I. Introduction by Murray Bookchin

I. Introduction by Murray Bookchin

On March 1, 1921, the Kronstadt naval base on Kotlin Island, some twenty-five miles offshore from Petrograd adopted a fifteen-point program of political and economic demands - a program in open defiance of the Bolshevik Party's control of the Soviet state.

Almost immediately the Bolsheviks denounced the uprising as a "White Guard plot," ostensibly another the series of counterrevolutionary conspiracies that had beleaguered the Soviet regime during the three preceeding years of civil war. Less than three weeks later, on March 17, Kronstadt was subdued in a bloody assault by select Red Army units. The Kronstadt uprising, to all appearances, had been little more than a passing episode in the bitter history of the civil war.

We can now say, however, that the Kronstadt uprising marked the definitive end of the Russian Revolution itself. Indeed, the character and importance of the uprising were destined to become issues of acrimonious dispute within the international Left for years to come. Today, although an entirely new generation of revolutionaries has emerged - a generation almost totally uninformed of the events "the problem of Kronstadt" has lost none of its relevance and poignancy. For the Kronstadt uprising posed very far-reaching issues: the relationship between the so-called "masses" and the parties which profess to speak in their name, and the nature of the social system in the modern Soviet Union. The Kronstadt uprising, in effect, remains as a lasting challenge to the Bolshevik concept of a party's historical function and the notion of the Soviet Union as a "workers" or "socialist" state.

The Kronstadt sailors were no ordinary military body. They were the famous "Red Sailors" of 1905, 1917, and the civil war. By common consent (until the Bolsheviks began to revise history after the uprising) the Kronstadt sailors were regarded as the most reliable and politicised military elements of the newly established Soviet regime. Trotsky's feeble attempt in later years to debase their reputation by alluding to "new" social strata (presumably "peasants") that had replaced the "original" Red Sailors (presumably "workers') in Kronstadt during the civil war is beneath contempt. Whether "peasants" or "workers" - and both existed in varying numbers in the naval base - Kronstadt had long been the furnace of the revolution. Its living traditions and its close contact with "Red Petrograd" served to anneal men of nearly all strata into revolutionaries.

In fact, Kronstadt had risen as a result of a strike movement in Petrograd, a near uprising by the Petrograd proletariat. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the demands of the Kronstadt sailors were not formulated in the fastness of an isolated island in the Gulf of Finland: they were developed as a result of the close contact between the naval base and the restless Petrograd workers, whose demands the fifteen-point program essentially articulated. As Isaac Deutscher was obliged to acknowledge, the Bolshevik denunciations of the Kronstadt uprising as a "White Guard plot" were simply groundless.

What were these demands? Ida Mett discusses them in detail in her book. A glance shows that the political demands centered around soviet democracy: new elections to the soviets, freedom of speech for Anarchists and Left Socialist parties, free trade unions and peasant organizations, the liberation of Anarchist and Socialist political prisoners. Economic and institutional demands focused on a loosening of the stringent trade restrictions imposed by the period of "War Communism." The demands of the Kronstadt sailors were the very minimum needed to rescue the revolution from bureaucratic decay and economic strangulation.

Ordinarily, there are two histories of revolutions. The first comprises the official history, a history which turns around the conflicts of parties, factions, and "leaders." The other, in the words of the Russian Anarchist, Voline, may be called the "unknown revolution" - the rarely written accounts of independent, creative action by the revolutionary people. Marxian accounts, to a surprising extent, fall into the official form of historiography: popular aspects of the revolution are often distorted to accord with a predetermined social framework. The workers invariably have their assigned historical "role"; the peasants a "role" of their own; the intellectuals and Party, still other "roles." The vital, often decisive activity of so-called "transitional classes," such as workers of peasant origin or declasse elements, are usually ignored. Owing to its simplistic mauling of social reality, this type of historiography leaves many crucial aspects of past and present-day revolutions completely unexplained. (1) Events acquire an academic form that is pieced together by programs, ideological clashes, and, of course, the ubiquitous "leaders."

In the Kronstadt uprising, the "masses" had the effrontery to enter the historic stage again, as they did in February and October, four years earlier. In fact, the uprising marked the culmination and the end of the popular movement in the Russian Revolution - a movement the Bolshevik party basically mistrusted and shamelessly manipulated. The overthrow of Czarism in February, 1917 - a spontaneous revolution in which none of the Socialist parties and factions played a significant role - opened the way to a sweeping popular movement. Having shattered centuries-old institutions in a matter of days, the workers and peasants began on their own initiative to create new, entirely revolutionary social forms. Historical accounts of the revolution rarely tell us that in the cities, the most significant of these were not the soviets but rather the factory committees: bodies of workers established and controlled by workers" assemblies in the shops. In the villages, what has usually been designated as "soviets" more closely corresponded to local committees of peasants, based on popular assemblies. In both cases, the committees were truly organic social bodies, wedded to direct, face-to-face democratic forms. By contrast, the regional soviets were essentially parliamentary bodies, structured as indirect or so-called "representative" political hierarchies. These culminated in remote national congresses of soviets, controlled by a select executive committee.

The social history of the Revolution turned around the fate of the factory committees and village assemblies, not simply around conflicting armies and duels between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents. The factory committees demanded and, for a brief period, acquired full control over industrial operations. Lenin distrusted them completely after October. As early as January, 1919, only two months after "decreeing" workers' control of the factories, the Bolshevik leader moved into open opposition to the committees. In Lenin's view, the revolution demanded "precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process." The committees were thereupon increasingly divested of any function in industrial operations their powers were transferred to the trade union and finally the powers of the unions delivered almost entirely to state appointed managers. Workers control was sharply denounced not only as "inefficient", "chaotic", and "impractical" but as "petit-bourgeois" and as "anarcho-syndicalist deviation."

In the countryside, Bolshevik policy was marked by a distrust of cooperatives and communes - and by expanding the use of forced requisitions of food. As I have indicated elsewhere, to Lenin the preferred, more "socialist" form of agricultural enterprise was represented by the State Farm literally, an agricultural factory in which the state owned the land and farming equipment, appointing managers who hire peasants on a wage basis. (2) By 1920, the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves completely from the working class an peasantry, a fact which Lenin openly acknowledged. Eve: the soviets had been hollowed into a political shell, divested of all content. Political life, public expression, and popular activity had come to a standstill; the Cheka, a secret police established under Dzerzhinsky, herded revolutionary oppositionists into jails and concentration camps. In increa8i" numbers, the more articulate spokesmen of independent soviet parties and groups were shot merely for the expression of dissident views. The policies formulated under the rubric of "War Communism" created near famine conditions in the cities by blocking virtually all exchange between town and country and by imposing more demanding requisitions upon the peasantry. The workers and peasants may have won the civil war, but this much is certain: they had lost the revolution.

Only in this political and economic context can we understand the strikes that swept Petrograd in February, 1921, and the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors. From Kronstadt the cry went up for a "Third Revolution of the toilers," not a counterrevolution to restore the past. By crushing the uprising, the Bolsheviks succeeded not only in blocking a third revolution, but in paving the way for the Stalinist regime. Later, history was to take its own savage revenge: many of the Bolsheviks who had played a role in putting down Kronstadt were to pay with their lives In the bloody purges of the thirties.

The main value of Ida Mett's work is the glimpse it gives us into the popular movement, a movement on which depends the outcome of all revolutionary upheavals. We are drawn away from the Party and soviet congresses, from the "leaders" and the political factions, into the very soul of the revolutionary process. We gain a sense of the political insights evolved in the streets and barracks; we are brought into the molecular processes of the movement below; we establish contact with the remarkable spirit of popular improvisation, the enthusiasm and energy, that marks the revolutionary people in motion. For these reasons alone Mett's short work deserves the closest reading, for what is at stake in her account of Kronstadt is not the Russian Revolution alone, but the very concept of revolution itself.

The Bolshevik party did not "make" the Russian Revolution; it dominated the revolution and thereby strangled it. It played no role whatever in February, 1917, when Czarism was overthrown; in October, eight months later, the party took power for itself, not on behalf of the 8oviets or the factory committees. Doubtless, conscious revolutionary organizations were necessary in 1917, or, at least, active groups of revolutionaries. The real issue, however, was whether these revolutionary groups were capable of dissolving into the social forms created by the revolutionary people (be they factory committees or Soviets) or whether they turne4 into a separate power over these social forms, manipulation and finally destroying them. The Bolshevik party was constitutionally incapable of taking the first direction; its hierarchical, centralized structure, not to speak of the mentality of its leaders, had simply converted the party into a mirror image of the bourgeois state apparatus it claimed to overthrow.

During the debates that were to determine the fate of the factory committees, the Left Communist, Ossinsky warned his party: "Socialism and socialist organization mum he set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism."

The warning, delivered in the early days of the revolution, was prophetic. It would he an utter absurdity t claim that a state apparatus which divests the workers o any control over society can be regarded as a "workers' state." Actually, until 1917, all the major factions of the Russian Marxist movement believed that Russia was face with a bourgeois revolution. Aside from organizations considerations, the disagreements between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks centred primarily around the political role of the workers and peasants in the coming upheaval. By demanding a "'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," the Bolsheviks were essentially calling for a politically dominant role by the oppressed. The Mensheviks, in turn, adhered essentially to the view that Russia required a democratic, parliamentary republic, governed by bourgeois parties. Neither of the two social-democratic factions were so naive as to believe that backward, agrarian Russia was prepared for a "proletarian dictatorship," much less for socialism.

The success of the February Revolution, however, caused Lenin to veer toward a "proletarian dictatorship, a position spelled out in the famous slogan: "All power to the soviets!" Significant as this shift may have been, it was not rooted in any conviction on Lenin's part that Russia was suddenly prepared for a "workers' state." Quite to the contrary: Lenin viewed a "proletarian revolution" in Russia primarily as a stimulus to socialist revolutions in the industrialised, war-torn countries of the West, notably Germany. To Lenin, the war had opened the prospect of revolutions abroad - revolutions that could be ignited by a "proletarian revolution" in Russia. At no point did he deceive himself that a "workers' state" or "socialism" could be established within the confines of a predominantly peasant country.

The defeat of the Spartakus uprising in Berlin in January, 1919, left the Russian Revolution completely isolated. Despite the Marxian jargon of the new Soviet regime, despite its red flags and the obvious hostility of the traditional ruling classes at home and abroad, the fact remains that the revolution increasingly fell back to a bourgeois level, for it was inconceivable that an isolated, economically backward country, besieged by political enemies on every side, could advance beyond capitalist social relations.

But what type of capitalist social relations were created by the October Revolution? This was to remain a very knotty question. The revolution had eliminated the traditional Russian bourgeoisie and many of its political institutions. It had nationalized the land and all of industry, an unprecedented act in the modern history of Europe. Later, the Soviet regime was to institute "planned production." All of these changes in the early decades of the twentieth century were regarded as incompatible with capitalism, although Engels in Anti-Duhring had toyed with the theoretical possibility that they could occur within a bourgeois framework.

The problems created by the October Revolution were further complicated by the terminology of the Bolsheviks themselves. Lenin had variously described the Soviet state as "state capitalist", "a workers' state," and "peasants' state with bureaucratic deformations," to he followed by Trotsky's nonsensical description of the Stalinist dictatorship as "degenerated workers' state." Lenin also complicated the problem by crudely describing socialism as "nothing but a state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people." Thus, in the early years of the Soviet regime, it was difficult not only to find parallels for state capitalism in any existing capitalist country, but to distinguish it from "socialism."

Today, after a half century of capitalist development we occupy a better vantage point. We can see that, excel for the few months when the factory committees controlled Industry, the Russian Revolution had by no means transcended a bourgeois social and economic framework. Commodity production and economic exploitation were destined to he as prevalent after the October Revolution as before. The workers and peasants were to be denied control over Soviet society as surely as they had been denied over Czarist society. We also know that nationalization of industry and planned production are perfectly compatible with bourgeois social relations. The historic trend of industrial capitalism has always been in the direction of the centralization capital, the development of monopoly, the merging Industry with the state, economic planning, and finally the increasing power of a bureaucratic apparatus over economic and political life.

