On 28 February 1921 a mass meeting of sailors on two battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, drew up a resolution demanding free elections to a new parliament, free trade unions independent of the Communist Party, a free press, the abolition of the Cheka – and a range of other broadly democratic reforms. The next day there was a demonstration of 16,000 sailors in the centre of the Kronstadt barracks town, where the demands were read out again by the young man who became the sailors’ leader, a young petty officer on the Sevastopol, Stepan Petrichenko

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 476