Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-23T04:41:54.583Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

General Ali Fuat Cebesoy and the Kronstadt Revolt (1921): A Footnote to History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Ivar Spector
Ivar Spector
Affiliation:
University of Washington Seattle, Washington
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The revolt of the Red sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd, 1–18 March 1921, constituted a major threat to the new, unstable, and economically destitute Soviet régime in Russia. Although other uprisings against Soviet power had been successfully suppressed, this revolt of the Red sailors, among the foremost supporters of the Bolshevik seizure of authority on 25 October (N.S., 7 November) 1917, was a severe blow to Soviet prestige at home and abroad. Because of their popularity, the government was apprehensive about depending upon regular Soviet troops to suppress the uprising. Its predicament has been substantiated, for the first time, by Soviet Marshal Ivan S. Konev in his ‘Reminiscences’, where he admits that some Soviet trainees and artillerymen refused outright to fire on their rebel comrades.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , October 1972 , pp. 491 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 491 note 1 The research for this paper is based primarily on interviews with General Cebesoy in Istanbul in 1958 and in 1963, with his niece, Mrs Ayşe Sarialp, serving as his interpreter.Google Scholar

page 491 note 2 International Affairs (Moscow), no. 1 (January 1966), p. 89.Google Scholar

page 491 note 3 For Cebesoy's enumeration of the Soviet military aid he negotiated in 1921, see Spector, Ivar, An Introduction to Russian History and Culture, 5th ed. (New York; Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), p. 371.Google Scholar For a Soviet version of aid extended to the Turks at this time, see Documents: ‘M. V. Frunze's Mission to Turkey’, International Affairs (Moscow), no. 7 (July 1960), pp. 119–22. According to Cebesoy, he was in contact with Frunze in Moscow, but not in Turkey.Google Scholar

page 493 note 1 In addition to his own participation as a volunteer, Marshal Konev lists Marshal K. I. Voroshilov, General Dybenko, and the writer Alexander Fadeyev among those who helped to suppress the uprising.Google Scholar

page 493 note 2 For additional information on General Cebesoy's role in the years following the Russian Revolution and during World War II, see Spector, Ivar, op. cit. pp. 342, 352–3, 369–70, 377, 430.Google Scholar