Ironically, Trotsky might have understood how this trend developed in Russia had he simply followed through his own concept of "combined development" to its logic conclusion. He saw (quite correctly) that Czarist Russia, latecomer in the European bourgeois development, necessarily acquired the most advanced industrial and class forms, instead of recapitulating the entire bourgeois development from its beginnings. He neglected to consider that Russia torn by a tremendous internal upheaval which dispossessed the traditional bourgeois and land-owning classes, might have thereby run ahead of the capitalist development elsewhere in the world - certainly, after the workers and peasants were dispossessed of their control over the factories and land by the new bureaucracy. Hypnotized by the preposterous formula, "nationalized property is antithetical to capitalism," Trotsky failed to recognize that monopoly capitalism itself tends to amalgamate with the state by its own inner dialectic, that involves the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer enterprises. Lenin's analogy between "socialism" and state capitalism thus became a terrifying reality under Stalin - a form of state capitalism that does not "benefit the whole people."

Fundamentally, the source of the confusion concerning the "nature" of the social system in Russia - the famous "Russian question" - lay in the incompleteness of the Marxian economic analysis. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx was familiar only with two phases of the capitalist development: mercantilism and "laissez-faire" industrial capitalism. Although Capital brilliantly delineates the emergence of industrial from mercantile capitalism, the discussion ends precisely where it must begin for us a century later. We can see that the concentration of capital advances into still another phase: the statification of capital. The "free market" passes into a monopolistic and finally a state- manipulated market. The "anarchy of production" (to use Engels' phrase) passes into the managed, "planned" economy, a system of planning designed not only to avert economic crises but to promote capital accumulation. Capitalism follows through its dialectic in almost classical Hegelian terms: from the state-controlled economy initiated by mercantilism into the "free market" established by industrial capitalism and back again to neo-mercantilist forms, but on the new level created by technological and industrial growth. Marx could not be expected to follow this dialectic to its conclusion a century ago; for us to ignore it, a century later, would he theoretical myopia of the worst possible kind.

The development toward state capitalism appears as a tendency in the West primarily because early economic and political forms still exercise a powerful influence upon social institutions. Although waning rapidly, the notions of the "free market" and the "sovereign individual" continue to pervade economic relations in Europe and America. In Russia and many areas of the "Third World," however, state capitalism assumes a complete form because revolution rupture the present from the past, leading to the destruction of the older ruling classes and institutions. "Socialism)" in its accepted Marxian form tends to become ideology in the narrowest sense of the term precisely because, as Lenin observed, so much of Marxian socialism can be identified with state capitalism. Marx's acceptance of the state - the "proletarian dictatorship," the "socialist state" - becomes the vehicle for transmuting the great socialist vision into a totally reactionary spectacle: the red flags which drape the coffin of the popular revolution.

What might have happened had Kronstadt succeeded? We certainly would have been spared a Stalinist development, a development which turned the entire world Communist movement into an instrument of international counter-revolution. In the end, it was not only Russia that suffered brutally, but humanity as a whole. The legacy left to us by Bolshevism in the forms of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism, has burdened revolutionary thought and praxis as much as the betrayals of the reformist wings of the socialist movement.

A victory by the Kronstadt sailors might have also opened a new perspective for Russia - a hybrid social development combining workers' control of factories with an open market in agricultural goods, based on a small-scale peasant economy and voluntary agrarian communes. Certainly, such a society in backward agrarian Russia could not have stabilized itself for very long without outside aid; but aid might have been forthcoming had the revolutionary movement of Europe and Asia developed freely, without interference from the Third International. Stalinism foreclosed this possibility completely. By the late twenties, virtually all sections of the Communist International had become instruments of Stalinist policy, to be marketed in exchange for diplomatic and military alliances with the capitalist powers.

The suppression of Kronstadt in March 1921, was an act of outright counterrevolution, the throttling of the popular movement at a time when Lenin, Trotsky, and other outstanding Bolsheviks stood at the helm of the Soviet regime. To speak as Trotsky does, of the "continuity" of the Russian Revolution into the thirties, to describe the bureaucracy as the guardian of the victories of October, to call Stalinism merely a "Thermidorean" reaction - all of this is sheer nonsense. There is neither continuity nor Thermidor; merely the window dressing for a vision that was throttled in 1921 and even earlier. Stalin's accession to power merely underscored a counterrevolution that had begun earlier. Long before 1927, when the Trotskyist opposition was expelled, all the social gains had been erased so far as the Russian people were concerned. Hence the indifference of the workers and peasants to the anti-Stalinist opposition movements within the Communist Party.

All the conditions for Stalinism were prepared by the defeat of the Kronstadt sailors and Petrograd strikers. We may choose to lament these popular movements, to honour the heroism of the victims, to inscribe their efforts in the annals of the revolution. But above all the Kronstadt revolt and the strike movement in Petrograd must be understood - as we would understand the lessons of all the great revolutions - if we are to grasp the content of the revolutionary process itself.

II. Preface to Solidarity Edition

The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution will be assessed, analysed, celebrated or bemoaned in a variety of ways.

To the peddlers of religious mysticism and to the advocates of 'freedom of enterprise', Svetlana Stalin's sensational (and well timed) defection will 'prove' the resilience of their respective doctrines, now shown as capable of sprouting on what at first sight would appear rather barren soil.

To incorrigible liberals, the recent, cautious re-introduction of the profit motive into certain sectors of the Russian economy will 'prove' that laissez-faire economics is synonymous with human nature and that a rationally planned economy was always a pious pipe-dream.

To those 'lefts' (like the late Isaac Deutscher) who saw in Russia's industrialisation an automatic guarantee of more liberal attitudes in days to come, the imprisonment of Daniel and Sinyavsky for thought-crime (and the current persecution of those who stood up for them) will have come as a resounding slap in the face.

To the 'marxist-leninists' of China (and Albania), Russia's rapprochement with the USA, her passivity in the recent Middle East crisis, her signing of the Test Ban Treaty and her reactionary influence on revolutionary developments in the colonial countries will all bear testimony to her headlong slither into the swamp of revisionism, following the Great Stalin's death. (Stalin, it will be remembered, was the architect of such revolutionary, non-revisionist measures as the elimination of the old Bolsheviks, the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Teheran and Yalta Agreements and the dynamic struggles of the French, and Italian Communist Parties in the immediate post-war years, struggles which led to their direct seizure of power in their respective countries.)

To the Yugoslavs, reintegrated at last after their adolescent wandering from the fold, the re-emergence of 'sanity' in Moscow will be seen as corroboration of their worst suspicions. The 1948 'troubles' were clearly all due to the machinations of the wicked Beria. Mihajlo Mihajlov now succeeds Djilas behind the bars of a peoples' prison . . . just to remind political heretics that in Yugoslavia too, 'proletarian democracy' is confined to those who refrain from asking awkward questions.

To the Trotskyists of all ilk - at least to those still capable of thinking for themselves - the mere fact of the 50th anniversary celebrations should be food for thought. What do words mean? How 'transitional' can a transitional society be? Aren't four decades of 'bonapartism' in danger of making the word a trifle meaningless? Like the unflinching Christians carrying their cross, will unflinching Trotskyists go on carrying their question mark (concerning the future evolution of Russian society) for the rest of their earthly existence? For how much longer will they go on gargling with the old slogans of 'capitalist restoration or advance towards socialism' proposed by their mentor in his Revolution Betrayed. . . thirty years ago! Surely only the blind can now fail to see that Russia is a class society of a new type, and has been for several decades.

Those who have shed these mystifications - or who have never been blinded by them - will see things differently. They will sense that there can be no vestige of socialism in a society whose rulers can physically annihilate the Hungarian Workers' Councils, denounce equalitarianism and workers' management of production as 'petty-bourgeois' or 'anarcho-syndicalist' deviations, and accept the cold-blooded murder of a whole generation of revolutionaries as mere 'violations of socialist legality, to be rectified ­ oh so gingerly and tactfully - by the technique of 'selective posthumous rehabilitation'. It will be obvious to them that something went seriously wrong with the Russian Revolution. What was it? And when did the 'degeneration' start?

Here again the answers differ. For some the 'excesses' or 'mistakes' are attributable to a spiteful paranoia slowly sneaking up on the senescent Stalin. This interpretation, however, (apart from tacitly accepting the very 'cult of the individual' which its advocates would claim to decry) fails to account for the repressions of revolutionaries and the conciliations with imperialism perpetrated at a much earlier period. For others the 'degeneration' set In with the final defeat of the Left Opposition as an organized force (1927), or with Lenin's death (1924), or with the abolition of factions at the 10th Party Congress (1921). For the Bordigists the proclamation of the New Economic Policy (1921) irrevocably stamped Russia as "State capitalist'. Others, rightly rejecting this preoccupation with the minutiae of revolutionary chronometry, stress more general factors, albeit in our opinion some of the less important ones.

Our purpose in publishing this text about the Kronstadt events of 1921 is not to draw up an alternative timetable. Nor are we looking for political ancestors. The construction of an orthodox apostolic succession is the least of our preoccupations. (In a constantly changing world it would only testify to our theoretical sterility). Our object is simply to document some of the real - but less well known - struggles that took place against the growing bureaucracy during the early post-revolutionary years, at a time when most of the later critics of the bureaucracy were part and parcel of the apparatus itself.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution presents us with the absurd sight of a Russian ruling class (which every day resembles more its Western counterpart) solemnly celebrating the revolution which overthrew bourgeois power and allowed the masses, for a brief moment, to envisage a totally new kind of social order.

What made this tragic paradox possible? What shattered this vision? How did the Revolution degenerate?

Many explanations are offered. The history of how the Russian working class was dispossessed is not, however, a matter for an esoteric discussion among political cliques, who compensate for their own irrelevance by mental journeys into the enchanted world of the revolutionary past, An understanding of what took place is essential for every serious socialist. It is not mere archivism.

No viable ruling class rules by force alone. To rule it must suceeed in getting its own vision of reality accepted by society at large. The concepts by which it attempts to legitimise its rule must be projected into the past. Socialists have correctly recognized that the history taught in bourgeois schools reveals a particular, distorted, vision of the world. It is a measure of the weakness of the revolutionary movement that socialist history remains for the most part unwritten.

What passes as socialist history is often only a mirror image of bourgeois historiography, a percolation into the ranks of the working class movement of typically bourgeois methods of thinking. In the world of this type of 'historian' leaders of genius replace the kings and queens of the bourgeois world. Famous congresses, splits or controversies, the rise and fall of political parties or of unions, the emergence or degeneration of this or that leadership replace the internecine battles of the rulers of the past. The masses never appear independently on the historical stage, making their own history. At best they only 'supply the steam', enabling others to drive the locomotive, as Stalin so delicately put it.

'Most of the time, "official" historians don't have eyes to see or ears to hear the acts and words which express the workers' spontaneous activity. They lack the categories of thought - one might even say the brain cells - necessary to understand or even to perceive this activity as it really is. To them an activity that has no leader or programme, no institutions and no statutes, can only be described as "troubles" or "disorders". The spontaneous activity of the masses belongs by definition to what history suppresses. (1)

This tendency to identify working class history with the history of its organizations, institutions and leaders is not only inadequate - it reflects a typically bourgeois vision of mankind, divided in almost pre-ordained manner between the few who will manage and decide, and the many, the malleable mass, incapable of acting consciously on its own behalf and forever destined to remain the object (and never the subject) or history. Most histories of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution rarely amount to more than this.

The Stalinist bureaucracy was unique in that it presented a view of history based on outright lies rather than on the more usual mixture of subtle distortion and self-mystification. But Krushchev's revelations and subsequent developments in Russia have caused official Russian versions of events (in all their variants) to he questioned even by members of the Communist Party. Even the graduates of what Trotsky called 'the Stalin school of falsification' are now beginning to reject the lies of the Stalinist era. Our task is to take the process of demystification a little further.

