New material from Soviet archives confirms the Bolsheviks' position - Internasional Miscellaneous

New material from Soviet archives confirms the Bolsheviks' position
Dikirim oleh : Trotskyist - Fourth International
Pada tanggal : 11-01-2006, 01:08
internasional / miscellaneous / opinion/analysis

By A Kramer

For many years the capitalist press, erudite professors and bourgeois analysts have been going on about the "secrets in the Soviet archives". There was much speculation about the "terrible secrets of the communist regime" that would finally confirm the "evil character" of communism.

After the events that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, historians were finally allowed access to the Soviet archives. So one would expect a flow of terribly indicting facts. However the results for the bourgeois historians have been really disappointing. Of course, they did find a large amount of new evidence that confirms the shocking crimes of Stalinism. But we never had any doubt about this. Trotsky and his followers condemned these crimes long before any archives were opened. Trotsky's supporters in Soviet Russia in the 1920 and 1930s had first hand knowledge of these crimes because they were among the first to suffer the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration. Thousands of them died at the hands of Stalin's henchmen.

What the bourgeois historians were hoping for was a mass of evidence that they could use to show that there was no difference between Stalinism and the healthy regime under Lenin and Trotsky in the first period after the revolution. But they met with real problems in trying to find documents that could be used to discredit the leaders of the Russian Revolution - Lenin and Trotsky. The most difficult documents to get to in the past were those concerning the leaders of the Left Opposition. It is now clear to any historian why this was. The archives show that these leaders played a key role in the 1917 revolution and in establishing the Soviet state.

During the last ten years many new interesting sources about critical moments of the Russian Revolution have been published. Among them are two books about the most tragic act of the Russian Revolution ? the so-called Kronstadt rebellion.

It is not necessary to describe here all the aspects of this well-known event. At the beginning of March 1921, in one of the most critical periods of the Soviet Republic's existence, in the naval base of Kronstadt near Petrograd, there was an attempt at a military coup against the Soviet government. The critical state that the Soviet Union was passing through in that moment meant that Lenin and Trotsky were forced to deal with the rebels very quickly. After rejecting the government's ultimatum to capitulate, Kronstadt was stormed and captured in the second attack. The rebel leaders escaped to Finland.

At the end of the 1930s a group of former Trotskyists, including Victor Serge, Max Eastman, Souvarine and some others, attacked Trotsky for his behaviour during the rebellion. (In doing this Serge contradicted his own earlier views expressed at the time of the rebellion). They described the Kronstadt events as a workers' and sailors' rebellion against the "Bolshevik dictatorship", and saw the crushing of the rebels as a "first step towards Stalinism". Later on, this criticism was adopted by other anti-Communist ideologues and propagandists. Trotsky answered these people in 1938 in his article "Hue And Cry Over Kronstadt" where he analysed the petit-bourgeois nature of this putsch.

There is no need to repeat Trotsky's arguments here, as anyone can read his article by linking to it above. Anyone who wants to know the truth can read Trotsky for themselves. What I intend to do here is to highlight some of the new information published in these recent documents - a collection of material on Kronstadt.

The first book was published under the strange title, "The Unknown Trotsky: the red Bonaparte" (Krasnov V.G., Moscow, 2000). This attempts to describe the role of Trotsky during the Russian civil war. The second book ? "Kronstadt 1921" (Moscow, 2001) - is a collection of documents about the Kronstadt rebellion. It is important to stress that neither of the two books have been written by Bolshevik sympathizers.

The popular image that anti-Bolshevik critics try to portray is that there was widespread sympathy among the then Red Army soldiers towards the rebels. There has been a lot of speculation about the mass of soldiers refusing to take part in the attack for political reasons and also stories of mass desertions among the Red Army soldiers with many of them passing to the side of the Kronstadt rebels. This, however, is a myth.

What really happened was absolutely different. There was one case where one unit moved to the side of those defending Kronstadt. This was during the first unsuccessful attack. It was a battalion from the 561st Red Army regiment. This regiment was recruited among former Machno, Wrangel and Denikin prisoners. It is a well-known fact that during the civil war in Russia some peasant units changed sides even several times as a result of military failures.

