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 Bolsheviki were about to attack the meeting and that fifteen carloads of soldiers and Communists, armed with rifles and machine guns, had been dispatched for that purpose. “This information,” the Izvestia report continues, “produced passionate resentment among the delegates. Investigation soon proved the report groundless, but rumors persisted that a regiment of kursanti, headed by the notorious Tchekist Dulkiss, was already marching in the direction of the fort Krasnaia Gorka.” In view of these new developments, and remembering the threats of Kuzmin and Kalinin, the Conference at once took up the question of organising the defense of Kronstadt against Bolshevik attack. Time pressing, it was decided to turn the Presidium of the Conference into a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, which was charged with the duty of preserving the order and safety of the city. That Committee was also to make the necessary preparations for holding the new elections to the Kronstadt Soviet.

Petrograd was in a state of high nervous tension. New strikes had broken out and there were persistent rumors of labor disorders in Moscow, of peasant uprisings in the East and in Siberia. For lack of a reliable public press the people gave credence to the most exaggerated and even to obviously false reports. All eyes were on Kronstadt in expectation of momentous developments.

The Bolsheviki lost no time in organising their attack against Kronstadt. Already on March 2 the Government issued a prikaz (order) signed by Lenin and Trotsky, which denounced the Kronstadt movement as a myatezh, a mutiny against the Communist authorities. In that document the sailors were charged with being “the tools of former Tsarist generals who together with Socialist–Revolutionist traitors staged a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the 14