'Shot Like Partridges': The Crushing Of The Kronstadt Uprising (9 b/w photos)

[rpannier]

https://www.rferl.org/a/crushing-of-kronstadt-uprising-lenin/31102658.html

A century ago, Lenin's communists turned their guns on rebelling sailors once hailed as the "pride and glory" of the Bolshevik Revolution.


Communist fighters advance across the frozen Gulf of Finland toward the port city of Kronstadt in March 1921.


Sailors of Kronstadt during the revolutionary unrest of 1917 pose with a flag vowing "Death to the bourgeoisie."

When Kronstadt sailors were allowed to return to their villages on leave, they were confronted with the contrast between what Lenin's revolutionary socialism had promised and the horrors it delivered.


Starving villagers in the Volga region in 1920. A year earlier, Lenin had mandated the seizure of food from peasants to feed his army and supply Russian cities as part of a policy of "war communism."


The list of demands issued from the Kronstadt rebels in the spring of 1921

On February 28, as thousands of workers in Petrograd were on strike, the Kronstadt sailors piled further pressure on the ruling Bolsheviks by issuing a list of demands, including the restoration of freedom of speech -- though only for their fellow radical leftists -- and for democratic elections.


Kronstadt marines during the 1921 uprising

The Bolshevik response was to issue the sailors at Kronstadt a bloodcurdling ultimatum, threatening that if they did not surrender immediately, the rebels would be "shot like partridges."


Bolshevik military commanders "discuss the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion." A map of the island fortress can be seen in the background.

With spring approaching, the Bolshevik leadership worried that the ice around Kronstadt would melt. That would open the island fortress to resupply by sea and make the anti-communist stronghold virtually impossible to capture.


Red Army airplanes are lined up on the frozen Gulf of Finland ahead of the attacks on Kronstadt. Poor weather hampered the use of the aircraft, and their bombing runs were largely ineffective.


Bolshevik fighters, some dressed in white cloaks for camouflage, arrive on the outskirts of Kronstadt.


A Kronstadt sailor is questioned by Bolsheviks after the crushing of the rebellion.

Many of the commanders of the communist fighters would eventually suffer the same fate as the sailors. Of the four Bolsheviks who led the suppression of Kronstadt, three were later executed during Stalin's "purges." The fourth, Leon Trotsky, was killed in exile by a Stalinist assassin armed with an ice pick.

[Lars39]

1. Woman in third pic down looks like

she’s sizing the photographer for number of meals she could get out of him.

[PatSeg]

2. K&R

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

Around 8,000 sailors were able to flee across the ice to nearby Finland. Years after the uprising, some of those escapees were promised an amnesty in Stalin's Soviet Union. The men who trusted the offer and returned to their homeland were sent to gulags or executed.

[The Revolution]

4. The Great War just did a video on this

If anyone is interested:

[cyclonefence]

5. see also Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece "The Battleship Potemkin"