There was the other case of the 236th and 237th infantry regiment which refused to go attack. Their position was: "We'll not go on the ice", "we'll go to our villages". These peasant units were terrified at the idea of having to attack across the ice this first class fortress defended by battleships. There are other reports about refusals to carry out orders on the part of different units, but in all these cases the causes were such things as the poor quality of food and clothing, the bad quality of the camouflage. No political reasons were given. This is easily understood if we remember how the young Soviet regime inherited a backward economy and, on top of that, had been forced to use its scarce resources to defend itself against the White armies backed by the imperialists who were trying to crush the revolution.

The situation inside Kronstadt also appears different to the myth. There was no solid mass of soldiers, firmly behind the rebellion. Even bourgeois historians such as Krasnov have had to recognize this fact. Inside Kronstadt there were clashes between the old revolutionary sailors and the new recruits who came from peasant and petit-bourgeois families. This fact can be confirmed by the fact that some ships declared their neutrality, while others moved against the rebels.

Here it is worth quoting from some of the statements issued by the crews of a number of ships, among them the mine-sweepers "Ural", "Orfei" and "Pobeditel": "The men of the White guards that are leading the rebels can do a lot of damage to the Republic, and they may not even hesitate to bomb Petrograd".

The same situation was to be found behind the rebel battle lines. From the 7th Army intelligence report we learn that many rebel sailors and soldiers wanted to move over to the side of the Bolsheviks, but they were terrorized by their commanders.

However, the final nail in the coffin for the anti-Bolshevik mythology built up around Kronstadt comes later. According to documents published in these two books new facts emerge about what happened in the town around Kronstadt. During the attack on Kronstadt, the workers of the town moved against the putschists and liberated the town even before the main forces of the Red Army arrived. So in reality what we had was not a workers' and sailors' rebellion against Bolshevism, but a workers' and sailors' Bolshevik uprising against the "rebels"!

In the proclamations of the Kronstadt sailors we see the words that refer to "the men of the White guards that are leading the rebels ". These were not mere words. The real command over the rebels was concentrated not in the Kronstadt soviet, as some naive individuals may think, but in the so-called "Court for the Defence of Kronstadt Fortress". One of its leaders was rear-admiral S.H. Dmitriev (who was executed after the fortress fall), the other was general A. H. Koslovsky, who escaped to Finland. Both of these senior officers were very far from having any kind of sympathy for Socialism "with Bolsheviks" or "without Bolsheviks".

There is also much talk about S. M. Petrechenko - the sailor and anti-Bolshevik leader. What is really interesting is to note that in 1927 this man was recruited by Stalin's GPU and he was one of Stalin's agent until 1944 when he was arrested by the Finnish authorities. The following year he died in a Finnish concentration camp.

So, the real story is that the Kronstadt workers and sailors actually understood the real nature of these rebels far better than any of the later intellectuals who have tried to build up the myth of Kronstadt. The same can be said of the counterrevolutionary forces that were operating in Kronstadt. The former Tsarist prime-minister and finance minister, and in emigration the director of the Russian Bank in Paris, Kokovzev, transferred 225 thousand francs to the Kronstadt rebels. The Russian-Asian bank transferred 200 thousand francs. The French prime-minister, Briand, during the meeting with the former ambassador of Kerensky's government, Malachov, promised "any necessary help to Kronstadt".

As Trotsky explained, the so-called Kronstadt rebellion was not the first petit-bourgeois, anti-Bolshevik movement to take place during both the civil war and the revolution. There were a lot of other movements that were lead by people raising the slogan of "Soviets without Bolsheviks", etc. There were such movements in some factories in the Urals and among the Aries Cossacks. But from these experiences we can see clearly that in the conditions of uncompromising class war this kind of slogan can lead straight into the camp of Mediaeval reaction and barbarism. There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party. And again, the ordinary Russian workers and soldiers of the time understood this very well. They understood it far better than some people today, among them even some people on the left.

The fact is that many ordinary members of the Anarchists, Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries and others parties took part in the Soviets with the Bolsheviks, but not without them. There was a huge difference between the ordinary rank and file members of these parties and their leaders who were completely anti-Bolshevik in their feelings. In the early 1920s the local Soviet authorities in some Jewish areas of the Ukraine were totally recruited from members of the Bund. Many Anarchists took part in the Revolution and in the Civil War on the side of the Bolsheviks against the White reaction. They also cooperated with the new power until the rise of Stalinism. To this day, those courageous people are considered by some modern anarchists as "traitors". Some people never learn!

