tarian Republic.” The Kronstadt movement for free Soviets was characterised by Lenin and Trotsky as “the work of Entente interventionists and French spies.” “On February 28,” the prikaz read, “there were passed by the men of the Petropavlovsk resolutions breathing the spirit of the Black Hundreds. Then there appeared on the scene the group of the former general, Kozlovsky. He and three of his officers, whose names we have not yet ascertained, have openly assumed the rôle of rebellion. Thus the meaning of recent events has become evident. Behind the Socialist–Revolutionists again stands a Tsarist general. In view of all this the Council of Labor and Defense orders: (1) To declare the former general Kozlovsky and his aides outlawed; (2) to put the City of Petrograd and the Petrograd Province under martial law; (3) to place supreme power over the whole Petrograd District into the hands of the Petrograd Committee of Defense.”
There was indeed a former general, Kozlovsky, in Kronstadt. It was Trotsky who had placed him there as an artillery specialist. He played no role whatever in the Kronstadt events, but the Bolsheviki cleverly exploited his name to denounce the sailors as enemies of the Soviet Republic and their movement as counter-revolutionary. The official Bolshevik press now began its campaign of calumny and defamation of Kronstadt as a hotbed of “White conspiracy headed by General Kozlovsky,” and Communist agitators were sent among the workers in the mills and factories of Petrograd and Moscow to call upon the proletariat “to rally to the support and defense of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government against the counter-revolutionary uprising in Kronstadt.”
Far from having anything to do with generals and counter-revolutionists, the Kronstadt sailors refused to accept aid even from the Socialist–Revolutionist Party. Its leader, Victor Tchernov, then in Reval, attempted to influence the sailors in favor of his Party and its demands, but received no encouragement from the Provisional
