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Title: The Kronstadt Commune
Author: Ida Mett
Date: 1938
Language: en
Topics: Russian Revolution,
Source: Retrieved on 3 August 2012 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/mett/1938/kronstadt.htm
Notes:  Original title: “La Commune de Cronstadt”

Ida Mett

The Kronstadt Commune

Preface

by Maurice Brinton

The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution will be assessed,

analyzed, celebrated or bemoaned in a variety of ways.

To the peddlers of religious mysticism and to the advocates of “freedom

of enterprise”, Svetlana Stalin’s sensational (and well-timed) defection

will “prove” the resilience of their respective doctrines, now shown as

capable of sprouting on what at first sight would appear rather barren

soil.

To incorrigible liberals, the recent, cautious reintroduction of the

profit motive into certain sectors of the Russian economy will “prove”

that laissez-faire economics is synonymous with human nature and that a

rationally planned economy was always a pious pipe-dream.

To those “lefts” (like the late Isaac Deutscher) who saw in Russia’s

industrialization an automatic guarantee of more liberal attitudes in

days to come, the imprisonment of Daniel and Sinyavsky for thought-crime

(and the current persecution of those who stood up for them) will have

come as a resounding slap in the face.

To the “Marxist-Leninists” of China (and Albania), Russia’s

rapprochement with the USA, her passivity in the recent Middle East

crisis, her signing of the Test Ban Treaty and her reactionary influence

on revolutionary developments in the colonial countries will all bear

testimony to her headlong slither into the swamp of revisionism,

following the Great Stalin’s death. (Stalin, it will be remembered, was

the architect of such revolutionary, non-revisionist, measures as the

elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front,

the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Teheran and Yalta Agreements and the dynamic

struggles of the French and Italian Communist Parties in the immediate

post-war years, struggles which led to their direct seizure of power in

their respective countries.)

To the Yugoslavs, reintegrated at last after their adolescent wandering

from the fold, the re-emergence of “sanity” in Moscow will be seen as

corroboration of their worst suspicions. The 1948 “troubles” were

clearly all due to the machinations of the wicked Beria. Mihajlo

Mihajlov now succeeds Djilas behind the bars of a people’s prison ...

just to remind political heretics that, in Yugoslavia too, “proletarian

democracy” is confined to those who refrain from asking awkward

questions.

To the Trotskyists of all ilk — at least to those still capable of

thinking for themselves — the mere fact of the fiftieth anniversary

celebrations should be food for thought. What do words mean? How

“transitional” can a transitional society be? Aren’t four decades of

“Bonapartism” in danger of making the word a trifle meaningless? Like

the unflinching Christians carrying their cross, will unflinching

Trotskyists go on carrying their question mark (concerning the future

evolution of Russian society) for the rest of their earthly existence?

For how much longer will they go on gargling with the old slogans of

“capitalist restoration or advance towards socialism” proposed by their

mentor in his Revolution Betrayed ... thirty years ago! Surely only the

blind can now fail to see that Russia is a class society of a new type,

and has been for several decades.

Those who have shed these mystifications — or who have never been

blinded by them — will see things differently. They will sense that

there can be no vestige of socialism in a society whose rulers can

physically annihilate the Hungarian Workers’ Councils, denounce

equalitarianism and workers’ management of production as

“petty-bourgeois” or “anarcho-syndicalist” deviations, and accept the

cold-blooded murder of a whole generation of revolutionaries as mere

“violations of socialist legality”, to be rectified — oh so gingerly and

tactfully — by the technique of “selective posthumous rehabilitation”.

It will be obvious to them that something went seriously wrong with the

Russian Revolution. What was it? And when did the “degeneration” start?

Here again the answers differ. For some the “excesses” or “mistakes” are

attributable to a spiteful paranoia slowly sneaking up on the senescent

Stalin. This interpretation (apart from tacitly accepting the very “cult

of the individual” which its advocates would claim to decry) fails,

however, to account for the repressions of revolutionaries and the

conciliations with imperialism perpetrated at a much earlier period. For

others the “degeneration” set in with the final defeat of the Left

Opposition as an organized force (1927), or with Lenin’s death (1924),

or with the abolition of factions at the tenth Party Congress (1921).

For the Bordigists the proclamation of the New Economic Policy (1921)

irrevocably stamped Russia as “state capitalist”. Others, rightly

rejecting this preoccupation with the minutiae of revolutionary

chronometry, stress more general factors, albeit in our opinion some of

the less important ones.

Our purpose in publishing this text about the Kronstadt events of 1921

is not to draw up an alternative timetable. Nor are we looking for

political ancestors. The construction of an orthodox apostolic

succession is the least of our preoccupations. (In a constantly changing

world it would only testify to our theoretical sterility.) Our

occupation is simply to document some of the real — but less well-known

— struggles that took place against the growing bureaucracy during the

early post-revolutionary years, at a time when most of the later critics

of the bureaucracy were part and parcel of the apparatus itself.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution presents us with the

absurd sight of a Russian ruling class (which every day resembles more

its Western counterpart) solemnly celebrating the revolution which

overthrew bourgeois power and allowed the masses, for a brief moment, to

envisage a totally new kind of social order.

What made this tragic paradox possible? What shattered this vision? How

did the Revolution degenerate?

Many explanations are offered. The history of how the Russian working

class was dispossessed is not, however, a matter for an esoteric

discussion among political cliques, who compensate for their own

irrelevance by mental journeys into the enchanted world of the

revolutionary past. An understanding of what took place is essential for

every serious socialist. It is not mere archivism.

No viable ruling class rules by force alone. To rule it must succeed in

getting its own vision of reality accepted by society at large. The

concepts by which it attempts to legitimize its rule must be projected

into the past. Socialists have correctly recognized that the history

taught in bourgeois schools reveals a particular, distorted, vision of

the world. It is a measure of the weakness of the revolutionary movement

that socialist history remains for the most part unwritten.

What passes as socialist history is often only a mirror image of

bourgeois historiography, a percolation into the ranks of the working

class movement of typically bourgeois methods of thinking. In the world

of this type of “historian” leaders of genius replace the kings and

queens of the bourgeois world. Famous congresses, splits or

controversies, the rise and fall of political parties or unions, the

emergence or degeneration of this or that leadership replace the

internecine battles of the rulers of the past. The masses never appear

independently on the historical stage, making their own history. At best

they only “supply the steam”, enabling others to drive the locomotive,

as Stalin so delicately put it.

“Most of the time, ‘official’ historians don’t have eyes to see or ears

to hear the acts and words which express the workers’ spontaneous

activity ... They lack the categories of thought — one might even say

the brain cells — necessary to understand or even to perceive this

activity as it really is. To them an activity that has no leader or

programme, no institutions and no statutes, can only be described as

‘troubles’ or ‘disorders’. The spontaneous activity of the masses

belongs by definition to what history suppresses.”[1]

This tendency to identify working class history with the history of its

organizations, institutions and leaders is not only inadequate — it

reflects a typically bourgeois vision of mankind, divided in almost

preordained manner between the few who will manage and decide, and the

many, the malleable mass, incapable of acting consciously on its own

behalf, and forever destined to remain the object (and never the

subject) of history. Most histories of the degeneration of the Russian

Revolution rarely amount to more than this.

The Stalinist bureaucracy was unique in that it presented a view of

history based on outright lies rather than on the more usual mixture of

subtle distortion and self-mystification. But Khrushchev’s revelations

and subsequent developments in Russia have caused official Russian

versions of events (in all their variants) to be questioned even by

members of the Communist Party. Even the graduates of what Trotsky

called “the Stalin school of falsification” are now beginning to reject

the lies of the Stalinist era. Our task is to take the process of

demystification a little further.

Of all the interpretations of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution

that of Issac Deutscher is the most widely accepted on the Left. It

echoes most of the assumptions of the Trotskyists. Although an

improvement on the Stalinist versions, it is hardly sufficient. The

degeneration is seen as due to strictly conjunctural factors (the

isolation of the revolution in a backward country, the devastation

caused by the Civil War, the overwhelming weight of the peasantry,

etc.). These factors are undoubtedly very important. But the growth of

the bureaucracy is more than just an accident in history. It is a

worldwide phenomenon, intimately linked to a certain stage in the

development of working class consciousness. It is the terrible price

paid by the working class for its delay in recognizing that the true and

final emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the

working class itself, and cannot be entrusted to others, allegedly

acting on its behalf. If “socialism is Man’s total and positive

self-consciousness” (Marx, 1844), the experience (and rejection) of the

bureaucracy is a step on that road.

The Trotskyists deny that early oppositions to the developing

bureaucracy had any revolutionary content. On the contrary they denounce

the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt rebels as basically

counter-revolutionary. Real opposition, for them, starts with the

proclamation — within the Party — of the Left Opposition of 1923. But

anyone in the least familiar with the period will know that by 1923 the

working class had already sustained a decisive defeat. It had lost power

in production to a group of managers appointed from above. It had also

lost power in the Soviets, which were now only ghosts of their former

selves, only a rubber stamp for the emerging bureaucracy. The Left

Oppostion fought within the confines of the Party, which was itself

already highly bureaucratized. No substantial number of workers rallied

to its cause. Their will to struggle had been sapped by the long

struggle of the preceding years.

Opposition to the anti-working-class measures being taken by the

Bolshevik leadership in the years immediately following the revolution

took many forms and expressed itself through many different channels and

at many different levels. It expressed itself within the Party itself,

through a number of oppositional tendencies of which the Workers’

Opposition (Kollontai, Lutovinov, Shlyapnikov) is the best known.[2]

Outside the Party the revolutionary opposition found heterogenous

expression, in the life of a number, often illegal groups (some

anarchist, some anarcho-syndicalist, some still professing their basis

faith in Marxism).[3] It also found expression in spontaneous, often

“unorganized” class activity, such as the big Leningrad strikes of 1921

and the Kronstadt uprising. It found expression in the increasing

resistance of the workers to Bolshevik industrial policy (and in

particular to Trotsky’s attempts to militarize the trade unions). It

also found expression in proletarian opposition to Bolshevik attempts to

evict all other tendencies from the Soviets, thus effectively gagging

all those seeking to re-orient socialist construction along entirely

different lines.

At an early stage several tendencies had struggled against the

bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution. By posthumously excluding

them from the ranks of the revolutionary, Trotskyists, Leninists and

others commit a double injustice. Firstly they excommunicate all those

who foresaw and struggled against the nascent bureaucracy prior to 1923,

thereby turning a deaf ear to some of the most pertinent and valid

criticisms ever voiced against the bureaucracy. Secondly they weaken

their own case, for if the demands for freely elected Soviets, for

freedom of expression (proletarian democracy) and for workers’

management of production were wrong in 1921, why did they become

partially correct in 1923? Why are they correct now? If in 1921 Lenin

and Trotsky represented the “real interests” of the workers (against the

actual workers), why couldn’t Stalin? Why couldn’t Kadar in Hungary in

1956? The Trotskyist school of hagiography has helped to obscure the

real lessons of the struggle against the bureaucracy.

• * *

When one seriously studies the crucial years after 1917, when the fate

of the Russian Revolution was still in the melting pot, one is driven

again and again to the tragic events of the Kronstadt uprising of March

1921. These events epitomize, in a bloody and dramatic manner, the

struggle between two concepts of the Revolution, two revolutionary

methods, two types of revolutionary ethos. Who decides what is or is not

in the long term interests of the working class? What methods are

permissible in settling differences between revolutionaries? And what

methods are double-edged and only capable in the long run of harming the

Revolution itself?

There is remarkably little of a detailed nature available in English

about the Kronstadt events. The Stalininst histories, revised and

re-edited according to the fluctuating fortunes of Party functionaries,

are not worth the paper they are written on. They are an insult to the

intelligence of their readers, deemed incapable of comparing the same

facts described in earlier and later editions of the same book.

Trotsky’s writings about Kronstadt are few and more concerned at

retrospective justification and at scoring debating points against the

Anarchists[4] than at seriously analyzing this particular episode of the

Russian Revolution. Trotsky and the Trotskyists are particularly keen to

perpetuate the myth that they were the first and only coherent

anti-bureaucratic tendency. All their writings seek to hide how far the

bureaucratization of both Party and Soviets had already gone by 1921 —

i.e. how far it had gone during the period when Lenin and Trotsky were

in full and undisputed control. The task for serious revolutionaries

today is to see the link between Trotsky’s attitudes and pronouncements

during and before the “great trade union debate” of 1920–21 and the

healthy hostility to Trotskyism of the most advanced and revolutionary

layers of the industrial working class. This hostility was to manifest

itself — arms in hand — during the Kronstadt uprising. It was to

manifest itself again two or three years later — this time by folded

arms — when these advanced layers failed to rally to Trotsky’s support,

when he at last chose to challenge Stalin, within the limited confines

of a Party machine, towards whose bureaucratization he had signally

contributed.[5]

Deutscher in The Prophet Armed vividly depicts the background of Russia

during the years of Civil War, the suffering, the economic dislocation,

the sheer physical exhaustion of the population. But the picture is

one-sided, its purpose to stress that the “iron will of the Bolsheviks”

was the only element of order, stability and continuity in a society

that was hovering on the brink of total collapse. He pays scant

attention to the attempts made by groups of workers and revolutionaries

— both within the Party and outside its ranks — to attempt social

reconstruction on an entirely different basis, from below.[6] He does

not discuss the sustained opposition and hostility of the Bolsheviks to

workers’ management of production[7] or in fact to any large-scale

endeavour which escaped their domination or control. Of the Kronstadt

events themselves, of the Bolshevik calumnies against Kronstadt and of

the frenzied repression that followed the events of March 1921,

Deutscher says next to nothing, except that the Bolshevik accusations

against the Kronstadt rebels were “groundless”. Deutscher totally fails

to see the direct relation between the methods used by Lenin and Trotsky

in 1921 and those other methods, perfected by Stalin and later used

against the Old Bolsheviks themselves during the notorious Moscow trials

of 1936 1937 and 1938.

In Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary there is a chapter devoted

to Kronstadt.[8] Serge’s writings are particularly interesting in that

he was in Leningrad in 1921 and supported what the Bolsheviks were

doing, albeit reluctantly. He did not however resort to the slanders and

misrepresentations of other leading Party members. His comments throw

light on the almost schizophrenic frame of mind of the rank and file of

the Party at that time. For different reasons neither the Trotskyists

nor the anarchists have forgiven Serge his attempts to reconcile what

was best in their respective doctrines: the concern with reality and the

concern with principle.

Easily available and worthwhile anarchist writings on the subject (in

English) are virtually non-existent, despite the fact that many

anarchists consider this area relevant to their ideas. Emma Goldman’s

Living My Life and Berkman’s The Bolshevik Myth contain some vivid but

highly subjective pages about the Kronstadt rebellion. The Kronstadt

Revolt by Anton Ciliga (produced as a pamphlet in 1942) is an excellent

short account which squarely faces up to some of the fundamental issues.

It has been unavailable for years. Voline’s account, on the other hand,

is too simplistic. Complex phenomena like the Kronstadt revolt cannot be

meaningfully interpreted by loaded generalizations like “as Marxists,

authoritarians and statists, the Bolsheviks could not permit any freedom

or independent action of the masses”. (Many have argued that there are

strong Blanquist and even Bakuninist strands in Bolshevism, and that it

is precisely these departures from Marxism that are at the root of

Bolshevism’s “elitist” ideology and practice.) Voline even reproaches

the Kronstadt rebels with “speaking of power (the power of the Soviets)

instead of getting rid of the word and of the idea altogether ...” The

practical struggle however was not against “words” or even “ideas”. It

was a physical struggle against their concrete incarnation in history

(in the form of bourgeois institutions). It is a symptom of anarchist

muddle-headedness on this score that they can both reproach the

Bolsheviks with dissolving the Constituent Assembly[9] ... and the

Kronstadt rebels for proclaiming that they stood for soviet power! The

“Soviet anarchists” clearly perceived what was at stake — even if many

of their successors fail to. They fought to defend the deepest conquest

of October — soviet power — against all its usurpers, including the

Bolsheviks.

• * *

Our own contribution to the fiftieth anniversary celebrations will not

consist in the usual panegyrics to the achievements of Russian rocketry.

Nor will we chant paeans to Russian pig-iron statistics. Industrial

expansion may be the prerequisite for a fuller, better life for all but

is in no way synonymous with such a life, unless all social relations

have been revolutionized. We are more concerned at the social costs of

Russian achievements.

Some perceived what these costs would be at a very early stage. We are

interested in bringing their prophetic warnings to a far wider audience.

The final massacre at Kronstadt took place on March 18, 1921, exactly

fifty years after the slaughter of the Communards by Thiers and

Calliffet. The facts about the Commune are well known. But fifty years

after the Russian Revolution we still have to seek basic information

about Kronstadt. The facts are not easy to obtain. They lie buried under

the mountains of calumny and distortion heaped on them by Stalinists and

Trotskyists alike.

The publication of this pamphlet in English, at this particular time, is

part of this endeavour. Ida Mett’s book La Commune de Cronstadt was

first published in 1938. It was republished in France ten years later

but has been unobtainable for several years. In 1962 and 1963 certain

parts of it were translated into English and appeared in Solidarity (II,

6 to 11). We now have pleasure in bringing to English-speaking readers a

slightly abridged version of the book as a whole, which contains

material hitherto unavailable in Britain.

Apart from various texts published in Kronstadt itself in March 1921,

Ida Mett’s book contains Petrichenko’s open letter of 1926, addressed to

the British Communist Party. Petrichenko was the President of the

Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee. His letter refers to

discussions in the Political Bureau of the CPGB on the subject of

Kronstadt, discussions which seem to have accepted that there was no

extraneous intervention during the uprising. (Members of the CP and

others might seek further enlightenment on the matter from King Street,

whose archives on the matter should make interesting reading.)

Ida Mett writes from an anarchist viewpoint. Her writings however

represent what is best in the revolutionary tradition of “class

struggle” anarchism. She thinks in terms of a collective, proletarian

solution to the problems of capitalism. The rejection of the class

struggle, the anti-intellectualism, the preoccupation with

transcendental morality and with personal salvation that characterize so

many of the anarchists of today should not for a minute detract

“Marxists” from paying serious attention to what she writes. We do not

necessarily endorse all her judgments and have — in footnotes —

corrected one or two minor factual inaccuracies in her text. Some of her

generalizations seem to us too sweeping and some of her analyses of the

bureaucratic phenomenon too simple to be of real use. But as a chronicle

of what took place before, during and after Kronstadt, her account

remains unsurpassed.

