by Philipp Blom
Lenin’s government, then still resident in Petrograd, sensed that the Kronstadt sailors were mounting a serious challenge to its authority. Initially they dispatched some of their highest-ranking commissars—Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee and formally the head of state, and Nikolai Nikolayevich Kuzmin, political commissar of the Baltic fleet—to save the situation by talking to the men during an outside meeting held on March 1, at which fifteen thousand people were present despite the icy temperatures. Initially all went well. The delegation was met by a military band and an honor guard carrying banners, and the meeting began peacefully. But when the sailors’ resolution was read and Kalinin began to speak against it, the atmosphere changed. He was heckled and jeered, his voice drowned out by whistling and taunts.
A seasoned speaker, Kuzmin next attempted to get the crowd on his side by reminding them of their heroic deeds during the revolution. But his tactic backfired when a voice from the audience called out, “Have you forgotten how you had every tenth man shot on the northern front? Away with him!” There had indeed been such atrocities during the war, and Kuzmin had been a commissar on the northern front. In one instance, a detachment of recruits attempting to flee had been intercepted, and the commander and every tenth man condemned to death and shot on Trotsky’s personal orders.
Kuzmin reacted unrepentantly: “The working people have always shot traitors to the cause, and they will continue to shoot them in future!” he shouted to a howling chorus of jeers and threats.3 When Kuzmin had finished and stepped down in front of his increasingly hostile audience, the rostrum belonged to the sailors, who one after the next decried the government and called for greater freedoms and greater equality between privileged party officials and ordinary workers. The resolution was accepted by a huge majority, and the assembly decided to send another delegation to the capital to make their demands known to the population.
During the following days the situation continued to escalate. The seamen elected their own soviet, declaring the official ruling body invalid. Kuzmin and two other officials held angry speeches and were placed under arrest by the sailors during another meeting the following day. When the rumor spread that fifteen trucks loaded with Bolshevik forces were on their way to attack the meeting, the mutiny tipped into a full-scale revolt. A Revolutionary Committee was formed to command operations, and armed men were deployed to occupy the arsenals, telephone exchange, storage depots, pumping station, Cheka headquarters, and other strategic points. The rebels decreed a curfew; all ships were under their command. With three officials in their hands as prisoners and a whole arsenal at their disposal, the Kronstadt rebellion had begun.
The government in Petrograd recognized that this challenge to its authority marked a crucial moment. After years of war the army was exhausted, and it was possible that it would not be able to control the situation if the rebellion spread to other cities and provinces, as it had done before, especially if the opponents were not White guards but soldiers who had themselves made great sacrifices to the revolution. The troops might themselves mutiny and refuse orders, endangering the very core of Soviet rule.
In what was to become an established pattern, the response of Lenin’s government was two-pronged. The Party mounted a large propaganda effort to convince the people that Kronstadt had been subverted by foreign agents and counterrevolutionary forces. Meanwhile, the army on the ground was to defeat the rebels as fast as possible, attacking the fortress before the ice could melt, which would make the rebels’ encampment practically impenetrable and give them control over all naval access to the capital. The Kronstadt sailors, whom Trotsky himself had called the “pride and glory” of the Russian Revolution, had become the most dangerous enemy of the Bolsheviks. Preparing for retaliation, Trotsky had ordered the arrest of the wives and children of the rebels as hostages.
During the following days news of sporadic mutinies in other army units appeared to confirm Lenin’s worst fears. Railway workers at Krasnoe Selo refused to work on trains used to send soldiers against the garrison, the 27th Omsk Division refused orders, and an anti-Bolshevik plot at Peterhof Command School was discovered and quickly quashed. The rebels in their stronghold, meanwhile, appeared more determined than ever. But their stand against the Bolshevik government did not receive any substantial support. Exhausted by war and hunger, the workers of Petrograd, whose strike had set the events in motion, did not rise against the government. Moreover, supplies on the island were quickly running out. They had little fuel or ammunition left, not enough food, and almost no winter clothes, and the long watches and sleepless nights had exhausted even the most battle-hardened men. They had waited in vain for help from outside. The impregnable fortress was beginning to look like a death trap.
When the decisive assault finally came during the night of March 16 to 17, some fifty thousand soldiers advanced in thick fog against the island, a move that had been preceded by a prolonged bombardment. When the first units reached the outlying forts around 5:00 a.m., moving forward on all fours over the now waterlogged ice, the rebels illuminated the advancing soldiers with flares and searchlights and pleaded with them to join them in their fight. Only when the advancing soldiers rushed the battlements with bayonets did those in the fortress open fire, inflicting heavy casualties.
Throughout that day, wave upon wave of attackers were rebutted by the desperate rebels, who used their artillery to turn the expanse around the fort into a cold cemetery for hundreds of advancing soldiers. Retreating soldiers were shot on the spot by their own officers, who were determined to press on. Eventually the sheer number of attackers overwhelmed the defenses, and as the walls were breached, the battle in the open turned into a series of dogged street fights, with the sailors being pushed back house by house. At around 4:00 p.m., the rebels once again mustered all their forces and actually succeeded in driving the attackers off the island, but the fresh supplies of soldiers on the other side proved too much for them. Under cover of night, eight hundred defenders escaped across the ice to Finland. During the next day, ten times that number made their way to safety. The rebellion was defeated.