Of all the interpretations of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution that of Isaac Deutscher is the most widely accepted on the left. It echoes most of the assumptions of the Trotskyists. Although an improvement on the Stalinist versions, it is hardly sufficient. The degeneration is seen as due to strictly conjunctural factors (the isolation of the re. volution in a backward country, the devastation caused by the Civil War, the overwhelming weight of the peasantry, etc.). These factors are undoubtedly very important. But the growth of the bureaucracy is more than just an accident of history. It is a worldwide phenomenon, intimately linked to a certain stage in the development of working class consciousness. It is the terrible price paid by the working class for its delay in recognizing that the true and final emancipation of the working class can only he achieved by the working class itself, and cannot be entrusted to others, allegedly acting on its behalf. If "socialism is Man's total and positive self-consciousness" (Marx, 1844), the experience (and rejection) of the bureaucracy is a step on that road.

The Trotskyists deny that early oppositions to the developing bureaucracy had any revolutionary content. On the contrary, they denounce the Workers Opposition and the Kronstadt rebels as basically counter-revolutionary. Real opposition, for them, starts with the proclamation - within the Party - of the Left Opposition of 1923. But anyone in the least familiar with the period will know that by 1923 the working class had already sustained a decisive defeat. It had lost power in production to a group of managers appointed from above. It had also lost power in the soviets, which were now only the ghosts of their former selves, only a rubber stamp for the emerging bureaucracy. The Left Opposition fought within the confines of the Party, which was itself already highly bureaucratised. No substantial number of workers rallied to its cause. Their will to struggle had been sapped by the long struggles of the preceding years.

Opposition to the anti-working class measures being taken by the Bolshevik leadership in the years immediately following the revolution took many forms and expressed itself through many different channels and at many different levels. It expressed itself within the Party itself, through a number of oppositional tendencies of which the Workers Opposition (Kollontai, Lutovinov, Shliapnikov) is the best known.(" Outside the Party the revolutionary opposition found heterogeneous expression, in the life of a number of small, often illegal groups (some anarchist, some anarcho-syndicalist, some still professing their basic faith in Marxism.) (3) It also found expression in spontaneous, often 'unorganised' class activity, such as the big Leningrad strikes of 1921 and the Kronstadt uprising. It found expression in the increasing resistance of the workers to Bolshevik industrial policy (and in particular to Trotsky's attempts to militarise the trade unions). It also found expression in proletarian opposition to Bolshevik attempts to evince all other tendencies from the soviets, thus effectively gagging all those seeking to re-orient socialist construction along entirely different lines.

At an early stage several tendencies had struggled against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution. By posthumously excluding them from the ranks of the revolutionary opposition, Trotskyists, Leninists and others commit a double injustice. Firstly, they excommunicate all those who foresaw and struggled against the nascent bureaucracy. Secondly, they weaken their own ease, for if the demands for freely elected soviets, for freedom of expression (proletarian democracy) and for workers' management of production were wrong in 1921, why did they become partially correct in 1923? Why are they correct now? If in 1921 Lenin and Trotsky represented the 'real interests of the workers (against the actual workers), why couldn't Stalin? Why couldn't Kadar in Hungary in 1956? The Trotskyist school of hagiography has helped to obscure the real lessons of the struggle against the bureaucracy.

When one seriously studies the crucial years after 1917, when the fate of the Russian Revolution was still in the melting pot, one is driven again and again to the tragic events of the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921. These events epitomise, in a bloody and dramatic manner, the struggle between two concepts of the Revolution, two revolutionary methods, two types of revolutionary ethos. (Who decides what if; or is not in the long-term interests of the working class? What methods are permissible in settling differences between revolutionaries? And what methods are double-edged and only capable in the long run of harming the Revolution itself?

There is remarkably little of a detailed nature available in English about the Kronstadt events. The Stalinist histories, revised and re-edited according to the fluctuating fortunes of Party functionaries are not worth the paper they fire written on. They are an insult to the intelligence of their readers, deemed incapable of comparing the same facts described in earlier and later editions of the same book.

Trotsky's writings about Kronstadt are few and more concerned at retrospective justification and at scoring debating points against the Anarchists (4) than at seriously analysing this particular episode of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky and the Trotskyists are particularly keen to perpetuate the myth that they were the first and only coherent anti-bureaucratic tendency. All their writings seek to bide how far the bureaucratisation of both Party and soviets had already gone by 1921 - i.e. how far it had gone during the period when Lenin and Trotsky were in full and undisputed control. The task for serious revolutionaries today is to see the link between Trotsky's attitudes and pronouncements during and before the 'great trade union debate' of 1920-1921 and the healthy hostility to Trotskyism of the most advanced and revolutionary layers of the industrial working class. This hostility was to manifest itself - arms in hand - during the Kronstadt uprising. It was to manifest itself again two or three years later - this time by folded arms - when these advanced layers failed to rally to Trotsky's support, when he at last chose to challenge Stalin, within the limited confines of a Party machine, towards whose bureaucratisation he had signally contributed. (5)

Deutscher in The Prophet Armed vividly depicts the background of Russia during the years of Civil War, the suffering, the economic dislocation, the sheer physical exhaustion of the population. But the picture is one-sided, its purpose to stress that the 'iron will of the Bolsheviks' was the only element of order, stability and continuity in a society hovering on the brink of total collapse. He pays scant attention to the attempts made by groups of workers and revolutionaries - both within the Party and outside its ranks - to attempt social reconstruction on an entirely different basis, from below. (6) He does not discuss the sustained opposition and hostility of the Bolsheviks to workers' management of production (7) or in fact to any large-scale endeavour which escaped their domination or control. Of the Kronstadt events themselves, of the Bolshevik calumnies against Kronstadt and of the frenzied repression that followed the events of March 1921, Deutscher says next to nothing, except that the Bolshevik accusations against the Kronstadt rebels were 'groundless. Deutscher totally fails to see the direct relation between the methods used by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921 and those other methods, perfected by Stalin and later used against the old Bolsheviks themselves, during the notorious Moscow trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938.

In Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary there is a chapter devoted to Kronstadt. 18) Serge's writings are particularly interesting in that he was in Leningrad in 1921 and supported what the Bolsheviks were doing, albeit reluctantly. He did not however resort to the slanders and misrepresentations of other leading Party members. His comments throw light on the almost schizophrenic frame of mind of the rank and file of the Party at that time. For different reasons neither the Trotskyists nor the Anarchists have forgiven Serge his attempts to reconcile what was best in their respective doctrines: the concern with reality and the concern with principle.

Easily available and worthwhile anarchist writings on the subject (in English) are virtually non-existent, despite the fact that many anarchists consider this area relevant to their ideas. Emma Goldman's Living my Life and Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth contain some vivid but highly subjective pages about the Kronstadt rebellion. The Kronstadt Revolt by Anton Ciliga is an excellent short account which squarely faces up to some of the fundamental issues. It has been unavailable for years. Voline's account, on the other hand, is too simplistic. Complex phenomena like the Kronstadt revolt cannot be meaningfully interpreted by loaded generalisations like 'as Marxists, authoritarians and statists, the Bolsheviks could not permit any freedom or independent action of the masses'. (Many have argued that there are strong Blanquist and even Bakuninist strands in Bolshevism, and that it is precisely these departures from Marxism that are at the root of Bolshevism's 'elitist' ideology and practice.) Voline even reproaches the Kronstadt rebels with 'speaking of power (the power of the soviets) instead of getting rid of the word and of the idea altogether ... The practical struggle however was not against 'words" or even 'ideas. It was a physical struggle against their concrete incarnation in history (in the form of bourgeois institutions). It is a symptom of anarchist muddle-headedness on this score that they can both reproach the Bolsheviks with dissolving the Constituent Assembly (9) . . . and the Kronstadt rebels for proclaiming that they stood for soviet power! The 'Soviet anarchists' clearly perceived what was at stake - even if many of their successors fail to. They fought to defend the deepest conquest of October - soviet power - against all its usurpers, including the Bolsheviks.

Our own contribution to the 50th anniversary celebrations will not consist in the usual panegyrics to the achievement of Russian rocketry. Nor will we chant paeans to Russian pig-iron statistics. Industrial expansion may he pre-requisite for a fuller, better life for all but is in no way synonymous with such a life, unless all social relations have been revolutionised. We are more concerned at the social costs of Russian achievements.

Some perceived what these costs would he at a very early stage. We are interested in bringing their prophetic warnings to a far wider audience. The final massacre at Kronstadt took place on March 18, 1921, exactly fifty years after the slaughter of the Communards by Thiers and Galliffet. The facts about the Commune are well known. But fifty years after the Russian Revolution we still have to seek basic information about Kronstadt. The facts are not easy to obtain. They lie buried under the mountains of calumny and distortion heaved on them by Stalinists and Trotskyists alike.

The publication of this pamphlet in English, at this particular time, is part of this endeavour. Ida Mett's book La Commune de Cronstadt was first published in Paris in 1938. It was republished in France ten years later but has been unobtainable for several years. In 1962 and 1963 certain parts of it were translated into English and appeared in Solidarity (vol. 11, Nos. 6 to 11). We now have pleasure in bringing to English-speaking readers a slightly abridged version of the book as a whole, which contains material hitherto unavailable. (10)

Apart from various texts published in Kronstadt itself in March 1921, Ida Mett's book contains Petrichenko's open letter of 1926, addressed to the British Communist Party. Petrichenko was the President of the Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee. His letter refers to discussions in the Political Bureau of the CPGB on the subject of Kronstadt, discussions which seem to have accepted that there was no extraneous intervention during the uprising.

Ida Mett writes from an anarchist viewpoint. Her writing 'however represents what is best in the revolutionary tradition of 'class struggle' anarchism. She thinks in terms of a collective, proletarian solution to the problems of capitalism. The rejection of the class struggle, the anti-intellectualism, the preoccupation with transcendental morality and with personal salvation that characterize so many of the anarchists of today should not for a minute detract 'Marxists' from paying serious attention to what she writes. We (do not necessarily endorse all her judgements and) have - in footnotes - corrected one or two minor factual inaccuracies in her text. Some of her generalisations, seem to us too sweeping and some of her analyses of the bureaucratic phenomenon too simple to be of real use. But as a chronicle of what took place before, during and after Kronstadt, her account remains unsurpassed.

Her text throws interesting light on the attitude to the Kronstadt uprising shown at the time by various Russian political tendencies (anarchists, Mensheviks, left and right S.R.s, bolsheviks, etc.). Some whose approach to politics is superficial in the extreme (and for whom a smear or a slogan "to a substitute for real understanding) will point accusingly to some of this testimony, to some of these resolutions and manifestos as evidence irrevocably damning the Kronstadt rebels. "Look', they will say., 'at what the Mensheviks and right S.R.s were saying. Look at how they were calling for a return to the Constituent Assembly, and at the same time proclaiming their solidarity with Kronstadt. Isn't this proof positive that Kronstadt was a counter-revolutionary upheaval? You yourselves admit that rogues like Victor Tchernov, President elect of the Constituent Assembly, offered to help the Kronstadters? What further evidence is needed?

We are not afraid of presenting all the facts to our readers. Let them judge for themselves. It is our firm conviction that most Trotskyists and Leninists are - and are kept - as ignorant of this period of Russian history as Stalinists are of the period of the Moscow Trials. At hest they vaguely sense the presence of skeletons in the cupboard. At worst they parrot what their leaders tell them, intellectually too lazy or politically too well conditioned to probe for themselves. Real revolutions are never 'pure'. They unleash the deepest passions of men. People actively participate or are dragged into the vortex of such movements for a variety of often contradictory reasons. Consciousness and false consciousness are inextricably mixed.

A river in full flood inevitably carries a certain amount of rubbish. A revolution in full flood carries a number of political corpses and may even give a semblance of life.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 many were the messages of verbal or moral support for the rebels, emanating from the West, piously preaching the virtues of bourgeois democracy or of free enterprise. The objectives of those who spoke in these terms were anything but the institution of a classless society. But their support for the rebels remained purely verbal, particularly when it became clear to them what the real objectives of the revolution were: a fundamental democratisation of Hungarian institutions without a reversion to private ownership of the means of production.

The backbone of the Hungarian revolution was the network of workers councils. Their main demands were for workers' management of production and for a government based on the councils. These facts justified the support of revolutionaries throughout the world. Despite the Mindszentys. Despite the Shallholders and Social-Democrats - or their shadows - now trying to jump onto the revolutionary bandwagon. The class criterion is the decisive one.