We have nothing to fear from the publication of more material from the Soviet archives. We hope that over the next few years more documents will be found in these archives about the long and glorious struggles of the Russian proletariat. They will surely provide more information on the revolutionary traditions of the Russian workers.

December, 2003

Here are comments added on UKindymedia to this article, the Kronstadt Izvestias have been published in french:

Izvestia for Trud

10.01.2006 22:26
Wnat Kronstadt itself said can be found in the Kronstadt Izvestias which were brought out across the ice. Why make such a song and dance out of CP archives? I know they bowdlerised Makarenko, so what do you think they did with the rest of their History.

The demands of Kronstadt were virtually what Trotsky himself had been arguing for in the Central Committee previously. As you heard happen in Tienamen, those being massacred were singing the Internationale.

Trotsky was a good lad in 1921(20). Even Lenin said something essential. Why are people always trying to make heroes? Have a read of "The bad side of Leadership". Better take up Anti-Parliamentarianism too.

Ilyan
My typo mistake, On Trotsky, for 1921 read 1920

10.01.2006 23:24
And for those bewildered by Makarenko, find the original of his Road to Life and compare it to the Politically Correct Crap that was published in 1951.

Ilyan
*
Stalin

11.01.2006 12:15
Hey,

both you anarchists and you trots have never achieved anything and never will. Why,once you have power and are faced with oppossition, you are forced to use force to defend yourself. it is nice to say " lets all be anarchist and free when you have enemies ready to tear you to bits. This is why we believe in Stalin,who made a few mistakes, over the idealistic anarchists and trotskyist. kronstadt was justified as was stalins so called crimes.

man of steel,
*
Uncle Joe
12.01.2006 00:16
Stalin inherited a corrupted Revolution. He never recanted his belief in the withering away of the State that I heard. He thought he was developing towards that. It is hard to justify his crimes. And few have more reason to hate him than me. One man I know I loved very mich was abouit eight years in a Gulag. Another I stll ask questions about.

Who am I to complain? Stalin forcibly took the grain from millions of people and sold it on the depression market for money. They tell me five million died of starvation. Stalin spent the money bulding factories, buying machine tools and hiring engineers. Those dead were the shocktroops who won the crucial battle of Kursk, they died that there might be T34s in sufficiant quantity to defeat Hitler. Is that what you are trying to tell us Man of Steel?

But the question is, without Kronstadt, need it have happened? To what extent was did knowledge of Kronstadt cause the TUC to desert the field of Victory in 1926? Would the German Communists have been stronger than the Hitlerites?

But the real good belly laugh comes when Gorbachov is about to turn the foundation Stalin built so brutally into the first glimmering of Socialism, Thatcher got on the phone to Yeltsin. And now the wealth created by Soviet people is squandered by thieves buying up football clubs.

Anyhow Man of Steel, do not make the assumption that Anarchists are pacifists - Anarchy covers a very broad spectrum indeed. They might yet save Earth's ability to support Life. At this late stage, I have to admit that is a very small chance.

Ilyan
*

IndyMedia engages with today's burning issues!

12.01.2006 11:12
Sorry, bit unfair, most IMC articles are relevant - but come on folks, not another flipping argument about Kronstadt!

I remember being at a planning meeting at the height of the anti-war campaign - there were some anarchists present, and their only contribution to the proceedings was to shout 'what about Kronstadt?' at the SWP speakers. Most people thought they were bonkers.

Mr Spoon
*

take a look this Writing

12.01.2006 13:14
yeah..but better take a look to this material.

Solidarity Group, a Trotskyis, have wrote:
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html

in Rusia Revo ..the Bolsheviks/Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin did more than opposing worker and peasant or revolution...

jeri
mail e-mail: jeri_vhr@yahoo.com

So many people have to see everything in black and white. Marx made a first class analysis of Capitalism. Unfortunately there are dogmatic Marxists who have lost their science. Lenin gave very sound advice but unfortunateky failed to follow it himself. "..only the people, universally armed."

