Word: kronstadt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEIR REVOLT was crushed in short order. But then, no regime can tolerate for long an uprising of its own praetorian guard, and when a group of sailors at Kronstadt confronted the Bolsheviks with cries of unfilled promises and scorn for falsified slogans, the government had no choice but to act fast...
...fortress was more vital to the defense of the Soviet nation than the enclave of battleships and guns at Kronstadt. Perched on an island in the Gulf of Fniland 20 miles off Petrograd, it guarded the naval approaches to Russia's largest and former capital city, and its capture could place an enemy within easy grasp of the country's industrial and intellectual center...
Falsely, perhaps, Soviet authorities had felt they could depend on the Kronstadt sailors to uphold the gains of the Bolshevik victory. Inveterate enemies of Tsarist autocracy, the sailors had risen decisively against both Nicholas and the mildly reformist Provisional Government. They had propelled the Communists to victory at the Winter Palace, and the valiant support which they rendered the fledgling regime during the stormy days after the October insurrection had prompted Minister of War Leon Trotsky to hail them as "the pride and glory of the revolution...
Landan claims that "much of the onus for the oppressive social and political atmosphere in the Soviet Union today must necessarily rest with Stalin's successors." Who then was responsible for crushing the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, where revolutionary sailors called for implementation of Lenin's own slogan of "All Power to the Soviets" and were massacred by troops sent by Lenin and commanded by Trotsky? Who shifted the practice of the Third International from prompting international revolution to defending the national interests of the Soviet government and attempting to change the course of other revolutionary movements by executive fiat...