On this same date there occurred another incident which, on account of its highly dramatic aspect, attracted wide attention in the press of the Allied countries, and was therefore considered more significant than it has since proved to be. The local council of the Workingmen's and Soldiers' Council of Deputies in Kronstadt, the location of the naval arsenal and the headquarters of the Baltic fleet, declared Kronstadt an independent republic. The president of this council, a young student by the name of Anatole Lamanov, was apparently an anarchist of the extreme type; extreme in that he believed that anarchist principles could be put into immediate practice, and he at once issued a proclamation calling on all other communities in Russia to declare their independence. His idea was that all the communities should be knit together very loosely for specific purposes, such as the war against the Germans, of which he was still heartily in favor. Later dispatches, if true, would indicate that the real instigator of this comic-opera scene was a woman, possibly in the pay of the German Government, since she was the companion of Robert Grimm, a Swiss Socialist, later expelled from Russia by the Socialists themselves on account of pro-German activities. With its usual tolerance the Provisional Government made no attempt to suppress this act of secession by armed force. The council itself in Petrograd, representing the whole country, immediately denounced the Kronstadt proclamation, and sent two deputies to Kronstadt to reason with Lamanov and his associates. The whole incident seemed to be largely a matter of paper proclamations, since no violence on either side ever occurred, and the Kronstadt situation finally faded from public attention. Nevertheless it caused Kerensky to cut short his tour of the various fronts and return to Petrograd two days later. In the public speeches which he then made he spoke very encouragingly of the situation on the firing lines, but two days later it was announced that General Alexiev's resignation as commander in chief had been accepted and that Brussilov had been appointed in his place.