Her text throws interesting light on the attitude to the Kronstadt

uprising shown at the time by various Russian political tendencies

(anarchists, Mensheviks, Left and Right S.R.s, Bolsheviks, etc.). Some

whose approach to politics is superficial in the extreme (and for whom a

smear or a slogan is a substitute for real understanding) will point

accusingly to some of this testimony, to some of these resolutions and

manifestos as evidence irrevocably damning the Kronstadt rebels. “Look”,

they will say, “what the Mensheviks and Right S.R.s were saying. Look at

how they were calling for a return to the Constituent Assembly, and at

the same time proclaiming their solidarity with Kronstadt. Isn’t this

proof positive that Kronstadt was a counter-revolutionary upheaval? You

yourselves admit that rogues like Victor Chernov, President elect of the

Constituent Assembly, offered to help the Kronstadters? What further

evidence is needed?”

We are not afraid of presenting all the facts to our readers. Let them

judge for themselves. It is our firm conviction that most Trotskyists

and Leninists are — and are kept — as ignorant of this period of Russian

history as Stalinists are of the period of the Moscow Trials. At best

they vaguely sense the presence of skeletons in the cupboard. At worst

they vaguely parrot what their leaders tell them, intellectually too

lazy or politically too well-conditioned to probe for themselves. Real

revolutions are never “pure”. They unleash the deepest passions of men.

People actively participate or are dragged into the vortex of such

movements for a variety of often contradictory reasons. Consciousness

and false consciousness are inextricably mixed. A river in full flood

inevitably carries a certain amount of rubbish. A revolution in full

flood carries a number of political corpses — and may even momentarily

give them a semblance of life.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 many were the messages of verbal

or moral support for the rebels, emanating from the West, piously

preaching the virtues of bourgeois democracy or of free enterprise. The

objective of those who spoke in these terms were anything but the

institution of a classless society. But their support for the rebels

remained purely verbal, particularly when it became clear to them what

the real objectives of the revolution were: a fundamental

democratization of Hungarian institutions without a reversion to private

ownership of the means of production.

The backbone of the Hungarian revolution was the network of workers’

councils. Their main demands were for workers’ management of production

and for a government based on the councils. These facts justified the

support of revolutionaries throughout the world. Despite the

Mindszentys. Despite the Smallholders and Social-Democrats — or their

shadows — now trying to jump on to the revolutionary bandwagon. The

class critierion is the decisive one.

Similar considerations apply to the Kronstadt rebellion. Its core was

the revolutionary sailors. Its main objectives were ones with which no

real revolutionary could disagree. That others sought to take advantage

of the situation is inevitable — and irrelevant. It is a question of who

is calling the tune.

• * *

Attitudes to the Kronstadt events, expressed nearly fifty years after

the event often provide deep insight into the political thinking of

contemporary revolutionaries. They may in fact provide a deeper insight

into their conscious or unconscious aims than many a learned discussion

about economics, or philosophy, or about other episodes of revolutionary

history.

It is a question of one’s basic attitude as to what socialism is all

about. What are epitomized in the Kronstadt events are some of the most

difficult problems of revolutionary strategy and revolutionary ethics:

the problems of ends and means, of the relations between Party and

masses, in fact of whether a Party is necessary at all.

Can the working class by itself only develop a trade union

consciousness”.[10] Should it even be allowed, at all times, to go that

far?[11]

Or can the working class develop a deeper consciousness and

understanding of its interests than can any organization allegedly

acting on its behalf? When the Stalinists or Trotskyists speak of

Kronstadt as “an essential action against the class enemy”, when more

“sophisticated” revolutionaries refer to it as a “tragic necessity”, one

is entitled to pause for a moment. One is entitled to ask how seriously

they accept Marx’s dictum that “the emancipation of the working class is

the task of the working class itself. Do they take this seriously or do

they pay mere lip-service to the words? Do they identify socialism with

the autonomy (organizational and ideological) of the working class? Or

do they see themselves, with their wisdom as to the “historical

interests” of others, and with their judgments as to what should be

“permitted”, as the leadership around which the future elite will

crystallize and develop? One is entitled not only to ask ... but also to

suggest the answer!

Introduction to the French Edition

The time seems ripe for us to seek a better understanding of Kronstadt,

although no new facts have emerged since 1921. The archives of the

Russian Government and of the Red Army remain closed to any kind of

objective analysis. However statements in some official publications

seem to reflect some of these events, albeit in a distorted light. But

what was known at the time was already sufficient to allow one to grasp

the political significance of this symptomatic and crucial episode of

the Russian Revolution.

Working class militants in the West had absolute confidence in the

Bolshevik Government. This government had just headed an immense effort

of the working class in its struggle against feudal and bourgeois

reaction. In the eyes of these workers it incarnated the Revolution

itself.

People could just not believe that this same government could have

cruelly put down a revolutionary insurrection. That is why it was easy

for the Bolsheviks to label the (Kronstadt) movement as a reactionary

one and to denounce it as organized and supported by the Russian and

European bourgeoisies.

“An insurrection of White generals, with ex-general Kazlovski at its

head” proclaimed the papers at the time. Meanwhile the Kronstadt sailors

were broadcasting the following appeal to the whole world:

“Comrade workers, red soldiers and sailors. We are for the power of the

Soviets and not that of the parties. We are for free representation of

all who toil. Comrades, you are being misled. At Kronstadt all power is

in the hands of revolutionary sailors, of red soldiers and of workers.

It is not in the hands of White Guards, allegedly headed by a general

Kozlovski, as Moscow Radio tells you.”

Such were the conflicting interpretations of the Kronstadt sailors and

of the Kremlin Government. As we wish to serve the vital interests of

the working class by an objective analysis of historical events, we

propose to examine these contradictory theses, in the light of facts and

documents, and of the events that almost immediately followed the

crushing of Kronstadt.

“The workers of the world will judge us” said the Kronstaders in their

broadcast.

“The blood of the innocents will fall on the heads of those who have

become drunk with power.” Was it a prophecy?

Here is a list of prominent communists having played an active part in

the suppression of the insurrection. Readers will see their fate:

ZINOVIEV, omnipotent dictator of Petrograd. Inspired the implacable

struggle against both strikers and sailors. SHOT.

TROTSKY, Peoples Commissar for War and for the Navy. ASSASSINATED by a

Stalinist agent in Mexico.

LASHEVICH, member of the Revolutionary War Committee, member of Defence

Committee organized to fight against the Petrograd strikers. Committed

SUICIDE.

DYBENKO, veteran sailor. Before October, one of the organizers of the

Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet, Played a particularly active role

in the military crushing of Kronstadt. In 1938 still a garrison

commander in the Petrograd region. SHOT.

KUZMIN, commissar to the Baltic Fleet. Fate unknown. NEVER SPOKEN OF

AGAIN.

KALININ, remained in nominal power as ‘President’. Died a NATURAL DEATH.

TUKHACHEVSKY, Elaborated the plan and led the assault on Kronstadt.

SHOT.

PUTNA, decorated for his participation in the military suppression of

Kronstadt, later military attaché in London. SHOT.

Delegates at the 10^(th) Party Congress, who came to fight against

Kronstadt:

PYATOKOV: SHOT

RUKHIMOVICH: SHOT

BUBNOV: DEPOSED. DISAPPEARED.

ZATONSKY: DEPOSED. DISAPPEARED.

VOROSHILOV: STILL PLAYED A ROLE DURING THE 1941–45 WAR. (Later President

of Praesidium.)

Paris, October 1948.

The Kronstadt Events

“A new White plot ... expected and undoubtedly prepared by the French

counter-revolution.” Pravda, March 3, 1921.

“White generals, you all know it, played a great part in this. This is

fully proved.” Lenin, report delivered to the 10^(th) Congress of the

R.C.P.(B), March 8, 1921, Selected Works, vol. IX, p.98.

“The Bolsheviks denounced the men of Kronstadt as counter-revolutionary

mutineers, led by a White general. The denunciation appears to have been

groundless” Isaac Deutcher, The Prophet Armed, (Oxford University Press,

1954) p.511

“No pretence was made that the Kronstadt mutineer were White Guards.”

Brian Pearce (Historian of the Socialist Labour Leaque) in Labour

Review, vol. V, No. 3.

1. Background to the Kronstadt insurrection

The Kronstadt insurrection broke out three months after the conclusion

of the civil war on the European front.

As the Civil War drew to a victorious end the working masses of Russia

were in a state of chronic famine. They were also increasingly dominated

by a ruthless regime, ruled by a single party. The generation which had

made October still remembered the promise of the social revolution and

the hopes they had of building a new kind of society.

This generation had comprised a very remarkable section of the working

class. It had reluctantly abandoned its demands for equality and for

real freedom, believing them to be, if not incompatible with war, at

least difficult to achieve under wartime conditions. But once victory

was assured, the workers in the towns, the sailors, the Red Army men,

and the peasants, all those who had shed their blood during the Civil

War, could see no further justification for their hardships and for

blind submission to a ferocious discipline. Even if these might have had

some reason in wartime, such reasons no longer applied.

While many had been fighting at the front, others — those enjoying

dominant positions in the State apparatus — had been consolidating their

power and detaching themselves more and more from the workers. The

bureaucracy was already assuming alarming proportions. The State machine

was in the hands of a single Party, itself more and more permeated by

careerist elements. A non Party worker was worth less, on the scale of

everyday life, than an ex bourgeois or nobleman, who had belatedly

rallied to the Party. Free criticism no longer existed. Any Party member

could denounce as ‘counter revolutionary’ any worker simply defending

his class rights and his dignity as a worker.

Industrial and agricultural production were declining rapidly. There

were virtually no raw materials for the factories. Machinery was worn

and neglected. The main concern of the proletariat was the bitter fight

against famine. Thefts from the factories had become a sort of

compensation for miserably paid labour. Such thefts continued despite

the repeated searches carried out by the Cheka at the factory gates.

Workers who still had connections with the countryside would go there to

barter old clothes, matches or salt in exchange for food. The trains

were crammed with such people (the Mechotchniki). Despite a thousand

difficulties, they would try to bring food to the famished cities.

Working class anger would break out repeatedly, as barrages of militia

confiscated the paltry loads of flour or potatoes workers would be

carrying on their backs to prevent their children from starving.

The peasants were submitted to compulsory requisitions. They were sowing

less, despite the danger of famine that now resulted from bad crops. Bad

crops had been common. Under ordinary conditions such crops had not

automatically had these disastrous effects. The cultivated areas were

larger and the peasants would usually set something aside for more

difficult times.

The situation preceding the Kronstadt uprising can be summed up as a

fantastic discrepancy between promise and achievement. There were harsh

economic difficulties. But as important was the fact that the generation

in question had not forgotten the meaning of the rights it had struggled

for during the Revolution. This was to provide the real psychological

background to the uprising.

The Red Navy had problems of its own. Since the Brest Litovsk peace, the

Government had undertaken a complete reorganisation of the armed forces,

on the basis of a rigid discipline, a discipline quite incompatible with

the erstwhile principle of election of officers by the men. A whole

hierarchical structure had been introduced. This had gradually stifled

the democratic tendencies which had prevailed at the onset of the

Revolution. For purely technical reasons such a reorganisation had not

been possible in the Navy, where revolutionary traditions had strong

roots. Most of the naval officers had gone over to the Whites, and the

sailors still retained many of the democratic rights they had won in

1917. It had not been possible completely to dismantle their

organisations.

This state of affairs was in striking contrast with what pertained in

the rest of the armed forces. It could not last. Differences between the

rank and file sailors and the higher command of the armed forces

steadily increased. With the end of the Civil War in European Russia

these differences became explosive.

Discontent was rampant not only among the non Party sailors. It also

affected Communist sailors. Attempts to “discipline” the Fleet by

introducing “Army customs” met with stiff resistance from 1920 on. Zef,

a leading Party member and a member of the Revolutionary War Committee

for the Baltic Fleet, was officially denounced by the Communist sailors

for his “dictatorial attitudes.” The enormous gap developing between the

rank and file and the leadership was shown up during the elections to

the Eighth Congress of Soviets, held in December 1920. At the naval base

of Petrograd large numbers of sailors had noisily left the electoral

meeting, openly protesting against the dispatch there as official

delegates of people from Politotdiel and from Comflot (i.e., from the

very organisations monopolising political control of the Navy).

On 15^(th). February 1921, the Second Conference of Communist Sailors of

the Baltic Fleet had met. It had assembled 300 delegates who had voted

for the following resolutions:

“This Second Conference of Communist Sailors condemns the work of

Poubalt (Political Section of the Baltic Fleet).

• Poubalt has not only separated itself from the masses but also from

the active functionaries. It has become transformed into a bureaucratic

organ enjoying no authority among the sailors.

• There is total absence of plan or method in the work of Poubalt. There

is also a lack of agreement between its actions and the resolutions

adopted at the Ninth Party Congress.

• Poubalt, having totally detached itself from the Party masses, has

destroyed all local initiative. It has transformed all political work

into paper work. This has had harmful repercussions on the organisation

of the masses in the Fleet. Between June and November last year, 20 per

cent of the (sailor Party members have left the Party. This can be

explained by the wrong methods of the work of Poubalt.

• The cause is to be found in the very principles of Poubalts

organisation. These principles must be changed in the direction of

greater democracy.”

Several delegates demanded in their speeches the total abolition of the

‘political sections’ in the Navy, a demand we will find voiced again in

the sailors’ resolutions during the Kronstadt uprising. This was the

frame of mind in which the famous discussion on the trade union question

preceding the Tenth Party Congress took place.

In the documents of the period one can clearly perceive the will of

certain Bolshevik leaders (amongst whom Trotsky) not only to ignore the

great discontent affecting the workers and all those who had fought in

the previous period, but also to apply military methods to the problems

of everyday life, particularly to industry and to the trade unions.

In these heated discussions, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet adopted a

viewpoint very different from Trotsky’s. At the elections to the Tenth

Party Congress, the Baltic Fleet voted solidly against its leaders:

Trotsky, Peoples Commissar of War (under whose authority the Navy came),

and Raskolnikov, Chief of the Baltic Fleet. Trotsky and Raskolnikov were

in agreement on the Trade Union question.

The sailors sought to protest against the developing situation by

abandoning the Party en masse. According to information released by

Sorine, Commissar for Petrograd, 5,000 sailors left the Party in January

1921 alone.

There is no doubt that the discussion taking place within the Party at

this time had profound effects on the masses. It overflowed the narrow

limits the Party sought to impose on it. It spread to the working class

as a whole, to the solders and to the sailors. Heated local criticism

acted as a general catalyst. The proletariat had reasoned quite

logically: if discussion and criticism were permitted to Party members,

why should they not be permitted to the masses themselves who had

endured all the hardships of the Civil War?

In his speech to the Tenth Congress — published in the Congress

Proceedings — Lenin voiced his regret at having ‘permitted’ such a

discussion. ‘We have certainly committed an error,’ he said, ‘in having

authorised this debate. Such a discussion was harmful just before the

Spring months that would be loaded with such difficulties.’

2. Petrograd on the Eve of Kronstadt

Despite the fact that the population of Petrograd had diminished by two

thirds, the winter of 1920–21 proved to be a particularly hard one.

Food in the city had been scarce since February 1917 and the situation

had deteriorated from month to month. The town had always relied on food

stuffs brought in from other parts of the country. During the Revolution

the rural economy was in crisis in many of these regions. The

countryside could only feed the capital to a very small extent. The

catastrophic condition of the railways made things even worse. The ever

increasing antagonisms between town and country created further

difficulties everywhere.

To these partly unavoidable factors must be added the bureaucratic

degeneration of the administration and the rapacity of the State organs

for food supply. Their role in feeding the population was actually a

negative one. If the population of Petrograd did not die of hunger

during this period, it was above all thanks to its own adaptability and

initiative. It got food wherever it could!

Barter was practised on a large scale. There was still some food to be

had in the countryside, despite the smaller area under cultivation. The

peasant would exchange this produce for the goods he lacked: boots,

petrol, salt, matches. The population of the towns would try and get

hold of these commodities in any way it could. They alone had real

value. It would take them to the country side. In exchange people would

carry back a few pounds of flour or potatoes. As we have mentioned

before, the few trains, unheated, would be packed with men carrying bags

on their shoulders. En root, the trains would often have to stop because

they had run out of fuel. Passengers would get off and cut logs for the

boilers.

Market places had officially been abolished. But in nearly all towns

there were semi tolerated illegal markets, where barter was carried out.

Such markets existed in Petrograd. Suddenly, in the Summer of 1920,

Zinoviev issued a decree forbidding any kind of commercial transaction.

The few small shops still open were closed and their doors sealed.

However, the State apparatus was in no position to supply the towns.

From this moment on, famine could no longer be attenuated by the

initiative of the population. It became extreme. In January 1921,

according to information published by Petrokommouns (the State Supplies

of the town of Petrograd), workers in metal smelting factories were

allocated rations of 800 grams of black bread a day; shock workers in

other factories 600 grams; workers with A.V. cards: 400 grams; other

workers: 200 grams. Black bread was the staple diet of the Russian

people at this time.

But even these official rations were distributed irregularly and in even

smaller amounts than those stipulated. Transport workers would receive,

at irregular intervals, the equivalent of 700 to 1,000 calories a day.

Lodgings were unheated. There was a great shortage of both clothing and

footwear. According to official statistics, working class wages in 1920

in Petrograd were only 9 per cent of those in 1913.

The population was drifting away from the capital. All who had relatives

in the country had rejoined them. The authentic proletariat remained

till the end, having the most slender connections with the countryside.

This fact must be emphasised, in order to nail the official lies seeking

to attribute the Petrograd strikes that were soon to break out to

peasant elements, ‘insufficiently steeled in proletarian ideas.’ The

real situation was the very opposite. A few workers were seeking refuge

in the countryside. The bulk remained. There was certainly no exodus of

peasants into the starving towns! A few thousand ‘Troudarmeitzys’

(soldiers of the labour armies), then in Petrograd, did not modify the

picture. It was the famous Petrograd proletariat, the proletariat which

had played such a leading role in both previous revolutions, that was

finally to resort to the classical weapon of the class struggle: the

strike.

