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Title: Trotsky Protests Too Much Author: Emma Goldman Date: 1938 Language: en Topics: history, marxism, Russian Revolution Source: Retrieved on March 15th, 2009 from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Essays/trotsky.html][sunsite.berkeley.edu]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=650, retrieved on July 5, 2020. Notes: Published by The Anarchist Communist Federation, Glasgow, Scotland, 1938
This pamphlet grew out of an article for Vanguard, the Anarchist monthly
published in New York City. It appeared in the July issue, 1938, but as
the space of the magazine is limited, only part of the manuscript could
be used. It is here given in a revised and enlarged form.
Leon Trotsky will have it that criticism of his part in the Kronstadt
tragedy is only to aid and abet his mortal enemy, Stalin. It does not
occur to him that one might detest the savage in the Kremlin and his
cruel regime and yet not exonerate Leon Trotsky from the crime against
the sailors of Kronstadt.
In point of truth I see no marked difference between the two
protagonists of the benevolent system of the dictatorship except that
Leon Trotsky is no longer in power to enforce its blessings, and Josef
Stalin is. No, I hold no brief for the present ruler of Russia. I must,
however, point out that Stalin did not come down as a gift from heaven
to the hapless Russian people. He is merely continuing the Bolshevik
traditions, even if in a more relentless manner.
The process of alienating the Russian masses from the Revolution had
begun almost immediately after Lenin and his party had ascended to
power. Crass discrimination in rations and housing, suppression of every
political right, continued persecution and arrests, early became the
order of the day. True, the purges undertaken at that time did not
include party members, although Communists also helped to fill the
prisons and concentration camps. A case in point is the first Labour
Opposition whose rank and file were quickly eliminated and their
leaders, Shlapnikov sent to the Caucasus for “a rest,” and Alexandra
Kollontay placed under house arrest. But all the other political
opponents, among them Mensheviki, Social Revolutionists, Anarchists,
many of the Liberal intelligentsia and workers as well as peasants, were
given short shrift in the cellars of the Cheka, or exiled to slow death
in distant parts of Russia and Siberia. In other words, Stalin has not
originated the theory or methods that have crushed the Russian
Revolution and have forged new chains for the Russian people.
I admit, the dictatorship under Stalin’s rule has become monstrous. That
does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors
in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest
scenes.
I have before me two numbers, February and April, 1938, of the New
International, Trotsky’s official magazine. They contain articles by
John G. Wright, a hundred percent. Trotskyist, and the Grand Mogul
himself, purporting to be a refutation of the charges against him in re
Kronstadt. Mr. Wright is merely echoing the voice of his master, and his
material is in no way first hand, or from personal contact with the
events of 1921. I prefer to pay my respects to Leon Trotsky. He has at
least the doubtful merit of having been a party to the “liquidation” of
Kronstadt.
There are, however, several very rash mis-statements in Wright’s article
that need to be knocked on the head. I shall, therefore, proceed to do
so at once and deal with his master afterwards.
John G. Wright claims that The Kronstadt Rebellion, by Alexander
Berkman, “is merely a restatement of the alleged facts and
interpretations of the Right Social Revolutionists with a few
insignificant alterations” — (culled from “The Truth About Russia in
Volya, Russia, Prague, 1921”).
The writer further accuses Alexander Berkman of “brazenness, plagiarism,
and making, as is his custom, a few insignificant alterations, and
hiding the real source of what appears as his own appraisal.” Alexander
Berkman’s life and work have placed him among the greatest revolutionary
thinkers and fighters, utterly dedicated to his ideal. Those who knew
him will testify to his sterling quality in all his actions, as well as
his integrity as a serious writer. They will certainly be amused to
learn from Mr. Wright that Alexander Berkman was a “plagiarist” and
“brazen,” and that “his custom is making a few insignificant
alterations... .”
The average Communist, whether of the Trotsky or Stalin brand, knows
about as much of Anarchist literature and its authors as, let us say,
the average Catholic knows about Voltaire or Thomas Paine. The very
suggestion that one should know what one’s opponents stand for before
calling them names would be put down as heresy by the Communist
hierarchy. I do not think, therefore, that John G. Wright deliberately
lies about Alexander Berkman. Rather do I think that he is densely
ignorant.