It seems there has been shotgun trolling of this article across Indycymru. Here are the comments called up by typing in the same name on a return visit to UKIndy:

"Trotsky Protests Too Much!

22.08.2004 14:28
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1938/trotsky-protests.htm

First Published: by The Anarchist Federation, Glasgow, 1938;
Editor’s Introduction: 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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 per cent. 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 life-long 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, 4th 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, 6th 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 1st 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 24th 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 regime, 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 1st 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 1st 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 manoeuvre 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’etre 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 idée 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 2nd 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 17th 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 manifestoes 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 co-operatives. 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 22nd 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.

1. “My Disillusionment in Russia,” p. 239.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leon Trotsky, John G. Wright and the Spanish Anarchists.
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.

Emma
"There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party"

22.08.2004 14:31
You dogmatic muppet. I don't think you'll convince anarchists, or libertarians generally, to support an authoritarian dogma on the grounds that an 85 year-old battle was actually between one set of authoritarians and another, not authoritarians versus libertarians.

"There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party" - Argentina anyone?

not a trot
Divide and Rule (yawn)

22.08.2004 14:54
Divide and rule
divide et impera
split and wreck
etc. etc. etc.

so someone wants anarchists and trotskyists to argue with each other

who might that somebody be?
what are their interests?
what do they want (not to happen)?

with apologies to master Bob;
they come spreading isms and schisms
like they want to divide and rule, yeah

(May I translate for those of you who dont get it:

DONT FEED THE TROLLS!

Duppy Conqueror
between partridges and icepicks

22.08.2004 19:44
First problem. Given that Red Army soldiers who refused to fight were surely less likely to be punished if they gave technical/military rather than political reasons, surely the former would be used to cover for the latter.

Second problem. When the Kronstadt rebellion happened, the civil war was OVER. In fact the rebels waited for the war to be over before they rebelled. Evidence is in Brinton’s pamphlet “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control”:
Available here as PDF
http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/varpams/bolshies&workercontrol.pdf
and here as HTML
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html

According to Brinton’s chronology,

Jan 1920 – Whites collapse in Siberia; Britain, France and Italy lift the blockade
Nov 14th 1920 – General Wrangel evacuates Siberia – this is the end of the civil war.
March 17th, 1921 – Kronstadt uprising begins

In other words, there are FIVE MONTHS between the end of the civil war and the Kronstadt uprising!

Actually Kronstadt is not the worst of what the Bolsheviks did, because they had been union-busting from at least 1919.

Third problem. Why did the Bolsheviks suppress a rebellion all but a handful of the demands of which were the same as those of the Bolsheviks in 1917? In fact, this account elides the rebels’ demands completely.

Here is the full list of demands:
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob19.html
Release socialist political prisoners, re-elect the Soviets by secret ballot, freedom of press for socialists/workers/peasants, freedom of association for trade unions etc., elect a committee to review cases of imprisonment, convene a non-party congress of workers and peasants for Petrograd, abolish state funding for Bolshevik propaganda… Where is the great horror at all this coming from? By the way, the only allegedly non-socialist demands, no. 9 (peasant economic freedom) and no. 10 (individual artisan production), were to be conceded a few years later in the NEP… Notice that “soviets without communists” is NOT one of the demands, as Trotsky later insists it is. Worse still, he says that “The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie.” They somehow managed to have a programme when it was impossible for them to have one!

Fourth problem. This new evidence does not in the slightest prove the absurd claims made by Lenin and Trotsky, such as that a White fleet was off the coast just waiting to be allowed into the port. Nor has the new evidence proved the claim that peasant annoyance at a bad harvest was the cause of the rebellion.

Here is the entire text of Trotsky’s “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/kronstadt/trotsky_hue_cry.html

Notice the class purism of the analysis. Firstly, that if the movement is “peasants” or “petty bourgeois”, it is by definition reactionary. Secondly, that the claims of the insurgents are not to be taken “at face value”, in terms of what they actually say, but read sideways through such external class categories. And of course, the interest of the workers is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship! And if the peasants resist this, it only shows their reaction! What a neat trick! Suddenly the political agendas need not be taken into account because everything is already known in advance, from predetermined and dogmatic definitions of class. “From the class point of view… the basic criterion for politics and history…” But the class categories are determined in advance. And the workers were no more in control in 1921 than the peasants. The bureaucracy was in control. Why is the “class analysis” not applied to the bureaucracy? Why is the party supposed to be able to “represent” the working class even though it is itself bureaucratic and not proletarian in terms of its own relationship to the means of production?