The first strike broke out at the Troubotchny factory, on 23^(rd)

February 1921. On the 24^(th), the strikers organised a mass

demonstration in the street. Zinovlev sent detachments of ‘Koursanty’

(student officers) against them. The strikers tried to contact the

Finnish Barracks. Meanwhile, the strikes were spreading. The Baltisky

factory stopped work. Then the Laferma factory and a number of others:

the Skorokhod shoe factory, the Admiralteiski factory, the Bormann and

Metalischeski plants, and finally, on 28^(th) February, the great

Putilov works itself.

The strikers were demanding measures to assist food supplies. Some

factories were demanding the re-establishment of the local markets,

freedom to travel within a radius of thirty miles of the city, and the

withdrawal of the militia detachments holding the road around the town.

But side by side with these economic demands. several factories were

putting forward more political demands freedom of speech and of the

Press, the freeing of working class political prisoners. In several big

factories, Party spokesmen were refused a hearing.

Confronted with the misery of the Russian workers who were seeking an

outlet to their intolerable conditions, the servile Party Committee and

Zinoviev, (who according to numerous accounts was behaving in Petrograd

like a real tyrant), could find no better methods of persuasion than

brute force.

Poukhov[12], ‘official’ historian of the Kronstadt revolt, wrote that

‘decisive class measures were needed to overcome the enemies of the

revolution who were using a non class conscious section of the

proletariat, in order to wrench power from the working class and its

vanguard, the Communist Party.’

On 24^(th). February, the Party leaders set up a special General Staff,

called the Committee of Defence. It was composed of three people:

Lachevitch, Anzelovitch and Avrov. They were to be supported by a number

of technical assistants. In each district of the town, a similar

Committee of Three (‘troika’) was to be set up, composed of the local

Party organiser, the commander of the Party battalion of the local

territorial brigade and of a Commissar from the Officers’ Training

Corps. Similar Committees were organised in the outlying districts.

These were composed of the local Party organiser, the President of the

Executive of the local Soviet and the military Commissar for the

District.

On 24^(th) February the Committee of Defence proclaimed a state of siege

in Petrograd. All circulation on the streets was forbidden after 11 PM,

as were all meetings and gatherings, both out of doors and indoors, that

had not been specifically permitted by the Defence Committee. ‘All

infringements would be dealt with according to military law.’ The decree

was signed by Avrov (later shot by the Stalinists), Commander of the

Petrograd military region, by Lachevitch (who later committed suicide),

a member of the War Council, and by Bouline (later shot by the

Stalinists), Commander of the fortified Petrograd District.

A general mobilisation of party members was decreed. Special detachments

were created, to be sent to “special destinations”. At the same time,

the militia detachments guarding the roads in and out of the town were

withdrawn. Then the strike leaders were arrested.

On 26^(th) February the Kronstadt sailors, naturally interested in all

that was going on in Petrograd, sent delegates to find out about the

strikes. The delegation visited a number factories. It returned to

Kronstadt on the 28^(th). That same day, the crew of the battleship

‘Petropavlovsk,’ having discussed the situation, voted the following

resolution:[13]

Having heard the reports of the representatives sent by the General

Assembly of the Fleet to find out about the situation in Petrograd, the

sailors demand:

• Immediate new elections to the Soviets. The present Soviets no longer

express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should

be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral

propaganda.

• Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the

Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

• The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant

organisations.

• The organisation, at the latest on 10^(th) March 1921, of a Conference

of non-Party workers, solders and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and

the Petrograd District.

• The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties,

and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors

belonging to working class and peasant organisations.

• The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those

detained in prisons and concentration camps.

• The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No

political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas,

or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political

sections various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources

from the State

• The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between

towns and countryside.

• The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in

dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

• The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. The

abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are

required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the

workers.

• The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil,

and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves

and do not employ hired labour.

• We request that all military units and officer trainee groups

associate themselves with this resolution.

• We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

• We demand the institution of mobile workers’ control groups.

• We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does

not utilise wage labour.”

Analysis of the Kronstadt Programme

The Kronstadt sailors and the Petrograd strikers knew quite well that

Russia’s economic status was at the root of the political crisis. Their

discontent was caused both by the famine and by the whole evolution of

the political situation. The Russian workers were increasingly

disillusioned in their greatest hope: the Soviets. Daily they saw the

power of a single Party substituting itself for that of the Soviets. A

Party, moreover, which was degenerating rapidly through the exercise of

absolute power, and which was already riddled with careerists. It was

against the monopoly exercised by this Party in all fields of life that

the working class sought to react.

Point one of the Kronstadt resolution expressed an idea shared by the

best elements of the Russian working class. Totally ‘bolshevised’

Soviets no longer reflected the wishes of the workers and peasants.

Hence the demand for new elections, to be carried out according to the

principal of full equality for all working class political tendencies.

Such a regeneration of the Soviets would imply the granting to all

working class tendencies of the possibility for expressing themselves

freely, without fear of calumny or extermination. Hence, quite

naturally, there followed the idea of freedom of expression, of the

Press, of Assembly and of organisation, contained in Point two.

We must stress that by 1921 the class struggle in the countryside had

been fought to a virtual standstill. The vast majority of the kulaks had

been dispossessed. It is quite wrong to claim that the granting of basic

freedoms to the peasants — as demanded in Point three — would have meant

restoring political rights to the kulaks. It was only a few years later

that the peasants were exhorted to ‘enrich themselves’ — and this by

Bukharin, then an official Party spokesman.

The Kronstadt revolution had the merit of stating things openly and

clearly. But it was breaking no new ground. Its main ideas were being

discussed everywhere. For having, in one way or another, put forward

precisely such ideas, workers and peasants were already filling the

prisons and the recently set up concentration camps. The men of

Kronstadt did not desert their comrades. Point six of their resolution

shows that they intended to look into the whole juridical apparatus.

They already had serious doubts as to its objectivity as an organ of

their rule. The Kronstadt sailors were thereby showing a spirit of

solidarity in the best working class tradition. In July 1917, Kerensky

had arrested a deputation of the Baltic Fleet that had come to

Petrograd. Kronstadt had immediately sent a further deputation to insist

on their release. In 1921, this tradition was being spontaneously

renewed.

Points seven and ten of the resolution attacked the political monopoly

being exercised by the ruling Party. The Party was using State funds in

an exclusive and uncontrolled manner to extend its influence both in the

Army and in the police.

Point nine of their resolution demanded equal rations for all workers

This destroys Trotsky’s accusation of 1938[14] according to which ‘the

men of Kronstadt wanted privileges, while the country was hungry.’

Point fourteen clearly raised the question of workers control. Both

before and during the October Revolution this demand had provoked

powerful echo among the working class. The Kronstadt sailors understood

quite clearly that real control had escaped from the hands of the rank

and file. They sought to bring it back. The Bolshevik meanwhile sought

to vest all control in the hands of a special Commissariat, the Rabkrin

— Workers and Peasants inspection[15].

Point eleven reflected the demands of the peasants to whom the Kronstadt

sailors had remained linked — as had, as a matter of fact, the whole of

the Russian proletariat. The basis of this link is to be found in the

specific history of Russian industry. Because of feudal backwardness,

Russian industry did not find its roots in petty handicraft. In their

great majority, the Russian workers came directly from the peasantry.

This must be stressed. The Baltic sailors of 1921 were, it is true,

closely linked with the peasantry. But neither more so nor less than had

been the sailors of 1917.

In their resolution, the Kronstadt sailors were taking up once again one

of the big demands of October. They were supporting those peasant claims

demanding the land and the right to own cattle for those peasants who

did not exploit the labour of others. In 1921, moreover, there was

another aspect to this particular demand. It was an attempt to solve the

food question, which was becoming desperate. Under the system of forced

requisition, the population of the towns was literally dying of hunger.

Why, incidentally, should the satisfaction of these demands be deemed

‘tactically correct’ when advocated by Lenin, in March 1921, and

‘counter revolutionary’ when put forward by the peasants themselves a

few weeks earlier?

What was so counter revolutionary about the Kronstadt programme. What

could justify the crusade launched by the Party against Kronstadt? A

workers and peasants’ regime that did not wish to base itself

exclusively on lies and terror, had to take account of the peasantry. It

need not thereby have lost its revolutionary character. The men of

Kronstadt were not alone, moreover, in putting forward such demands in

1921, Makhnos followers were still active in the Ukraine. This

revolutionary peasant movement was evolving its own ideas and methods of

struggle. The Ukrainian peasantry had played a predominant role in

chasing out the feudal hordes. It had earned the right itself to

determine the forms of its social life.

Despite Trotsky’s categorical and unsubstantiated assertions, the Makhno

movement was in no sense whatsoever a kulak movement. Koubanin, the

official Bolshevik historian of the Makhno movement, shows

statistically, in a book edited by the Party’s Historical institute,

that the Makhno movement at first appeared and developed most rapidly,

in precisely those areas where the peasants were poorest. The Makhno

movement was crushed before it had a chance of showing in practice its

full creative abilities. The fact that during the Civil War it had been

capable of creating its own specific forms of struggle, leads one to

guess that it could have been capable of a lot more.

As a matter of fact, in relation to agrarian policy, nothing was to

prove more disastrous than the zig zags of the Bolsheviks. In 1931, ten

years after Kronstadt, Stalin was to decree his famous ‘liquidation of

the kulaks.’ This resulted in an atrocious famine and in the loss of

millions of human lives.

Let us finally consider Point fifteen of the Kronstadt resolution,

demanding freedom for handicraft production. This was not a question of

principle. For the workers of Kronstadt, handicraft production was to

compensate for an industrial production that had fallen to nought.

Through this demand they were seeking a way out of their intolerable

economic plight.

3. Mass meetings and Bolshevik slanders

Mass Meetings

The Kronstadt Soviet was due to be renewed on 2^(nd). March.

A meeting of the First and Second Battleship Sections had been planned

for 1^(st). March. The notification had been published in the official

journal of the city of Kronstadt. The speakers were to include Kalinin,

President of the All Russian Executive of Soviets, and Kouzmin,

political commissar to the Baltic Fleet. When Kalinin arrived, he was

received with music and flags. All military honours were accorded him.

Sixteen thousand people attended the meeting. Party member Vassiliev,

president of the local soviet, took the chair. The delegates who had

visited Petrograd the previous day gave their reports. The resolution

adopted on 28^(th). February by the crew of the battleship

‘Petropavlovsk’ was distributed. Kalinin and Kouzmin opposed the

resolution. They proclaimed that ‘Kronstadt did not represent the whole

of Russia.’

Nevertheless, the mass assembly adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution. In

fact only two people voted against it: Kalinin and Kouzmin!

The mass assembly decided to send a delegation of 30 workers to

Petrograd to study the situation on the spot. It was also decided to

invite delegates from Petrograd to visit Kronstadt, so that they would

get to know what the sailors were really thinking. A further mass

meeting was planned for the following day, grouping delegates from

ships’ crews, from the Red Army groups, from State institutions, from

the dockyards and factories, and from the trade unions, to decide on the

procedure of new elections to the local soviet. At the end of the

meeting, Kalinin was allowed to regain Petrograd in all safety.

The following day, 2^(nd). March, the delegates meeting took place in

the House of Culture. According to the official Kronstadt ‘Izvestia’,

the appointment of delegates had taken place properly. The delegates all

insisted that the elections be carried out in a loyal and correct

manner. Kouzmin and Vassiliev spoke first. Kouzmin stated that the Party

would not relinquish power without a fight. Their speeches were so

aggressive and provocative that the assembly ordered them to leave the

meeting and put them under arrest. Other Party members were, however,

allowed to speak at length during the debate.

The meeting of delegates endorsed by an overwhelming majority the

Petropavlovsk resolution. It then got down to examining in detail the

question of elections to the new soviet. These elections were to

‘prepare the peaceful reconstruction of the Soviet regime.’ The work was

constantly interrupted by rumours, spreading through the assembly, to

the effect that the Party was preparing to disperse the meeting by

force. The situation was extremely tense.

The Provisional Committee

Because of the threatening speeches of the representatives of the State

power — Kouzmin and Vassiliev — and fearing retaliation, the assembly

decided to form a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, to which it

entrusted the administration of the town and the fortress. The Committee

held its first session aboard the ‘Petropavlovsk’, the Battle ship in

which Kouzmin and Vassiliev were being detained.

The leading body of the assembly of delegates all became members of the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee. They were:

• Petritchenko, chief quartermaster of the battleship ‘Petropavlovsk’,

• Yakovenko, liaison telephonist to the Kronstadt section,

• Ossossov, boiler man in the battleship ‘Sebastopol’,

• Arkhipov, chief engineer,

• Perepelkin, electrician in the battleship ‘Sebastopol’,

• Patrouchev, chief electrician in the ‘Petropavlovsk’,

• Koupolov, head male nurse,

• Verchinin, sailor in the ‘Sebastopol’,

• Toukin, worker in the ‘Electrotechnical’ factory,

• Romanenko, docks maintenance worker,

• Orechin, headmaster of the Third labour School,

• Valk, sawmill worker,

• Pavlov, worker in a marine mining shop,

• Boikev, head of the building section of the Kronstadt fortress,

• Kilgast, harbour pilot.

The majority of the members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee

were sailors with a long service. This contradicts the official version

of the Kronstadt events, which seeks to attribute the leadership of the

revolt to elements recently joining the Navy and having nothing in

common with the heroic sailors of 1917–1919.

The first proclamation of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee

stated: ‘We are concerned to avoid bloodshed. Our aim is to create

through the joint efforts of town and fortress the proper conditions for

regular and honest elections to the new soviet.’

Later that day, under the leadership of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee, the inhabitants of Kronstadt occupied all strategic points in

the town, taking over the State establishments, the Staff Headquarters,

and the telephone and wireless buildings. Committees were elected in all

battleships and regiments. At about 9:00 p.m., most of the forts and

most detachments of the Red Army had rallied. Delegates coming from

Oranienbaum had also declared their support for the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee. That same day the ’Izvestia’ printshops were

occupied.

On the morrow, 3^(rd). March, the men of Kronstadt published the first

issue of the ’Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee’.[16]

In it one read: ‘The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached

itself from the masses. It has shown itself incapable of getting the

country out of its mess. Countless incidents have recently occurred in

Petrograd and Moscow which show clearly that the Party has lost the

confidence of the working masses. The Party is ignoring working class

demands because it believes that these demands are the result of counter

revolutionary activity. In this the Party is making a profound mistake.

’

Bolshevik Slanders

Meanwhile, Moscow Radio was broadcasting as follows:

“Struggle against the White Guard Plot.” And, “Just like other White

Guard insurrections, the mutiny of ex General Kozlovsky and the crew of

the battle ship ‘Petropavlovsk’ has been organised by Entente spies.

This is clear from the fact that the French paper ‘Le Monde’ published

the following message from Helsingfors two weeks before the revolt of

General Kozlovsky: ‘We are informed from Petrograd that as the result of

the recent Kronstadt revolt, the Bolshevik military authorities have

taken a whole series of measures to isolate the town and to prevent the

soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt from entering Petrograd.’

“It is therefore clear that the Kronstadt revolt is being led from

Paris. The French counter espionage is mixed up in the whole affair.

History is repeating itself. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who have

their headquarters in Paris, are preparing the ground for an

insurrection against the Soviet power. The ground prepared, their real

master, the Tsarist general appeared. The history of Koltchak,

installing his power in the wake of that of the Socialist

Revolutionaries, is being repeated.” (Radio Stanzia Moskva and Radio

Vestnik Rosta Moskva, 3^(rd). March 1921.)

The two antagonists saw the facts differently. Their outlooks were poles

apart.

The call issued by Moscow’s Radio was obviously coming from the

Politbureau’s top leaders. It had Lenin’s approval, who must have been

fully aware of what was happening at Kronstadt. Even assuming that he

had to rely on Zinoviev for information, whom he knew to be cowardly and

liable to panic, it is difficult to believe that Lenin misunderstood the

real state of affairs. On 2^(nd). March, Kronstadt had sent an official

delegation to see him. It would have been enough to cross question it in

order to ascertain the true situation.

Lenin, Trotsky, and the whole Party leadership knew quite well that this

was no mere ‘generals’ revolt’. Why then invent this legend about

General Kozlovsky, leader of the mutiny? The answer lies in the

Bolshevik outlook, an outlook at times so blind that it could not see

that lies were as likely to prove nefarious as to prove helpful. The

legend of General Kozlovsky opened the path to another legend: that of

the Wrangel officer allegedly conspiring with Trotsky in 1928–29. It in

fact opened the path to the massive lying of the whole Stalin era.

Anyway, who was this General Kozlovsky, denounced by the official radio

as the leader of the insurrection? He was an artillery general, and had

been one of the first to defect to the Bolsheviks. He seemed devoid of

any capacity as a leader. At the time of the insurrection he happened to

be in command of the artillery at Kronstadt. The communist commander of

the fortress had defected. Kozlovsky, according to the rules prevailing

in the fortress, had to replace him. He, in fact, refused, claiming that

as the fortress was now under the jurisdiction of the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee, the old rules no longer applied. Kozlovsky

remained, it is true, in Kronstadt, but only as an artillery specialist.

Moreover, after the fall of Kronstadt, in certain interviews granted to

the Finnish press, Kozlovsky accused the sailors of having wasted

precious time on issues other than the defence of the fortress. He

explained this in terms of their reluctance to resort to bloodshed.

Later, other officers of the garrison were also to accuse the sailors of

military incompetence, and of complete lack of confidence in their

technical advisers. Kozlovsky was the only general to have been present

at Kronstadt. This was enough for the Government to make use of his

name.

The men of Kronstadt did, up to a point, make use of the military know

how of certain officers in the fortress at the time. Some of these

officers may have given the men advice out of sheer hostility to the

Bolsheviks. But in their attack on Kronstadt, the Government forces were

also making use of ex Tsarist officers. On the one side there were

Kozlovsky, Salomianov, and Arkannihov; On the other, ex Tsarist officers

and specialists of the old regime, such as Toukhatchevsky, Kamenev, and

Avrov. On neither side were these officers an independent force.