Similar considerations apply to the Kronstadt rebellion. Its core was the revolutionary sailors. Its main objectives were ones with which no real revolutionary could disagree. That others sought to take advantage of the situation is inevitable - and irrelevant. It is a question of who is calling the tune.

Attitudes to the Kronstadt events, expressed nearly 50 years after the event often provide deep insight into the political thinking of contemporary revolutionaries. They may in fact provide a deeper insight into their conscious or unconscious aims than many a learned discussion about economics, or philosophy or about other episodes of revolutionary history.

It is a question of one's basic attitude as to what socialism is all about. What are epitomised in the Kronstadt events are some of the most difficult problems of revolutionary strategy and revolutionary ethics - the problems of and@ and means, of the relations between Party and masses, In fact of whether a Party is necessary at all. Can the working 01ass by itself only develop a trade union consciousness? (11) Should it even be allowed, at all times, to go that far? (12)

Or can the working class develop a deeper consciousness and understanding of its interests than can any organization allegedly acting on its behalf? When Stalinists or Trotskyists speak of Kronstadt as 'an essential action against the class enemy' when more 'sophisticated' revolutionaries refer to as a strategic necessity', one is entitled to pause for a moment. One is entitled to ask how seriously they accept Marx's dictum that 'the emancipation of the working class is the task of tile working class itself. Do they take this seriously or do they pay mere lip service to the words? Do they identify socialism with the autonomy (organizational and ideological) of the working class? Or do they see themselves, with their wisdom as to the "historical interests' of others, and with their judgment as to what should be 'permitted', as the leadership around which the future elite will crystallise and develop? One is entitled not only to ask . . . but also to suggest the answer!

November, 1967

III. Introduction to the French Edition

The time seems ripe for us to seek a better understanding of Kronstadt, although no new facts have emerged since 1921. The archives of the Russian Government and of the Red Army remain closed to any kind of objective analysis. However statements in some official publications seem to reflect some of these events, albeit in a distorted light. But what was known at the time was already sufficient to allow one to grasp the political significance of this symptomatic and crucial episode of the Russian Revolution.

Working class militants in the West had absolute confidence in the Bolshevik Government. This government had just headed an immense effort of the working class in its struggle against feudal and bourgeois reaction. In the eyes of these workers it incarnated the Revolution itself.

People could just not believe that this same government could have cruelly put down a revolutionary insurrection. That is why it was easy for the Bolsheviks to label the (Kronstadt) movement as a reactionary one and to denounce it as organized and supported by the Russian and European bourgeoisies.

'An insurrection of White generals, with ex-general Kazlovski at its head' proclaimed the papers at the time. Meanwhile the Kronstadt sailors were broadcasting the following appeal to the whole world:

'Comrade workers, red soldiers and sailors. We are for the power of the Soviets and not that of the parties. We are for free representation of all who toil. Comrades, you are being misled. At Kronstadt all power is in the hands of revolutionary sailors, of red soldiers and of workers. It is not in the hands of White Guards, allegedly headed by a general Kozlovski, as Moscow Radio tells you.'

Such were the conflicting interpretations of the Kronstadt sailors and of the Kremlin Government. As we wish to serve the vital interests of the working class by an objective analysis of historical events, we propose to examine these contradictory theses, in the light of facts and documents, and of the events that almost immediately followed the crushing of Kronstadt.

'The workers of the world will judge us' said the Kronstaders in their broadcast. 'The blood of the innocents will fall on the heads of those who have become drunk with power.' Was it a prophecy?

Here is a list of prominent communists having played an active part in the suppression of the insurrection. Readers will see their fate:

ZINOVIEV, omnipotent dictator of Petrograd. Inspired the implacable struggle against both strikers and sailors. SHOT.

TROTSKY, Peoples Commissar for War and for the Navy. ASSASSINATED by a Stalinist agent in Mexico.

LASHEVICH, member of the Revolutionary War Committee, member of Defence Committee organized to fight against the Petrograd strikers. Committed SUICIDE.

DYBENKO, veteran sailor. Before October, one of the organizers of the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet, Played a particularly active role in the military crushing of Kronstadt. In 1938 still a garrison commander in the Petrograd region. SHOT.

KUZMIN, commissar to the Baltic Fleet. Fate unknown. Never spoken of again.

KALININ, remained in nominal power as Å’President¹. Died a NATURAL DEATH.

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

PUTNA, decorated for his participation in the military suppression of Kronstadt, later military attache in London. SHOT.

Delegates at the 10th Party Congress, who came to fight against Kronstadt:

PYATOKOV: SHOT

RUKHIMOVICH: SHOT

BUBNOV: Deposed. Disappeared.

ZATONSKY: Deposed. Disappeared.

VOROSHILOV: Still played a role during the 1941-45 war. (Later President of Praesidium.)

Paris, October 1948.

The Kronstadt Events

"A new White Plot... expected and undoubtedly prepared by the French counter-revolution."

PRAVDA, March 3. 1921.

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

Lenin, report delivered to the 10th Congress of the R.C.P. (B), March 8. 1921. Selected Works, vol. IX, p. 98.

"The Bolsheviks denounced the men of Kronstadt as counter-revolutionary mutineers, led by a White general. The denunciation appears to have been groundless.' Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Anned, (Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 511.

"No pretence was made that the Kronstadt mutineers were White Guards:

Brian Pearce ('Historian' of the Socialists Labour League) in Labour Review, vol. V, No. 3.

1. Background to the Kronstadt Insurrection

Background to the Kronstadt insurrection

The Kronstadt insurrection broke out three months after the conclusion of the civil war on the European front.

As the Civil War drew to a victorious end the working masses of Russia were in a state of chronic famine. They were also increasingly dominated by a ruthless regime, ruled by a single party. The generation which had made October still remembered the promise of the social revolution and the hopes they had of building a new kind of society.

This generation had comprised a very remarkable section of the working class. It had reluctantly abandoned its demands for equality and for real freedom, believing them to be, if not incompatible with war, at least difficult to achieve under wartime conditions. But once victory was assured, the workers in the towns, the sailors, the Red Army men, and the peasants, all those who had shed their blood during the Civil War, could see no further justification for their hardships and for blind submission to a ferocious discipline. Even if these might have had some reason in wartime, such reasons no longer applied.

While many had been fighting at the front, others--those enjoying dominant positions in the State apparatus--had been consolidating their power and detaching themselves more and more from the workers. The bureaucracy was already assuming alarming proportions. The State machine was in the hands of a single Party, itself more and more permeated by careerist elements. A non Party worker was worth less, on the scale of everyday life, than an ex bourgeois or nobleman, who had belatedly rallied to the Party. Free criticism no longer existed. Any Party member could denounce as 'counter revolutionary' any worker simply defending his class rights and his dignity as a worker.

Industrial and agricultural production were declining rapidly. There were virtually no raw materials for the factories. Machinery was worn and neglected. The main concern of the proletariat was the bitter fight against famine. Thefts from the factories had become a sort of compensation for miserably paid labour. Such thefts continued despite the repeated searches carried out by the Cheka at the factory gates.

Workers who still had connections with the countryside would go there to barter old clothes, matches or salt in exchange for food. The trains were crammed with such people (the Mechotchniki). Despite a thousand difficulties, they would try to bring food to the famished cities. Working class anger would break out repeatedly, as barrages of militia confiscated the paltry loads of flour or potatoes workers would be carrying on their backs to prevent their children from starving.

The peasants were submitted to compulsory requisitions. They were sowing less, despite the danger of famine that now resulted from bad crops. Bad crops had been common. Under ordinary conditions such crops had not automatically had these disastrous effects. The cultivated areas were larger and the peasants would usually set something aside for more difficult times.

The situation preceding the Kronstadt uprising can be summed up as a fantastic discrepancy between promise and achievement. There were harsh economic difficulties. But as important was the fact that the generation in question had not forgotten the meaning of the rights it had struggled for during the Revolution. This was to provide the real psychological background to the uprising.

The Red Navy had problems of its own. Since the Brest Litovsk peace, the Government had undertaken a complete reorganisation of the armed forces. on the basis of a rigid discipline, a discipline quite incompatible with the erstwhile principle of election of officers by the men. A whole hierarchical structure had been introduced. This had gradually stifled the democratic tendencies which had prevailed at the onset of the Revolution. For purely technical reasons such a reorganisation had not been possible in the Navy, where revolutionary traditions had strong roots. Most of the naval officers had gone over to the Whites, and the sailors still retained many of the democratic rights they had won in 1917. It had not been possible completely to dismantle their organisations.

This state of affairs was in striking contrast with what pertained in the rest of the armed forces. It could not last. Differences between the rank and file sailors and the higher command of the armed forces steadily increased. With the end of the Civil War in European Russia these differences became explosive.

Discontent was rampant not only among the non Party sailors. It also affected Communist sailors. Attempts to "discipline" the Fleet by introducing "Army customs" met with stiff resistance from 1920 on. Zef, a leading Party member and a member of the Revolutionary War Committee for the Baltic Fleet, was officially denounced by the Communist sailors for his "dictatorial attitudes." The enormous gap developing between the rank and file and the leadership was shown up during the elections to the Eighth Congress of Soviets, held in December 1920. At the naval base of Petrograd large numbers of sailors had noisily left the electoral meeting, openly protesting against the dispatch there as official delegates of people from Politotdiel and from Comflot (i.e., from the very organisations monopolising political control of the Navy).

On 15th. February 1921, the Second Conference of Communist Sailors of the Baltic Fleet had met. It had assembled 300 delegates who had voted for the following resolutions:

This Second Conference of Communist Sailors condemns the work of Poubalt
(Political Section of the Baltic Fleet).

1. Poubalt has not only separated itself from the masses but also from the active functionaries. It has become transformed into a bureaucratic organ enjoying no authority among the sailors.

2. There is total absence of plan or method in the work of Poubalt. There is also a lack of agreement between its actions and the resolutions adopted at the Ninth Party Congress.

3. Poubalt, having totally detached itself from the Party masses, has destroyed all local initiative. It has transformed all political work into paper work. This has had harmful repercussions on the organisation of the masses in the Fleet. Between June and November last year, 20 per cent of the (sailor Party members have left the Party. This can be explained by the wrong methods of the work of Poubalt.

4. The cause is to be found in the very principles of Poubalts organisation. These principles must be changed in the direction of greater democracy.

Several delegates demanded in their speeches the total abolition of the 'political sections' in the Navy, a demand we will find voiced again in the sailors' resolutions during the Kronstadt uprising. This was the frame of mind in which the famous discussion on the trade union question preceding the Tenth Party Congress took place.

In the documents of the period one can clearly perceive the will of certain Bolshevik leaders (amongst whom Trotsky) not only to ignore the great discontent affecting the workers and all those who had fought in the previous period, but also to apply military methods to the problems of everyday life, particularly to industry and to the trade unions.

In these heated discussions, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet adopted a viewpoint very different from Trotsky's. At the elections to the Tenth Party Congress, the Baltic Fleet voted solidly against its leaders: Trotsky, Peoples Commissar of War (under whose authority the Navy came), and Raskolnikov, Chief of the Baltic Fleet. Trotsky and Raskolnikov were in agreement on the Trade Union question.

The sailors sought to protest against the developing situation by abandoning the Party en masse. According to information released by Sorine, Commissar for Petrograd, 5,000 sailors left the Party in January 1921 alone.

There is no doubt that the discussion taking place within the Party at this time had profound effects on the masses. It overflowed the narrow limits the Party sought to impose on it. It spread to the working class as a whole, to the solders and to the sailors. Heated local criticism acted as a general catalyst. The proletariat had reasoned quite logically: if discussion and criticism were permitted to Party members, why should they not be permitted to the masses themselves who had endured all the hardships of the Civil War?

In his speech to the Tenth Congress--published in the Congress Proceedings--Lenin voiced his regret at having 'permitted' such a discussion. 'We have certainly committed an error,' he said, 'in having authorised this debate. Such a discussion was harmful just before the Spring months that would be loaded with such difficulties.'