Trotsky does not try to demonstrate that the Kronstadt rebels were in fact counterrevolutionary. He first of all asserts in advance that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be defended at any cost, and deduces from this that the rebellion has to be smashed. Because the dictatorship is proletarian, therefore the rebellion is counterrevolutionary. Neat wordplay, but proves nothing! For where is it proven that the dictatorship is proletarian? Is this not precisely what is challenged by the critics of the Kronstadt massacre?

There’s a long quote from Lenin here, where he claims not that a few former Whites had defected, but that the entire White forces were amassed in Kronstadt and that furthermore, extra forces were prepared offshore to be landed imminently:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/mett/time8.html

Also on the net: Ida Mett’s book on Kronstadt
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/mett.html

Eyewitness accounts of the Russian revolution
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia.html

Andy
mail e-mail: ldxar1@resist.ca
home Homepage: http://www.livejournal.com/users/andy_ldxar1/
THERE WAS A NUKULAR BOMB IN KRONSTADT!!!!

22.08.2004 19:51
Make no mistake. We cannot stand by while turrists like the Kronstate bandits prepare to murder innocent Russians. We knew for certain that the turrists had stockpiles of chemical, biological and nukular weapons. We knew that someday, the rogue bandits of Kronstate would link up with the turrists of al-Kayda to wreak mass destruction and turror. In these times of danger, inaction is not an option. The homeland security of the Russian state is in jeopardy if we let down our guard. The turrists who struck our country on September the 11th could strike again at any time. To do nothing, to appease the turrists, would be to give up the lives of our own innocent people.

Make no mistake. There were weapons of mass destruction in Kronstate. We had to act and we acted swiftly and firmly to eliminate the threat posed by these turrists. And we will do the same again, whenever turrists threaten our nation.

George W Trotsky
Who gives a fuck!

22.08.2004 21:02
I really don't give a shit what happened one hundred years ago. Live in the present day rather than digging up old arguments about the Russian "Revolution". Its 2004 if you hadn't noticed and the world's a different place.

Look to the future, not the past. There's fuck all to learn from history, you can pick and choose the bits of the past to suit your own dogma, it doesn't mean shit to most people.

Miss Point
the truth about Kronstadt

22.08.2004 21:27
The quality of the Trotskyite article can be found in this
sentence:

"There were a lot of other movements that were lead by people
raising the slogan of 'Soviets without Bolsheviks', etc."

The kronstadt rebels did not raise this slogan, ever.

If you are interested in the truth about the revolt, visit
"An Anarchist FAQ":

H.7 What was the Kronstadt rebellion?
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html

This webpage quotes from all the respected sources on Kronstadt,
including the soviet archives. And guess what? The anarchists
are/were right and Trotsky wrong.

anarcho
home Homepage: http://www.anarchistfaq.org
Revolutions - Argentina?

22.08.2004 22:34
Not going to comment directly about Kronstadt here. Some interesting new material plus some good ol stuff has been posted here. Been round these circles time and again.

However, the post by 'Not a Trot' deserves some comment:

They quote "There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party" and then add: -"Argentina anyone? "

While I'm not sure anymore whether we need a 'revolutionary party', neither am I sure about spontaneous revolution based on both older history and more recent events.

Has there been a revolution in Argentina? I don't think so.

There has been an uprising in Argentina with revolutionary potential against the disaster and ruin global capitalism has bought them.

But they have not yet broken the power that the state and capital has. They have not broken and disorganised the power of the ruling class - an essential first feature of revolution, even in its most limited political sense. (We are not even talking here about the fuller meaning of a successfull revolution, the emergence of a new social and economic epoch without classes and states, which has yet to happen).

So the Leninist/Trotskyist argument about the necessity of a 'revolutionary party' is not refuted by mentioning recent events in Argentina.

Of course, there has been a fabulous and creative uprising and an inspiring revolutionary struggle by the workers, the poor and the disposessed in Argentina

In this struggle, many elements of a new society could be glimpsed.