It was Alexander Berkman’s lifelong habit to keep diaries. Even during
the fourteen years’ purgatory he had endured in the Western Penitentiary
in the United States, Alexander Berkman had managed to keep up his diary
which he succeeded in sending out sub rosa to me. On the S.S. “Buford”
which took us on our long perilous cruise of 28 days, my comrade
continued his diary and he kept up this old habit through the 23 months
of our stay in Russia.
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, conceded by conservative critics even to
be comparable with Feodor Dostoyevsky’s Dead House, was fashioned from
his diary. The Kronstadt Rebellion and his Bolshevik Myth are also the
offspring of his day-by-day record in Russia. It is stupid, therefore,
to charge that Berkman’s brochure about Kronstadt “is merely a
restatement of the alleged facts... .” from the S.R. work that appeared
in Prague.
On a par in accuracy with this charge against Alexander Berkman by
Wright is his accusation that my old pal had denied the existence of
General Kozlovsky in Kronstadt.
The Kronstadt Rebellion, page 15, states: “There was indeed a former
General Kozlovsky in Kronstadt. It was Trotsky who had placed him there
as an artillery specialist. He played no role whatever in the Kronstadt
events.” This was borne out by none other than Zinoviev who was then
still at the zenith of his glory. At the Extraordinary Session of the
Petrograd Soviet, 4^(th) March, 1921, called to decide the fate of
Kronstadt, Zinoviev said: “Of course Kozlovsky is old and can do
nothing, but the White Officers are back of him and are misleading the
sailors.” Alexander Berkman, however, stressed the fact that the sailors
would have none of Trotsky’s former pet General, nor would they accept
the offer of provisions and other help of Victor Tchernov, leader of the
Right S.R.’s in Paris (Socialist Revolutionists).
Trotskyists no doubt consider it bourgeois sentimentality to permit the
maligned sailors the right to speak for themselves. I insist that this
approach to one’s opponent is damnable Jesuitism and has done more to
disintegrate the whole labour movement than anything else of the
“sacred” tactics of Bolshevism.
That the reader may be in a position to decide between the criminal
charge against Kronstadt and what the sailors had to say for themselves,
I here reproduce the radio message to the workers of the world, 6^(th)
March, 1921:
“Our cause is just: we stand for the power of soviets, not parties. We
stand for freely elected representatives of the labouring masses. The
substitute Soviets manipulated by the Communist Party have always been
deaf to our needs and demands; the only reply we have ever received was
shooting... . Comrades! They not only deceive you; they deliberately
pervert the truth and resort to most despicable defamation... In
Kronstadt the whole power is exclusively in the hands of the
revolutionary sailors, soldiers and workers — not with counter
revolutionists led by some Kozlovsky, as the lying Moscow radio tries to
make you believe... Do not delay, comrades! Join us, get in touch with
us; demand admission to Kronstadt for your delegates. Only they will
tell you the whole truth and will expose the fiendish calumny about
Finnish bread and Entente offers.
“Long live the revolutionary proletariat and the peasantry!”
“Long live the power of freely elected Soviets!”
The sailors “led” by Kozlovsky, yet pleading with the workers of the
world to send delegates that they might see whether there was any truth
in the black calumny spread against them by the Soviet Press!
Leon Trotsky is surprised and indignant that anyone should dare to raise
such a hue and cry over Kronstadt. After all, it happened so long ago,
in fact seventeen years have passed, and it was a mere “episode in the
history of the relation between the proletarian city and the petty
bourgeois village.” Why should anyone want to make so much ado at this
late day unless it is to “compromise the only genuine revolutionary
current which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with
its enemies, and which alone represents the future.” Leon Trotsky’s
egotism known far and wide by his friends and his foes, has never been
his weakest spot. Since his mortal enemy has endowed him with nothing
short of a magic wand, his self-importance has reached alarming
proportions.