2. Petrograd on the Eve of Kronstadt

Petrograd on the Eve of Kronstadt

Despite the fact that the population of Petrograd had diminished by two thirds, the winter of 1920-21 proved to be a particularly hard one.

Food in the city had been scarce since February 1917 and the situation had deteriorated from month to month. The town had always relied on food stuffs brought in from other parts of the country. During the Revolution the rural economy was in crisis in many of these regions. The countryside could only feed the capital to a very small extent. The catastrophic condition of the railways made things even worse. The ever increasing antagonisms between town and country created further difficulties everywhere.

To these partly unavoidable factors must be added the bureaucratic degeneration of the administration and the rapacity of the State organs for food supply. Their role in feeding the population was actually a negative one. If the population of Petrograd did not die of hunger during this period, it was above all thanks to its own adaptability and initiative. It got food wherever it could!

Barter was practised on a large scale. There was still some food to be had in the countryside, despite the smaller area under cultivation. The peasant would exchange this produce for the goods he lacked: boots, petrol, salt, matches. The population of the towns would try and get hold of these commodities in any way it could. They alone had real value. It would take them to the country side. In exchange people would carry back a few pounds of flour or potatoes. As we have mentioned before, the few trains, unheated, would be packed with men carrying bags on their shoulders. En root, the trains would often have to stop because they had run out of fuel. Passengers would get off and cut logs for the boilers.

Market places had officially been abolished. But in nearly all towns there were semi tolerated illegal markets, where barter was carried out. Such markets existed in Petrograd. Suddenly, in the Summer of 1920, Zinoviev issued a decree forbidding any kind of commercial transaction. The few small shops still open were closed and their doors sealed. However, the State apparatus was in no position to supply the towns. From this moment on, famine could no longer be attenuated by the initiative of the population. It became extreme. In January 1921, according to information published by Petrokommouns (the State Supplies of the town of Petrograd), workers in metal smelting factories were allocated rations of 800 grams of black bread a day; shock workers in other factories 600 grams; workers with A.V. cards: 400 grams; other workers: 200 grams. Black bread was the staple diet of the Russian people at this time.

But even these official rations were distributed irregularly and in even smaller amounts than those stipulated. Transport workers would receive, at irregular intervals, the equivalent of 700 to 1,000 calories a day. Lodgings were unheated. There was a great shortage of both clothing and footwear. According to official statistics, working class wages in 1920 in Petrograd were only 9 per cent. of those in 1913.

The population was drifting away from the capital. All who had relatives in the country had rejoined them. The authentic proletariat remained till the end, having the most slender connections with the countryside.

This fact must be emphasised, in order to nail the official lies seeking to attribute the Petrograd strikes that were soon to break out to peasant elements, 'insufficiently steeled in proletarian ideas.' The real situation was the very opposite. A few workers were seeking refuge in the countryside. The bulk remained. There was certainly no exodus of peasants into the starving towns! A few thousand 'Troudarmeitzys' (soldiers of the labour armies), then in Petrograd, did not modify the picture. It was the famous Petrograd proletariat, the proletariat which had played such a leading role in both previous revolutions, that was finally to resort to the classical weapon of the class struggle: the strike.

The first strike broke out at the Troubotchny factory, on 23rd February 1921. On the 24th, the strikers organised a mass demonstration in the street. Zinovlev sent detachments of 'Koursanty' (student officers) against them. The strikers tried to contact the Finnish Barracks. Meanwhile, the strikes were spreading. The Baltisky factory stopped work. Then the Laferma factory and a number of others: the Skorokhod shoe factory, the Admiralteiski factory, the Bormann and Metalischeski plants, and finally, on 28th February, the great Putilov works itself.

The strikers were demanding measures to assist food supplies. Some factories were demanding the re-establishment of the local markets, freedom to travel within a radius of thirty miles of the city, and the withdrawal of the militia detachments holding the road around the town. But side by side with these economic demands. several factories were putting forward more political demands freedom of speech and of the Press, the freeing of working class political prisoners. In several big factories, Party spokesmen were refused a hearing.

Confronted with the misery of the Russian workers who were seeking an outlet to their intolerable conditions, the servile Party Committee and Zinoviev, (who according to numerous accounts was behaving in Petrograd like a real tyrant), could find no better methods of persuasion than brute force.

Poukhov(1), 'official' historian of the Kronstadt revolt, wrote that 'decisive class measures were needed to overcome the enemies of the revolution who were using a non class conscious section of the proletariat, in order to wrench power from the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party.'

On 24th. February, the Party leaders set up a special General Staff, called the Committee of Defence. It was composed of three people: Lachevitch, Anzelovitch and Avrov. They were to be supported by a number of technical assistants. In each district of the town, a similar Committee of Three ('troika') was to be set up, composed of the local Party organiser, the commander of the Party battalion of the local territorial brigade and of a Commissar from the Officers' Training Corps. Similar Committees were organised in the outlying districts. These were composed of the local Party organiser, the President of the Executive of the local Soviet and the military Commissar for the District.

On 24th February the Committee of Defence proclaimed a state of siege in Petrograd. All circulation on the streets was forbidden after 11 PM, as were all meetings and gatherings, both out of doors and indoors, that had not been specifically permitted by the Defence Committee. 'All infringements would be dealt with according to military law.' The decree was signed by Avrov (later shot by the Stalinists), Commander of the Petrograd military region, by Lachevitch (who later committed suicide), a member of the War Council, and by Bouline (later shot by the Stalinists), Commander of the fortified Petrograd District.

A general mobilisation of party members was decreed. Special detachments were created, to be sent to "special destinations". At the same time, the militia detachments guarding the roads in and out of the town were withdrawn. Then the strike leaders were arrested.

On 26th February the Kronstadt sailors, naturally interested in all that was going on in Petrograd, sent delegates to find out about the strikes. The delegation visited a number factories. It returned to Kronstadt on the 28th. That same day, the crew of the battleship 'Petropavlovsk,' having discussed the situation, voted the following resolution: (2)

Having heard the reports of the representatives sent by the General Assembly of the Fleet to find out about the situation in Petrograd, the sailors demand:

1. immediate new elections to the Soviets. The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda.
2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.
4. The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, solders and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.
5. The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.
6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.
7. The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.
8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.
9. The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
10. The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. The abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.
11. The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.
12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution. 13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.
14. We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.
15. We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.

Analysis of the Kronstadt Programme

The Kronstadt sailors and the Petrograd strikers knew quite well that Russia's economic status was at the root of the political crisis. Their discontent was caused both by the famine and by the whole evolution of the political situation. The Russian workers were increasingly disillusioned in their greatest hope: the Soviets. Daily they saw the power of a single Party substituting itself for that of the Soviets. A Party, moreover, which was degenerating rapidly through the exercise of absolute power, and which was already riddled with careerists. It was against the monopoly exercised by this Party in all fields of life that the working class sought to react.

Point one of the Kronstadt resolution expressed an idea shared by the best elements of the Russian working class. Totally 'bolshevised' Soviets no longer reflected the wishes of the workers and peasants. Hence the demand for new elections, to be carried out according to the principal of full equality for all working class political tendencies.

Such a regeneration of the Soviets would imply the granting to all working class tendencies of the possibility for expressing themselves freely, without fear of calumny or extermination. Hence, quite naturally, there followed the idea of freedom of expression, of the Press, of Assembly and of organisation, contained in Point two.

We must stress that by 1921 the class struggle in the countryside had been fought to a virtual standstill. The vast majority of the kulaks had been dispossessed. It is quite wrong to claim that the granting of basic freedoms to the peasants--as demanded in Point three--would have meant restoring political rights to the kulaks. It was only a few years later that the peasants were exhorted to 'enrich themselves'--and this by Bukharin, then an official Party spokesman.

The Kronstadt revolution had the merit of stating things openly and clearly. But it was breaking no new ground. Its main ideas were being discussed everywhere. For having, in one way or another, put forward precisely such ideas, workers and peasants were already filling the prisons and the recently set up concentration camps. The men of Kronstadt did not desert their comrades. Point six of their resolution shows that they intended to look into the whole juridical apparatus. They already had serious doubts as to its objectivity as an organ of their rule. The Kronstadt sailors were thereby showing a spirit of solidarity in the best working class tradition. In July 1917, Kerensky had arrested a deputation of the Baltic Fleet that had come to Petrograd. Kronstadt had immediately sent a further deputation to insist on their release. In 1921, this tradition was being spontaneously renewed.

Points seven and ten of the resolution attacked the political monopoly being exercised by the ruling Party. The Party was using State funds in an exclusive and uncontrolled manner to extend its influence both in the Army and in the police.

Point nine of their resolution demanded equal rations for all workers This destroys Trotsky's accusation of 1938 (3) according to which 'the men of Kronstadt wanted privileges, while the country was hungry.'

Point fourteen clearly raised the question of workers control. Both before and during the October Revolution this demand had provoked powerful echo among the working class. The Kronstadt sailors understood quite clearly that real control had escaped from the hands of the rank and file. They sought to bring it back. The Bolshevik meanwhile sought to vest all control in the hands of a special Commissariat, the Rabkrin--Workers and Peasants inspection (4).

Point eleven reflected the demands of the peasants to whom the Kronstadt sailors had remained linked--as had, as a matter of fact, the whole of the Russian proletariat. The basis of this link is to be found in the specific history of Russian industry. Because of feudal backwardness, Russian industry did not find its roots in petty handicraft. In their great majority, the Russian workers came directly from the peasantry. This must be stressed. The Baltic sailors of 1921 were, it is true, closely linked with the peasantry. But neither more so nor less than had been the sailors of 1917.

In their resolution, the Kronstadt sailors were taking up once again one of the big demands of October. They were supporting those peasant claims demanding the land and the right to own cattle for those peasants who did not exploit the labour of others. In 1921, moreover, there was another aspect to this particular demand. It was an attempt to solve the food question, which was becoming desperate. Under the system of forced requisition, the population of the towns was literally dying of hunger. Why, incidentally, should the satisfaction of these demands be deemed 'tactically correct' when advocated by Lenin, in March 1921, and 'counter revolutionary' when put forward by the peasants themselves a few weeks earlier?

What was so counter revolutionary about the Kronstadt programme. What could justify the crusade launched by the Party against Kronstadt? A workers and peasants' regime that did not wish to base itself exclusively on lies and terror, had to take account of the peasantry. It need not thereby have lost its revolutionary character. The men of Kronstadt were not alone, moreover, in putting forward such demands in 1921, Makhnos followers were still active in the Ukraine. This revolutionary peasant movement was evolving its own ideas and methods of struggle. The Ukrainian peasantry had played a predominant role in chasing out the feudal hordes. It had earned the right itself to determine the forms of its social life.

Despite Trotsky s categorical and unsubstantiated assertions, the Makhno movement was in no sense whatsoever a kulak movement. Koubanin, the official Bolshevik historian of the Makhno movement, shows statistically, in a book edited by the Party's Historical institute, that the Makhno movement at first appeared and developed most rapidly, in precisely those areas where the peasants were poorest. The Makhno movement was crushed before it had a chance of showing in practice its full creative abilities. The fact that during the Civil War it had been capable of creating its own specific forms of struggle, leads one to guess that it could have been capable of a lot more.

As a matter of fact, in relation to agrarian policy, nothing was to prove more disastrous than the zig zags of the Bolsheviks. In 1931, ten years after Kronstadt, Stalin was to decree his famous 'liquidation of the kulaks.' This resulted in an atrocious famine and in the loss of millions of human lives.

Let us finally consider Point fifteen of the Kronstadt resolution, demanding freedom for handicraft production. This was not a question of principle. For the workers of Kronstadt, handicraft production was to compensate for an industrial production that had fallen to nought. Through this demand they were seeking a way out of their intolerable economic plight.

On to Mass meetings and Bolshevik slanders

3. Mass Meetings and Bolshevik Slanders

Mass meetings and Bolshevik slanders
Mass Meetings

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

A meeting of the First and Second Battleship Sections had been planned for 1st. March. The notification had been published in the official journal of the city of Kronstadt. The speakers were to include Kalinin, President of the All Russian Executive of Soviets, and Kouzmin, political commissar to the Baltic Fleet. When Kalinin arrived, he was received with music and flags. All military honours were accorded him.

