AHC: Make a Left-Wing Uprising Against the Bolsheviks Successful

[Napoleon IV]

During the Russian Civil War there were a number of left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks (most notably the Kronstadt and the Tambov rebellions). Your challenge is to make one of those succeed, and describe what the victorious rebels would do next.

 

[David T]

The situation in February 1921 looked like that of exactly four years earlier, with strikes in Moscow and Petrograd, and some soldiers refusing to fire on the strikers. Under these circumstances, as Orlando Figes writes, the Bolsheviks "could not wait for it [the Kronstadt uprising] to peter out. Revolts in other cities, such as Kazan and Niznhyi Novgorod, were already being inspired by it. The ice-packed Gulf of Finland, moreover, was about to thaw and this would make the fortress, with the whole of its fleet freed from the ice, virtually impregnable." (*A People's Tragedy*, p. 762) http://www.rulit.me/books/a-people-s-tragedy-the-russian-revolution-1891-1924-read-232715-281.html So an interesting POD would be the Gulf of Finland thawing a little early that year...

 

[Alexander the Average]

So an interesting POD would be the Gulf of Finland thawing a little early that year...

Instead of having the gulf thaw earlier (alternate weather is usually counted as ASB), what if the mutineers waited a few more weeks before launching the uprising? It would have given them a stronger position, and as the uprising wouldn't have happened literally in the middle of the Bolshevik's party congress it's possible that the Bolsheviks might have responded less severely.