The Russo-Japanese and the first revolution died down, the fleet became calmer, including due to the reduction of this very fleet to values, rather, nominal for the level of a superpower, a period of calm began. A new fleet was under construction, including four Baltic giants - dreadnoughts of the Sevastopol type. It was on one of them - "Gangut" that another uprising took place, already during the First World War.
And the backstory is pretty simple and typical.
Firstly, the dreadnoughts were not allowed into battle, turning into a kind of detachment to guard the mine and artillery position of the Gulf of Finland. There are a lot of exits to the sea, there are zero combat actions, which has a decomposing effect on the personnel.
Secondly, all the same coal loading - the heating of the boilers of "Sevastopol" is mixed, and it was somehow not accepted to hire loaders in the port, in Russia sailors traditionally did all the heavy work themselves.
Thirdly - the Germans, in the sense, officers with German surnames during the war with Germany.
Fourthly, the slovenliness of the commanding staff, who does not work with subordinates, from the word "in general", throwing this case onto the priests, who were often not literate enough and worked out purely formally.
Well, and agitation - if the ships stick out in the bases for the winter, then all kinds of different things, for example, the agitation of the revolutionary parties, come into their heads, unburdened by the war.
It, in principle, could not but jerk, in the end it did, and already traditionally due to the foolishness of the commander:
On October 19, 1915, the crew of the Gangut ship was loading coal; for dinner that day, on the occasion of hard work, pasta was expected, but since they were not on sale, Bataler Podkopaev ordered to cook porridge. Upon learning of this, the crew was very unhappy and refused to have dinner, about which the senior officer of the ship, senior lieutenant Baron Fitingoff, reported to the commander of the ship. The latter, however, not attaching particular importance to what had happened, ordered nothing more to be given to the sailors, and himself went ashore.
There was such a tradition - after coal loading (classes, to put it mildly, not easy) they gave pasta with meat. But they were either really not on sale, or it was too lazy to look for them, but they made porridge. As expected, the personnel refused to eat it. The situation is typical for our army of any era and it is extinguished at once - something tastier and more satisfying is given out, and that's it. The senior officer reports to the commander, and he decides that they will interrupt without dinner at all, after hard work, and leaves for the shore.
It does not come out to comment in any way - the same rake as on Potemkin. The result is generally similar:
After the evening prayer, the sailors refused to take bunks and go to bed, and most of them put on pea jackets and went out on deck. Here, among the groups of sailors, shouts began to be heard: "Down with the Germans", "let's have another supper", "because of the Germans, our big ships are not working", etc. When the company commanders, on the orders of the senior officer, went to their people in the company premises and began to persuade them to stop the riots, the sailors there were also very worried, single voices were heard: "Why talk to them", "hit him in the face", “All go upstairs,” and two officers were even thrown with logs, and one of them was hit on the leg.
But the uprising did not come, the commander returned from the shore and did what was needed initially:
The riots stopped only by 11 o'clock in the morning, when the absent ship commander, adjutant wing Kedrov, who was absent, returned to the ship, calming the crew and allowing them to issue canned food and tea instead of dinner.
Then they wrote a lot about the leading and guiding role of the RSDLP, but where is the revolution here?
They didn’t even beat anyone’s face, they beat them up and, having received canned food, went away. Typical everyday life, they did not even punish anyone really: hard labor, taking into account the simple thing that a riot on a ship in wartime is a gallows. And even this time the officers were at least somehow punished - by arrest in a cabin with sentries and reprimands. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, tried, according to their recollections, to slow down this business, the mutiny on the battleship was unprofitable for them at that moment. And two years later, the year 1917 and Kronstadt burst out.
Great and bloodless in Kronstadt
The topic of the massacre of officers in the Baltic is tinged with ideological tones and comes down mainly to Kronstadt, which is to some extent fair - some of the killings took place there, it was close to the capital and caused a wide response. But part of this is not all - 45 officers were killed in Helsingfors, 36 in Kronstadt, 5 in Revel, and 2 in St. Petersburg. ships that have never been in battle - this is a ready-made bomb, but Kronstadt …
For 1917, Kronstadt is a huge training course. And at the head of this training was the most inappropriate person for such a case - Vice Admiral Robert Viren. The hero of Port Arthur, an excellent combatant commander of the war, he was not a coward and was a skillful sailor, but at the same time a man who elevated discipline to the absolute. He punished recruits a lot and willingly, and he did it for any trifle, any slightest deviation from the charter. In a word, a good warrior, but a bad mentor, and he was appointed a mentor. In the eyes of the sailors, Kronstadt was a uniform hard labor and, when the revolution took place in Petrograd, it immediately took off. Viren himself was terribly killed, raised on bayonets, thrown into a ravine and forbidden to bury him for a long time. There were atrocities in Helsingfors, on "Paul I" and on other ships … Belli, who served in both the imperial and the Soviet navies, wrote well about this:
In the second half of the 19th century, on steam-sailing ships with insignificant equipment … the relationship between officers-nobles and sailors-peasants was similar to the relationship between landowners and peasants and reflected a picture common to the entire Russian Empire. Although at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the crews of the armored fleet were already recruited to a large extent from industrial workers, nevertheless, the relationship between officers and sailors remained the same. It is quite obvious that in the new conditions on ships with extensive and varied equipment, this phenomenon was a complete anachronism, but no one from the leadership of the naval department paid attention to this, and everything went the old fashioned way, as, incidentally, throughout the life of the Russian Empire.