Sixteen thousand people attended the meeting. Party member Vassiliev, president of the local soviet, took the chair. The delegates who had visited Petrograd the previous day gave their reports. The resolution adopted on 28th. February by the crew of the battleship 'Petropavlovsk' was distributed. Kalinin and Kouzmin opposed the resolution. They proclaimed that 'Kronstadt did not represent the whole of Russia.'

Nevertheless, the mass assembly adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution. In fact only two people voted against it: Kalinin and Kouzmin!

The mass assembly decided to send a delegation of 30 workers to Petrograd to study the situation on the spot. It was also decided to invite delegates from Petrograd to visit Kronstadt, so that they would get to know what the sailors were really thinking. A further mass meeting was planned for the following day, grouping delegates from ships' crews, from the Red Army groups, from State institutions, from the dockyards and factories, and from the trade unions, to decide on the procedure of new elections to the local soviet. At the end of the meeting, Kalinin was allowed to regain Petrograd in all safety.

The following day, 2nd. March, the delegates meeting took place in the House of Culture. According to the official Kronstadt 'Izvestia', the appointment of delegates had taken place properly. The delegates all insisted that the elections be carried out in a loyal and correct manner. Kouzmin and Vassiliev spoke first. Kouzmin stated that the Party would not relinquish power without a fight. Their speeches were so aggressive and provocative that the assembly ordered them to leave the meeting and put them under arrest. Other Party members were, however, allowed to speak at length during the debate.

The meeting of delegates endorsed by an overwhelming majority the Petropavlovsk resolution. It then got down to examining in detail the question of elections to the new soviet. These elections were to 'prepare the peaceful reconstruction of the Soviet regime.' The work was constantly interrupted by rumours, spreading through the assembly, to the effect that the Party was preparing to disperse the meeting by force. The situation was extremely tense.
The Provisional Committee

Because of the threatening speeches of the representatives of the State power--Kouzmin and Vassiliev--and fearing retaliation, the assembly decided to form a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, to which it entrusted the administration of the town and the fortress. The Committee held its first session aboard the 'Petropavlovsk', the Battle ship in which Kouzmin and Vassiliev were being detained.

The leading body of the assembly of delegates all became members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. They were:

* Petritchenko, chief quartermaster of the battleship 'Petropavlovsk',
* Yakovenko, liaison telephonist to the Kronstadt section,
* Ossossov, boiler man in the battleship 'Sebastopol',
* Arkhipov, chief engineer,
* Perepelkin, electrician in the battleship 'Sebastopol',
* Patrouchev, chief electrician in the 'Petropavlovsk',
* Koupolov, head male nurse,
* Verchinin, sailor in the 'Sebastopol',
* Toukin, worker in the 'Electrotechnical' factory,
* Romanenko, docks maintenance worker,
* Orechin, headmaster of the Third labour School,
* Valk, sawmill worker,
* Pavlov, worker in a marine mining shop,
* Boikev, head of the building section of the Kronstadt fortress,
* Kilgast, harbour pilot.

The majority of the members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee were sailors with a long service. This contradicts the official version of the Kronstadt events, which seeks to attribute the leadership of the revolt to elements recently joining the Navy and having nothing in common with the heroic sailors of 1917-1919.

The first proclamation of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee stated: 'We are concerned to avoid bloodshed. Our aim is to create through the joint efforts of town and fortress the proper conditions for regular and honest elections to the new soviet.'

Later that day, under the leadership of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, the inhabitants of Kronstadt occupied all strategic points in the town, taking over the State establishments, the Staff Headquarters, and the telephone and wireless buildings. Committees were elected in all battleships and regiments. At about 9:00 p.m., most of the forts and most detachments of the Red Army had rallied. Delegates coming from Oranienbaum had also declared their support for the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. That same day the 'Izvestia' printshops were occupied.

On the morrow, 3rd. March, the men of Kronstadt published the first issue of the 'Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee'. (5) In it one read: 'The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses. It has shown itself incapable of getting the country out of its mess. Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow which show clearly that the Party has lost the confidence of the working masses. The Party is ignoring working class demands because it believes that these demands are the result of counter revolutionary activity. In this the Party is making a profound mistake. '
Bolshevik Slanders

Meanwhile, Moscow Radio was broadcasting as follows:

"Struggle against the White Guard Plot." And, "Just like other White Guard insurrections, the mutiny of ex General Kozlovsky and the crew of the battle ship 'Petropavlovsk' has been organised by Entente spies. This is clear from the fact that the French paper 'Le Monde' published the following message from Helsingfors two weeks before the revolt of General Kozlovsky: 'We are informed from Petrograd that as the result of the recent Kronstadt revolt, the Bolshevik military authorities have taken a whole series of measures to isolate the town and to prevent the soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt from entering Petrograd.'"

'It is therefore clear that the Kronstadt revolt is being led from Paris. The French counter espionage is mixed up in the whole affair. History is repeating itself. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who have their headquarters in Paris, are preparing the ground for an insurrection against the Soviet power. The ground prepared, their real master, the Tsarist general appeared. The history of Koltchak, installing his power in the wake of that of the Socialist Revolutionaries, is being repeated.'
(Radio Stanzia Moskva and Radio Vestnik Rosta Moskva, 3rd. March 1921.)

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

The call issued by Moscow's Radio was obviously coming from the Politbureau's top leaders. It had Lenin's approval, who must have been fully aware of what was happening at Kronstadt. Even assuming that he had to rely on Zinoviev for information, whom he knew to be cowardly and liable to panic, it is difficult to believe that Lenin misunderstood the real state of affairs. On 2nd. March, Kronstadt had sent an official delegation to see him. It would have been enough to cross question it in order to ascertain the true situation.

Lenin, Trotsky, and the whole Party leadership knew quite well that this was no mere 'generals' revolt'. Why then invent this legend about General Kozlovsky, leader of the mutiny? The answer lies in the Bolshevik outlook, an outlook at times so blind that it could not see that lies were as likely to prove nefarious as to prove helpful. The legend of General Kozlovsky opened the path to another legend: that of the Wrangel officer allegedly conspiring with Trotsky in 1928-29. It in fact opened the path to the massive lying of the whole Stalin era.

Anyway, who was this General Kozlovsky, denounced by the official radio as the leader of the insurrection? He was an artillery general, and had been one of the first to defect to the Bolsheviks. He seemed devoid of any capacity as a leader. At the time of the insurrection he happened to be in command of the artillery at Kronstadt. The communist commander of the fortress had defected. Kozlovsky, according to the rules prevailing in the fortress, had to replace him. He, in fact, refused, claiming that as the fortress was now under the jurisdiction of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, the old rules no longer applied. Kozlovsky remained, it is true, in Kronstadt, but only as an artillery specialist. Moreover, after the fall of Kronstadt, in certain interviews granted to the Finnish press, Kozlovsky accused the sailors of having wasted precious time on issues other than the defence of the fortress. He explained this in terms of their reluctance to resort to bloodshed. Later, other officers of the garrison were also to accuse the sailors of military incompetence, and of complete lack of confidence in their technical advisers. Kozlovsky was the only general to have been present at Kronstadt. This was enough for the Government to make use of his name.

The men of Kronstadt did, up to a point, make use of the military know how of certain officers in the fortress at the time. Some of these officers may have given the men advice out of sheer hostility to the Bolsheviks. But in their attack on Kronstadt, the Government forces were also making use of ex Tsarist officers. On the one side there were Kozlovsky, Salomianov, and Arkannihov; On the other, ex Tsarist officers and specialists of the old regime, such as Toukhatchevsky. Kamenev, and Avrov. On neither side were these officers an independent force.

4. Effects on the Party Rank and File

Effects on the Party Rank and File

On 2nd. March, the Kronstadt sailors, aware of their rights, their duties and the moral authority vested in them by their revolutionary past, attempted to set the soviets on a better path. They saw how distorted they had become through the dictatorship of a single party.

On 7th. March, the Central Government launched its military onslaught against Kronstadt.

What had happened between these two dates ?

In Kronstadt, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, enlarged during a mass meeting by the co-option of five new members, had started to reorganise social life in both town and fortress. It decided to arm the workers of Kronstadt to ensure the internal protection of the town. It decreed the compulsory re-election, within three days, of the leading trade union committees and of the Congress of Trade Unions, in which bodies it wished to vest considerable powers.

Rank and file members of the Communist Party were showing their confidence in the Provisional Revolutionary Committee by a mass desertion from the Party. A number of them formed a Provisional Party Bureau which issued the following appeal:

'Give no credence to the absurd rumours spread by provocateurs seeking bloodshed according to which responsible Party comrades are being shot or to rumours alleging that the Party is preparing an attack against Kronstadt. This is an absurd lie, spread by agents of the Entente, seeking to overthrow the power of the Soviets.

'The Provisional Party Bureau considers re-elections to the Kronstadt Soviet to be indispensable. It calls on all its supporters to take part in these elections.

'The Provisional Party Bureau calls on all its supporters to remain at their posts and to create no obstacles to the measures taken by the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Long live the power of the Soviets! Long live international working class unity!

Signed (on behalf of the Provisional Party Bureau of Kronstadt): Iline (ex commissar for supplies), Pervouchin (ex President of the local Executive Committee), Kabanov (ex President of the Regional Trade Union Bureau)'.

The Stalinist historian Poukhov referring to this appeal, declared that "it can only be considered a treasonable act and an opportunist step towards an agreement with the leaders of the insurrection, who are obviously playing a counter revolutionary role"(6). Poukhov admits that this document had "a certain effect" on the rank and file of the Party. According to him, 780 Party members in Kronstadt left the Party at this time!

Some of those resigning from the Party sent letters to the Kronstadt 'Izvestia', giving reasons for their action. The teacher Denissov wrote:

'I openly declare to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee that as from gunfire directed at Kronstadt, I no longer consider myself a member of the Party. I support the call issued by the workers of Kronstadt. All power to the Soviets, not to the Party.'!

A military group assigned to the special company dealing with discipline also issued a declaration:

'We, the undersigned, joined the Party believing it to express the wishes of the working masses. In fact the Party has proved itself an executioner of workers and peasants. This is revealed quite clearly by recent events in Petrograd. These events show up the face of the Party leaders. The recent broadcasts from Moscow show clearly that the Party leaders are prepared to resort to any means in order to retain power.

'We ask that henceforth, we no longer be considered Party members. We rally to the call issued by the Kronstadt garrison in its resolution of 2nd. March. We invite other comrades who have become aware of the error of their ways, publicly to recognise the fact.

'Signed: Gutman, Yefimov, Koudriatzev, Andreev. ('Izvestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 7th. March 1921)'.

The Communist Party members in the 'Rif' fort published the following resolution:

'During the last three years, many greedy careerists have flocked to our Party. This has given rise to bureaucracy and has gravely hampered the struggle for economic reconstruction.

'Our Party has always faced up to the problem of the struggle against the enemies of the proletariat and of the working masses. We publicly declare that we intend to continue in the future our defence of the rights secured by the working class. We will allow no White Guard to take advantage of this difficult situation confronting the Republic of Soviets. At the first attempt directed against its power we will know how to retaliate.

'We fully accept the authority of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, which is setting itself the objective of creating soviets genuinely representing the proletarian and working masses.

'Long live the power of the Soviets, the real defenders of working class rights.

'Signed: the Chairman and Secretary of the meeting of Communists in Fort Rif' ('Izvestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. 7th. March 1921.

Were such declarations forcibly extracted from Party members by the regime of terror directed against Party members allegedly reigning in Kronstadt at the time? Not a shred of evidence has been produced to this effect. Throughout the whole insurrection not a single imprisoned Communist was shot. And this despite the fact that among the prisoners were men responsible for the fleet such as Kouzmin and Batys. The vast majority of Communist Party members were in fact left entirely free.

