5 - All Power to Soviets

Summary

Late in the evening of 24 October came the eagerly awaited telephone call from the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) summoning ‘the armed forces of Kronstadt to come at dawn to the defence of the [Second] Congress of Soviets’ which, convened the next day, was to give official Soviet sanction to the seizure of power. Lazar Bregman and Nikolai Gorelnikov, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Kronstadt Soviet and of its Military-Technical Commission, immediately ordered Kronstadt's expeditionary force, ‘ships, units, detachments, crews and their commanders’, to proceed to Petrograd ‘in defence of the revolution and in support of the Revolutionary Committee, and in accordance with its orders’. They also radioed a message ‘to all’ that ‘The Petrograd Soviet is in danger’ and that ‘military cadets, together with other dark elements’, were preparing an attack.

When the morning of 25 October came, Ivan Flerovsky, Kronstadt's number one Bolshevik and its liaison with the Petrograd MRC, had good reason to feel proud and exhilarated when, together with Yarchuk, he reviewed the force of some 5,000 heavily armed sailors and soldiers (3,825 sailors and 943 soldiers) in Anchor Square and watched them board the ships and landing craft.