The human cost of the assault was dramatic. While estimates vary widely (official Communist Party figures cite seven hundred Red casualties, others twenty-five thousand), probably ten thousand Bolshevik soldiers were killed in the assault, with thousands more wounded. Among the rebels, only about six hundred were killed, and another twenty-five hundred taken prisoner. Most of these were shot without trial over the ensuing weeks, while some were sent to gulags, sometimes with their entire families, including children. The fate of Kronstadt was intended to send a signal to insurrectionaries everywhere.
The signal was received, and it changed the fledgling Soviet regime. It was perfectly clear now that Lenin’s government was prepared to crush any demand for participatory government, any challenge to his power.
Death in the Forest
FOR THE GOVERNMENT, Kronstadt was an opportunity to root out opposition on all levels of society, and the rebellion itself was followed by a wave of terror, including arrests, torture, and executions. To provide an official reason for it all, Soviet propagandists once again prepared public opinion in advance for the horror that was to come. An international anti-Bolshevik conspiracy was concocted, and duly uncovered with great fanfare. Its mastermind was declared to be Vladimir Nikolaevich Tagantsev, a professor of geography and glacier expert with no interest in politics. His name had been found among dozens of others in the address book of a spy killed at the Finnish border. This was enough for the Cheka to frame Tagantsev as the mastermind of a plot to overthrow the government, a plot with connections far into the ranks of Petrograd’s intelligentsia.
On May 31, 1922, barely a week after the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, the gentle geographer was arrested on charges of high treason and taken to a Cheka prison, where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated frequently, and also tortured. In June he attempted to hang h
imself in his cell but was discovered by the guards. Soon afterward the local Cheka commander offered him a deal: leniency for him and immunity from prosecution for all members of the conspiracy he would name. The amnesty came in writing, signed by high-ranking officials. Exhausted by torture and anguish, Tagantsev relented and named names—most likely simply those of people he knew (or knew of), or names that had been suggested to him by his interrogators.
The amnesty, of course, proved to be no more than a ruse for compiling a list that effectively comprised much of Petrograd’s intellectual elite, men and women who had long been suspected by the Bolsheviks of being of questionable loyalty to the Revolution. Now the arrests could begin. Eight hundred people in all were bundled away by Cheka units for questioning, among them Nikolay Gumilev, a respected poet and the former husband of Anna Akhmatova, herself a blazing star in Russia’s poetic firmament. On August 25 Tagantsev and his wife, Gumilev, and some sixty others were taken from their cells and driven to the Kovalevsky Forest outside Petrograd, where they were shot. Altogether some thirty thousand men and women were executed there between 1918 and the mid-1920s, most of them without trial. It is estimated that forty-five hundred bodies still lie there in the forest, in unmarked mass graves.
Surviving the “vegetarian years”: During the 1920s, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova subsisted on bread and tea.
Gumilev had been a well-known and influential poet who deeply influenced the poets Osip Mandelstam and the young Vladimir Nabokov, among others. But in the poisonous climate of Soviet Russia, fame could prove to be a contagious affliction. Akhmatova had been married to him for only a few years, but she had a son with him. Now her association with a man convicted of crimes against the fatherland and the revolution stifled her own life and put her in grave danger.
At the time her former husband was shot, Akhmatova was thirty-two and working as a librarian at the Agronomic Institute. What she earned there was barely enough to keep her alive; for years she lived on a diet of bread and tea, a time she would later refer to as her “vegetarian years.”
Kronstadt and its repressive aftermath were in more than one way the end of the Russian Revolution. The ruthless killing of the survivors and the invented conspiracy followed by another wave of executions made it absolutely clear that the Bolshevik leadership was not interested in participative decision making by local and democratically elected soviets, but was going to rule with an iron fist.
Lenin, who had kept in the background during the rebellion itself, was shrewd enough to understand that his austerity regime of war communism needed some tempering in order to forestall further uprisings, which might prove too much for both the fighting power and the loyalty of his exhausted army. He described the rebellion as a “lightning flash” telling him what he had to do to move the regime forward, but though he loosened the reins a little, he nevertheless kept them firmly in his grip. Having conducted his policy of war communism in part as a war on the peasantry, who saw their grain impounded and whose productivity had slumped by more than a third, the regime now allowed some small-scale grain and craft production and trading, which improved the situation in the countryside and softened the population’s desperation.