But the old Leninist or Trotskysist argument is not that one needs a revolutionary party to start the class war. They think we need one to win the class war, to bring it to a successfull comnclusion - at least in terms of the shattering of the power of the capitalist state.

Unfortunately, the eveidence from Argentina does not yet prove that an uprising can spontaneously escalate into a full blown revolution.

This does not mean that we should fall into the old dogmas of either Bolshevism or Anarchism. We should lean from an honest anmd realistic apraisal of the events in todays global class struggle and its potential.

But at the same time, we should not forget our history and the lessons and traditions of past generations of revolutionaries, be they 'Marxist' or 'Anarchist'. We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater! We should just not be prisioners of these past traditions either.

Barry Kade
fair point

23.08.2004 11:11
Argentina isn't a full-blown revolution (yet) but its fairly free from dogma, the de-emphasis of class has been interesting to observe for those schooled in european revolutionary theory - from the unity of the piquetueros and the mothers of the disappeared to the 'bougeoise block' of middle-class people demosishing banks with hammers in anger at the banks theft from society and in solidarity with working class getting screwed by the whole process. An interesting route to classless society - 'we're not classes, we're people'.

There are plenty of successful historical revolutions without party leadership, though these have been pre-capitalist ones. There have been very few successful revolutions against capitalism due to it's ability to abosorb 'sparks of discontent to prevent them catching fire' (can't remember who said that but its nice). Even the anarchists in the spanish revolution worked through a syndicalist union (the CNT I think, but might be wrong) which was not disimilar to a political party, though in theory democratic. Infamously 'anarchists' also joined the capitalist government.

However, far from confirming the need for a party apparatus, both the Russian and Spanish revolutions confirm the problem with this approach. In Marxist theory, the purpose of the revolutionary party is to crush the capitalist backlash that almost inevitably follows social revolution. Subsequently, the state is meant to disband, so that Marx's ultimate vision of statless communism (anarchism?) can arise.

The problem lies in creating an all powerful state in waiting in a 'revolutionary party' history has shown you merely replace an unaccountable class of capitalists with an unaccountable class of bureaucrats. Bureaucracies don't disband themselves, in fact they tend to grow exponentially. Thus a new state apparatus is formed which is unnacountable to the people - the bolsheviks largely ignored the soviets dispite Lenin's almost syndicalist slogan in 1917 of 'all power to the soviets'. Creating that much centralised power, and expecting it not to corrupt even the most well meaning of people is absurd. Trotsky handled Kronstadt like any other politician - by sacrificing other people's children to a greater dogmatic ideal that was best understood by him, and not worthy of other people's input (save Lenin, senior bolsheviks perhaps).

not a trot
can you say "re-post"?

23.08.2004 23:36
Could someone please hide this since it has been up about a million times before.

(A)
if this happened today

24.08.2004 02:15
if a similar event happened today I would support the crushing of the rebels. they were fighing on the side of the imperialists. anarchists should rise above the level of supporting the reactionary coup plotters. here we see the generals waiting to pounce on proletarian russia to carve it up for the capitalists, and then hoodlum elements from the rural petty bourgois area launch their own futile putsh without the support of the russian working class. no wonder the rebellion went no where.

as for makhno, why do anti-authoritarians support this thug? he raped, executed and pillaged and was never loyal to any side in the civil war. in effect he was an opportunist bandit. lets not romanticise the horror of his social role.

gargomel
Ignorance is a bliss

24.08.2004 17:18
Thats funny, numerous posts above have proven you wrong and yet al you can do is hold your ears and repeat the dogma. tHIS FOR YOURSELF?Nah, not if you are a marxist-leninist!

(A)
More Leninist lies/ignorance

24.08.2004 20:33
"if a similar event happened today I would support the crushing
of the rebels. they were fighing on the side of the imperialists."

If you knew anything about the Kronstadt revolt you would
know that they rose in rebellion in solidarity with the striking
workers of Petrograd. Workers the Bolsheviks were busy repressing
to remain in power.

but, then again, you admit that your "revolutionary" government would
crush a similar group of rebels demanding democracy and freedom for
working class people. This shows you exactly who has power under
Leninism -- it's not the workers!

"anarchists should rise above the level of supporting the reactionary
coup plotters."

