ABSTRACT
The victory over Wrangel’s forces in the autumn of 1920 (see Chapter 9), which marked the final defeat of White counter-revolution, failed to secure the Bolsheviks in power. Ironically, now that fear of the restoration of the old order had been removed once and for all, waves of popular opposition gripped the countryside and cities, as N.I.Podvoiskii and other leading members of the Party conceded in a hitherto unpublished memorandum to the CC on 13 February 1921. They also added their doubts about the Red Army which, unless reinforced by the creation of special detachments of reliable Communists, was unlikely to prove capable of suppressing peasant and worker revolts (Naumov and Kosakovskii 1994, 4:12–13). Events were soon to confirm their fears when at the end of February even the Kronstadt sailors of the Baltic fleet (the ‘pride and glory’ of Bolshevism during 1917 and the Civil War) rose in revolt against the Bolsheviks. I.S.Agranov, assigned by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, head of the Cheka, to investigate the causes of the Kronstadt rising filed the following, hitherto secret, report on 5 April 1921. In it he outlined the sources of the unrest in Petrograd as well as Kronstadt itself.