Leon Trotsky is outraged that people should have revived the Kronstadt
“episode” and ask questions about his part. It does not occur to him
that those who have come to his defence against his detractor have a
right to ask what methods he had employed when he was in power, and how
he had dealt with those who did not subscribe to his dictum as gospel
truth. Of course it was ridiculous to expect that he would beat his
chest and say, “I, too, was but human and made mistakes. I, too, have
sinned and have killed my brothers or ordered them to be killed.” Only
sublime prophets and seers have risen to such heights of courage. Leon
Trotsky is certainly not one of them. On the contrary, he continues to
claim omnipotence in all his acts and judgments and to call anathema on
the heads of anyone who foolishly suggests that the great god Leon
Trotsky also has feet of clay.
He jeers at the documentary evidence left by the Kronstadt sailors and
the evidence of those who had been within sight and hearing of the
dreadful siege of Kronstadt. He calls them “false labels.” That does
not, however, prevent him from assuring his readers that his explanation
of the Kronstadt rebellion could be “substantiated and illustrated by
many facts and documents.” Intelligent people may well ask why Leon
Trotsky did not have the decency to present these “false labels” so that
the people might be in a position to form a correct opinion of them.
Now, it is a fact that even capitalist courts grant the defendant the
right to present evidence on his own behalf. Not so Leon Trotsky, the
spokesman of the one and only truth, he who has “never repudiated his
banner and has never compromised with its enemies.”
One can understand such lack of common decency in John G. Wright. He is,
as I have already stated, merely quoting holy Bolshevik scripture. But
for a world figure like Leon Trotsky to silence the evidence of the
sailors seems to me indicative of a very small character. The old saying
of the leopard changing his spots but not his nature forcibly applies to
Leon Trotsky. The Calvary he has endured during his years of exile, the
tragic loss of those near and dear to him, and, more poignantly still,
the betrayal by his former comrades in arms, have taught him nothing.
Not a glimmer of human kindness or mellowness has affected Trotsky’s
rancorous spirit.
What a pity that the silence of the dead sometimes speaks louder than
the living voice. In point of truth the voices strangled in Kronstadt
have grown in volume these seventeen years. Is it for this reason, I
wonder, that Leon Trotsky resents its sound?
Leon Trotsky quotes Marx as saying, “that it is impossible to judge
either parties or people by what they say about themselves.” How
pathetic that he does not realise how much this applies to him! No man
among the able Bolshevik writers has managed to keep himself so much in
the foreground or boasted so incessantly of his share in the Russian
Revolution and after as Leon Trotsky. By this criterion of his great
teacher, one would have to declare all Leon Trotsky’s writing to be
worthless, which would be nonsense of course.
In discrediting the motives which conditioned the Kronstadt uprising,
Leon Trotsky records the following: “From different fronts I sent dozens
of telegrams about the mobilisation of new ‘reliable’ detachments from
among the Petersburg workers and Baltic fleet sailors, but already in
1918, and in any case not later than 1919, the fronts began to complain
that a new contingent of ‘Kronstadters’ were unsatisfactory, exacting,
undisciplined, unreliable in battle and doing more harm than good.”
Further on, on the same page, Trotsky charges that, “when conditions
became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau more than
once discussed the possibility of securing an ‘internal loan’ from
Kronstadt where a quantity of old provisions still remained, but the
delegates of the Petrograd workers answered, ‘You will never get
anything from them by kindness; they speculate in cloth, coal and bread.
At present in Kronstadt every kind of riff-raff has raised its head.’”
How very Bolshevik that is, not only to slay one’s opponents but also to
besmirch their characters. From Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky to
Stalin, this methods has ever been the same.
Now, I do not presume to argue what the Kronstadt sailors were in 1918
or 1919. I did not reach Russia until January, 1920. From that time on
until Kronstadt was “liquidated” the sailors of the Baltic fleet were
held up as the glorious example of valour and unflinching courage. Time
on end I was told not only by Anarchists, Mensheviks and social
revolutionists, but by many Communists, that the sailors were the very
backbone of the Revolution. On the 1^(st) of May, 1920, during the
celebration and the other festivities organised for the first British
Labour Mission, the Kronstadt sailors presented a large clear-cut
contingent, and were then pointed out as among the great heroes who had
saved the Revolution from Kerensky, and Petrograd from Yudenich. During
the anniversary of October the sailors were again in the front ranks,
and their re-enactment of the taking of the Winter Palace was wildly
acclaimed by a packed mass.
