May 27, 1921. Horrors in Oklahoma and Futile Acts in Russia.

The body of Anna Brown, an Osage Indian woman, in Osage County, Oklahoma led to an investigation which which ultimately determined that a large number of Osage women were killed over a period of years, but the reasons and perpetrators, and even if they were related, were largely never determined, although there white men were convicted of murders.  It is thought that the killings may have been done to effectuate inheritance to non Indians, as at the time the Osage were the wealthiest people in the world due to oil production.  As a result of that suspicion, Congress ultimately passed a bill prohibiting the inheritance rights to pass to non tribal members.

Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Mensheviks seized control of Vladivostok from Bolsheviks.  

The Mensheviks were a  more numerous Socialist group than the Bolsheviks, and less radical, which doesn't mean they were not radical.  They failed in their contest with the Bolsheviks and, by this time, they'd actually been outlawed due to the Kronstadt Rebellion.

March 17, 1921. Soviet Triumphs

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. 

March 2, 1921. Doomed rebellions and protomonarchies.

Anti Bolshevik sailors took the Kronstandt fortress, on an island, but accessible from the mainland in February due to frozen ice.

Striking miners in the Italian occupied Croatian city of Labin declared a communist republic for the town.  The rebellion is regarded as the first anti fascist rebellion in the world, but the reason for it being so regarded really isn't clear.  The city was under Italian governance at the time, but while fascism was rising in Italy, it had not yet come into control of the Italian monarchy.  The rebellion would last until April 8 when the Italian government put it down.

Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein relocated to Amman in anticipation of ruling the Emirate of Transjordan

February 28, 1921. The Kronstadt Rebellion.

Sailors had been an integral part of the Russian Revolution, and indeed they'd been an integral part of revolutions in Russia, and in Europe in general.  Revolutionary left wing sailors had revolted in Russia in 1904, 1905, 1906 and most importantly, in 1917.  Indeed, in some ways the rebellion of Russian sailors in 1917 had heralded the onset of the Russian Revolution.

All of which made the uprising that started on this day in 1921 a momentous one.  On this day, Russian sailors, taking the view that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Russian Revolution, rose up against the Communist government on the port island of Kronstadt, just off of St. Petersburg.

Communism was proving to be a disaster.  Indeed, it was such a disaster that even though the Reds had only defeated the Whites, as we now recognize that defeat, a couple of months prior, the unworkable oppressive nature of the Communist dictatorship was already apparent.  The sailors rebellion at Kronstadt was in reaction to that.

The sailors were not "White", but rather left wing revolutionaries themselves.  They were heavily influenced by a concept of localism that some regard as anarchistic, but which might be most analogous to the views of the Greens, who sought to allow individuals the greatest possible freedom in the economy and in their personal lives.  They expressed their goals in the form of fifteen published points.

These read:

Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews dispatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to learn the state of affairs in Petrograd, we decided:

1. In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.

2. Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.

3. Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.

4. To convene, not later than 1 March 1921, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.

5. To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.

6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.

7. To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state. This is the reason for the inclusion of this document in a collection otherwise devoted entirely to official publications.

8. All ‘cordon detachments” are to be abolished immediately.

9. To equalize rations for all workers, harmful sectors being excepted.

10. To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgment of the workers.

11. To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labor.

12. To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate themselves with our resolutions.

13. We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.

14. To appoint a traveling bureau for control.

15. To permit free artisan production with individual labor.

The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

President of the Meeting, PETRICHENKO.

Secretary, PEREPELKIN.

Suffice it to say, their rebellion would not be a success.  Some have noted that it hastened the implementation of Lenin's New Economic Order, but that program itself was only intended to be temporary and indeed, given Lenin's death, it certainly proved to be.

Some regard the Kronstadt Rebellion as the final practical act of the Russian Civil War.  By this point in time the Whites had been defeated in western Russia and, to a large degree, their defeat in the East was a foregone conclusion.  The rebellion, however, represented a dangerous internal threat from the left.  Had it succeeded, which it always had very little chance of doing, it would have created a more democratic left wing Russian regime, although one that was still likely to be a radical one.

On the same day, Panamanian troops halted an advance by Costa Rica in a border war that had developed between the two nations.  U.S. troops landed in Panama City to protect U.S. interest in that nation, which obviously were centered on the Canal.

France mustered troops, including colonial troops, on the German border in anticipating of occupying the Ruhr due to the failure of Germany to provide timely reparation payments.