This meant immediate action. A small number of sappers and miners were gathered together and certain outer batteries captured. Two heavy shells were fired, and these guns signaled the garrison to rise. The sappers and miners were soon reinforced by artillerymen and sailors, but nearly all of these were unarmed, having had their arms taken from them a few days before. They therefore advanced upon the arsenal. On the way the officers’ quarters were invaded and six officers killed, including an admiral. The arsenal was captured against small resistance and the men rushed up-stairs to where the guns were stored. They pulled the doors from the gun-cases, and then for the first time suspected that the telegram and the whole signal to rise was a hoax. The guns were there, but the locks had all been removed! Unarmed sailors are no better than an unarmed mob. When the mutineers poured out into the street from the arsenal they were received by a regiment of loyal troops brought down from Peterhof that very afternoon and now hurried into action. They poured volley after volley into the men coming out of the arsenal. There was some bayonet-fighting, but the rattle of gatling guns speedily forced a surrender. The actual casualties of this night will never be known. They cannot be reckoned from without, and the government will not disclose the figures. Horrible scenes followed the slaughter. Bodies of the dead were pitched into the sea and with them some wounded who still lived. One or two of these survived, being carried by the current across the narrow stretch of water to the mainland and there washed ashore. Several hundred arrests followed. A Duma deputy, named Anipko, a member of the Group of Toil, was taken on this occasion, and with him my friend Paul. I could never learn why these two were not executed, but instead they were both sent to Siberia. A few days later there were nineteen men shot, twelve sent to hard labor for life, one hundred and twenty others to the mines for varying terms, and four hundred and twenty-nine to prison. These five hundred and eighty men, together with those killed outright, were supposed to be the leading members of the military organization in Kronstadt at that time. Doubtless they were. A régime of repression was naturally promptly established. Every time there is an incipient mutiny there is a renewal of oppression. Again and again during the last few years have mutinies, like the Kronstadt affair, been precipitated by the government, and always with results as disastrous to the men as satisfactory to the government. The fact that the army does not rise is no indication at all that the men are loyal to the Czar. As a whole they are not. The difficulty comes in their not being able to rise simultaneously, and in their inability to save their leaders from execution or exile long enough to lead them into battle.