Kronstadt is best known for its March 1921 uprising, when, with the battle-cry ‘All Power to Soviets and Not to Parties’, its disillusioned revolutionary sailors, soldiers and workers rose against Bolshevik Soviet power, the first and major example of left-wing protest from below against ‘the complete dominance’ of the Communist party. The revolt was all the more confounding to the Communist leaders since it came from the hard core of their social base, from the men who had been the shock-troops of the October revolution, the standard bearers of Soviet power during the civil war.

The student of the Kronstadt uprising is well served by Russian sources, and by Western and Soviet studies (though the latter are very party-minded and tendentious). A similarly rich literature deals with the 1917 Baltic Fleet, of which Kronstadt formed a major base and training centre.

This book sets out instead to focus attention on what I believe was Kronstadt's forgotten golden age of Soviet democracy in 1917–18. It was then, particularly during the March–October 1917 period of the provisional government with its free, open and multiparty society, that Red Kronstadt stood out as the prime example of Soviet power and democracy, well before the Bolsheviks turned the triumph of ‘All Power to Soviets’ into the Bolshevik dictatorship and Russia's Soviets into its emasculated instruments. Precisely because local Soviet power had been established there immediately in the wake of the February revolution of 1917, Kronstadt had no local October revolution nor any immediate Bolshevik takeover. Its significant contribution to the victory of the Bolshevik October revolution was in Petrograd and in Russia at large.