Everything is so, and the remnants of feudalism, and the inability to work with personnel, and no organization of the service. And then those who were not killed wrote about the "atrocities of the Bolsheviks and German spies", and the murderers wrote about "the executioners of the tsarist regime." The inevitable impasse has spilled over into blood.
Interestingly, the least number of kills was on destroyers, submarines and other ships with small crews that regularly went into battle. Willy-nilly, but war brings together, and these very feudal remnants die under fire. Well, the Black Sea Fleet, which really fought, lasted much longer. It exploded in the Baltic, where in Kronstadt they demanded from semi-literate recruits at full speed, it exploded on battleships that worked a lot, but did not fight, and took off on the Aurora, which was being repaired.
Year 1921
Youth drove us
On a saber hike, Youth threw us
On the Kronstadt ice.
What began with Kronstadt, in Kronstadt and ended, only four years later, when what remained of the fleet again decided to rule the state, putting forward a demand for a complete change of power in the country during the dying out Civil War:
“Since the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, to immediately re-elect the Soviets by secret ballot … Freedom of speech and press … Freedom of assembly and trade unions and peasant associations … Free all political prisoners … Abolish all political departments, since no party cannot use the privileges to promote their ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose … Equal ration for all working people … Give peasants full right of action over their land …"
The revolution devours its children, and any anarchy ends in order, and from this point of view, I cannot condemn Lenin in any way.
The mistakes of the tsarist government led to an explosion, and the new government was simply putting things in order. Russia simply would not have survived another round of ochlocracy and the redistribution of everything. The rest is a matter of emotions, it's just funny to watch how people, angrily stigmatizing the sailors of 1917, angrily stigmatize the Bolsheviks for the sailors of 1921.
Kronstadt has minimal relation to the riots of military sailors, it has become simply a kind of threshold, beyond which the old fleet was replaced by a new one, and anarchy changed the order. There is no reason to talk about blood either - both sides had shed so much by that time that looking for saints in that era is a stupid and senseless business.
Soviet times
Whatever one may say, but in Soviet times, with the advent of political officers and the end of the estate, they let go. In a sense, there were problems and unrest, but they were easily and naturally extinguished:
On August 9, 1956, at the cruise line of the Pacific Fleet "Dmitry Pozharsky", the sailors unauthorizedly, without the knowledge of the commander and the political officer, gathered on the tank, turned the tower of the main battalion No. 1 by 90 degrees, dragged the cinema equipment with noise and shouts and began to watch a movie. In the end, the commander was forced to declare a "combat alert", and the sailors fled to their combat posts. They saw a political motive in everything, inflated the "case", an inspection arrived, an investigation began, special officers shook "everyone and everything." As a result, the commander, political officer and chief officer were removed, other officers were thrown out of the fleet or thoroughly "screwed up" in service, some of the sailors were convicted by the tribunal …
There was a movie on the nearby cruiser "Senyavin", the sailors were offended … The commanding staff partly flew out of the fleet, partly ruined their careers, several sailors went to court, and that was all.
There were other minor incidents - where the officers relaxed or the conditions were completely inhuman. There was a BOD "Sentinel", but there the crew, in fact, did not support Sablin, and this is more an officer's riot than a sailor's.
Even with the collapse of the country, the fleet did not riot, even the attempts of the newborn Ukraine to raise separatist mutinies on the ships of the KChF did not really give anything, even the 90s, with their shortage of everything, did not lead to riots …
It was only necessary to establish the service and remove class contradictions.
And if you do not look for ideology, German / Japanese spies, “rebellious cattle” in the events of 1905-1921, then everything is simple - the non-perception of the crews as people did not and could not lead to good. Where the commanders turned out to be smarter, like Rozhestvensky, they did not lead to big riots. And where Kedrov ordered in the style "they don't want porridge - let them sleep hungry" or the sailors were insolently offered rotten meat under the threat of being shot - there it exploded.
As a result, the problem that could be settled in a legal way was solved by the revolution. However, like many other problems of the Russian Empire.
