The Sunday preceding the mutiny I visited Kronstadt. Near the center of the island is a summer garden in which a military band plays each Sunday afternoon. Ordinarily this garden is crowded with visitors. I found it as desolate as a cemetery. The band was there--playing manfully to deserted groves and empty benches. Here and there a soldier strolled with his sweetheart. But the absence of the usual gala throng was ominous. The streets, too, were still. Houses were closed. Veritably it was an evacuated city. Upon inquiry, I was told that a rumor had been circulated during the previous two or three days that all of Kronstadt had been mined, by the government, and a warning issued to the soldiers and sailors that if mutiny did break out the mines would be exploded, blowing sailors, soldiers, ships, and town into Kingdom Come. This sounded to me like a ridiculous fiction. And I still scout the idea. But the Russian people have learned by costly experiences that the wildest tales of the government often prove true in Russia. A panic had, therefore, possessed the town, and all of the townspeople who could had fled. Extraordinary as this report sounds, it would unquestionably have been a safer thing for the government to do than to allow Kronstadt to become a revolutionary stronghold. Wandering about the town I could discover no signs of an imminent uprising. I even failed to find any of my acquaintances among the military organization, which made me wonder a good deal. And indeed, as I learned later, at this time, four days before the actual outbreak, there was no thought of attempting the mutiny immediately, on the part of the revolutionary leaders. In reality it was planned for several weeks later, when the peasants would have gathered their scanty harvests and be ready to fight: when the railroad, postal and telegraph strikes were planned to come off simultaneously; then, as an adjunct to these national movements, the army and navy mutinies were to begin. The plan was an elaborate one and looked thrillingly good on paper, but as has happened before the _agent provocateur_ of the government had not been taken into account. Upon signal, Sveaborg, near Helsingfors, was to rise, then Reval in the Baltic provinces, then Sebastopol on the Black Sea, and finally Kronstadt. With these four important strongholds captured it would seem that the fight was won. The month of September, or possibly October, was the time selected to set in motion the attacks upon these centers--in conjunction with a general strike and multitudinous peasant uprisings--_jacquerie_--all over the empire. A plan of this magnitude necessarily depended for execution upon a great many different people, and, despite all the care that was supposedly exercised, every detail was early reported to the government, with the result that the whole thing was not only forestalled, but precipitated, and at the moment when everything was most favorable to the government.