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founded in 1703 by
PETER I
the Great, and the
fortress built in 1710. The sailors of Kronstadt
had a long tradition of political activism, having
mutinied in 1825 and 1882 and during the rev-
olutions of 1905 and 1917. From the time of the
1917 Revolution they had provided some of the
most ardent support to the
BOLSHEVIKS
. By 1921,
however, after three long years of economic
hardship and growing political repression, the
feeling that the Bolsheviks had lost touch with
the original goals of the Russian Revolution had
become widespread among the sailors. The
1921 uprising was a clear sign of the distance
that had developed between the regime and its
early supporters.
The revolt began in February 1921 in solidar-
ity with striking workers in Petrograd, whose
demands were met by violence from the Soviet
government. On February 28, sailors meeting
on board the battleship
Petropavlovsk
approved a
resolution that called for secret-ballot elections
open to all socialist parties, not just the Com-
munist, for the soviets, which were the center-
piece of the revolutionary democracy they had
supported in 1917. They also called for the abo-
lition of the Cheka, the political police, whose
existence, they believed, was no longer neces-
sary now that the civil war had ended. Other
demands included the abolition of
TROTSKY
's
labor armies and an end to forceful grain requi-
sitioning from the peasantry. When the Com-
munist Party responded by calling the sailors
counterrevolutionaries and demanding their
surrender, the sailors set up a Provisional Revo-
lutionary Committee. The initial Red Army
offensives against the sailors across the frozen
Gulf of Finland were successfully repelled by the
Kronstadt garrison, but eventually the sailors
were defeated on March 18.
In defeat, the revolt had two important con-
sequences. Shocked by the rebellion among its
once most loyal supporters, the Communist
Party moved to liberalize the economy after the
privations of the civil war. At the same time, it
tightened the lid on political expression by out-
lawing the remaining non-Communist parties.
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich
(1842-1921)
scientist and revolutionary
Like Mikhail
BAKUNIN
, Russia's other prominent
19th-century anarchist, Kropotkin was born into
a prominent aristocratic family. Unlike Bakunin,
he was more of a theorist than a man of action,
and he also became a respected international
scholar who made important contributions in
the field of geography. Born in Moscow and edu-
cated at an elite military school in St. Petersburg,
Kropotkin served in the army in the Far East,
where he made pioneering explorations. He
resigned his commission in 1867 and joined the
revolutionary movement, journeying from
POP
-
ULISM
to socialism to anarchism. Kropotkin was
a leading member of the Chaikovsky Circle, agi-
tating among workers in St. Petersburg and
advocating anarchist insurrection and social rev-
olution. While in Switzerland in 1872, he joined
the First International, siding with Bakunin
against Marx. Back in Russia, he was arrested in
1874 but escaped in 1876, and spent the next 40
years in western Europe. In exile, he became
one of the best-known propagandists in the
international anarchist movement, advocating a
theory of anarchist communism based on mutual
aid. Kropotkin opposed all state power and advo-
cated the abolition of states and private property,
as well as the transformation of humankind into
a federation of mutual-aid communities. He
spoke at lectures and discussions, wrote articles
in the anarchist and liberal press, and produced
pamphlets and books. He was expelled from
Switzerland in 1881 and imprisoned in France,
1883-86, before settling in London, his home for
the next three decades. As a geographer, Kropot-
kin contributed to knowledge about Manchuria
and eastern Siberia, and proved that the main
structural lines of Asia run from southwest to
northeast. Kropotkin welcomed the
FEBRUARY
REVOLUTION
of 1917 and returned to Russia the
same year. His support for the war effort and the
Provisional Government left him with little
influence after the Bolshevik revolution of Octo-
ber 1917. The
BOLSHEVIKS
made tactical use of
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