Anyone with any knowledge of Kronstadt would know that it was not a
plot but rather a spontaneous revolt by working class people against
a dictatorship which was busy repressing striking workers. The
spontaneous nature of the revolt and its utter lack of links with
the whites can be found in the soviet archives (some revelent quotes
are provided in section H.7 of "An Anarchist FAQ").

"here we see the generals waiting to pounce on proletarian russia to
carve it up for the capitalists, and then hoodlum elements from the
rural petty bourgois area launch their own futile putsh without the
support of the russian working class. no wonder the rebellion went
no where."

Anyone with any knowledge of Kronstadt would know that the vast majority
of the rebels had been there from 1917. 93% of the sailors of the two
battleships which started the revolt had joined the navy in 1917 or
before. As for "without the support of the russian working class" the
revolt was in solidarity with the russian working class. The Bolsheviks
in Petrograd imposed martial law and lied about the uprising and, therefore,
the Kronstadt revolt was isolated. State repression explains why the
rebellion "went no where."

But that would be obvious to anyone who knew anything about the Kronstadt
revolt. As can be seen, Leninists know nothing about it. This, however,
does not stop them wittering on about it.

So, if you are interested in the facts of the rebellion, visit:

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html

Moving onto another subject that Leninists know nothing about but do not
stop wittering on about...

"as for makhno, why do anti-authoritarians support this thug? he raped,
executed and pillaged and was never loyal to any side in the civil war. in
effect he was an opportunist bandit. lets not romanticise the horror of
his social role."

Which shows the ignorance of our Leninist. Makhno "executed" people. As
did Lenin, in substantially greater numbers. And should we forget that
there was a civil war doing on? Perhaps so. As for "pillaged", well,
the Bolsheviks did that. Their grain policy was based on pillaging the
peasants (and the workers, as they did not control the product of their
labour). The Makhnovists had substantial support in the countryside so
suggesting that their "pillaging" was substantially less than the
Bolsheviks.

As for "never loyal to any side in the civil war," what can I say? The
Bolsheviks broke three agreements with the Makhnovists. So much for
loyality! And the Makhnovists were *never* loyal to the Whites. They
fought them continually. Indeed, Denikin considered the Makhnovists his
greatest foe. The lie that Makhno worked with the Whites was created
by the Bolsheviks. Today their followers repeat it. As for being "an
opportunistic bandit" the facts are different. The Makhnovists had a
strong social base and had a clear vision of a new society which they
applied in practice. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Makhnovists encouraged
free soviets, speech and organisation. For details visit:

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH11.html

So it would be far better to say "lets not romanticise the horror of
the Bolsheviks social role." As the fate of Kronstadt and the Makhno
movement shows, they would stop at nothing to maintain their
dictatorship *over* the proletariat. It is sad that their lies are
still repeated today.

Anarcho
home Homepage: http://www.anarchistfaq.org
hahaha

24.08.2004 23:32
It is funny that anarchists criticise Marxists for being 'religiously devoted' to one man. It seems that all anarchists have their very own bible, the infoshop website. If in doubt during an argument, refer to the Anarchist FAQ.

Well when someone posts Trotsky's interpretation of the Kronstadt incident, then it is shouted down. All the original poster was doing was trying to show the anarchists on here a opposing view to that of Goldman et al.

Red
Trotsky's interpretation

24.08.2004 23:40
Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt
By Leon Trotsky

January 15, 1938

A "People's Front" of Denouncers

The campaign around Kronstadt is being carried on with undiminished vigor in certain circles. One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago, but only yesterday. Participating in the campaign with equal zeal and under one and the same slogan are Anarchists, Russian Mensheviks, left Social Democrats of the London Bureau, individual blunderers, Miliukov's paper, and, on occasion, the big capitalist press. A "People's Front" of its own kind!

Only yesterday I happened across the following lines in a Mexican weekly which is both reactionary Catholic and "democratic": "Trotsky ordered the shooting of 1,500 [?] Kronstadt sailors, these purest of the pure. His policy when in power differed in no way from the present policy of Stalin." As is known, the left Anarchists draw the same conclusion. When for the first time in the press I briefly answered the questions of Wendelin Thomas, member of the New York Commission of Inquiry, the Russian Mensheviks' paper immediately came to the defense of the Kronstadt sailors and…of Wendelin Thomas. Miliukov's paper came forward in the same spirit. The Anarchists attacked me with still greater vigor. All these authorities claim that my answer was completely worthless. This unanimity is all the more remarkable since the Anarchists defend, in the symbol of Kronstadt, genuine anti-state communism; the Mensheviks, at the time of the Kronstadt uprising, stood openly for the restoration of capitalism; and Miliukov stands for capitalism even now.