Is it possible that the leading members of the party, save Leon Trotsky,
were unaware of the corruption and the demoralisation of Kronstadt,
claimed by him? I do not think so. Moreover, I doubt whether Trotsky
himself held this view of the Kronstadt sailors until March, 1921. His
story must, therefore, be an afterthought, or is it a rationalisation to
justify the senseless “liquidation” of Kronstadt?
Granted that the personnel had undergone a change, it is yet a fact that
the Kronstadters in 1921 were nevertheless far from the picture Leon
Trotsky and his echo have painted. In point of actual fact, the sailors
met their doom only because of their deep kinship and solidarity with
the Petrograd workers whose power of endurance of cold and hunger had
reached the breaking point in a series of strikes in February, 1921. Why
have Leon Trotsky and his followers failed to mention this? Leon Trotsky
knows perfectly well, if Wright does not, that the first scene of the
Kronstadt drama was staged in Petrograd on 24^(th) February, and played
not by the sailors but by the strikers. For it was on this date that the
strikers had given vent to their accumulated wrath over the callous
indifference of the men who had prated about the dictatorship of the
proletariat which had long ago deteriorated into the merciless
dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Alexander Berkman’s entry in his diary of this historic day reads:
“The Trubotchny mill workers have gone on strike. In the distribution of
winter clothing, they complain, the Communists received undue advantage
over the non-partisans. The Government refuses to consider the
grievances till the men return to work.
“Crowds of strikers gathered in the street near the mills, and soldiers
were sent to disperse them. They were Kursanti, Communist youths of the
military academy. There was no violence.
“Now the strikers have been joined by the men from the Admiralty shops
and Calernaya docks. There is much resentment against the arrogant
attitude of the Government. A street demonstration was attempted, but
mounted troops suppressed it.”
It was after the report of their Committee of the real state of affairs
among the workers in Petrograd that the Kronstadt sailors did in 1921
what they had done in 1917. They immediately made common cause with the
workers. The part of the sailors in 1917 was hailed as the red pride and
glory of the Revolution. Their identical part in 1921 was denounced to
the whole world as counter-revolutionary treason. Naturally, in 1917
Kronstadt helped the Bolsheviks into the saddle. In 1921 they demanded a
reckoning for the false hopes raised in the masses, and the great
promise broken almost immediately the Bolsheviks had felt entrenched in
their power. A heinous crime indeed. The important phase of this crime,
however, is that Kronstadt did not “mutiny” out of a clear sky. The
cause for it was deeply rooted in the suffering of the Russian workers;
the city proletariat, as well as the peasantry.
To be sure, the former commissar assures us that “the peasants
reconciled themselves to the requisition as a temporary evil,” and that
“the peasants approved of the Bolsheviki, but became increasingly
hostile to the ‘Communists’.” But these contentions are mere fiction, as
can be demonstrated by numerous proofs — not the least of them the
liquidation of the peasant soviet, headed by Maria Spiridonova, and iron
and fire used to force the peasants to yield up all their produce,
including their grain for their spring sowing.
In point of historic truth, the peasants hated the régime almost from
the start, certainly from the moment when Lenin’s slogan, “Rob the
robbers,” was turned into “Rob the peasants for the glory of the
Communist Dictatorship.” That is why they were in constant ferment
against the Bolshevik Dictatorship. A case in point was the uprising of
the Karelian Peasants drowned in blood by the Tsarist General
Slastchev-Krimsky. If the peasants were so enamoured with the Soviet
régime, as Leon Trotsky would have us believe, why was it necessary to
rush this terrible man to Karelia.
