On this day in 1921 the Kronstadt Rebellion was crushed by the deployment of 60,000 troops of the Red Army. Most of the 10,000 sailors and 5,000 soldiers who were part of the uprising surrendered, but some fled over the frozen Gulf of Finland towards Helsinki, where 800 went arrived. The distance was over 150 miles. The siege itself resulted in 11,000 casualties.
Some news outlets in the United States claimed that the sailors were fighting for the restoration of Krensky's government, but this was far off the mark. The revolutionary sailors had anarchist sympathies but more than anything else they called into question the Communists fidelity to the ideals of the revolution, something well worth questioning given their exploitation of nearly everything.
On the same day the Soviet Russian government negotiated a ceasefire with the Georgian Menshevik government, allowing the government to go into exile.
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