4. Effects on the Party Rank and File

On 2^(nd). March, the Kronstadt sailors, aware of their rights, their

duties and the moral authority vested in them by their revolutionary

past, attempted to set the soviets on a better path. They saw how

distorted they had become through the dictatorship of a single party.

On 7^(th). March, the Central Government launched its military onslaught

against Kronstadt.

What had happened between these two dates?

In Kronstadt, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, enlarged during a

mass meeting by the co-option of five new members, had started to

reorganise social life in both town and fortress. It decided to arm the

workers of Kronstadt to ensure the internal protection of the town. It

decreed the compulsory re-election, within three days, of the leading

trade union committees and of the Congress of Trade Unions, in which

bodies it wished to vest considerable powers.

Rank and file members of the Communist Party were showing their

confidence in the Provisional Revolutionary Committee by a mass

desertion from the Party. A number of them formed a Provisional Party

Bureau which issued the following appeal:

“Give no credence to the absurd rumours spread by provocateurs seeking

bloodshed according to which responsible Party comrades are being shot

or to rumours alleging that the Party is preparing an attack against

Kronstadt. This is an absurd lie, spread by agents of the Entente,

seeking to overthrow the power of the Soviets.

The Provisional Party Bureau considers re-elections to the Kronstadt

Soviet to be indispensable. It calls on all its supporters to take part

in these elections.

The Provisional Party Bureau calls on all its supporters to remain at

their posts and to create no obstacles to the measures taken by the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Long live the power of the Soviets!

Long live international working class unity!

Signed (on behalf of the Provisional Party Bureau of Kronstadt): Iline

(ex commissar for supplies), Pervouchin (ex President of the local

Executive Committee), Kabanov (ex President of the Regional Trade Union

Bureau)”.

The Stalinist historian Poukhov referring to this appeal, declared that

“it can only be considered a treasonable act and an opportunist step

towards an agreement with the leaders of the insurrection, who are

obviously playing a counter revolutionary role”[17]. Poukhov admits that

this document had “a certain effect” on the rank and file of the Party.

According to him, 780 Party members in Kronstadt left the Party at this

time!

Some of those resigning from the Party sent letters to the Kronstadt

‘Izvestia’, giving reasons for their action. The teacher Denissov wrote:

“I openly declare to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee that as

from gunfire directed at Kronstadt, I no longer consider myself a member

of the Party. I support the call issued by the workers of Kronstadt. All

power to the Soviets, not to the Party!”

A military group assigned to the special company dealing with discipline

also issued a declaration:

“We, the undersigned, joined the Party believing it to express the

wishes of the working masses. In fact the Party has proved itself an

executioner of workers and peasants. This is revealed quite clearly by

recent events in Petrograd. These events show up the face of the Party

leaders. The recent broadcasts from Moscow show clearly that the Party

leaders are prepared to resort to any means in order to retain power.

We ask that henceforth, we no longer be considered Party members. We

rally to the call issued by the Kronstadt garrison in its resolution of

2^(nd). March. We invite other comrades who have become aware of the

error of their ways, publicly to recognise the fact.

Signed: Gutman, Yefimov, Koudriatzev, Andreev. (‘Izvestia’ of the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 7^(th). March 1921)”.

The Communist Party members in the ‘Rif’ fort published the following

resolution:

“During the last three years, many greedy careerists have flocked to our

Party. This has given rise to bureaucracy and has gravely hampered the

struggle for economic reconstruction.

Our Party has always faced up to the problem of the struggle against the

enemies of the proletariat and of the working masses. We publicly

declare that we intend to continue in the future our defence of the

rights secured by the working class. We will allow no White Guard to

take advantage of this difficult situation confronting the Republic of

Soviets. At the first attempt directed against its power we will know

how to retaliate.

We fully accept the authority of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee, which is setting itself the objective of creating soviets

genuinely representing the proletarian and working masses.

Long live the power of the Soviets, the real defenders of working class

rights.

Signed: the Chairman and Secretary of the meeting of Communists in Fort

Rif” (‘Izvestia’ of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. 7^(th).

March 1921.

Were such declarations forcibly extracted from Party members by the

regime of terror directed against Party members allegedly reigning in

Kronstadt at the time? Not a shred of evidence has been produced to this

effect. Throughout the whole insurrection not a single imprisoned

Communist was shot. And this despite the fact that among the prisoners

were men responsible for the fleet such as Kouzmin and Batys. The vast

majority of Communist Party members were in fact left entirely free.

In the ‘Izvestia’ of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee for 7^(th).

March, one can read under the heading ‘We are not seeking revenge’, the

following note:

“The prolonged oppression to which the Party dictatorship has submitted

the workers has provoked a natural indignation among the masses. This

has led, in certain places, to boycotts and sackings directed against

the relatives of Party members. This must not take place. We are not

seeking revenge. We are only defending our interests as workers. We must

act cautiously. We must only take action against those who sabotage or

those who through lying propaganda seek to prevent a reassertion of

working class power and rights”.

In Petrograd, however, humanist ideas of rather a different kind were

prevailing. As soon as the arrests of Kouzmin and Vassiliev were

learned, the Defence Committee ordered the arrests of the families of

all Kronstadt sailors known to be living in Petrograd. A Government

plane showered Kronstadt with leaflets saying:

“The Defence Committee an announces that it has arrested and imprisoned

the families of the sailors as hostages for the safety of communist

comrades arrested by the Kronstadt mutineers. We refer specifically to

the safety of Fleet Commissar Kouzmin, and Vassiliev, President of the

Kronstadt Soviet. If a hair of their heads is touched, the hostages will

pay with their lives”. (‘Izvestia’ of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee, 5^(th). March 1921).

The Provisional Revolutionary Committee replied with the following radio

message:

“In the name of the Kronstadt garrison, the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee of Kronstadt insists on the liberation, within 24 hours, of

the families of the workers, sailors and red soldiers arrested as

hostages by the Petrograd Soviet.

The Kronstadt garrison assures you that in the city of Kronstadt, Party

members are entirely free and that their families enjoy absolute

immunity. We refuse to follow the example of the Petrograd Soviet. We

consider such methods, even when conducted by ferocious hatred, as

utterly shameful and degrading.

Signed: Petritchenko, sailor, President of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee; Kilgast, Secretary”.

To refute rumours according to which Party members were being

ill-treated, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee set up a special

Commission to investigate the cases of the imprisoned communists. In its

issue of 4^(th). March, the ‘Izvestia’ of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee announced that a Party member would be attached to the

Commission. It is doubtful if this body ever got to work, as two days

later the bombardment of Kronstadt began. The Provisional Revolutionary

Committee did, however, receive a Party delegation. It granted it

permission to visit the prisoners in the ‘Petropavlovsk’. The prisoners

had even been allowed to hold meetings among themselves, and to edit a

wall newspaper. (Zaikovski: ‘Kronstadt from 1917 to 1921’)

There was no terror in Kronstadt. Under very difficult and tragic

circumstances, the ‘rebels had done their utmost to apply the basic

principles of working class democracy. If many rank and file communists

decided to support the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, it was

because this body expressed the wishes and aspirations of the working

people. In retrospect, this democratic self assertion of Kronstadt may

appear surprising. It certainly contrasted with the actions and frame of

mind prevailing among the Party leaders in Petrograd and Moscow. They

remained blind, deaf and totally lacking in understanding of what

Kronstadt and the working masses of the whole of Russia really wanted.

Catastrophe could still have been averted during those tragic days: Why

then did the Petrograd Defence Committee use such abusive language? The

only conclusion an objective observer can come to is that it was done

with the deliberate intention of provoking bloodshed, thereby ‘teaching

everyone a lesson’ as to the need for absolute submission to the central

power.

5. Threats, Bribes and Skirmishes

Threats and Bribes

On 5^(th). March, the Petrograd Defence Committee issued a call to the

rebels.

“You are being told fairy tales when they tell you that Petrograd is

with you or that the Ukraine supports you. These are impertinent lies.

The last sailor in Petrograd abandoned you when he learned that you were

led by generals like Kozlovskv. Siberia and the Ukraine support the

Soviet power. Red Petrograd laughs at the miserable efforts of a handful

of White Guards and Socialist Revolutionaries. You are surrounded on all

sides. A few hours more will lapse and then you will he compelled to

surrender. Kronstadt has neither bread nor fuel. If you insist, we will

shoot you like partridges.

At the last minute, all those generals, the Kozlovskvs, the Bourksers,

and all that riff raff, the Petrichenkos, and the Tourins will flee to

Finland, to the White guards. And you, rank and file soldiers and

sailors, where will you go then? Don’t believe them when they promise to

feed you in Finland. Haven’t you heard what happened to Wrangel’s

supporters? They were transported to Constantinople. There they are

dying like flies, in their thousands, of hunger and disease. This is the

fate that awaits you, unless you immediately take a grip of yourselves.

Surrender Immediately! Don’t waste a minute. Collect your weapons and

come over to us. Disarm and arrest your criminal leaders, and in

particular the Tsarist generals. Whoever surrenders immediately will be

forgiven. Surrender now.

Signed: The Defence Committee”.

In reply to these threats from Petrograd, the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee Issued a final appeal.

“TO ALL, TO ALL, TO ALL.

Comrades, workers, red soldiers and sailors. Here in Kronstadt we know

full well how much you and your wives and your children are suffering

under the iron rule of the Party. We have overthrown the Party dominated

Soviet. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is today starting

elections to a new Soviet. It will be freely elected, and it will

reflect the wishes of the whole working population, and of the garrison

— and not just those of a handful of Party members.

Our cause is just. We stand for the power of the Soviets, not for that

of the Party. We stand for freely elected representatives of the toiling

masses. Deformed Soviets, dominated by the Party, have remained deaf to

our pleas. Our appeals have been answered with bullets.

The workers’ patience is becoming exhausted. So now they are seeking to

pacify you with crumbs. On Zinoviev’s orders the militia barrages have

been withdrawn. Moscow has allocated ten million gold roubles for the

purchase abroad of food stuffs and other articles of first necessity.

But we know that the Petrograd proletariat will not be bought over in

this way. Over the heads of the Party, we hold out to you the fraternal

hand of revolutionary Kronstadt.

Comrades, you are being deceived. And truth is being distorted by the

basest of calumnies.

Comrades, don’t allow yourselves to be misled.

In Kronstadt, power is in the hands of the sailors, of the red soldiers

and of the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands of white Guards

commanded by General Kozlovsky, as Moscow Radio lyingly asserts.

Signed: The Provisional Revolutionary Committee”.

Foreign communists were in Moscow and Petrograd at the time of the

revolt. They were in close contact with leading Party circles. They

confirmed that the Government had made hasty purchases abroad (even

chocolate was bought, which had always been a luxury in Russia). Moscow

and Petrograd had suddenly changed their tactics. The Government had a

better grasp of psychological war than had the men of Kronstadt. It

understood the corrupting influence of white bread on a starving

population. It was in vain that Kronstadt asserted that crumbs would not

buy the Petrograd proletariat. The Government’s methods had undoubted

effect, especially when combined with vicious repression directed

against the strikers.

Support in Petrograd

Part of the Petrograd proletariat continued to strike during the

Kronstadt events. Poukhov, the Party historian, himself admits this. The

workers were demanding the liberation of the prisoners. In certain

factories, copies of the ‘Ivestia’ of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee were found plastered on the walls. A lorry even drove through

the street of Petrograd scattering leaflets from Kronstadt. In certain

enterprises (for instance, the State Printing Works No. 26), the workers

refused to adopt a resolution condemning the Kronstadt sailors. At the

‘Arsenal’ factory, the workers organised a mass meeting on 7^(th) March,

(the day the bombardment of Kronstadt began). This meeting adopted a

resolution of the mutinous sailors! It elected a commission which was to

go from factory to factory, agitating for a general strike.

Strikes were continuing in the biggest factories of Petrograd: Poutilov,

Baltisky, Oboukhov, Nievskaia Manoufactura, etc. The authorities sacked

the striking workers, transferred the factories to the authority of the

local troikas (three men committees), who proceeded to selective

rehiring of workers. Other repressive measures were also taken against

the strikers.

Strikes were also starting in Moscow, in Nijni Novgorod and in other

cities. But here too, the prompt delivery of foodstuffs, combined with

calumnies to the effect that Tsarist generals were in command at

Kronstadt had succeeded in sowing doubts among the workers.

The Bolsheviks’ aim had been achieved. The proletariat of Petrograd and

of the other industrial cities was in a state of confusion. The

Kronstadt sailors, who had been hoping for the support of the whole of

working class Russia, remained isolated, confronting a Government

determined to annihilate them, whatever the cost.

First Skirmishes

On 6^(th). March, Trotsky addressed an appeal by radio to the Kronstadt

garrison:

“The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government has decided to reassert its

authority without delay, both over Kronstadt and over the mutinous

battleships, and to put them at the disposal of the Soviet Republic. I

therefore order all those who have raised a hand against the Socialist

Fatherland, immediately to lay down their weapons. Those who resist will

be disarmed and put at the disposal of the Soviet Command. The arrested

commissars and other representatives of the Government must be freed

immediately. Only those who surrender unconditionally will be able to

count on the clemency of the Soviet Republic. I am meanwhile giving

orders that everything be prepared to smash the revolt and the rebels by

force of arms. The responsibility for the disasters which will effect

the civilian population must fall squarely on the heads of the White

Guard insurgents.

Signed: Trotsky, President of the Military Revolutionary Council of the

Soviet Republic, KAMENEV,[18] Glavkom (Commanding Officer)”.

On 8^(th). March, a plane flew over Kronstadt and dropped a bomb. On the

following days, Government artillery continued to shell the fortress and

neighbouring forts, but met with stiff resistance. Aircraft dropped

bombs which provoked such fury among the civilian population that they

started firing back. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee had to

order the defenders not to waste their ammunition.

By 1921 the Kronstadt garrison had been markedly reduced. Figures issued

by the General Staff of the defenders put the number at 3,000. Gaps

between infantrymen defending the perimeter were at least 32 feet wide.

Stocks of ammunition and shells were also limited.

During the afternoon of 3^(rd). March, the Revolutionary Committee had

met in conference together with certain military specialists. A Military

Defence Committee was set up which prepared a plan to defend the

fortress. But when the military advisers proposed an assault in the

direction of Oranienbaum (where there were food stocks, at

Spassatelnaia), the Provisional Revolutionary Committee refused. It was

not putting its faith in the military capacity of the sailors; but in

the moral support of the whole of proletarian Russia. Until the first

shot had been fired, the men of Kronstadt refused to believe that the

Government would militarily attack them. This is no doubt why the

Provisional Revolutionary Committee had not set out to prevent the

approach of the Red Army by breaking the ice around the foot of the

fortress. For much the same reasons, fortified barrages were not set up

along the probable line of attack.

Kronstadt was right. Militarily they could not win. At best, they could

have held a fortnight. This might have been important, for once the ice

had melted, Kronstadt could have become a real fortress, capable of

defending itself. Nor must we forget that their human reserves were

infinitesimal, compared with the numbers the Red Army could throw into

battle.

6. Demoralisation in the Red Army

What was morale like in the Red Army at this time? In an interview given

to ’Krasnaia Gazeta’, Dybenko[19] described how all the military units

participating in the assault on Kronstadt had to be reorganised. This

was an absolute necessity. During the first day of military operations,

the Red Army had shown that it did not wish to fight against the

sailors, against the ‘bratichki’ (little brothers), as they were known

at the time. Amongst the advanced workers, the Kronstadt sailors were

known as people most devoted to the Revolution. And anyway, the very

motives that were driving Kronstadt to revolt, existed among the ranks

of the Red Army. Both were hungry and cold, poorly clad and poorly shod

and this was no mean burden in the Russian winter, especially when what

was asked of them was to march and fight on ice and snow.

During the night of 8^(th). March, when the Red Army attack against

Kronstadt started, a terrible snow storm was blowing over the Baltic.

Thick fog made the tracks almost invisible. The Red Army soldiers wore

long white blouses which hid them well against the snow. This is how

Poukhov[20] described morale in Infantry Regiment 561 in an official

communiqué. The regiment was approaching Kronstadt from the Oranienbaum

side.

“At the beginning of the operation the second battalion had refused to

march. With much difficulty and thanks to the presence of communists, it

was persuaded to venture on the ice. As soon as it reached the first

south battery, a company of the 2^(nd). battalion surrendered. The

officers had to return alone. The regiment stopped. Dawn was breaking.

We were without news of the 3^(rd) battalion, which was advancing

towards south batteries 1 and 2. The battalion was marching in file and

was being shelled by artillery from the forts. It then spread out and

veered to the left of Fort Milioutine, from which red flags were being

waved. Having advanced a further short distance, it noticed that the

rebels had fitted machine guns on the forts, and were offering them the

choice of surrendering or being massacred. Everybody surrendered, except

the battalion commissar and three or four soldiers who turned back on

their steps”.

On 8^(th). March, Oublanov, Commissar for the Northern Sector, wrote to

the Petrograd Party:

“I consider it my revolutionary duty to clarify you as to the state of

affairs on the northern sector. It is impossible to send the Army into a

second attack on the forts. I have already spoken to Comrades

Lachevitch, Avrov and Trotsky about the morale of the Koursantys (cadet

officers, deemed most fit for battle). I have to report the following

tendencies. The men wish to know the demands of Kronstadt. They want to

send delegates to Kronstadt. The number of political commissars in this

sector is far from sufficient”.

Army morale was also revealed in the case of the 79^(th). Brigade of the

27^(th) Omsk Division. The Division comprised three regiments. It had

shown its fighting capacities in the struggle against Koltchak. On

12^(th). March, the division was brought to the Kronstadt front. The

Orchane regiment refused to fight against Kronstadt. The following day,

in the two other regiments of the same division, the soldiers organised

impromptu meetings where they discussed what attitude to take. Two of

the regiments had to be disarmed by force, and the ‘revolutionary’

tribunal posed heavy sentences.

There were many similar cases. Not only were the soldiers unwilling to

fight against their class brothers, but they were not prepared to fight

on the ice in the month of March. Units had been brought in from other

regions of the country, where by mid March the ice was melting already.