He had fought against the Revolution from its very beginning and had led
some of the Wrangel forces in the Crimea. He was guilty of fiendish
barbarities to war prisoners and infamous as a maker of pogroms. Now
Slastchev-Krimsky recanted and he returned to “his Fatherland.” This
arch-counter revolutionist and Jew-baiter, together with several Tsarist
generals and White Guardists, was received by the Bolsheviki with
military honours. No doubt it was just retribution that the anti-Semite
had to salute the Jew, Trotsky, his military superior. But to the
Revolution and the Russian people the triumphal return of the
imperialist was an outrage.
As a reward for his newly-fledged love of the Socialist Fatherland,
Slastchev-Krimsky was commissioned to quell the Karelian peasants who
demanded self-determination and better conditions.[1]
Leon Trotsky tells us that the Kronstadt sailors in 1919 would not have
given up provisions by “kindness” — not that kindness had been tried at
any time. In fact, this word does not exist in Bolshevik lingo. Yet here
are these demoralised sailors, the riff-raff speculators, etc., siding
with the city proletariat in 1921, and their first demand is for
equalisation of rations. What villains these Kronstadters were, really!
Much is being made by both writers against Kronstadt of the fact that
the sailors who, as we insist, did not premeditate the rebellion, but
met on the 1^(st) of March to discuss ways and means of aiding their
Petrograd comrades, quickly formed themselves into a Provisional
Revolutionary Committee. The answer to this is actually given by John G.
Wright himself. He writes: “It is by no means excluded that the local
authorities in Kronstadt bungled in their handling of the situation... .
It is no secret that Kalinin and Commissar Kusmin, were none too highly
esteemed by Lenin and his colleagues... . In so far as the local
authorities were blind to the full extent of the danger or failed to
take proper and effective measures to cope with the crisis, to that
extent their blunders played a part in the unfolding events... .”
The statement that Lenin did not esteem Kalinin or Kusmin highly is
unfortunately an old trick of Bolshevism to lay all blame on some
bungler so that the heads may remain lily pure.
Indeed, the local authorities in Kronstadt did “bungle.” Kuzmin attacked
the sailors viciously and threatened them with dire results. The sailors
evidently knew what to expect from such threats. They could not but
guess that if Kuzmin and Vassiliev were permitted to be at large their
first step would be to remove arms and provisions from Kronstadt. This
was the reason why the sailors formed their Provisional Revolutionary
Committee. An additional factor, too, was the news that a committee of
30 sailors sent to Petrograd to confer with the workers had been denied
the right to return to Kronstadt, that they had been arrested and placed
in the Cheka.
Both writers make a mountain of a molehill of the rumours announced at
the meeting of 1^(st) March to the effect that a truckload of soldiers
heavily armed were on their way to Kronstadt. Wright has evidently never
lived under an air-tight dictatorship. I have. When every channel of
human contact is closed, when every thought is thrown back on itself and
expression stifled, then rumours rise like mushrooms from the ground and
grow into terrifying dimensions. Besides, truckloads of soldiers and
Chekists armed to their very teeth tearing along the streets in the day,
throwing out their nets at night and dragging their human haul to the
Cheka, was a frequent sight in Petrograd and Moscow during the time when
I was there. In the tension of the meeting after Kuzmin’s threatening
speech, it was perfectly natural for rumours to be given credence.
The news in the Paris Press about the Kronstadt uprising two weeks
before it happened had been stressed in the campaign against the sailors
as proof positive that they had been tools of the Imperialist gang and
that rebellion had actually been hatched in Paris. It was too obvious
that this yarn was used only to discredit the Kronstadters in the eyes
of the workers.
In reality this advance news was like other news from Paris, Riga or
Helsingfors, and which rarely, if ever, coincided with anything that had
been claimed by the counter-revolutionary agents abroad. On the other
hand, many events happened in Soviet Russia which would have gladdened
the heart of the Entente and which they never got to know — events far
more detrimental to the Russian Revolution caused by the dictatorship of
the Communist Party itself. For instance, the Cheka which undermined
many achievements of October and which already in 1921 had become a
malignant growth on the body of the Revolution, and many other similar
events which would take me too far afield to treat here.
