It was the first weeks of March, 1921 in the new Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
Kronstadt was and still is a naval fortress on an island in the Gulf of Finland. It served as headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet during Tsarist times and was built to protect the aproach from the sea to St. Petersburg, some 30 miles away. In 1921, St. Petersburg was called Petrograd, later to be changed to Leningrad and then back to St. Petersburg.
The Kronstadt sailors had been in the vanguard of the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917. In 1917, the sailors again joined revolutionary forces and fired upon the Winter Palace from battleships at sea. Trotsky called them the “pride and glory of the Russian Revolution.” The inhabitants of Kronstadt had been early supporters and practitioners of soviet power, forming a free commune in 1917 which was relatively independent of the…
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