The uprising in Kronstadt, and the story of my great-grandfather

90 years ago on the island before the Petrograd Kotlin raged change. Dissatisfied komissaroderzhaviem and general poverty, the sailors penetrated anarchist ideas. In just three years before attending the October Revolution with the Bolsheviks, the sailors now have rebelled against the Bolshevik government. The rebels were in favor of Soviet power, for the transfer of land to peasants for the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and release of political prisoners. In contrast to today's Russia, then in the twenty-first year of the anarchist in its essence the idea of ​​easily met with popular support.

In Kronstadt, the people's power and freedom to maintain one and all: the sailors, soldiers, officers and, of course, ordinary people, who constituted about one-third of 24-thousand population of the island.

Rebellion (more Kronshatdtskim Provisional Revolutionary Committee. - Ed.) Supervised Stepan Maksimovich Petrichenko, senior clerk battleship Petropavlovsk.

The Bolshevik government flatly refused any negotiations with Kronstadters and harsh response to their demands.Arrived in Petrograd to negotiate the sailors were arrested, the family members of the Military Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt sent into exile. Eighth March Red Army attacked Kronstadt to crush the revolution.

Case solved within days. In the Gulf of Finland is about to have to melt the ice, and this could prevent the onset of the Bolsheviks on the ice. Part of the Red Army soldiers refused to fire on the insurgents, because they supported the demands of the rebels. Kronstadt had hoped that the rebellion soon spread to Petrograd, and waited for support from the mainland.

Time, however, was too small.While on the mainland, too, were starving and suffering from dictatorship komissaroderzhaviya, the revolt had not had time to spread. Ice is also not had time to melt. As a result, the troops under the command of Trotsky drowned the rebellion in blood. Approximately six to eight thousand rebels managed to escape across the ice on the coast of Finland.

The Kronstadt rebellion is familiar both Russian and foreign anarchists. Many of them have ever roamed the Kronstadt, breathed the winds of revolution and represent yourself in the place of sailors on a winter island.I myself, too, sometimes I walk around the island and think: what would happen if the ice melted a few weeks earlier? Had time to revolt spread to the mainland and spread to the whole of Russia? We would live now in an anarchist society? (Program Kronstadt was not a purely anarchist, but rather levosotsialisticheskoy, anarchist-SR. - Ed.)

But the ice was tough and the Bolsheviks won.By anarchist Kronstadt Commune remained only a memory. While in Kronstadt seems that even the memory remains. Monuments to the rebels on the island you will not find, no matter how look. Who just are not set there obelisks - from Lenin to Aivazovsky.

In the town square is lit an eternal flame in memory of those killed during the Kronstadt revolt ... Red Army soldiers. The Kronstadt rebels also were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery of Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg.

In the footsteps of my great-grandfather

... About five years ago, the uprising in Kronstadt was for me and personal significance.Mom, suspecting nothing, went to the cinema to watch a documentary about the Kronstadt refugees. In the middle of the film, considering the photos of baleen rebels, she suddenly realized: "This is my grandfather!".

And, indeed, out there somewhere and he was, the grandfather of my mother, my great-grandfather - Hilary Osipovich Petrov. About this man and his past my family knows very little. It was known that he was born somewhere in the current Gomel, Belarus.In Finland, he came across the ice, because it "did not like the Soviet government and the army," as he's great-grandfather.

In Finland, Hilary married IINS, and soon they had children: Elizabeth, Vera, and Leo. Because of the repression and discrimination against the Russian, the family took a Finnish surname. Great-grandfather secretly taught Finnish language, and their life was the same as that of a normal Finnish family. None by themselves, and did not ask about his past, his great-grandfather. In Finland, the thirty-forties Belarusian roots were considered as a kind of disgrace, which sought better to forget.

Mom remembers how his great-grandfather always began telling a story in Russian: "Once upon a grandfather and a woman, and had their chicken-ryaba ...», or as he sang the sad Russian songs for the bath, while chopping wood.Aunt Vera remembers that he was afraid of all the panic of the authorities. He had a temporary residence permit, but the Finnish citizenship and did not dare draw - feared exile in Siberia.

Great-grandfather left behind a lot of letters and photographs of their relatives. They were stored until the seventies in the attic in a big box.But when Aunt Faith had moved from their home of his grandfather and grandmother in a city apartment, she burned all the excess - including the box with all contents. After all, nobody still does not understand these letters, and people in the photos - nobody knows, she thought.

About this event I am now very sorry. How much more we would know about my grandfather, if letters are preserved. Possibly would have survived and addresses of relatives. Maybe a subconscious fear of exile in Siberia passed from my grandfather and his daughter, Aunt Vera, who burned the letter.

A few tattered photographs of relatives survived my mom.Sometimes we get them and read the suggestions on the reverse side. "Illarionu from Uncle Vanya, Masha and Viti. Happy New Year! "Reflect on how to find the images in the photographs of relatives or their descendants, among hundreds Petrovs Gomel region. Maybe someone of them could tell us more about the history of Hilarion.

Through the director of a documentary film to my mother managed to get out of Vyborg archive material about the Kronstadt refugees.According to the documents, great grandfather was detained along with other insurgents in Zelenogorsk in 1921, and placed in the well-known for their brutality prison camp on the island Turkinsaari. From there, he, as he had a profession, was transferred to Kurkiyoksky district, where he began working as a cobbler. From the same from Kurkiyoki, born and my great-grandmother IINS. Since then, the story we already know.

But what happened in the life of Hilarion Osipovich before he fled across the ice and was in camp on Turkinsaari? What is its role in the Kronstadt mutiny? Maybe he was once a different name?

Maybe it had something to do with one of the leaders of the uprising, Petrichenko, whose relatives were arrested in the same region of Gomel in Belarus? As my grandfather came from Belarus in Kronstadt? Was he one of the anarchist sailors? I'm afraid these questions remain forever unanswered. Or do I still've ever met their relatives from the Gomel region ...

Tuuli Hakulinen

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