Kronstadt (English French bilingual)

Description

On March 1, 1921, 15,000 sailors and soldiers from Kronstadt, west of Petrograd, rose up against the government of the Council of People's Commissars, the power born of the Revolution of October 1917. These sons and brothers of peasants, weary of the requisitions of food intended to feed (more and more badly) the cities and the army engaged in a civil war which ruined the country, denounce , almost unanimously, the policy of the communist party in power and stigmatize its stranglehold on the soviets which they demand the immediate renewal, through an election by secret ballot.This is the first step of an insurrection which will bring together 27,000 sailors and soldiers and will end, seventeen days later, in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Nearly 7,000 insurgents will then flee in haste. They will drag themselves along, hungry, exhausted s and chilled on the frozen sea to reach neighboring Finland, where three concentration camps awaited them, their barbed wire, lice, scabies and hunger. And they will decide, finally, for the most part, to return to Soviet Russia.