No, the advance news in the Paris Press had no bearing whatever on the
Kronstadt rebellion. In point of fact, no one in Petrograd in 1921
believed its connection, not even quite a number of Communists. As I
have already stated, John G. Wright is merely an apt pupil of Leon
Trotsky and therefore quite innocent of what most people within and
outside of the party thought about this so-called “link.”
Future historians will no doubt appraise the Kronstadt “mutiny” in its
real value. If and when they do, they will no doubt come to the
conclusion that the uprising could not have come more opportunely if it
had been deliberately planned.
The most dominant factor which decided the fate of Kronstadt was the
N.E.P. (the New Economic Policy). Lenin, aware of the very considerable
party opposition this new-fangled “revolutionary” scheme would meet,
needed some impending menace to ensure the smooth and ready acceptance
of the N.E.P. Kronstadt came along most conveniently. The whole crushing
propaganda machine was immediately put into motion to prove that the
sailors were in league with all the Imperialist powers, and all the
counter-revolutionary elements to destroy the Communist State. That
worked like magic. The N.E.P. was rushed through without a hitch.
Time alone will prove the frightful cost this maneuver has entailed. The
three hundred delegates, the young Communist flower, rushed from the
Party Congress to crush Kronstadt, were a mere handful of the thousands
wantonly sacrificed. They went fervently believing the campaign of
vilification. Those who remained alive had a rude awakening.
I have recorded a meeting with a wounded Communist in a hospital in My
Disillusionment. It has lost nothing of its poignancy in the years
since:
“Many of those wounded in the attack on Kronstadt had been brought to
the same hospital, mostly Kursanti. I had an opportunity to speak to one
of them. His physical suffering, he said, was nothing as compared with
his mental agony. Too late he had realised that he had been duped by the
cry of ‘counter-revolution.’ No Tsarist generals, no White Guardists in
Kronstadt had led the sailors — he found only his own comrades, sailors,
soldiers and workers, who had heroically fought for the Revolution.”
No one at all in his senses will see any similarity between the N.E.P.
and the demand of the Kronstadt sailors for the right of free exchange
of products. The N.E.P. came to reintroduce the grave evils the Russian
Revolution had attempted to eradicate. The free exchange of products
between the workers and the peasants, between the city and the country,
embodied the very raison d’être of the Revolution. Naturally “the
Anarchists were against the N.E.P.” But free exchange, as Zinoviev had
told me in 1920, “is out of our plan of centralisation.” Poor Zinoviev
could not possibly imagine what a horrible ogre the centralisation of
power would become.
It is the id‚e fixe of centralisation of the dictatorship which early
began to divide the city and the village, the workers and the peasants,
not, as Leon Trotsky will have it, because “the one is proletarian ... .
and the other petty bourgeois,” but because the dictatorship had
paralysed the initiative of both the city proletariat and the peasantry.
Leon Trotsky makes it appear that the Petrograd workers quickly sensed
“the petty bourgeois nature of the Kronstadt uprising and therefore
refused to have anything to do with it.” He omits the most important
reason for the seeming indifference of the workers of Petrograd. It is
of importance, therefore, to point out that the campaign of slander,
lies and calumny against the sailors began on the 2^(nd) March, 1921.
The Soviet Press fairly oozed poison against the sailors. The most
despicable charges were hurled against them, and this was kept up until
Kronstadt was liquidated on 17^(th) March. In addition, Petrograd was
put under martial law. Several factories were shut down and the workers
thus robbed, began to hold counsel with each other. In the diary of
Alexander Berkman, I find the following:
“Many arrests are taking place. Groups of strikers guarded by Chekists
on the way to prison are a common sight. There is great nervous tension
in the city. Elaborate precautions have been taken to protect the
Government institution. Machine guns are placed on the Astoria, the
living quarters of Zinoviev and other prominent Bolsheviki. Official
proclamations commanding immediate return of the strikers to the
factories ... and warning the populace against congregating in the
streets. “The Committee of Defence has initiated a ‘clean-up of the
city.’ Many workers suspected of sympathising with Kronstadt have been
placed under arrest. All Petrograd sailors and part of the garrison
thought to be ‘untrustworthy’ have been ordered to distant points, while
the families of Kronstadt sailors living in Petrograd are held as
hostages. The Committee of Defence notified Kronstadt that ‘the
prisoners are kept as pledges’ for the safety of the Commissar of the
Baltic Fleet, N. N. Kuzmin, the Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, T.