Lenin’s grip was slipping, however, a result of his deteriorating health. He had never quite recovered from an attempt on his life in 1918, and in contrast to his former legendary energy, he now frequently felt a crippling tiredness that forced him to take extended breaks in Gorky, his country seat, away from the center of power. In 1922 he succeeded in imposing his personal protégé as Party secretary; Joseph Stalin was a hard leader and a dangerous man, but Lenin trusted him. Later that year, Lenin suffered his first stroke, and further attacks in December left him almost incapacitated. From his wheelchair he had to watch how his comrade Stalin was rebuilding the Party machine in his image. Left without the power to speak after another stroke in early 1923, Lenin nevertheless attempted to remove Stalin from power and made it known that Trotsky would be his favorite for his succession, but it was too late. When Lenin died on January 21, 1924, Stalin’s power was almost absolute.
The Mummified Revolution
AS A YOUNG MAN, Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Party and the new leader of the revolution, had studied at an Orthodox seminary, intending to be a priest. He knew about the power and importance of religious symbols. His relationship with Lenin had been ambivalent at the best of times, and during Lenin’s decline Stalin had disregarded Lenin’s orders and worked to cement his own power. Now, however, Stalin saw that this was his chance to create a saint, an icon of the revolution, and a powerful myth. The body of Lenin, who had died in Gorky, was transported back to Moscow and lay in state for three days in Red Square, during which more than two million people came to pay their respects. Then, after an official funeral celebration, the body was given to scientists.
The plan to preserve Lenin’s body had been conceived by two people in particular: Leonid Krasin, people’s commissar for foreign trade, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who held the position of commissar of enlightenment and who together with the writer Maksim Gorky had earlier been part of the “god builders,” an offshoot of socialism seeking to convert socialist thought into a formal religion with its own rituals, observances, and dogmas. There had been serious consideration given to preserving Lenin’s body cryonically, with a view to resurrecting the great leader when scientific advances would allow it, but finally Lunacharsky and Krasin, the latter a refrigeration engineer by training, decided that the body should be embalmed instead—a fitting symbol for the state of the revolution. A mausoleum was constructed on Red Square, a squat structure of cubes strongly reminiscent of a pyramid, in which the embalmed body of the leader would await eternity and the coming of the paradise of peasants and workers.
The eschatological hope inherent in the religious symbolism of Lenin’s last resting place was by no means accidental. His wartime policy had been built in part on the quasi certainty that Russia was only the prelude to a worldwide revolution which appeared imminent. As a devastating war turned into an uncertain and often violent peace, however, the world revolution failed to materialize.
For the Soviet leadership the failure of a global revolution not only flew in the face of all their prophecies but also forced them to rethink their own regime, much as the church fathers had done almost two thousand years earlier, when it became clear that the imminent expectation of the Last Judgment would have to be deferred and the church be put on a more solid institutional foundation.
Even if hopes of a world revolution were fading rapidly, in 1921 they were not quite dead. As the sailors in Kronstadt rebelled against their own leadership, thousands of German workers rose against the young and still fragile Weimar Republic, which had already almost miraculously survived a series of coups and armed uprisings from the left and the right.
The uprising was part of a plan to expedite the judgment day of capitalism. To make certain that matters would run smoothly, Lenin had sent one of his most trusted lieutenants, the Galician Comintern member Karl Radek, the highest-ranking foreigner in the Soviet hierarchy. Born into a Jewish family in Lemberg (today Lviv in Ukraine), Radek was an old hand at organization and agitation. He took a leading role in the efforts to convince the workers in the Halle region in eastern Germany to rise against the capitalist yoke. The location of this effort had been carefully chosen. Nowhere else was the Communist Party as strong as in this mining district. In the 1921 county elections the party received 30 percent of the vote and was the strongest political force in Halle, a city with just under two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom sixty-seven thousand were card-carrying Party members.
March Is the Cruelest Month
THE “MARCH ACTION” was planned in advance, with inflammatory rhetoric spread through communist and bourgeois newspapers as well as on the streets. When the police found a large unexploded bomb at the foot of the Siegessäule in Berlin, the monument commemorating victory over France in 1870, the matter
seemed clear: the explosives were wrapped in pages from a local newspaper from the Halle region. The authorities decided to transfer armed police units to the area in order to keep the situation under control.
For the communist organizers, the heavy-handed police raids and roadblocks springing up in and around Halle and Merseburg were the ideal excuse for action, and soon a series of terrorist acts commenced that, according to revolutionary theory, would destabilize bourgeois power and call the workers to the cause. But the train derailments that killed innocent passengers, the bombings and arson attacks that targeted not just the houses of factory owners but also police stations and the palaces of justice in Leipzig and Dresden, the widespread lootings, and the multiple bank robberies did not cause the revolutionary masses to stream into the streets in a gigantic show of solidarity, and the general strike demanded by the communist press was implemented only patchily and halfheartedly. The revolution was refusing to take off.
In the end, only a single factory was transformed by its workers into a bastion of the armed rebellion. In a military-style operation (many of its workers had been at the front only three years earlier), the Leuna chemical works were closed off with trenches dug around the factory entrances; they even went so far as to turn a train into a mobile fortress equipped with machine guns.