They had little confidence in the solidity of the Baltic ice. Those who

had taken part in the first assault, had seen that the shells from

Kronstadt were opening up enormous holes in its surface, in which the

unfortunate Government troops were being engulfed. These were hardly

encouraging scenes. All this contributed to the failure of the first

assaults against Kronstadt.

Reorganisation

The regiments to be used in the final assault against Kronstadt were

thoroughly reorganised. Groups that had shown any sympathy towards

Kronstadt were disarmed and transferred to other units. Some were

severely punished by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Party members were

mobilised and allocated to various battalions for purposes of propaganda

and for reporting back on unsure elements.

Between 8^(th). and 15^(th). of March, while the cannons exchanged fire

over the ice at Kronstadt, the Tenth Party Congress was held in Moscow.

The Congress despatched 300 delegates to the front, among them

Vorochilov, Boubnov, Zatousky, Roukhimovitch and Piatakov. The

‘delegates’ were nominated ‘political commissars’ and appointed to the

military section of the Tcheka, or to ‘special commissions for the

struggle against desertion’. Some just fought in the ranks.

The Revolutionary Tribunals were working overtime. Poukhov describes how

‘they would vigorously react to all unhealthy tendencies. Troublemakers

and provocateurs were punished according to their deserts’. The

sentences would immediately be made known to the soldiers. Some times

they would even be published in the papers.

But despite all the propaganda, all the reorganisation, and all the

repression, the soldiers retained their doubts. On 14^(th). March, there

were further acts of insubordination. Regiment 561, reorganised on

8^(th). March, still refused to march. ‘We will not fight against our

brothers from the same “stanltsas”[21]’, they proclaimed.

Small groups of Red Army men surrendered to the rebels and started

fighting on their side. Witnesses described how some units lost half

their men before even entering the line of fire of the insurgents. They

were being machined gunned from the rear ‘to prevent them surrendering

to the rebels’.

Official sources described how issues of the Kronstadt ‘Izvestia’ were

being read with great interest in the Red Army. So were the leaflets

distributed by the Kronstadt rebels. Special political commissions were

set up to prevent such material from entering the barracks. But this had

an opposite effect from the one expected.

Party organisations throughout the country were mobilised. Intensive

propaganda was carried out among the troops in the rear. The human and

material resources available to the Government were far greater than

those available to Kronstadt. Trains were daily bringing new troops to

Petrograd. Many were being sent from the Kirghiz and Bachkir lands

(i.e., were composed of men as far removed as possible from the

‘Kronstadt frame of mind’). As to the defenders of Kronstadt, their

forces were not only diminishing numerically (through losses sustained

in fighting), but they were more and more exhausted. Badly clad and half

starving, the Kronstadt rebels remained at their guns, almost without

relief, for just over a week. At the end of this period, many of them

could hardly stand.

7. The Final Assault

Aware of these facts and having taken all necessary measures in relation

to organisation, supplies and improvement in morale Toukhatchevsky,

commander of the 7^(th). Army, issued his famous proclamation of

15^(th). March. He ordered that Kronstadt be taken by all out assault in

the night of 16^(th)-17^(th) March. Entire regiments of the 7^(th). Army

were equipped with hand grenades, white blouses, shears for cutting

barbed wire and with small sleighs for carrying machine guns.

Toukhatchevsky’s plan was to launch a decisive attack from the south,

and then to capture Kronstadt by a massive simultaneous assault from

three different directions.

On 16^(th). March, the Southern Group opened its artillery barrage at

14.20 hrs. At 17.00 hrs. the Northern Group also started shelling

Kronstadt. The Kronstadt guns answered back. The bombardment lasted four

hours. Aircraft then bombed the city, with a view to creating panic

among the civilian population. In the evening, the artillery bombardment

ceased. The Kronstadt searchlights swept over the ice looking for the

invaders.

Towards midnight, the Government troops had taken up their position and

started to advance. At 2:45 a.m., the Northern Force had occupied Fort

7, abandoned by the Kronstadt defenders. At 4:30 a.m., Government troops

attacked Forts 4 and 6, but suffered very heavy losses from the

Kronstadt artillery. At 6:40 a.m., Government officer cadets finally

captured Fort 6.

At 5:00 a.m., the Southern Force launched an attack on the forts facing

them. The defenders, overwhelmed, fell back towards the city. A fierce

and bloody battle then broke out in the streets. Machine guns were used,

at very close range. The sailors defended each house, each attic, each

shed. In the town itself, they were reinforced by the workers’ militias.

The attacking troops were, for a few hours, thrown back towards the

forts and suburbs. The sailors reoccupied the Mechanical Institute,

which had been captured early by the 80^(th) government Brigade.

The street fighting was terrible. Red Army soldiers were losing their

officers, Red Army men and defending troops were mixing in indescribable

confusion. No one quite knew who was on which side. The civilian

population of the town tried to fraternise with the Government troops,

despite the shooting. Leaflets of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee were still being distributed. To the bitter end the sailors

were trying to fraternise.

Throughout 17^(th). March the fighting raged on. By the evening the

Northern Group had occupied most of the forts. Street fighting continued

throughout the night and well into the following morning. One by one the

last forts — Milioutine, Constantine and Obroutchev — fell. Even after

the last one had been occupied, isolated groups of defenders were still

desperately fighting back with machine guns. Near the Tolbukhin light

house, a final group of 150 sailors put up a desperate resistance.

The Balance Sheet

Figures Issued by the Military Health Authorities of the Petrograd

District — and relating to the period between 3^(rd) and 21^(st) March —

spoke of 4,127 wounded and 527 killed. These figures do not include the

drowned, or the numerous wounded left to die on the ice.[22] Nor do they

include the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals.

We do not even have approximate figures as to the losses on the

Kronstadt side. They were enormous, even without the reprisal massacres

that later took place. Perhaps one day the archives of the Tcheka and of

the Revolutionary Tribunals will reveal the full and terrible truth.

This is what Poukhov, ‘official’ Stalinist historian of the revolt, says

on the matter: ‘While steps were being taken to re-establish normal

life, and as the struggle against rebel remnants was being pursued, the

Revolutionary Tribunals of the Petrograd Military District were carrying

out their work in many areas’.....’ Severe proletarian justice was being

meted out to all traitors to the Cause ’.....’ The sentences were given

much publicity in the press and played a great educational role’. These

quotations from official sources refute Trotskyist lies that ‘the

fortress was surrounded and captured with insignificant losses.’[23]

In the night of 17^(th)-18^(th) March, part of the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee left Kronstadt. Some 8,000 people (some sailors

and the most active part of the civilian population), moved towards

Finland and permanent exile. When the Red Army — defenders of the

‘soviet’ power — finally entered Kronstadt, they did not re-establish

the Kronstadt soviet. Its functions were taken over by the Political

Section of the Secretariat of the new Assistant Commander of the

Fortress.

The whole Red Fleet was profoundly reorganised. Thousands of Baltic

sailors were sent to serve in the Black Sea, in the Caspian and in

Siberian naval stations. According to Poukhov: ‘the less reliable

elements, those infected with the Kronstadt spirit, were transferred.

Many only went reluctantly. This measure contributed to the purification

of an unhealthy atmosphere’.

In April, the new Naval Command started an individual check. ‘A special

commission dismissed 15,000 sailors in “non essential” (i.e., non

specialised) categories V, G, and D — as well as sailors not considered

reliable from a political point of view’.

After the physical annihilation of Kronstadt, its very spirit had to be

eradicated from the Fleet.

8. What they said at the time

“Revolts by workers and peasants have shown that their patience has come

to an end. The uprising of the workers is near at hand. The time has

come to overthrow the bureaucracy... Kronstadt has raised for the first

time the banner of the Third Revolution of the toilers... The autocracy

has fallen. The Constituent Assembly has departed to the region of the

damned. The bureaucracy is crumbling...” Isvestia of the Kronstadt

Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Etapy Revoliutsi (Stages of the

Revolution), March 12, 1921.

“In the bourgeois newspapers you can read that we brought up Chinese,

Kalmuk and other regiments against Yudemitch and Kronstadt. This is, of

course, a lie. We brought up our youth. The storming of Kronstadt was

indeed symbolic. Kronstadt, as I said, was about to pass into the hands

of French and English imperialism.” L. Trotsky. Speech delivered at

2^(nd) Congress of Communist Youtb International, July 14, 1921. The

First Five Years of The Communist International (Pioneer Publishers,

1945), p. 312.

The Anarchists

Did the Kronstadt sailors put forward their demands and resolutions by

themselves? Or were they acting under the influence of political groups,

which might have suggested slogans to them? Anarchist influence is often

incriminated when this subject is described. How sure can one be of the

matter? Among members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, as

among the Kronstadters in general, there were certainly individuals

claiming to be anarchists. But if one bases oneself on documentary

evidence, as we have sought to do throughout this study, one must

conclude that there was no direct intervention by anarchist groups.

The Menshevik Dan, who was in prison for a while in Petrograd with a

group of Kronstadt rebels, tells us in his memoirs[24] that Perepelkin,

one of the members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, was close

to anarchism. He also tells us that the Kronstadt sailors were both

disillusioned and fed up with Communist Party policy and that they spoke

with hatred about political parties in general. In their eyes, the

Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were as bad as the

Bolsheviks. All were out to seize power and would later betray the

people who had vested their confidence in them. According to Dan, the

conclusion of the sailors, disappointed with political parties was: “You

are all the same. What we need is anarchism, not a power structure!”.

The anarchists of course defend the Kronstadt rebels. It seems likely to

us that had any of their organisations really lent a hand in the

insurrection the anarchist press would have mentioned the fact. In the

anarchist press of the time, however, there is no mention of such help.

For instance Yartchouk, an old anarcho-syndicalist[25] who before

October had enjoyed considerable authority amongst the population and

sailors of Kronstadt, mentions no such anarchist role in his pamphlet

devoted to the 1921 uprising[26], written immediately after the events.

We must consider his judgement as fairly conclusive evidence.

At the time of the insurrection the anarchists were already being

persecuted all over the country. Isolated libertarians and the few

remaining anarchist groupings were undoubtedly ‘morally’ on the side of

the insurgents. This is shown for instance in the following leaflet,

addressed to the working class of Petrograd:

“The Kronstadt revolt is a revolution. Day and night you can hear the

sound of the cannon. You hesitate to intervene directly against the

Government to divert its forces from Kronstadt, although the cause of

Kronstadt is your cause... The men of Kronstadt are always in the

forefront of rebellion. After the Kronstadt revolt let us see the revolt

of Petrograd. And after you, let anarchism prevail.”

Four anarchists then in Petrograd (Emma Goldmann, Alexander Berkman,

Perkous and Petrovsky) foresaw a bloody outcome to events. On March 5,

they sent the following letter to the Petrograd Council for Labour and

Defence:

“It Is not only impossible but in fact criminal to keep quiet at the

present time. Recent developments compel us anarchists to give our

opinion on the present situation. The discontent and ferment in the

minds of the workers and sailors are the result of circumstances which

deserve serious attention from us. Cold and famine have provoked

discontent, while the absence of any possibility of discussion or

criticism drive the workers and sailors to seek an outlet to this

discontent. The fact that a workers’ and peasants’ government uses force

against workers and sailors is even more important. It will create a

reactionary impression in the international labour movement and will

therefore harm the cause of the social revolution. Bolshevik comrades,

think while there is still time. Don’t play with fire. You are about to

take a decisive step. We propose the following to you: nominate a

commission of six, of which two should be anarchists, to go to Kronstadt

to solve the differences peacefully. In the present circumstances this

is the most rational way of doing things. It will have an international

revolutionary significance.”

These anarchists certainly did their duty. But they acted on their own

and there is nothing to show that they were organisationally linked with

the rebels in any way. Moreover the very fact that they proposed this

kind of mediation suggests that they were not in direct contact with the

sailors, who had themselves sent a deputation to Petrograd through which

it would have been possible to negotiate. And if, in the “Petropavlovsk”

resolution, we find the demand of freedom of speech and freedom of

publication for the anarchists, this merely shows that the Kronstadters

of 1921 had retained their ideas and traditions of before October.

Before October both Bolsheviks and Anarchists had considerable influence

at Kronstadt[27]. In the summer of 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd

Soviet, Trotsky had been able to answer the Menshevik leader Tseretelli:

“Yes, the Kronstadters are anarchists. But during the final stage of the

Revolution the reactionaries who are now inciting you to exterminate

Kronstadt will be preparing ropes to hang both you and us. And it will

be the Kronstadters who will fight to the last to defend us.”

The anarchists were well-known in Kronstadt as revolutionaries. That is

why the rebels, when they spoke of opening the doors of the Soviets to

different socialist tendencies, had first thought of the anarchists as

well as of the left Socialist Revolutionaries.

The most important of the demands of the Petropavlovsk resolution were

those calling for democratic rights for the workers and those peasants

not exploiting the labour of others and the demand calling for the

abolition of the monopoly of Party influence. These demands were part of

the programme of other socialist tendencies, already reduced to

illegality. The anarchists agreed with these demands and were not the

only ones to be putting them forward.

On the other hand the Kronstadters repeatedly insisted that they were

“for soviet power”. A small minority of Russian libertarians (the

‘soviet anarchists’) were known to support the idea of close

collaboration with the soviets, which were already integrated into the

state machine. The Makhnovist movement on the other hand (which was not

exclusively anarchist although under the strong personal influence of

Makhno, an anarchist since the age of 16) did not speak of ‘soviet

power’ as some thing to be defended. Its slogan was ‘free soviets’, i.e.

soviets where different political tendencies might coexist, without

being vested with state power.

The Kronstadters believed that the trade unions had an important role to

play. This idea was by no means an exclusively anarchist one. It was

shared by the left Socialist Revolutionaries and by the Workers’

Opposition (Kollontai and Chliapnikov) in the Communist Party itself.

Later other oppositional communist tendencies (like the Sapronovites)

were to espouse it. In short the idea was the hallmark of all those who

sought to save the Russian Revolution through proletarian democracy and

through an opposition to the one-party monopoly which had started

dominating and was now replacing all other tendencies.

We may conclude by saying that anarchism had an influence on the

Kronstadt insurrection to the extent that it advocated the idea of

proletarian democracy.

The Mensheviks

The Mensheviks had never carried much weight among the sailors. The

number of Menshevik deputies to the Kronstadt Soviet bore no real

relation to their influence in the Fleet. The anarchists, who after the

second election only had three or four deputies to the Soviet, enjoyed a

far greater popularity. This paradoxical situation arose from the lack

of organisation among the anarchists and also from the fact that in 1917

the differences between bolshevism and anarchism were hardly perceptible

to the masses. Many anarchists at that time saw bolshevism as a kind of

Bakouninized Marxism[28].

The Mensheviks — at least their official faction — although

fundamentally hostile to Bolshevism, were not in favour of an armed

struggle against the State power. Because of this they were hostile to

armed intervention[29]. They tried to play the role of a legal

opposition both in the Soviets and in the trade unions. Opposed both to

the dictatorship of the proletariat and to the dictatorship of a single

party and convinced that a stage of capitalist development still

confronted Russia, they felt that armed interventions would only prevent

the democratic forces in Russia from establishing themselves. They hoped

that once the armed struggle had come to an end the regime would be

compelled to follow a course of democratic transformation.

On March 7, 1921, during the Kronstadt insurrection, the underground

Petrograd Committee of the Mensheviks published the following leaflet:

“To the workers, red soldiers and Koursantys of Petrograd.

Stop the slaughter! The guns are thundering and the Communists who claim

to be a Workers Party are shooting the sailors of Kronstadt.

We don’t know all the details about what has happened at Kronstadt. But

we do know that the Kronstadters have called for free elections to the

soviets and for the release of arrested socialists and of arrested

non-party workers and soldiers. They have called for the convening, on

March 10, of a non-party conference of workers, red soldiers and sailors

to discuss the critical situation of Soviet Russia.

A genuine workers’ power should have been able to clarify the real

causes of the Kronstadt events. It should have discussed things openly

with the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, in front of the whole of

working class Russia. Instead, the Bolsheviks have proclaimed a state of

siege and have machine-gunned the soldiers and sailors.

Comrades, we cannot, we must not just sit and listen to the sound of the

guns. Each salvo may destroy dozens of human lives. We must intervene

and put an end to this massacre.

Insist that military operations against the sailors and workers of

Kronstadt be ended immediately. Insist that the Government start

immediate negotiations with Kronstadt, with the participation of

Petrograd factory delegates. Elect delegates forthwith to participate in

these discussions. Stop the slaughter!”

The Central Committee of the Mensheviks had also published a leaflet.

This proclaimed that

“what was necessary was not a policy of violence towards the peasantry

but a policy of conciliation towards it. Power should really be in the

hands of the working masses. To this end new and free elections to the

soviets were essential. What was needed was that Workers’ Democracy,

much talked about but of which one couldn’t see the slightest trace.”

Sozialistitchenski Vestnik, the official organ of Russian Social

Democracy (published abroad) assessed the Kronstadt insurrection as

follows: “It is precisely the masses themselves, who until now had

supported bolshevism, who have now taken the initiative in a decisive

struggle against the present regime”. The paper considered the Kronstadt

slogans to be Menshevik ones and added that Mensheviks “had all the

greater right to be pleased about it, in view of the fact that their

party had played no role in the insurrection, given the total lack of

any Menshevik organisation in the Fleet”.

Martov, the leader of Russian Menshevism was already out of Russia. In

an article in Freiheit, published on May 1^(st) 1921, he denied that

either Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries had played any part in the

insurrection. The initiative, he felt, was coming from the sailors who

were breaking with the Communist Party at the organisational level, but

not at the level of principles.

Poukhov quotes another leaflet signed by one of the numerous groups of

Mensheviks. It said: “Down with the lies of the Counter Revolution!

Where are the real counter-revolutionaries? They are the Bolsheviks, the

commissars, those who speak of ‘soviet power’. Against them the real

Revolution is rising up. We must support it. We must come to the rescue

of Kronstadt. Our duty is to help Kronstadt. long live the Revolution.

Long live the Constituent Assembly!” The Menshevik Central Committee

declined all responsibility for slogans put forward by such dissident

groupings.

