isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

DEFEAT IN VICTORY
brothers and what he and the party had been unable to give.
Once again, as after Brest, a bitter and hostile echo of his own
voice came back to him from the lips of other people; and once
again he had to suppress it.
The rebels ignored his warning and hoped to gain time. This
was the middle of March. The Bay of Finland was still icebound.
In a few days, however, a thaw might set in; and then
the fortress, bristling with guns, defended by the whole Red
Navy of the Baltic, assured of supplies from Finland or other
Baltic countries, would become inaccessible, almost invincible.
In the meantime even Communists joined in the revolt, announcing
that they had left 'the party of the hangman Trotsky'.
The fortress, so Trotsky (or was it Tukhachevsky?) resolved,
must be seized before ice floes barred the approach. In feverish
haste picked regiments and shock troops were dispatched to
reinforce the garrison of Petrograd. When the news of the
mutiny reached the tenth congress, it aroused so much alarm
and anger that most of the able-bodied delegates rushed
straight from the conference hall in the Kremlin to place themselves
at the head of the shock troops which were to storm the
fortress across the Bay of Finland. Even leaders of the Workers'
Opposition and Decemists who, at the congress, had just raised
demands not very different from those the rebels voiced, went
into battle. They, too, held that the sailors had no right to
dictate, hands on triggers, even the justest of demands.
White sheets over their uniforms, the Bolshevik troops, under
Tukhachevsky's command, advanced across the Bay. They were
met by hurricane fire from Kronstadt's bastions. The ice broke
under their feet; and wave after wave of white-shrouded
attackers collapsed into the glacial Valhalla. The death march
went on. From three directions fresh columns stumped and
fumbled and slipped and crawled over the glassy surface until
they too vanished in fire, ice, and water. As the successive
swarms and lines of attackers drowned, it seemed to the men of
Kronstadt that the perverted Bolshevik revolution drowned
with them and that the triumph of their own pure, unadulterated
revolution was approaching. Such was the lot of these
rebels, who had denounced the Bolsheviks for their harshness
and whose only aim it was to allow the revolution to imbibe the
milk of human kindness, that for their survival they fought a