Vassiliev, and other Communists. If the least harm is suffered by our
comrades the hostages will pay with their lives.”
Under these iron-clad rules it was physically impossible for the workers
of Petrograd to ally themselves with Kronstadt, especially as not one
word of the manifestos issued by the sailors in their paper was
permitted to penetrate to the workers in Petrograd. In other words, Leon
Trotsky deliberately falsifies the facts. The workers would certainly
have sided with the sailors because they knew that they were not
mutineers or counter-revolutionists, but that they had taken a stand
with the workers as their comrades had done as long ago as 1905, and
March and October, 1917. It is therefore a grossly criminal and
conscious libel on the memory of the Kronstadt sailors.
In the New International on page 106, second column, Trotsky assures his
readers that no one “we may say in passing, bothered in those days about
the Anarchists.” That unfortunately does not tally with the incessant
persecution of Anarchists which began in 1918, when Leon Trotsky
liquidated the Anarchist headquarters in Moscow with machine guns. At
that time the process of elimination of the Anarchists began. Even now
so many years later, the concentration camps of the Soviet Government
are full of the Anarchists who remained alive. Actually before the
Kronstadt uprising, in fact in October 1920, when Leon Trotsky again had
changed his mind about Machno, because he needed his help and his army
to liquidate Wrangel, and when he consented to the Anarchist Conference
in Kharkhov, several hundred Anarchists were drawn into a net and
despatched to the Boutirka prison where they were kept without any
charge until April, 1921, when they, together with other Left
politicals, were forcibly removed in the dead of night and secretly sent
to various prisons and concentration camps in Russia and Siberia. But
that is a page of Soviet history of its own. What is to the point in
this instance is that the Anarchists must have been thought of very
much, else there would have been no reason to arrest them and ship them
in the old Tsarist way to distant parts of Russia and Siberia.
Leon Trotsky ridicules the demands of the sailors for Free Soviets. It
was indeed naive of them to think that free Soviets can live side by
side with a dictatorship. Actually the free Soviets had ceased to exist
at an early stage in the Communist game, as the Trade Unions and the
cooperatives. They had all been hitched to the chariot wheel of the
Bolshevik State machine. I well remember Lenin telling me with great
satisfaction, “Your Grand Old Man, Enrico Malatesta, is for our
soviets.” I hastened to say, “You mean free soviets, Comrade Lenin. I,
too, am for them.” Lenin turned our talk to something else. But I soon
discovered why Free Soviets had ceased to exist in Russia.
John G. Wright will have it that there was no trouble in Petrograd until
22^(nd) February. That is on par with his other rehash of the “historic”
Party material. The unrest and dissatisfaction of the workers were
already very marked when we arrived. In every industry I visited I found
extreme dissatisfaction and resentment because the dictatorship of the
proletariat had been turned into a devastating dictatorship of the
Communist Party with its different rations and discriminations. If the
discontent of the workers had not broken loose before 1921 it was only
because they still clung tenaciously to the hope that when the fronts
would be liquidated the promise of the Revolution would be fulfilled. It
was Kronstadt which pricked the last bubble.
The sailors had dared to stand by the discontented workers. They had
dared to demand that the promise of the Revolution — all Power in the
Soviets — should be fulfilled. The political dictatorship had slain the
dictatorship of the proletariat. That and that alone was their
unforgivable offense against the holy spirit of Bolshevism.
In his article Wright has a footnote to page 49, second column, wherein
he states that Victor Serge in a recent comment on Kronstadt “concedes
that the Bolsheviki, once confronted with the mutiny had no other
recourse except to crush it.” Victor Serge is now out of the hospitable
shores of the workers’ “fatherland.” I therefore do not consider it a
breach of faith when I say that if Victor Serge made this statement
charged to him by John G. Wright, he is merely not telling the truth.