The right S.R.s

The call for the convening of the Constituent Assembly was the central

theme of the propaganda of the Right wing Socialist Revolutionaries. In

Revolutzionaia Rossia, their Party organ (which in March 1921 was being

published abroad) Victor Tchernov. ex-president of the dissolved

Constituent Assembly and leader of the Right S.R.s wrote: “All those who

want to find a way out of the disgusting, bloodstained Bolshevik

dictatorship, all those who wish to tread the path of freedom must stand

up around Kronstadt and come to its help. The crown of democracy must be

the Constituent Assembly”.

Now Tchernov was fully aware that in No. 6 of the Kronstadt Isvestia the

rebel sailors had written “The workers and peasants will go forward.

They will leave behind them the Utchred-Nika (pejorative form for the

Constituent Assembly) and its bourgeois regime. They will also leave

behind them the Communist Party dictatorship with its tchekas and its

State Capitalism, which has seized the masses by the throat and is

threatening to throttle them”. When Tchernov discussed these lines of

the Kronstadters he attributed them to an ideological survival of past

Bolshevik influence.

By personal and political temperament, Tchernov was diametrically

opposed to the Mensheviks. With his political friends he launched a

passionate appeal to the sailors.

“The Bolsheviks killed the cause of liberty and democracy when they

counterpoised, in the popular mind, the idea of soviets to the idea of

the Constituent Assembly. Instead of seeing the soviets as a support for

the Constituent Assembly, as a powerful link between the Assembly and

the country, they raised the soviets against the Assembly and thereby

killed both the soviets and the Assembly. This is what you must

understand, deceived workers, soldiers, and sailors. Let your slogan

‘free elections to the soviets’ reverberate, as a call to a march from

the soviets to the Constituent Assembly.”

Tchernov went even further. From a private ship he sent the following

radio message to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee:

“The President of the Constituent Assembly, Victor Tchernov, sends

fraternal greetings to the heroic sailor, soldier and worker comrades

who, for the third time since 1905, are shaking off the yoke of tyranny.

Acting as an intermediary, he proposes, with the help of Russian

co-operative organisations now abroad, to send men to ensure the feeding

of Kronstadt. Let me know what you need and how much you need. I am

prepared to come personally and to place both my forces and my authority

at the disposal of the popular revolution. I have confidence in the

final victory of the working people. From every corner we are receiving

news that the masses are ready and willing to rise in the name of the

Constituent Assembly. Don’t be trapped into negotiations with the

Bolsheviks. They will only enter into such negotiations in order to gain

time and to concentrate around Kronstadt those formations of the

privileged soviet military corps of which they can be sure. Glory to

those who were the first to raise the flag of popular liberation. Down

with the despotism of both right and left. Long live liberty and

democracy.”

At the same time a second appeal was sent to Kronstadt by special

courier, from the ‘deputation abroad of the Socialist Revolutionary

Party’:

“The Party has abstained from any type of putchism. In Russia it has

lately put the brakes on the upsurges of popular anger while frequently

trying, through the pressure of worker and peasant opinion, to compel

the Kremlin dictators to concede to the demands of the people. But now

that popular anger has overflowed, now that the flag of popular

revolution has been proudly hoisted over Kronstadt, our Party is

offering the rebels the help of all the forces it can muster in the

struggle for liberty and democracy. The S.R.s are prepared to share your

fate and to win or die in your ranks. Let us know how we can help you.

Long live the people’s revolution. Long live free soviets and the

Constituent Assembly!”

To these concrete proposals, Tchernov received, on March 3 1921, the

following answer by radio:

“The Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the city of Kronstadt has

received the greetings of comrade Tchernov, despatched from Reval. To

all our brothers abroad we express our gratitude for their sympathy. We

thank Comrade Tchernov for suggestions but ask him not to come for the

time being until the matter has been clarified. For the time being we

are noting his proposal.

Signed: Petrichenko President of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee.”

The Bolsheviks claim that the Provisional Revolutionary Committee

consented in principle to Tchernov’s arrival. They also claim that

Tchernov made his offer to send provisions to Kronstadt conditional on

the rebels launching the slogan of the Constituent Assembly. On March

20, 1921 the communist Komarov declared at a meeting of the Petrograd

Soviet that the Provisional Revolutionary Committee had asked Tchernov

to wait for 12 days during which time the food situation in Kronstadt

would have become such that it would be possible to launch the slogan

asked for by the S.R.s. Komarov claimed that this information had been

obtained in the course of the cross-questioning of Perepelkin a member

of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee who had fallen into Bolshevik

hands. Perepelkin was even alleged to have said that the President of

the Provisional Revolutionary Committee had secretly sent a positive

answer to Tchernov.

The sailor Perepelkin was shot and his ‘confessions’ cannot be verified.

But in prison, just before, he had met the Menshevik Dan and had

mentioned no such thing to him although during their joint exercise

periods Perepelkin had provided Dan with many details concerning the

insurrection. One is led to believe that already in 1921, Bolshevik

‘justice’ knew how to concoct confessions.

In an article published in January 1926, in Znamia Borby, organ of the

left S.R.s, Petrichenko, President of the Provisional Revolutionary

Committee, confirms the answer given to Tchernov by the committee. He

explains that the Committee itself could not deal with this question. It

proposed to hand the problem over to the newly elected soviet.

Petrichenko adds “I am describing things as they took place in reality

and independent of my own political opinion”. As for Tchernov, he denies

having posed conditions for the rebels. He claims openly to have

supported the slogan of the Constituent Assembly, “convinced that sooner

or later the rebels would have adopted it”.

The left S.R.s

In the June 1921 issue of their paper Znamia published abroad, this is

how the left S.R.s outlined their programme:

“The essential aim of the left (internationalist) S.R. Party is the

reconstitution of the soviets and the restoration of genuine Soviet

power.... We are aiming at the permanent re-establishment of the

violated Constitution of the Soviet Republic, as adopted on June 10,

1918, at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets.... the peasantry,

which is the backbone of the working population in Russia, should have

the right to dispose of its fate.... another essential demand is the

re-establishment of the self-activity and of the free initiative of the

workers in the cities. Intensive labour cannot be demanded of men who

are starving and half dead. First they must be fed and to this end it is

essential to co-ordinate the interests of workers and peasants.”

The spirit of the “Petropavlovsk” Resolution is undoubtedly very close

to that of the left S.R. programme. The left S.R.s, however, deny

participation in the insurrection. In the same issue of Znamia one of

their Moscow correspondents writes: “At Kronstadt, there wasn’t a single

responsible representative of left populism. The whole movement

developed without our participation. At the onset we were outside of it

but it was nevertheless essentially left populist in outlook. Its

slogans and its moral objectives are very close to our own”.

In the wish to establish historical truth we will now quote two further

authorised testimonies, that of Lenin and that of the sailor

Petrichenko, one of the leaders of the insurrection.

Lenin’s Views

In his article “The Tax in Kind”[30] this is what Lenin has to say about

Kronstadt:

“In the spring of 1921, mainly as a result of the failure of the harvest

and the dying of cattle, the condition of the peasantry, which was

extremely bad already as a consequence of the war and blockade, became

very much worse. This resulted in political vacillation which, generally

speaking, expresses the very ‘nature’ of the small producer. The most

striking expression of this vacillation was the Kronstadt mutiny....

There was very little of anything that was fully formed, clear and

definite. We heard nebulous slogans about ‘liberty’, ‘free trade’,

‘emancipation from serfdom’, ‘Soviets without the Bolsheviks’, or new

elections to the Soviets, or relief from ‘party dictatorship”, and so on

and so forth. Both the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries

declared the Kronstadt movement to be ‘their own’.

Victor Chernov sent a runner to Kronstadt: on the proposal of this

runner, the Menshevik Valk, one of the Kronstadt leaders, voted for the

’Constituent.’ In a flash, with radio-telegraphic speed, one might say,

the White Guards mobilised all their forces ’for Kronstadt’. The White

Guard military experts in Kronstadt, a number of experts, and not

Kozlovsky alone, drew up a plan for a landing of forces at Oranienbaum,

a plan which frightened the vacillating

Menshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary non-party masses.

More than fifty Russian White Guard newspapers published abroad are

conducting a furious campaign ‘for Kronstadt’. The big banks, all the

forces of finance capital, are collecting funds to assist Kronstadt. The

wise leader of the bourgeoisie and the landlords, the Cadet Milyukov, is

patiently explaining to the fool Victor Chernov directly (and to Dan and

Rozhkov who are in Petrograd jail for their connection with the

Kronstadt Mensheviks, indirectly) that they need be in no hurry with

their Constituent, and that they can and must support the Soviets only

without the Bolsheviks.

Of course, it is easy to be cleverer than conceited fools like Chernov,

the hero of petty-bourgeois phrases, or like Martov, the knight of

philistine reformism painted to look like ‘Marxism’. Properly speaking,

the point is not that Milyukov, as an individual, is cleverer, but that

because of his class position the party leader of the big bourgeoisie

sees, understands the class essence and political interaction of things

more clearly than the leaders of the petty bourgeoisie, the Chernovs and

Martovs. The bourgeoisie is really a class force which inevitably rules

under capitalism, both under a monarchy and in the most democratic

republic, and which also inevitably enjoys the support of the world

bourgeoisie.

But the petty bourgeoisie. i.e.. all the heroes of the Second

International and of the ‘Two-and-a-Half’ International, cannot, by the

very economic nature of the case, be anything else than the expression

of class impotence; hence the vacillation, phrases and helplessness....

When in his Berlin Journal Martov declared that Kronstadt not only

adopted Menshevik slogans but also proved that an anti-Bolshevik

movement was possible which did not entirely serve the interests of the

White Guards, the capitalists and the landlords, he served as an example

of a conceited philistine Narcissus. He said in effect: ‘Let us close

our eyes to the fact that all the real White Guards greeted the

Kronstadt mutineers and through the banks collected funds in aid of

Kronstadt!’ Kilyukov is right compared with the Chernovs and Martovs,

for he proposes real tactics for a real White Guard Force, the force of

the capitalists and landlords. He says in effect: ‘It does not matter

whom we support, even the anarchists, any sort of Soviet government, as

long as the Bolsheviks are overthrown, as long as shifting of power can

be brought about! It makes no difference, to the Right or to the Left,

to the Mensheviks or to the anarchists, as long as power shifts away

from the Bolsheviks.’ As for the rest — ‘we’, the Milyukovs, we shall

give the anarchists, the Chernovs and the Martovs a good slapping and

kick them out as was done to Chernov and Maisky in Siberia, to the

Hungarian Chernovs and Martovs in Hungary, to Kautsky in Germany and

Friedrich Adler and Co. in Vienna. The real, practical bourgeoisie

fooled hundreds of these philistine Narcissuses: the Mensheviks,

Socialist-Revolutionaries and non-party people, and kicked them out

scores of times in all revolutions in all countries. This is proved by

history. It is corroborated by facts. The Narcissuses will chatter; the

Milyukovs and White Guards will act....

The events of the spring of 1921 once again revealed the role of the

Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks: they are helping the

vacillating petty-bourgeois element to recoil from the Bolsheviks, to

cause a ‘shifting of power’ for the benefit of the capitalists and

landlords. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries have now learnt

to disguise themselves as ‘non-party’.”

Petrichenko’s Evidence

We will finally quote the main passages of Petrichenko’s evidence, as

published in his article in the left S.R. paper Znamia Borby, In January

1926:

“I have read the letters exchanged between the left S.R. organisation

and the British Communists. In this correspondence the question of the

Kronstadt insurrection of 1921 is raised...

As I was the President [of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee] I

feel it a moral obligation briefly to throw some light on these events

for the benefit of the Political Bureau of the British Communist Party.

I know you get your information from Moscow. I also know that this

information is one-sided and biased. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if you

were shown the other side of the coin....

You have yourselves admitted that the Kronstadt insurrection of 1921 was

not inspired from the outside. This recognition implies that the

patience of the working masses, sailors, red soldiers, workers and

peasants had reached its final limit.

Popular anger against the dictatorship of the Communist Party — or

rather against its bureaucracy — took the form of an insurrection. This

is how precious blood came to be spilt. There was no question of class

or caste differences. There were workers on both sides of the

barricades. The difference lay in the fact that the men of Kronstadt

marched forward consciously and of their own free will, while those who

were attacking them had been misled by the Communist Party leaders and

some were even acting against their own wishes. I can tell you even

more: the Kronstadters didn’t enjoy taking up arms and spilling blood!

What happened then to force the Kronstadters to speak the language of

guns with the Communist Party bosses, daring to call themselves a

‘Workers and Peasants Government’?

The Kronstadt sailors had taken an active part in the creation of such a

government. They had protected it against all the attacks of the

Counter-revolution. They not only protected the gates of Petrograd — the

heart of the world revolution — but they also formed military

detachments for the innumerable fronts against the White Guards,

starting with Kornilov and finishing with Generals Youdienitch and

Neklioudov.

You are asked to believe that these same Kronstadters had suddenly

become the enemies of the Revolution. The ‘Workers and Peasants’

Government denounced the Kronstadt rebels as agents of the Entente, as

French spies, as supporters of the bourgeoisie, as S.R.s, as Mensheviks,

etc., etc. It is astounding that the men of Kronstadt should suddenly

have become dangerous enemies just when real danger from the generals of

the armed counter-revolution had disappeared — just when the rebuilding

of the country had to be tackled — just when people were thinking of

tasting the fruits of October — \just when it was a question of showing

the goods in their true colour, of showing one’s political baggage (i.e.

when it was no longer a question of making promises but of sticking to

them). People were beginning to draw up a balance sheet of revolutionary

achievements. We hadn’t dared dream about this during the Civil War. Yet

it is just at this point in time that the men of Kronstadt were found to

be enemies. What crime had Kronstadt, therefore, committed against the

revolution?

As the Civil War subsided, the Petrograd workers thought it their right

to remind the Soviet of that town that the time had come to remember

their economic plight and to pass from a war regime to a regime of

peace.

The Petrograd Soviet considered this harmless and essential demand to be

counter-revolutionary. It not only remained deaf and dumb to these claim

but it started resorting to home searches and arrests of workers,

declaring them spies and agents of the Entente. These bureaucrats became

corrupt during the Civil War at a time when no one dared resist them.

They hadn’t noticed that the situation had changed.

The workers answered by resorting to strikes. The fury of the Petrograd

Soviet then became like the fury of a wild animal. Assisted by its

Opritchniks[31] it kept the workers hungry and exhausted. It held them

in an iron grip, driving them to work by all kinds of constraint. The

Red soldiers and sailors, despite their sympathy with the workers,

didn’t dare rise in their defence. But this time the ‘workers’ and

‘peasants’ Government came unstuck about Kronstadt. Somewhat belatedly

Kronstadt had learned about the true state of affairs in Petrograd.

You are therefore right, British comrades, when you say that the

Kronstadt revolt was not the result of the activities of any one

particular person.

Furthermore I would like you to know more about the alleged support to

Kronstadt of counter-revolutionary foreign and Russian organisations! I

repeat again that the uprising was not provoked by any political

organisation. I doubt they even existed at Kronstadt. The revolt broke

out spontaneously. It expressed the wishes of the masses themselves,

both the civilian population and the garrison. This is seen in the

resolutions adopted and in the composition of the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee, where one cannot detect the dominant influence

of any anti-soviet party. According to the Kronstadters any thing that

happened or was done there was dictated by the circumstances of the

moment. The rebels didn’t place their faith in anyone. They didn’t even

place it in the hands of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee or in

the hands of the assemblies of delegates, or in the hands of meetings,

or anywhere else. There was no question about this. The Provisional

Revolutionary Committee never attempted anything in this direction,

although it could have done. The Committee’s only concern was strictly

to implement the wishes of the people. Was that a good thing or a bad

thing? I cannot pass judgement.

The truth is that the masses led the Committee and not the other way

round. Among us there were no well-known political figures, of the kind

who see everything three archines[32] deep and know all that needs to be

done, and how to get the most out of every situation. The Kronstadters

acted without predetermined plans or programme, feeling their way

according to circumstances and within the context of the resolutions

they had adopted. We were cut off from the entire world. We didn’t know

what was going on outside Kronstadt, either in Russia or abroad. Some

may possibly have drawn up their own blueprints for our insurrection as

usually happens. They were wasting their time. It is fruitless to

speculate as to what would have happened if things had evolved

differently, for the turn of events itself might have been quite

different from what we were anticipating. One thing is certain, the

Kronstadters didn’t want the initiative to pass out of their hands.

In their publications the Communists accuse us of accepting an offer of

food and medicine from the Russian Red Cross, in Finland. We admit we

saw nothing wrong in accepting such an offer. Both the Provisional

Revolutionary Committee and the assembly of delegates agreed to it. We

felt that the Red Cross was a philanthropic organisation, offering us

disinterested help that could do us no harm. When we decided to allow

the Red Cross delegation to enter Kronstadt we lead them blindfolded to

our head-quarters. At our first meeting we informed them that we

gratefully accepted their offer of help as coming from a philanthropic

organisation, but that we considered ourselves free of any undertakings

towards them. We accepted their request to leave a permanent

representative in Kronstadt, to watch over the regular distribution to

women and children of the rations which they were proposing to send us.

Their representative, a retired naval officer called Vilken, remained in

Kronstadt. He was put in a permanently guarded flat and couldn’t even

step outside without our permission. What danger could this man have

represented? All he could see was the resolve of the garrison and of the

civilian population of Kronstadt.

Was this the ‘aid of the international bourgeoisie’? Or did this aid

perhaps lie in the fact that Victor Tchernov had sent us his greetings?

Was this the ‘support of both the Russian and international

counter-revolution’? Can you really believe that the men of Kronstadt

were ready to throw themselves into the embrace of any anti-soviet

party? Remember that when the rebels learned that the right wing was

beginning to devise plans about their insurrection they didn’t hesitate

to warn the workers about it. Remember the article of March 6 in the

Kronstadt Isvestia, entitled ‘gentlemen or comrades’.”

9. Kronstadt: last upsurge of the Soviets

“... this luxury was really absolutely impermissible. By permitting

[sic!] such a discussion [on the trade unions] we undoubtedly made a

mistake and failed to see that in this discussion a question came to the

forefront which, because of the objective conditions, should not have

been in the forefront ...” Lenin. Report to 10^(th) Party Congress,

March 8, 1921. Selected Works, Vol. IX, p. 90.

