the Communist Party, a free press, the abolition of the Cheka – and a range of other broadly democratic reforms.“ While calls for higher pay and more food rations could be tolerated to an extent a direct attack on the political power of the Regime could not be. The leader of the Kronstadt sailors was Stephan Petrichenko.

Lenin told Trotsky “This is a rebellion and they must be shown no mercy. They must be destroyed. There will be no compromise” d’Encausse states “from every viewpoint it was unthinkable, impossible to accept that the working class, the sailors, Bolsheviks until then, could oppose the regime.” Lenin sent Trotsky and Tukhachevsky with 20,000 Red Army troops to Kronstadt. They arrived on March 4, 1921.

Before the Red Army attacked Petrichenko sent one last message to the Kremlin. As relayed by Sebestyen, Petrichenko said “Barely three years ago, you – Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and all of you – were denounced as traitors and German spies. We, the workers and sailors, had to come to your rescue and saved your skins from the Kerensky government. It is we who placed you in power. Have you forgotten that? Now you threaten us with the sword. You are playing with fire. You are repeating the blunders and crimes of Kerensky. Beware that a similar fate doesn’t overtake you.”

Tukhachevsky described the days of fighting as follows “It wasn’t a battle, but an inferno, They fought like wild beasts. I cannot understand where they found the strength for such furious rage. Every house had to be taken by storm.”

d’Encausse summarizes the days of fighting as follows: “The dead amounted to thousands on both sides. The army, which had to march over ice fields, suffered nearly 10,000 dead, wounded, or missing. After the victory, it massacred the defeated, executing those considered leaders without even the pretense of a trial. Then the Cheka judged and sentenced hundreds if not thousands of the survivors, put them before a firing squad or sent them to concentration camps.”

The sailors from Kronstadt had helped seal the Bolshevik victory in the October 1917 revolution but when they challenged the political authority of the Soviet Union they were mercilessly destroyed.

See Lenin by Helene Carrere d’Encausse and Lenin by Victor Sebestyen for more details on the Kronstadt Rebellion