Victor Serge was one of the French Communist Section who was as much
distressed and horrified over the impending butchery decided upon by
Leon Trotsky to “shoot the sailors as pheasants” as Alexander Berkman,
myself and many other revolutionists. He used to spend every free hour
in our room running up and down, tearing his hair, clenching his fists
in indignation and repeating that “something must be done, something
must be done, to stop the frightful massacre.” When he was asked why he,
as a party member, did not raise his voice in protest in the party
session, his reply was that that would not help the sailors and would
mark him for the Cheka and even silent disappearance. The only excuse
for Victor Serge at the time was a young wife and a small baby. But for
him to state now, after seventeen years, that “the Bolsheviki once
confronted with the mutiny had no other recourse except to crush it,”
is, to say the least, inexcusable. Victor Serge knows as well as I do
that there was no mutiny in Kronstadt, that the sailors actually did not
use their arms in any shape or form until the bombardment of Kronstadt
began. He also knows that neither the arrested Communist Commissars nor
any other Communists were touched by the sailors. I therefore call upon
Victor Serge to come out with the truth. That he was able to continue in
Russia under the comradely régime of Lenin, Trotsky and all the other
unfortunates who have been recently murdered, conscious of all the
horrors that are going on, is his affair, but I cannot keep silent in
the face of the charge against him as saying that the Bolsheviki were
justified in crushing the sailors.
Leon Trotsky is sarcastic about the accusation that he had shot 1,500
sailors. No, he did not do the bloody job himself. He entrusted
Tuchachevsky, his lieutenant, to shoot the sailors “like pheasants” as
he had threatened. Tuchachevsky carried out the order to the last
degree. The numbers ran into legions, and those who remained after the
ceaseless attack of Bolshevist artillery, were placed under the care of
Dibenko, famous for his humanity and his justice.
Tuchachevsky and Dibenko, the heroes and saviours of the dictatorship!
History seems to have its own way of meting out justice.
Leon Trotsky tries a trump card, when he asks, “Where and when were
their great principles confirmed, in practice at least partially, at
least in tendency?” This card, like all others he has already played in
his life, will not win him the game. In point of fact Anarchist
principles in practice and tendency have been confirmed in Spain. I
agree, only partially. How could that be otherwise with all the forces
conspiring against the Spanish Revolution? The constructive work
undertaken by the National Confederation of Labour (the C.N.T.), and the
Anarchist Federation of Iberia (the F.A.I.), is something never thought
of by the Bolshevik régime in all the years of its power, and yet the
collectivisation of the industries and the land stand out as the
greatest achievement of any revolutionary period. Moreover, even if
Franco should win, and the Spanish Anarchists be exterminated, the work
they have started will continue to live. Anarchist principles and
tendencies are so deeply rooted in Spanish soil that they cannot be
eradicated.
During the four years civil war in Russia the Anarchists almost to a man
stood by the Bolsheviki, though they grew more daily conscious of the
impending collapse of the Revolution. They felt in duty bound to keep
silent and to avoid everything that would bring aid and comfort to the
enemies of the Revolution.
Certainly the Russian Revolution fought against many fronts and many
enemies, but at no time were the odds so frightful as those confronting
the Spanish people, the Anarchists and the Revolution. The menace of
Franco, aided by German and Italian man power and military equipment,
Stalin’s blessing transferred to Spain, the conspiracy of the
Imperialist powers, the betrayal by the so-called democracies and, not
the least, the apathy of the international proletariat, far outweigh the
dangers that surrounded the Russian Revolution. What does Trotsky do in
the face of such a terrible tragedy? He joins the howling mob and
thrusts his own poisoned dagger into the vitals of the Spanish
Anarchists in their most crucial hour. No doubt the Spanish Anarchists
have committed a grave error. They failed to invite Leon Trotsky to take
charge of the Spanish Revolution and to show them how well he had
succeeded in Russia that it may be repeated all over again on Spanish
soil. That seems to be his chagrin.
[1] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 239.