By 24 May* Trotsky had encouraged the declaration. Speaking in the Kronstadt Soviet on 14 May he had said that what was good for Kronstadt would later be good for any other town:'You are ahead and the rest have fallen behind.' Trotsky, however, was not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party.the rebellion was over. Yet the Kronstadt sailors were to remain a threatening source of militancy, as the events of June, July and October were to show.64The other great bastion of Bolshevik militancy was the Vyborg district of Petrograd.The Vyborg party organization had over 5,000 Bolshevik members by the start of May.It was there that the most strike-prone metal factories were located — Russian Renault, Nobel, New Lessner, Erikson, Puzyrev, Vulcan, Phoenix and the Metal Works — and most of them were under the Bolsheviks' sway. These factories contained an inflammable mixture of young and literate metal-workers, who tended to be easily influenced by the Bolsheviks' militant slogans, and the less skilled immigrant workers who had flooded into the cities during the industrial boom of the war, and who consequently had suffered most from the double squeeze of low wages and high rents.Both groups were inclined to engage in violence on the streets.
