Ivan Alekseevich Ermolaev (1899 – 1994) – poet, participant in the Kronstadt events of 1921.
On January 10, 1994, the president of Russia First President Yeltsin issued a Decree under which all participants in the Kronstadt events of March 1921 were subject to rehabilitation, and the mutiny was declared never to have taken place.
73 years have passed since then, and it turned out that the Decree directly affected only one person. Subject to rehabilitation was the Residents of Nizhny Novgorod Ivan Alekseevich Ermolaev. None of the others listed among the "mutineers" were still alive. It was said, however, that the Decree came as a surprise to one of the oldest residents of Latvia, a former Latvian rifleman who had taken part in the armed assault on Kronstadt and had been proud of it his whole life.
On January 17, 1994, Ivan Alekseevich turned 95.
For more than 70 years, the pages of our state's history carried the myth of a mutiny that never happened. But Kronstadt was shelled for real.
– It was not a mutiny, it was a protest by an aggrieved people! – Ermolaev explained. – We were trying to defend our fathers, who had been tormented by grain requisitioning in the villages of Russia. It all began on March 1, 1921, during a rally, when the sailors – most of them peasant sons who had returned to the fleet after leave in their home villages – demanded that Kalinin, who had come to see us, immediately abolish grain requisitioning, disband the requisitioning detachments, introduce a tax in kind, and allow the peasants to trade freely. But instead of explaining that such decisions were about to be adopted at the Tenth Party Congress, he got frightened and took us for mutineers hostile to Soviet power. And he described the situation in Moscow in such a way that troops were sent against us…
In 1918, Ivan Ermolaev was a student generalist at the newly created Lobachevsky University. He studied at the Faculty of History and Philology when he was called up to serve in the Volga Flotilla. In summer he was to fight the Whites on the Volga, and in autumn return to his student desk. But the flotilla had its own newspaper, and the command decided to appoint the student as the publication's executive secretary, without releasing him from his studies. Three years passed this way. Ermolaev wrote and published poetry and was elected secretary of the Nizhny Novgorod Union of Poets.
By the start of 1921, the Volga Military Flotilla had been disbanded, and a radio-mine school was formed on its base. In January 1921, the school relocated with its entire personnel to Kronstadt and joined the training mine detachment of the Baltic Fleet. That is how Ermolaev ended up in Kronstadt.
On February 27, the crews of two ships – the "Petropavlovsk" and the "Sevastopol" – drew up a resolution of 13 points addressed to the government. Ermolaev was among its authors. He recalled: – There were no threats in the text. We asked the authorities to give the people what they themselves had promised when they led the people into the revolution. It was put to a vote. And the majority of Kronstadt's communists supported the resolution. Then on March 3, "Izvestia" reported that a counter-revolutionary White Guard mutiny had begun in Kronstadt. But we had no tsarist general Kozlovsky at all! There wasn't a single White Guard among us! Not one officer took part in the so-called "mutiny"… The delegates we sent to Moscow and Petrograd were arrested along the way and shot without trial or investigation. On March 8, Lenin urged the Tenth Party Congress to adopt a decision replacing grain requisitioning with a tax in kind.
In essence, the sailors' demands had been met. Nevertheless, the so-called "mutiny" was suppressed in the most brutal manner: early on the morning of March 17, the storming of Kronstadt began with a hurricane of fire. The authorities needed to assert themselves by crushing the dissenters, as a lesson to others. Along with a large group of sailors, Ermolaev managed to escape to Finland. In October 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided on an amnesty for all rank-and-file participants in the Kronstadt events. Everyone who had fled abroad was allowed to return home.
Ermolaev came back among the first. He was arrested at once, and then exiled for three years to the Solovetsky Islands. In October 1924 he was released and returned to Nizhny Novgorod, where a year later he was fully reinstated in his rights. He trained as a civil engineer. And for more than forty years he built and organized food-industry enterprises, becoming the first director of a sparkling wine factory in The City of Gorky. He continued to write poetry but never published a book. All his life he remained true to the ideals of his youth: Time has changed us little. And it is a pity that a baleful gloom So unexpectedly closed off The clear azure sky before us.
Publications
- Ermolaev Ivan, Shmerelson Grigory, Irodionova Vera. Poems. N. Novgorod: Literary-Art Circle of NGU students, 1920.
- Collections: Zarnitsy [Heat Lightning]: A Literary and Art Collection: Dedicated to the 2nd Anniversary of the October Revolution. Nizhny Novgorod. Published by the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Agency "Tsentropechat". 1919.
- Volzhskaya Volnitsa [Volga Freedom]: A Literary and Art Collection. Nizhny Novgorod. Nizhny Novgorod Branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. 1920.
- Memoirs: Ermolaev I. Vlast Sovetam!.. [All Power to the Soviets!..]: On the events in Kronstadt, March 1–18, 1921.
- "Druzhba Narodov" [Friendship of Peoples] magazine. 1990, No. 3, pp. 182-189.