How can the Kronstadt uprising cause such heartburn to Anarchists, Mensheviks, and "liberal" counter-revolutionists, all at the same time? The answer is simple: all these groupings are interested in compromising the only genuinely revolutionary current, which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with its enemies, and alone represents the future. It is because of this that among the belated denouncers of my Kronstadt "crime" there are so many former revolutionists or semi-revolutionists, people who have lost their program and their principles and who find it necessary to divert attention from the degradation of the Second International or the perfidy of the Spanish Anarchists. As yet, the Stalinists cannot openly join this campaign around Kronstadt but even they, of course, rub their hands with pleasure; for the blows are directed against "Trotskyism", against revolutionary Marxism, against the Fourth International!

Why in particular has this variegated fraternity seized precisely upon Kronstadt? During the years of the revolution we clashed not a few times with the Cossacks, the peasants, even with certain layers of workers (certain groups of workers from the Urals organized a volunteer regiment in the army of Kolchak!). The antagonism between the workers as consumers and the peasants as producers and sellers of bread lay, in the main, at the root of these conflicts. Under the pressure of need and deprivation, the workers themselves were episodically divided into hostile camps, depending upon stronger or weaker ties with the village. The Red Army also found itself under the influence of the countryside. During the years of the civil war it was necessary more than once to disarm discontented regiments. The introduction of the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) attenuated the friction but far from eliminated it. On the contrary, it paved the way for the rebirth of kulaks [wealthy peasants] and led, at the beginning of this decade, to the renewal of civil war in the village. The Kronstadt uprising was only an episode in the history of the relations between the proletarian city and the petty-bourgeois age. It is possible to understand this episode only in connection with the general course of the development of the class struggle during the revolution.

Kronstadt differed from a long series of other petty-bourgeois movements and uprisings only by its greater external effect. The problem here involved a maritime fortress under Petrograd itself. During the uprising proclamations were issued and radio broadcasts were made. The Social Revolutionaries and the Anarchists, hurrying from Petrograd, adorned the uprising with "noble" phrases and gestures. All this left traces in print. With the aid of these "documentary" materials (i.e., false labels), it is not hard to construct a legend about Kronstadt, all the more exalted since in 1917 the name Kronstadt was surrounded by a revolutionary halo. Not idly does the Mexican magazine quoted above ironically call the Kronstadt sailors the "purest of the pure".

The play upon the revolutionary authority of Kronstadt is one of the distinguishing features of this truly charlatan campaign. Anarchists, Mensheviks, liberals, reactionaries try to present the matter as if at the beginning of 1921 the Bolsheviks turned their weapons on those very Kronstadt sailors who guaranteed the victory of the October insurrection. Here is the point of departure for all the subsequent falsehoods. Whoever wishes to unravel these lies should first of all read the article by Comrade J. G. Wright in the New International (February 1938). My problem is another one: I wish to describe the character of the Kronstadt uprising from a more general point of view.

Social and Political Groupings in Kronstadt

A revolution is "made" directly by a minority. The success of a revolution is possible, however, only where this minority finds more or less support, or at least friendly neutrality, on the part of the majority. The shift in different stages of the revolution, like the transition from revolution to counter-revolution, is directly determined by changing political relations between the minority and the majority, between the vanguard and the class.

Among the Kronstadt sailors there were three political layers: the proletarian revolutionists, some with a serious past and training; the intermediate majority, mainly peasant in origin; and finally, the reactionaries, sons of kulaks, shopkeepers, and priests. In czarist times, order on battleships and in the fortress could be maintained only so long as the officers, acting through the reactionary sections of the petty officers and sailors, subjected the broad intermediate layer to their influence or terror, thus isolating the revolutionists, mainly the machinists, the gunners, and the electricians, i.e., predominantly the city workers.

The course of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin in 1905 was based entirely on the relations among t

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