“What the rebels of Kronstadt demanded was only what Trotsky had

promised their elder brothers and what he and the Party had been unable

to give. Once again a bitter and hostile echo of his own voice came back

to him from the lips of other people, and once again he had to

suppressed it.” Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 512–3

Trotsky’s Accusations

Taking everything into account, what was the Kronstadt uprising? Was it

a counter-revolutionary insurrection? Was it a revolt without conscious

counter-revolutionary objectives, but which was bound to open the doors

to the counter-revolution? Or was it simply an attempt by the working

masses to materialise some of the promise of October? Was the revolt

inevitable? And was the bloody end to which it came also inevitable? We

will conclude by trying to answer these questions.

The accusations made against Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921 are

exactly the same as those mentioned later by the Stalinist historian

Poukhov, in his book published in 1931. Trotsky repeated them. The

trotskyists still repeat them today.

Trotsky’s attitude on this question was however always somewhat

embarrassed and awkward. He would issue his accusations by the dropper

instead of proclaiming them once and for all. In 1937, when he discussed

Kronstadt for the first time in writing (in his books on the Russian

Revolution he hardly ever dealt with the subject) he starts by saying

that “The country was hungry, and the Kronstadt sailors were demanding

privileges. The mutiny was motivated by their wish for privileged

nations.”[33] Such a demand was never put forward by the men of

Kronstadt. In his later writings Trotsky, having doubtless taken care to

read more on the matter, was to abandon this particular accusation. What

remains, however, is that he started his public accusations with a lie.

In an article in the Belgian paper ‘Lutte Ouvriere’ (February 26, 1938)

Trotsky wrote:

“From a class point of view, which — no offence to the eclectics —

remains the fundamental criterion both in politics and in history, it is

extremely important to compare the conduct of Kronstadt with that of

Petrograd during these critical days. In Petrograd too the whole leading

stratum of the working class had been skimmed off. Famine and cold

reigned in the abandoned capital, even more cruelly than in Moscow...

The paper of the Kronstadt rebels spoke of barricades in Petrograd, of

thousands of people killed.[34] The Press of the whole world was

announcing the same thing. In fact the exact opposite took place. The

Kronstadt uprising did not attract the workers of Petrograd. It repelled

them. The demarcation took place along class lines. The workers

immediately felt that the Kronstadt rebels were on the other side of the

barricade and they gave their support to the Government.”

Here again Trotsky is saying things which are quite untrue. Earlier on

we showed how the wave of strikes had started in Petrograd and how

Kronstadt had followed suit. It was against the strikers of Petrograd

that the Government had to organise a special General Staff: the

Committee of Defence. The repression was first directed against the

Petrograd workers and against their demonstrations, by the despatch of

armed detachments of Koursantys.[35]

But the workers of Petrograd had no weapons. They could not defend

themselves as could the Kronstadt sailors. The military repression

directed against Kronstadt certainly intimidated the Petrograd workers.

The demarcation did not take place “along class lines” but according to

the respective strengths of the organs of repression. The fact that the

workers of Petrograd did not follow those of Kronstadt does not prove

that they did not sympathise with them. Nor, at a later date, when the

Russian proletariat failed to follow the various “oppositions” did this

prove that they were in agreement with Stalin! In such instances it was

a question of the respective strengths of the forces confronting one

another.

In the same article Trotsky repeats his points concerning the exhaustion

of Kronstadt, from the revolutionary point of view. He claims that,

whereas the Kronstadt sailors of 1917 and 1918 were ideologically at a

much higher level than the Red Army, the contrary was the case by 1921.

This argument is refuted by official Red Army documents. These admit

that the frame of mind of Kronstadt had infected large layers of the

army.

Trotsky denounces those who attack him over Kronstadt over the

belatedness of their strictures. “The campaign around Kronstadt” he says

“is conducted, in certain places, with unrelenting energy. One might

imagine that events took place yesterday and not seventeen years ago”

But seventeen years is a very short period, on any historical scale. We

don’t accept that to speak of Kronstadt is to “evoke the days of the

Egyptian Pharaohs”. Moreover it appears logical to us to seek some of

the roots of the great Russian catastrophe in this striking and

symptomatic episode. After all it took place at a time when the

repression of the Russian workers was not being perpetrated by some

Stalin or other but by the flower of Bolshevism, by Lenin and Trotsky

themselves. Seriously to discuss the Kronstadt revolt is therefore not,

as Trotsky claims, “to be interested in discrediting the only genuinely

revolutionary tendency, the only tendency never to have reneged its

flag, never to have compromised with the enemy, the only tendency to

represent the future”.

During the subsequent seventeen years Trotsky shed none of his hostility

towards the rebels. Lacking arguments he resorts to gossip. He tells us

that “at Kronstadt, where the garrison was doing nothing and only living

on its past, demoralisation had reached important proportions. When the

situation became particularly difficult in famished Petrograd, the

Political Bureau discussed several times whether to raise an internal

loan in Kronstadt, where there still remained old stores of all sorts.

But the Petrograd delegates would answer: ‘They will give us nothing of

their own free will. They speculate on cloth, coal, bread, for in

Kronstadt all the old scum has raised its head again!”.

This argument concerning “old stores of all sorts” is in bad faith. One

need only recall the ultimatum to the Kronstadters issued by the

Petrograd Defence Committee on March 5^(th) (referred to elsewhere):

“You will be obliged to surrender. Kronstadt has neither bread nor

fuel”. What had happened in the meantime to the said old stories

Further information on this topic comes from the Kronstadt Ivestia. It

describes the distribution to children of one pound of dried potatoes on

presentation of ration vouchers 5 and 6. On March 8^(th), four litres of

oats were distributed to last four days — and on March 9^(th) a quarter

of a pound of black biscuit made of flour and dried potato powder. On

March 10^(th) the Regional Committee of Metalworkers decided to place at

the disposal of the community the horse meat to which its members were

entitled. During the insurrection there was also distributed a tin of

condensed milk per person, on one occasion some meat preserves, and

finally (to children only), half a pound of butter.

That no doubt is what Trotsky refers to as “old stores of all sorts”!

According to him these might have been borrowed to alleviate the great

Russian famine. We should add that before the insurrection these

“stores” were in the hands of communist functionaries and that it was

upon these people alone that consent to the proposed “loan” depended.

The rank and file sailor, who took part in the insurrection, had no

means open to him whereby he could have opposed the loan, even if he had

wanted to. So much for the question of “stores” — which in passing shows

the worth of some of the accusations used against Kronstadt.

To resort to such arguments in the course of a serious discussion (and

consciously to substitute for such a discussion a polemic about the

Spanish Revolution) shows up a serious flaw: the absence of valid

arguments on the matter among the Bolsheviks (for Trotsky isn’t the

central figure in the repression of Kronstadt. Lenin and the Politbureau

directed the whole operation. The Workers’ Opposition must also shoulder

its share of responsibility. According to the personal testimony of

foreign Communists residing in Russia at the time, the Workers’

Opposition didn’t agree with the measures being taken against the

rebels. But neither did it dare open its mouth for the defence of

Kronstadt. At the 10^(th) Party Congress no one protested at the

butchery of the rebels. The worker Lutovinov, a well known member of the

Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and one of the leaders of the

Workers Opposition, was sent to Berlin in March 1921 on a diplomatic

mission (in reality this was a form of political exile). He declared

that: ‘The news published abroad concerning the Kronstadt events was

greatly exaggerated. The Soviet Government is strong enough to finish

off the rebels. The slowness of the operation is to be explained by the

fact that we wish to spare the population of Kronstadt”. (‘L’Humanite’.

March 18, 1921)[36]

Trotsky uses yet another argument against the rebels: he accuses them of

seeking to take advantage of their revolutionary past. This is a most

dangerous argument for anyone in opposition. Stalin was to use it

against Trotsky and the old Bolshevik. It was only later that Stalin

accused them of having been, from the very beginning of the Revolution,

the agents of the international bourgeoisie. During the first years of

the struggle he conceded that Trotsky had rendered great services to the

Revolution but he would add that Trotsky had subsequently passed into

the ranks of the counter-revolution. One had to judge a man on what he

did now. The example of Mussolini was constantly mentioned.

However, there are many things that Trotsky is unable to explain. He

cannot explain how Kronstadt and the whole Red Fleet came to renounce

their ideological support for the Government. He cannot explain the

frame of mind of the communist elements in the Fleet during the

discussions on the Trade Union question. He cannot explain their

attitude during the 8^(th) All-Russian Soviet Congress elections or

during the Second Communist Conference of the Baltic Fleet, which took

place on the eve of the insurrection. These are, however, key points

around which the discussion should centre. When Trotsky asserts that all

those supporting the government were genuinely proletarian and

progressive, whereas all others represented the peasant

counterrevolution, we have a right to ask of him that he present us with

a serious factual analysis in support of his contention. The unfurling

of subsequent events showed that the Revolution was being shunted onto a

disastrously wrong track. This was first to compromise then to destroy

all its social, political, and moral conquests. Did the Kronstadt revolt

really represent an attempt to guide the Revolution along new lines?

That is the crucial question one has to ask. Other problems should be

seen as of secondary importance and flowing from this serious concern.

It is certainly not the smashing of the Kronstadt revolt that put a

brake to the course of the Revolution. On the contrary, in our opinion,

it was the political methods used against Kronstadt and widely practised

throughout Russia which contributed to the setting up, on the ruins of

the Social Revolution, of an oligarchic regime which had nothing in

common with the original ideas of the Revolution.[37]

The Bolshevik interpretations

In 1921 the Bolshevik Government claimed that Kronstadt had rebelled

according to a preconceived plan. This particular interpretation was

based on a note published in certain French newspapers (Le Matin, L’Echo

de Paris) on February 15^(th). This note announced the uprising and led

to the claim that the uprising was led by the Entente.

This was the argument which enabled Lenin to claim, at the 10^(th) Party

Congress:

“The transfer of political power from the hands of the Bolsheviks to a

vague conglomeration or alliance of heterogeneous elements who seem to

be only a little to the Right of the Bolsheviks, and perhaps even to the

‘Left’ of the Bolsheviks — so indefinite is the sum of political

groupings which tried to seize power in Kronstadt. Undoubtedly, at the

same time, White generals — you all know it — played a great part in

this. This is fully proved. The Paris newspapers reported a mutiny in

Kronstadt two weeks before the events in Kronstadt took place.”[38]

The publication of false news about Russia was nothing exceptional. Such

news was published before, during, and after the Kronstadt events. It is

undeniable that the bourgeoisie throughout the world was hostile to the

Russian Revolution and would exaggerate any bad news emanating from that

country. The Second Communist Conference of the Baltic Fleet had just

voted a resounding resolution, critical of the political leadership of

the Fleet. This fact could easily have been exaggerated by the bourgeois

press, once again confusing the wishes with reality. To base an

accusation on a ‘proof’ of this kind is inadmissible and immoral.

In 1938 Trotsky himself was to drop this accusation. But in the article

we have already mentioned he refers his readers to a study of the

Kronstadt rebellion undertaken by an American trotskyst John G Wright.

In an article published in the New International (in February 1938) Mr

Wright takes up once again the claim that the revolt must have been

planned before-hand. In view of the fact the press had announced it on

February 15^(th). He says: “the connection between Kronstadt and the

counterrevolution can be established not only out of the mouths of the

enemies of Bolshevism but also on the basis of irrefutable facts”. What

irrefutable facts? Again, quotations from the bourgeois press (Le Matin,

Vossische Zeitung, The Times) giving false news before and during the

insurrection.

It is interesting that these arguments were not much used at the time,

durinq the battle itself, but only years later. If, at the time the

Bolshevik Government had proofs of these alleged contacts between

Kronstadt and the counter-revolutionaries why did it not try the rebels

publicly? Why did it not show the working masses of Russia the ‘real’

reasons for the uprising? If this wasn’t done it was because no such

proofs existed.

We are also told that if the New Economic policy had been introduced in

time the insurrection would have been avoided. But as we have just shown

the uprising did not take place according to a preconceived plan. No one

knew that it was necessarily going to take place. We have no theory as

to the exact timing and development of popular movements and it is quite

possible that under economic and political conditions different from

those prevailing in the spring of 1921 the insurrection might never have

taken place. On the other hand the uprising might have occurred in a

different form, or in a different place, for instance in Nijni Novgorod

where an important strike movement took place, coinciding with the great

strike wave in Petrograd. The particular conditions relating to the

Fleet and to Kronstadt’s revolutionary past certainly had an effect, but

one can’t be certain just exactly how significant this effect was. Much

the same applies to the statement that “if the N.E.P. had been

introduced a few months earlier there would have been no Kronstadt

revolt”.

The N.E P. was admittedly proclaimed at the same time as the rebels were

being massacred. But it doesn’t follow in any way that the N.E.P.

corresponded to the demands put forward by the sailors. In the Kronstadt

Isvestia of March 14^(th) we find a characteristic passage on this

subject. The rebels proclaimed that “Kronstadt is not asking for freedom

of trade but for genuine power to the Soviets”. The Petrograd strikers

were also demanding the reopening of the markets and the abolition of

the road blocks set up by the militia. But they too were stating that

freedom of trade by itself would not solve their problems.

Insofar as the N.E.P. replaced the forced requisition of foodstuffs by

the tax in kind and insofar as it re-established internal trade it

certainly satisfied some of the demands of the men of Kronstadt and of

the striking Petrograd workers. With the N.E.P. rationing and arbitrary

seizures ceased. Petty owners were able to sell their goods on the open

markets, lessening the effects on the great famine. The N.E.P. appeared

to be first and foremost a safety measure.

But the N.E.P. unleashed the capitalist elements in the country just at

a time when the one party dictatorship was leaving the proletariat and

working peasants without means of defence against these capitalist

forces. “The class exerting the dictatorship is in fact deprived of the

most elementary political rights” proclaimed the Worker’s Truth, an

oppositional communist group in 1922. The Worker’s Group, another

oppositional tendency, characterised the situation as follows: “The

working class is totally deprived of rights, the trade unions being a

blind instrument in the hands of the functionaries”.

This was certainly not what the Kronstadt rebels were asking for! On the

contrary. They were proposing measures which would have restored to the

working class and working peasantry their true place in the new regime.

The Bolsheviks only implemented the least important demands of the

Kronstadt programme (those coming in eleventh place in the resolution of

the rebels!). They totally ignored the basic demand, the demand for

workers’ democracy!

This demand, put forward in the Petropavlovsky resolution was neither

utopian nor dangerous. We here take issue with Victor Serge. In

Revolution Proletarienne (of September 10^(th), 1937) Serge stated that

“while the sailors were engaged in mortal combat, they put forward a

demand which, at that particular moment, was extremely dangerous —

although quite genuine and sincerely revolutionary: the demand for

freely elected soviets... they wished to unleash a cleansing tornado but

in practice they could only have opened the doors to the peasant

counterrevolution, of which the Whites and foreign intervention would

have taken advantage... Insurgent Kronstadt was not

counterrevolutionary, but its victory would inevitably have led to the

counterrevolution.” Contrary to Serge’s assertion we believe that the

political demands of the sailors were full of a deep political wisdom.

They were not derived from any abstract theory but from a profound

awareness of the conditions of Russian life. They were in no way

counterrevolutionary.

Rosa Luxembourg’s views

It is worth recalling what Rosa Luxemburg, a political personality

respected throughout the world as a great socialist militant, had

written about the lack of democracy in the leadership of the Russian

Revolution, as early as 1918.

“It is an incontestable fact”, she wrote, “that the rule of the broad,

popular masses is inconceivable without unlimited freedom of the press,

without absolute freedom of meeting and of association... the gigantic

tasks which the Bolsheviks have tackled with courage and resolution

require the most intensive political education of the masses and

accumulation of experience which is impossible without political

freedom. Freedom restricted to those who support the Government or to

Party members only, however numerous they may be, is not real freedom.

Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently. This is

not because of fanaticism for abstract justice but because everything

that is instructive, healthy and cleansing in political liberty hinges

on this and because political liberty loses its value when freedom

becomes a privilege.”

“We have never worshipped at the altar of formal democracy,” she

continued. “We have always distinguished between the social content end

the political form of bourgeois democracy. The historical task facing

the proletariat after its accession to power is to replace bourgeois

democracy by proletarian democracy, not to abolish all democracy... The

dictatorship (of the proletariat) consists in the way democracy is

applied, not in its abolition. It must be the action of the class and

not of a small minority, managing things in the name of the class.... If

political life throughout the country is stifled it must fatally follow

that life in the soviets themselves will be paralysed. Without general

elections, without unlimited freedom of the press and of assembly,

without free confrontation of opinions, life will dry up in all public

institutions — or it will be only a sham life, where the bureaucracy is

the only active element.”

We have dwelt on these quotations to show that Rosa Luxembourg, in her

statements about the need for democracy, went much further than the

Kronstadt rebels. They restricted their comments about democracy to

matters of interest to the proletariat and to the working peasantry.

Moreover Rosa Luxemburg formulated her criticisms of the Russian

Revolution in 1918, in a period of full civil war, whereas the

Petropavlovsk resolution was voted at a time when the armed struggle had

virtually come to an end.

Would anyone dare accuse Rosa, on the basis of her criticisms, of having

been in collusion with the international bourgeoisie? Why then are the

demands of the Kronstadt sailors denounced as ‘dangerous’ and as

inevitably leading to the counterrevolution? Has not the subsequent

evolution of events amply vindicated both the Kronstadt rebels and Rosa

Luxemburg? Was Rosa Luxemburg not right when she asserted that the task

of the working class was to exercise working class power and not the

dictatorship of a party or of a clique? For Rosa Luxemburg working class

power was defined as “the achievement in a contest of the widest

discussion, of the most active and unlimited participation of the

popular masses in an unrestricted democracy.”

A third Soviet Revolution

When putting forward their democratic demands, the Kronstadt rebels had

probably never heard of the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. What they had

heard of, however, was the first Constitution of the Soviet Republic,

voted on July 10, 1918, by the 5^(th) All Russian Congress of Soviets.

