Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, Series Number 37)

This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. Professor Getzler argues that the Kronstadters' 'Third Revolution' of March 1921 was a desperate attempt at a restoration of that Soviet democracy which they believed had been taken from them by Bolshevik 'commissarocracy'. Pointing to continuity in personnel, ideology and institutions linking the 1917–18 Kronstadt experiment in Soviet democracy with the March 1921 uprising, the author sees that continuity reflected in the Kronstadt tragedy's central figure, the long-haired, dreamy-eyed student Anatolii Lamanov. Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917 and chief editor of its Izvestiia, Lamanov became the ideologist of the 1921 uprising and was soon after executed as a 'counter-revolutionary'. Kronstadt, fortress, naval base and port town on the island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland, situated some twenty miles from Petersburg and protecting the capital from the sea, entered the Russian February revolution of 1917 with a population of some 82,000 (20,000 soldiers, 12,000 sailors and 50,000 civilian inhabitants) and a formidable reputation for severe regimentation, revolutionary unrest, mutiny and repression, and thorough disaffection. This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. This book focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. This is a major study of revolutionary Kronstadt, spanning the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918