In the 'Izvestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee for 7th. March, one can read under the heading 'We are not seeking revenge', the following note:

"The prolonged oppression to which the Party dictatorship has submitted the workers has provoked a natural indignation among the masses. This has led, in certain places, to boycotts and sackings directed against the relatives of Party members. This must not take place. We are not seeking revenge. We are only defending our interests as workers. We must act cautiously. We must only take action against those who sabotage or those who through lying propaganda seek to prevent a reassertion of working class power and rights".

In Petrograd, however, humanist ideas of rather a different kind were prevailing. As soon as the arrests of Kouzmin and Vassiliev were learned, the Defence Committee ordered the arrests of the families of all Kronstadt sailors known to be living in Petrograd. A Government plane showered Kronstadt with leaflets saying:

'The Defence Committee an announces that it has arrested and imprisoned the families of the sailors as hostages for the safety of communist comrades arrested by the Kronstadt mutineers. We refer specifically to the safety of Fleet Commissar Kouzmin, and Vassiliev, President of the Kronstadt Soviet. If a hair of their heads is touched, the hostages will pay with their lives'.

('Izvestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 5th. March 1921).

The Provisional Revolutionary Committee replied with the following radio message:

'In the name of the Kronstadt garrison, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt insists on the liberation, within 24 hours, of the families of the workers, sailors and red soldiers arrested as hostages by the Petrograd Soviet.

'The Kronstadt garrison assures you that in the city of Kronstadt, Party members are entirely free and that their families enjoy absolute immunity. We refuse to follow the example of the Petrograd Soviet. We consider such methods, even when conducted by ferocious hatred, as utterly shameful and degrading.

'Signed: Petritchenko, sailor, President of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee; Kilgast, Secretary'.

To refute rumours according to which Party members were being ill-treated, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee set up a special Commission to investigate the cases of the imprisoned communists. In its issue of 4th. March, the 'Izvestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee announced that a Party member would be attached to the Commission. It is doubtful if this body ever got to work, as two days later the bombardment of Kronstadt began. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee did, however, receive a Party delegation. It granted it permission to visit the prisoners in the 'Petropavlovsk'. The prisoners had even been allowed to hold meetings among themselves, and to edit a wall newspaper. (Zaikovski: 'Kronstadt from 1917 to 1921')

There was no terror in Kronstadt. Under very difficult and tragic circumstances, the 'rebels had done their utmost to apply the basic principles of working class democracy. If many rank and file communists decided to support the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, it was because this body expressed the wishes and aspirations of the working people. In retrospect, this democratic self assertion of Kronstadt may appear surprising. It certainly contrasted with the actions and frame of mind prevailing among the Party leaders in Petrograd and Moscow. They remained blind, deaf and totally lacking in understanding of what Kronstadt and the working masses of the whole of Russia really wanted.

Catastrophe could still have been averted during those tragic days: Why then did the Petrograd Defence Committee use such abusive language? The only conclusion an objective observer can come to is that it was done with the deliberate intention of provoking bloodshed, thereby 'teaching everyone a lesson' as to the need for absolute submission to the central power.

5. Threats, Bribes and Skirmishes

Threats, bribes and skirmishes

Threats and Bribes

On 5th. March, the Petrograd Defence Committee issued a call to the rebels.

'You are being told fairy tales when they tell you that Petrograd is with you or that the Ukraine supports you. These are impertinent lies. The last sailor in Petrograd abandoned you when he learned that you were led by generals like Kozlovskv. Siberia and the Ukraine support the Soviet power. Red Petrograd laughs at the miserable efforts of a handful of White Guards and Socialist Revolutionaries. You are surrounded on all sides. A few hours more will lapse and then you will he compelled to surrender. Kronstadt has neither bread nor fuel. If you insist, we will shoot you like partridges.

'At the last minute, all those generals, the Kozlovskvs, the Bourksers, and all that riff raff, the Petrichenkos, and the Tourins will flee to Finland, to the White guards. And you, rank and file soldiers and sailors, where will you go then? Don't believe them when they promise to feed you in Finland. Haven't you heard what happened to Wrangel's supporters? They were transported to Constantinople. There they are dying like flies, in their thousands, of hunger and disease. This is the fate that awaits you, unless you immediately take a grip of yourselves. Surrender Immediately! Don't waste a minute. Collect your weapons and come over to us. Disarm and arrest your criminal leaders, and in particular the Tsarist generals. Whoever surrenders immediately will be forgiven. Surrender now.

'Signed: The Defence Committee'.

In reply to these threats from Petrograd, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee Issued a final appeal.

'TO ALL, TO ALL, TO ALL.

Comrades, workers, red soldiers and sailors. Here in Kronstadt we know full well how much you and your wives and your children are suffering under the iron rule of the Party. We have overthrown the Party dominated Soviet. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is today starting elections to a new Soviet. It will be freely elected, and it will reflect the wishes of the whole working population, and of the garrison--and not just those of a handful of Party members.

'Our cause is just. We stand for the power of the Soviets, not for that of the Party. We stand for freely elected representatives of the toiling masses. Deformed Soviets, dominated by the Party, have remained deaf to our pleas. Our appeals have been answered with bullets.

'The workers' patience is becoming exhausted. So now they are seeking to pacify you with crumbs. On Zinoviev's orders the militia barrages have been withdrawn. Moscow has allocated ten million gold roubles for the purchase abroad of food stuffs and other articles of first necessity. But we know that the Petrograd proletariat will not be bought over in this way. Over the heads of the Party, we hold out to you the fraternal hand of revolutionary Kronstadt.

'Comrades, you are being deceived. And truth is being distorted by the basest of calumnies.

'Comrades, don't allow yourselves to be misled.

'In Kronstadt, power is in the hands of the sailors, of the red soldiers and of the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands of white Guards commanded by General Kozlovsky, as Moscow Radio Iyingly asserts.

'Signed: The Provisional Revolutionary Committee'.

Foreign communists were in Moscow and Petrograd at the time of the revolt. They were in close contact with leading Party circles. They confirmed that the Government had made hasty purchases abroad (even chocolate was bought, which had always been a luxury in Russia). Moscow and Petrograd had suddenly changed their tactics. The Government had a better grasp of psychological war than had the men of Kronstadt. It understood the corrupting influence of white bread on a starving population. It was in vain that Kronstadt asserted that crumbs would not buy the Petrograd proletariat. The Government's methods had undoubted effect, especially when combined with vicious repression directed against the strikers.
Support in Petrograd

Part of the Petrograd proletariat continued to strike during the Kronstadt events. Poukhov, the Party historian, himself admits this. The workers were demanding the liberation of the prisoners. In certain factories, copies of the 'Ivestia' of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee were found plastered on the walls. A lorry even drove through the street of Petrograd scattering leaflets from Kronstadt. In certain enterprises (for instance, the State Printing Works No. 26), the workers refused to adopt a resolution condemning the Kronstadt sailors. At the 'Arsenal' factory, the workers organised a mass meeting on 7th. March, (the day the bombardment of Kronstadt began). This meeting adopted a resolution of the mutinous sailors! It elected a commission which was to go from factory to factory, agitating for a general strike.

Strikes were continuing in the biggest factories of Petrograd: Poutilov, Baltisky, Oboukhov, Nievskaia Manoufactura, etc. The authorities sacked the striking workers, transferred the factories to the authority of the local troikas (three men committees), who proceeded to selective rehiring of workers. Other repressive measures were also taken against the strikers.

Strikes were also starting in Moscow, in Nijni Novgorod and In other cities. But here too, the prompt delivery of foodstuffs, combined with calumnies to the effect that Tsarist generals were in command at Kronstadt had succeeded in sowing doubts among the workers.

The Bolsheviks' aim had been achieved. The proletariat of Petrograd and of the other industrial cities was in a state of confusion. The Kronstadt sailors, who had been hoping for the support of the whole of working class Russia, remained isolated, confronting a Government determined to annihilate them, whatever the cost.

First Skirmishes

On 6th. March, Trotsky addressed an appeal by radio to the Kronstadt garrison:

'The Workers' and Peasants' Government has decided to reassert its authority without delay, both over Kronstadt and over the mutinous battleships, and to put them at the disposal of the Soviet Republic. I therefore order all those who have raised a hand against the Socialist Fatherland, immediately to lay down their weapons. Those who resist will be disarmed and put at the disposal of the Soviet Command. The arrested commissars and other representatives of the Government must be freed immediately. Only those who surrender unconditionally will be able to count on the clemency of the Soviet Republic. I am meanwhile giving orders that everything be prepared to smash the revolt and the rebels by force of arms. The responsibility for the disasters which will effect the civilian population must fall squarely on the heads of the White Guard insurgents.

'Signed: Trotsky, President of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Soviet Republic, KAMENEV,(7) Glavkom (Commanding Officer)'.

On 8th. March, a plane flew over Kronstadt and dropped a bomb. On the following days, Government artillery continued to shell the fortress and neighbouring forts, but met with stiff resistance. Aircraft dropped bombs which provoked such fury among the civilian population that they started firing back. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee had to order the defenders not to waste their ammunition.

By 1921 the Kronstadt garrison had been markedly reduced. Figures issued by the General Staff of the defenders put the number at 3,000. Gaps between infantrymen defending the perimeter were at least 32 feet wide. Stocks of ammunition and shells were also limited.

During the afternoon of 3rd. March, the Revolutionary Committee had met in conference together with certain military specialists. A Military Defence Committee was set up which prepared a plan to defend the fortress. But when the military advisers proposed an assault in the direction of Oranienbaum (where there were food stocks, at Spassatelnaia), the Provisional Revolutionary Committee refused. It was not putting its faith in the military capacity of the sailors; but in the moral support of the whole of proletarian Russia. Until the first shot had been fired, the men of Kronstadt refused to believe that the Government would militarily attack them. This is no doubt why the Provisional Revolutionary Committee had not set out to prevent the approach of the Red Army by breaking the ice around the foot of the fortress. For much the same reasons, fortified barrages were not set up along the probable line of attack.

Kronstadt was right. Militarily they could not win. At best, they could have held a fortnight. This might have been important, for once the ice had melted, Kronstadt could have become a real fortress, capable of defending itself. Nor must we forget that their human reserves were infinitesimal, compared with the numbers the Red Army could throw into battle.

6. Demoralisation in the Red Army

Demoralisation in the Red Army

What was morale like in the Red Army at this time? In an interview given to 'Krasnaia Gazeta', Dybenko (8) described how all the military units participating in the assault on Kronstadt had to be reorganised. This was an absolute necessity. During the first day of military operations, the Red Army had shown that it did not wish to fight against the sailors, against the 'bratichki' (little brothers), as they were known at the time. Amongst the advanced workers, the Kronstadt sailors were known as people most devoted to the Revolution. And anyway, the very motives that were driving Kronstadt to revolt, existed among the ranks of the Red Army. Both were hungry and cold, poorly clad and poorly shod and this was no mean burden in the Russian winter, especially when what was asked of them was to march and fight on ice and snow.

During the night of 8th. March, when the Red Army attack against Kronstadt started, a terrible snow storm was blowing over the Baltic. Thick fog made the tracks almost invisible. The Red Army soldiers wore long white blouses which hid them well against the snow. This is how Poukhov (9) described morale in Infantry Regiment 561 in an official communiqui. The regiment was approaching Kronstadt from the Oranienbaum side.

'At the beginning of the operation the second battalion had refused to march. With much difficulty and thanks to the presence of communists, it was persuaded to venture on the ice. As soon as it reached the first south battery, a company of the 2nd. battalion surrendered. The officers had to return alone. The regiment stopped. Dawn was breaking. We were without news of the 3rd. battalion, which was advancing towards south batteries 1 and 2. The battalion was marching in file and was being shelled by artillery from the forts. It then spread out and veered to the left of Fort Milioutine, from which red flags were being waved. Having advanced a further short distance, it noticed that the rebels had fitted machine guns on the forts, and were offering them the choice of surrendering or being massacred. Everybody surrendered, except the battalion commissar and three or four soldiers who turned back on their steps'.