Article 13, 14, 15 and 16 of the Constitution assured all workers of

certain democratic rights (freedom of worship, freedom of assembly,

freedom of union, freedom of the press). These articles sought to

prevent the allocation of special privileges to any specific group or

Party (articles 22 and 23).

The same Constitution proclaimed that no worker could be deprived of the

right to vote or of the right to stand as a candidate, provided he

satisfied the conditions stipulated in articles 64 and 65, that is to

say provided he did not exploit the labour of others or live off income

other than that which he had earned.

The central demand of the Kronstadt insurrection — all power to the

Soviets and not to the Party) — was in fact based on an article of the

Constitution. This proclaimed that all central and local power would

henceforth be precisely in the hands of the soviets!

From the very beginning this Constitution was violated by the Bolsheviks

— or rather its provisions were never put into effect. It is worth

recalling that Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms were formulated a few months

after the vote of this new constitution charter. When in 1921 the

sailors were to insist on a genuine application of the rights they had

acquired in 1918 they were called ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and denounced

as ‘agents of the international bourgeoisie’. Sixteen years later Victor

Serge was to say that the demands of the rebels would necessarily have

led to the counterrevolution. This shows how deep-going were Bolshevik

attitudes concerning the dangers of democracy.

The basic laws of the Soviet Republic constitute a juridical summary of

the ideology of the October Revolution. By the end of the Civil War

these ideas had been pushed so far back that a third revolution would

have been necessary to reinstate them and have them applied in everyday

life. This is what the Kronstadt rebels meant when they spoke of the

Third Revolution. In the Kronstadt Isvestia of March 8 they wrote: “At

Kronstadt the foundation stone has been laid of the Third Revolution.

This wall break the final chains which still bind the working masses and

wall open up new paths of socialist creation”.

We do not know if it would have been possible to save the conquests of

October by democratic methods. We do not know if the economic situation

of the country and its markedly peasant character were really suitable

for the first attempt at building socialism. These problems should be

discussed. But the task of those seeking truth is to proclaim the facts

without embellishments. It is not good enough to take a superciliously

scientific air to explain away historical phenomena.

When Trotsky sought to explain the development of the bureaucracy which

had strangled all real life in the institutions of the Soviet State he

found no difficulty in outlining his conception. In The Revolution

Betrayed he states that one of the important causes was the fact that

demobilised Red Army officers had come to occupy leading positions in

the local soviets and had introduced military methods into them — at a

time when the proletariat was exhausted following the prolonged

revolutionary upheaval. This apperarently led to the birth of the

bureaucracy. Trotsky omits to recall how he himself sought to introduce

precisely these methods into the trade unions. Was it to save the

proletariat further fatigue? And if the proletariat was that exhausted

how come it was still capable of waging virtually total general strikes

in the largest and most heavily industrialised cities? And if the Party

was still really the driving force of the social revolution how come it

did not help the proletariat in the struggle against the nascent, but

already powerful, bureaucracy — instead of shooting the workers down, at

a time when their energy had been sapped by three years of imperialist

war followed by three years of civil war.

Why did the Communist Party identify itself with the authoritarian

state? The answer is that the Party was no longer revolutionary. It was

no longer proletarian. And this is precisely what the men of Kronstadt

were blaming the Party for. Their merit is to have said all this in 1921

— when it might still have been possible to change the situation — and

not to have waited 15 years, by which time the defeat had become

irrevocable.

Bureaucracy is almost an hereditary hallmark in Russia. It is as old as

the Russian state itself. The Bolsheviks in power not only inherited the

Tsarist bureaucracy itself, but its very spirit. Its very atmosphere.

They should have realised that as the state enlarged its functions to

encompass economic affairs, as it became the owner of all natural wealth

and of industry, an immediate danger would arise of the rebirth and

rapid development of the bureaucratic frame of mind.

A doctor treating a patient with a bad heredity takes this into account

and advises certain precautions. What precautions did the Bolsheviks

take to combat the bureaucratic tendencies which were obvious, in the

very first years of the Revolution? What methods could they have used

other than to allow a powerful democratic draught to blow through the

whole atmosphere, and to encourage a rigorous and effective control to

be exerted by the working masses?

True enough, some form of control was envisaged. The trouble was that

the Commissariat of the Workers and Peasants inspection was to entrust

this control to the very same type of bureaucrat whose power it was

seeking to thwart. One need not seek far to find the causes of the

bureaucratisation. Its roots lay deeply in the Bolshevik concept of the

State commanded and controlled by a single Party, itself organised along

absolutist and bureaucratic lines. These causes were of course

aggravated by Russia’s own bureaucratic traditions.

It is wrong to blame the peasantry for the defeat of the Revolution and

for its degeneration into a bureaucratic regime. It would be too easy to

explain all Russia’s difficulties by the agrarian character of her

economy. Some people seem to say at one and the same time that the

Kronstadt revolt against the bureaucracy was a peasant revolt and that

the bureaucracy itself was of peasant origin. With such a concept of the

role of the peasantry one may ask how the Bolsheviks dared advocate the

idea of the socialist revolution? How did they dare struggle for it in

an agrarian country?

Some claim that the Bolsheviks allowed themselves such actions (as the

suppression of Kronstadt) in the hope of a forthcoming world revolution,

of which they considered themselves the vanguard. But would not a

revolution in another country have been influenced by the spirit of the

Russian Revolution? When one considers the enormous moral authority of

the Russian Revolution throughout the world one may ask oneself whether

the deviations of this Revolution would not eventually have left an

imprint on other countries. Many historical facts allow such a

judgement. One may recognise the impossibility of genuine socialist

construction in a single country, yet have doubts as to whether the

bureaucratic deformations of the Bolshevik regime would have been

straightened out by the winds coming from revolutions in other

countries.

The fascist experience in countries like Germany shows that an advanced

stage of capitalist development is an insufficient guarantee against the

growth of absolutist and autocratic tendencies. Although this is not the

place to explain the phenomenon, we must note the powerful wave of

authoritarianism coming from economically advanced countries and

threatening to engulf old ideas and traditions. It is incontestable that

Bolshevism is morally related to this absolutist frame of mind. It had

in fact set a precedent for subsequent tendencies. No one can be sure

that had another revolution occurred elsewhere following the one in

Russia, Bolshevism would have democratised itself. It might again have

revealed its absolutist features.

Were there not real dangers in the democratic way? Was there no reason

to fear reformist influences in the soviets, if democracy had been given

free rein? We accept that this was a real danger. But it was no more of

a danger than what inevitably followed the uncontrolled dictatorship of

a single party, whose General Secretary was already Stalin.[39]

We are told that the country was at the end of its tether, that it had

lost its ability to resist. True, the country was weary of war. But on

the other hand it was full of constructive forces, ardently seeking to

learn and to educate themselves. The end of the Civil War saw a surge of

workers and peasants towards schools, workers’ universities and

institutes of technical education. Wasn’t this yearning the best

testimony to the vitality and resistance of these classes? In a country

with a very high level of illiteracy, such an education could greatly

have helped the working masses in the genuine exercise of real power.

But by its very essence a dictatorship destroys the creative capacities

of a people. Despite the undoubted attempts of the Government to educate

workers, education soon became the privilege of Party members loyal to

the leading faction. From 1921 on, workers’ faculties and higher

educational establishments were purged of their more independent minded

elements. This process gained tempo with the development of oppositional

tendencies within the Party. The attempt at a genuine mass education was

increasingly compromised. Lenin’s wish that every cook should be able to

govern the state became less and less likely to be implemented.

The revolutionary conquest could only be deepened through a genuine

participation of the masses. Any attempt to substitute an ‘elite’ for

those masses could only be profoundly reactionary.

In 1921 the Russian Revolution stood at the cross roads. The democratic

or the dictatorial way, that was the question. By lumping together

bourgeois and proletarian democracy the Bolsheviks were in fact

condemning both. They sought to build socialism from above, through

skillful manoeuvres of the Revolutionary General Staff. While waiting

for a world revolution that was not round the corner, they built a state

capitalist society, where the working class no longer had the right to

make the decisions most intimately concerning it.

Lenin was not alone in perceiving that the Kronstadt rebellion was a

challenge to this plan. Both he and the Bolsheviks were fully aware that

what was at stake was the monopoly of their Party. Kronstadt might have

opened the way to a genuine proletarian democracy, incompatible with the

Party’s monopoly of power. That is why Lenin preferred to destroy

Kronstadt. He chose an ignoble but sure way: the calumny that Kronstadt

was allied to the bourgeoisie and to the agrarian counterrevolution.

When Kouzmin, Commissar to the Baltic Fleet, had stated at the Kronstadt

meeting of March 2^(nd) that the Bolsheviks would not surrender power

without a fight, he was saying the truth. Lenin must have laughed at

this Commissar who obviously didn’t understand the ABC of Bolshevik

morality or tactics. Politically and morally one had to destroy the

opponent — not argue with him using real arguments. And destroy its

revolutionary opponents is exactly what the Bolshevik government did.

The Kronstadt rebels were a grey, amorphous mass. But such masses

occasionally show an incredible level of political awareness. If there

had been among them a number of men of ‘higher’ political understanding

the insurrection might well never have taken place, for those men would

have understood firstly that the demands of the rebels were in flagrant

conflict with the policies of the Kremlin — and secondly that, at that

particular moment in time, the government felt itself firmly enough in

the saddle to shoot down, without pity or mercy, any tendency daring

seriously to oppose its views or plans.

The men of Kronstadt were sincere but naive. Believing in the justness

of their cause they did not foresee the tactics of their opponents. They

waited for help from the rest of the country, whose demands they knew

they were voicing. They lost sight of the fact that the rest of the

country was already in the iron grip of a dictatorship which no longer

allowed the people the free expression of its wishes and the free choice

of its institutions.

The great ideological and political discussion between ‘realists’ and

‘dreamers’ between ‘scientific socialists’ and the ‘revolutionary

volnitza’[40] was fought out, weapons in hand. It ended, in 1921, with

the political and military defeat of the ‘dreamers’. But Stalin was to

prove to the whole world that this defeat was also the defeat of

socialism, over a sixth of the earth’s surface.

[1] Paul Cardan, From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy (Solidarity Pamphlet

24).

[2] For information concerning their programme see The Workers’

Opposition by Alexandra Kollontai. This was first published in English

in Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Deadnought in 1921 and republished in

1961 as Solidarity Pamphlet 8.

[3] The history of such groups as the Workers’ Truth group or the

Workers’ Struggle group still remains to be written.

[4] An easy enough task after 1936, when some well-known anarchist

“leaders” [sic!] entered the Popular Front government in Catalonia at

the beginning of the Spanish Civil War — and were allowed to remain

there by the anarchist rank and file. This action — in an area where the

anarchists had a mass basis in the labour movement — irrevocably damned

them, just as the development of the Russian Revolution had irrevocably

damned the Mensheviks, as incapable of standing up to the test of

events.

[5] Three statements from Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1961), first published in June 1920, will

illustrate the point:

“The creation of a socialist society means the organization of the

workers on new foundations, their adaptation to those foundations and

their labour re-education, with the one unchanging end of the increase

in the productivity of labour ...” (p. 146).

“I consider that if the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs

of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with

initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man

management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much

less painfully” (pp. 162–163).

“We have been more than once accused of having substituted for the

dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our own Party ... In the

substitution of the power of the Party for the power of the working

class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no

substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of

the working class ...” (p. 109).

So much for the “anti-bureaucratic” antecedents of Trotskyism. It is

interesting that the book was highly praised by Lenin. Lenin only took

issue with Trotsky on the trade union question at the Central Committee

meeting of November 8 and 9, 1920. Throughout most of 1920 Lenin had

endorsed all Trotsky’s bureaucratic decrees in relation to the unions.

[6] For an interesting account of the growth of the Factory Committees

Movement — and of the opposition to them of the Bolsheviks at the First

All-Russian Trade Union Convention (January 1918), see Maximov’s The

Guillotine at Work (Chicago, 1940).

[7] At the Ninth Party Congress (March 1920) Lenin introduced a

resolution to the effect that the task of the unions was to explain the

need for a “maximum curtailment of administrative collegia and the

gradual introduction of individual management in units directly engaged

in production” (Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution

(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 124).

[8] Serge’s writings on this matter were first brought to the attention

of readers in the UK in 1961 (Solidarity, I, 7). This text was later

reprinted as a pamphlet.

[9] See Nicolas Walter’s article in Freedom (October 28, 1967) entitled

“October 1917: No Revolution at All”.

[10] Lenin proclaimed so explicitly in his What Is To Be Done? (1902).

[11] In a statement to the tenth Party Congress (1921) Lenin refers to a

mere discussion on the trade unions as an “absolutely impermissible

luxury” which “we” should not have permitted. These remarks speak

unwitting volumes on the subject (and incidentally deal decisively with

those who seek desperately for an “evolution” in their Lenin).

[12] Poukhov: The Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921. State Publishing House.

“Young Guard” edition, 1931. In the series: “Stages of the Civil War”.

[13] This resolution was subsequently endorsed by all the Kronstadt

sailors in General Assembly, and by a number of groups of Red Army

Guards. It was also endorsed by the whole working population of

Kronstadt in General Assembly. It became the political programme of the

insurrection. It therefore deserves a careful analysis.

[14] The accusation was made in answer to a question put to Trotsky by

Wedelin Thomas, a member of the New York Commission of Enquiry into the

Moscow Trials.

[15] Whom has history vindicated in this matter? Shortly before his

second stroke, Lenin was to write (Pravda, 28^(th) January, 1923): “Let

us speak frankly. The Inspection now enjoys no authority whatsoever.

Everybody knows that there is no worse institution than our Inspection”.

This was said a bare eighteen months after the suppression of Kronstadt.

(It is worth pointing out that Stalin had been the chief of the Rabkrin

from 1919 till the spring of 1922, when he became General Secretary of

the Party. He continued to exercise a strong influence over Rabkrin even

after he had formally left it. Lenin, incidentally, had voiced no

objection to Stalin’s appointment or activities in this post. That only

came later. Lenin had in fact defended both Stalin and Rabkrin against

some of Trotsky’s more far-sighted criticisms — see. I. Deutscher, The

Prophet Unarmed, pp. 47–48. (Note added in ‘Solidarity’, Vol. 2, No. 7,

p. 27).

[16] The entire life of this short lived journal was reprinted as an

appendix to a book Pravda o Kronshtadte, (The Truth about Kronstadt),

published in Prague, in 1921.

[17] Poukhov: The Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, in series “Stages of the

Civil War”, p. 95. “Young Guard” edition. 1931; State Publishing House.

Moscow.

[18] This Kamenev was an ex-Tsarist officer, now collaborating with the

Soviet Government. He was a different Kamenev from the one shot by the

Stalinists in 1936.

[19] Old Bolshevik. President of the Tsentrobalt (Central Committee of

the Sailors of the Baltic Fleet) in July 1917. After October Revolution

member of the First Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars. Together with Antonov

Ovseenko and Krylenko was put in charge of Army and Navy.

[20] op. cit.

[21] Cossack villages. Regiment 560, also composed of Cossacks and

Ukrainians, was fighting on the side of Kronstadt.

[22] So numerous were the latter that the Finnish Foreign Ministry

started discussions with Bersine, the Russian ambassador, with a view to

joint frontier guard patrols clearing the corpses from the ice. The

Finns feared that hundreds of bodies would be washed on to the Finnish

shores after the ice had melted.

[23] On 10^(th) September 1937, Trotsky wrote in La Lutte Ouvrière, “the

legend that would have it that Kronstadt 1921 was a great massacre”.

[24] Dan, T: Two years of roaming (1919–21) in Russian.

[25] In 1926 he became a Communist and returned to Russia.

[26] Yartchouk. The Kronstadt Revolt. In Russian and Spanish.

[27] According to the testimony of well-known Bolsheviks such as

Flerovski and Raskolnikov.

[28] This idea was later developed by Hermann Sandomirski, a ‘soviet

anarchist’, in an article published in the Moscow Izvestia, on the

occasion of Lenin’s death.

[29] In fact during Denikin’s offensive of 1919 they had told their

members to enter the Red Army.

[30] Ida Mett’s quotations from Lenin are wrongly attributed to his

article on “The Tax in Kind”. This report was delivered at the 10^(th)

Party Congress, on March 15, 1921 (Selected Works, Volume 9, p. 107). In

fact the quotations relate to an article on “The Food Tax” (Selected

Works, Volume 9, pp. 194–198). Ed. Solidarity.

[31] The Opritchniks were the personal guard of Ivan the Terrible and at

the same time his higher political police force. During the seven years

of their existence (1565–1572) they distinguished themselves by their

ferocious activity.

[32] archine = Russian measure of length.

[33] Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 56–57 (In Russian).

[34] It is untrue that the paper of the Kronstadters, the Kronstadt

Izvestia ever spoke of “thousands of people killed” in Petrograd.

[35] Officer cadets.

[36] Loutovinov committed suicide in Moscow, in May 1924.

[37] In his last book, written in the tragic context of an unequal

struggle with his mortal enemy, Trotsky made what was for him a great

effort at being objective. This is what he says about Kronstadt: “The

Stalinist school of falsification is not the only one that flourishes

today in the field of Russian history. Indeed, it derives a measure of

sustenance from certain legends built on ignorance and sentimentalism,

such as the lurid tales concerning Kronstadt, Makhno and other episodes

of the Revolution. Suffice it to say that what the Soviet Government did

reluctantly at Kronstadt was a tragic necessity; naturally the

revolutionary government could not have ‘presented’ the fortress that

protected Petrograd to the insurgent sailors only because a few dubious

Anarchists and S.R.s were sponsoring a handful of reactionary peasants

and soldiers in rebellion. Similar considerations were involved in the

case of Makhno and other potentially revolutionary elements that were

perhaps well-meaning but definitely ill-acting.” Stalin by Trotsky.

Hollis and Carter (1947), p. 337.

[38] Lenin. Selected Works. Lawrence and Wishart (1937). Volume 9, p.

97.

[39] Ida Matt is wrong in implying that Stalin was General Secretary of

the Party at the time of the events she is describing. The post of

General Secretary — and Stalin’s appointment to it (incidentally

endorsed by both Lenin and Trotsky) — only took place in 1922. (Ed.

Solidarity).

[40] ‘open conference’.