On 8th. March, Oublanov, Commissar for the Northern Sector, wrote to the Petrograd Party:

'I consider it my revolutionary duty to clarify you as to the state of affairs on the northern sector. It is impossible to send the Army into a second attack on the forts. I have already spoken to Comrades Lachevitch, Avrov and Trotsky about the morale of the Koursantys (cadet officers, deemed most fit for battle). I have to report the following tendencies. The men wish to know the demands of Kronstadt. They want to send delegates to Kronstadt. The number of political commissars in this sector is far from sufficient'.

Army morale was also revealed in the case of the 79th. Brigade of the 27th Omsk Division. The Division comprised three regiments. It had shown its fighting capacities in the struggle against Koltchak. On 12th. March, the division was brought to the Kronstadt front. The Orchane regiment refused to fight against Kronstadt. The following day, in the two other regiments of the same division, the soldiers organised impromptu meetings where they discussed what attitude to take. Two of the regiments had to be disarmed by force, and the 'revolutionary' tribunal posed heavy sentences.

There were many similar cases. Not only were the soldiers unwilling to fight against their class brothers, but they were not prepared to fight on the ice in the month of March. Units had been brought in from other regions of the country, where by mid March the ice was melting already. They had little confidence in the solidity of the Baltic ice. Those who had taken part in the first assault, had seen that the shells from Kronstadt were opening up enormous holes in its surface, in which the unfortunate Government troops were being engulfed. These were hardly encouraging scenes. All this contributed to the failure of the first assaults against Kronstadt.
Reorganisation

The regiments to be used in the final assault against Kronstadt were thoroughly reorganised. Groups that had shown any sympathy towards Kronstadt were disarmed and transferred to other units. Some were severely punished by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Party members were mobilised and allocated to various battalions for purposes of propaganda and for reporting back on unsure elements.

Between 8th. and 15th. of March, while the cannons exchanged fire over the ice at Kronstadt, the Tenth Party Congress was held in Moscow. The Congress despatched 300 delegates to the front, among them Vorochilov, Boubnov, Zatousky, Roukhimovitch and Piatakov. The 'delegates' were nominated 'political commissars' and appointed to the military section of the Tcheka, or to 'special commissions for the struggle against desertion'. Some just fought in the ranks.

The Revolutionary Tribunals were working overtime. Poukhov describes how 'they would vigorously react to all unhealthy tendencies. Troublemakers and provocateurs were punished according to their deserts'. The sentences would immediately be made known to the soldiers. Some times they would even be published in the papers.

But despite all the propaganda, all the reorganisation, and all the repression, the soldiers retained their doubts. On 14th. March, there were further acts of insubordination. Regiment 561, reorganised on 8th. March, still refused to march. 'We will not fight against our brothers from the same "stanltsas"(10)', they proclaimed.

Small groups of Red Army men surrendered to the rebels and started fighting on their side. Witnesses described how some units lost half their men before even entering the line of fire of the insurgents. They were being machined gunned from the rear 'to prevent them surrendering to the rebels'.

Official sources described how issues of the Kronstadt 'Izvestia' were being read with great interest in the Red Army. So were the leaflets distributed by the Kronstadt rebels. Special political commissions were set up to prevent such material from entering the barracks. But this had an opposite effect from the one expected.

Party organisations throughout the country were mobilised. Intensive propaganda was carried out among the troops in the rear. The human and material resources available to the Government were far greater than those available to Kronstadt. Trains were daily bringing new troops to Petrograd. Many were being sent from the Kirghiz and Bachkir lands (i.e., were composed of men as far removed as possible from the 'Kronstadt frame of mind'). As to the defenders of Kronstadt, their forces were not only diminishing numerically (through losses sustained in fighting), but they were more and more exhausted. Badly clad and half starving, the Kronstadt rebels remained at their guns, almost without relief, for just over a week. At the end of this period, many of them could hardly stand.

7. The Final Assault

The Final Assault

Aware of these facts and having taken all necessary measures in relation to organisation, supplies and improvement in morale Toukhatchevsky, commander of the 7th. Army, issued his famous proclamation of 15th. March. He ordered that Kronstadt be taken by all out assault in the night of 16th-17th March. Entire regiments of the 7th. Army were equipped with hand grenades, white blouses, shears for cutting barbed wire and with small sleighs for carrying machine guns.

Toukhatchevsky's plan was to launch a decisive attack from the south, and then to capture Kronstadt by a massive simultaneous assault from three different directions.

On 16th. March, the Southern Group opened its artillery barrage at 14.20 hrs. At 17.00 hrs. the Northern Group also started shelling Kronstadt. The Kronstadt guns answered back. The bombardment lasted four hours. Aircraft then bombed the city, with a view to creating panic among the civilian population. In the evening, the artillery bombardment ceased. The Kronstadt searchlights swept over the ice looking for the invaders.

Towards midnight, the Government troops had taken up their position and started to advance. At 2:45 a.m., the Northern Force had occupied Fort 7, abandoned by the Kronstadt defenders. At 4:30 a.m., Government troops attacked Forts 4 and 6, but suffered very heavy losses from the Kronstadt artillery. At 6:40 a.m., Government officer cadets finally captured Fort 6.

At 5:00 a.m., the Southern Force launched an attack on the forts facing them. The defenders, overwhelmed, fell back towards the city. A fierce and bloody battle then broke out in the streets. Machine guns were used, at very close range. The sailors defended each house, each attic, each shed. In the town itself, they were reinforced by the workers' militias. The attacking troops were, for a few hours, thrown back towards the forts and suburbs. The sailors reoccupied the Mechanical Institute, which had been captured early by the 80th government Brigade.

The street fighting was terrible. Red Army soldiers were losing their officers, Red Army men and defending troops were mixing in indescribable confusion. No one quite knew who was on which side. The civilian population of the town tried to fraternise with the Government troops, despite the shooting. Leaflets of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee were still being distributed. To the bitter end the sailors were trying to fraternise.

Throughout 17th. March the fighting raged on. By the evening the Northern Group had occupied most of the forts. Street fighting continued throughout the night and well into the following morning. One by one the last forts--Milioutine, Constantine and Obroutchev--fell. Even after the last one had been occupied, isolated groups of defenders were still desperately fighting back with machine guns. Near the Tolbukhin light house, a final group of 150 sailors put up a desperate resistance.
The Balance Sheet

Figures Issued by the Military Health Authorities of the Petrograd District--and relating to the period between 3rd. and 21st. March--spoke of 4,127 wounded and 527 killed. These figures do not include the drowned, or the numerous wounded left to die on the ice. (11) Nor do they include the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals.

We do not even have approximate figures as to the losses on the Kronstadt side. They were enormous, even without the reprisal massacres that later took place. Perhaps one day the archives of the Tcheka and of the Revolutionary Tribunals will reveal the full and terrible truth.

This is what Poukhov, 'official' Stalinist historian of the revolt, says on the matter: 'While steps were being taken to re-establish normal life, and as the struggle against rebel remnants was being pursued, the Revolutionary Tribunals of the Petrograd Military District were carrying out their work in many areas'.....' Severe proletarian justice was being meted out to all traitors to the Cause '.....' The sentences were given much publicity in the press and played a great educational role'. These quotations from official sources refute Trotskyist lies that 'the fortress was surrounded and captured with insignificant losses.'(12)

In the night of 17th-18th March, part of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee left Kronstadt. Some 8,000 people (some sailors and the most active part of the civilian population), moved towards Finland and permanent exile. When the Red Army--defenders of the 'soviet' power--finally entered Kronstadt, they did not re-establish the Kronstadt soviet. Its functions were taken over by the Political Section of the Secretariat of the new Assistant Commander of the Fortress.

The whole Red Fleet was profoundly reorganised. Thousands of Baltic sailors were sent to serve in the Black Sea, in the Caspian and in Siberian naval stations. According to Poukhov: 'the less reliable elements, those infected with the Kronstadt spirit, were transferred. Many only went reluctantly. This measure contributed to the purification of an unhealthy atmosphere'.

In April, the new Naval Command started an individual check. 'A special commission dismissed 15,000 sailors in "non essential" (i.e., non specialised) categories V, G, and D--as well as sailors not considered reliable from a political point of view'.

After the physical annihilation of Kronstadt, its very spirit had to be eradicated from the Fleet.

8. What They Said at the Time

What they said at the time

'Revolts by workers and peasants have shown that their patience has come to an end. The uprising of the workers is near at hand. The time has come to overthrow the bureaucracy... Kronstadt has raised for the first time the banner of the Third Revolution of the toilers... The autocracy has fallen. The Constituent Assembly has departed to the region of the damned. The bureaucracy is crumbling...'
Isvestia of the Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Etapy Revoliutsi (Stages of the Revolution), March 12, 1921.

'In the bourgeois newspapers you can read that we brought up Chinese, Kalmuk and other regiments against Yudemitch and Kronstadt. This is, of course, a lie. We brought up our youth. The storming of Kronstadt was indeed symbolic. Kronstadt, as I said, was about to pass into the hands of French and English imperialism.'
L. Trotsky. Speech delivered at 2nd Congress of Communist Youtb International, July 14, 1921. The First Five Years of The Communist International (Pioneer Publishers, 1945), p. 312.

The Anarchists

Did the Kronstadt sailors put forward their demands and resolutions by themselves? Or were they acting under the influence of political groups, which might have suggested slogans to them? Anarchist influence is often incriminated when this subject is described. How sure can one be of the matter? Among members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, as among the Kronstadters in general, there were certainly individuals claiming to be anarchists. But if one bases oneself on documentary evidence, as we have sought to do throughout this study, one must conclude that there was no direct intervention by anarchist groups.

The Menshevik Dan, who was in prison for a while in Petrograd with a group of Kronstadt rebels, tells us in his memoirs(1) that Perepelkin, one of the members of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, was close to anarchism. He also tells us that the Kronstadt sailors were both disillusioned and fed up with Communist Party policy and that they spoke with hatred about political parties in general. In their eyes, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were as bad as the Bolsheviks. All were out to seize power and would later betray the people who had vested their confidence in them. According to Dan, the conclusion of the sailors, disappointed with political parties was: "You are all the same. What we need is anarchism, not a power structure!".

The anarchists of course defend the Kronstadt rebels. It seems likely to us that had any of their organisations really lent a hand in the insurrection the anarchist press would have mentioned the fact. In the anarchist press of the time, however, there is no mention of such help. For instance Yartchouk, an old anarcho-syndicalist (2) who before October had enjoyed considerable authority amongst the population and sailors of Kronstadt, mentions no such anarchist role in his pamphlet devoted to the 1921 uprising (3), written immediately after the events. We must consider his judgement as fairly conclusive evidence.

At the time of the insurrection the anarchists were already being persecuted all over the country. Isolated libertarians and the few remaining anarchist groupings were undoubtedly 'morally' on the side of the insurgents. This is shown for instance in the following leaflet, addressed to the working class of Petrograd:

"The Kronstadt revolt is a revolution. Day and night you can hear the sound of the cannon. You hesitate to intervene directly against the Government to divert its forces from Kronstadt, although the cause of Kronstadt is your cause... The men of Kronstadt are always in the forefront of rebellion. After the Kronstadt revolt let us see the revolt of Petrograd. And after you, let anarchism prevail."

Four anarchists then in Petrograd (Emma Goldmann, Alexander Berkman, Perkous and Petrovsky) foresaw a bloody outcome to events. On March 5, they sent the following letter to the Petrograd Council for Labour and Defence:

"It Is not only impossible but in fact criminal to keep quiet at the present time. Recent developments compel us anarchists to give our opinion on the present situation. The discontent and ferment in the minds of the workers and sailors are the result of circumstances which deserve serious attention from us. Cold and famine have provoked discontent, while the absence of any possibility of discussion or criticism drive the workers and sailors to seek an outlet to this discontent. The fact that a workers' and peasants' government uses force against workers and sailors is even more important. It will create a reactionary impression in the international labour movement and will therefore harm the cause of the social revolution. Bolshevik comrades, think while there is still time. Don't play with fire. You are about to take a decisive step. We propose the following to you: nominate a commission of six, of which two should be anarchists, to go to Kronstadt to solve the differences peacefully. In the present circumstances this is the most rational way of doing things. It will have an international revolutionary significance."

These anarchists certainly did their duty. But they acted on their own and there is nothing to show that they were or