Kronstadt - Book\Article Recommendations

You must use Paul Avrich's book "Kronstadt 1921." You might want to steal (or borrow from a library) the Monad Press compilation of Lenin and Trotsky's scurrilous scribblings on it, so you can get first hand bullshit straight from the mouths and pens of the butchers themselves.

Bugbear, you may find the following [Lessons of Kronstadt, http://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm) interesting. It analyses these events from the Left Communist.

It is not often I agree with Joe:
Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, Israel Getzler ISBN 0-521-89442-5, Cambridge University Press 2002
Also it might be worth reading through this:
http://punkt.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=111
It is the discussion on it on the old forums. If you are writing something for school, it has the advantage that people have read through the books, and pulled out the best quotes.

Devrim

forgot about the Getzler book, been meaning to get that for ages now.

I quite liked Avrich's book it was fairly balanced goes into some depth but is also well written and not too long. He's one of my favorite writers though so I might be a wee bit biased.

Getzler's book is important for a number of reasons. Most especially is the very concrete, vivid picture he presents of the Kronstadt soviet of 1917. It was structured differently than the main soviets like those in Petrograd and Moscow in that the delegates actually made the decisions. It wasn't top-down, and the delegates were directly controlled by assemblies on the ships and in the workplaces. There was no division between factory committee movement and soviets in Kronstadt, as there was in Petrograd, because the Kronstadt soviet WAS a factory committee movement. The book is very good on explaining the politics of the Maximalists, an anti-parliamentary libertarian socialist group that is often ignored. The Maximalists were the dominant political tendency in Kronstadt at the time of the October 1917 revolution, as Getzler shows, and they worked very closely with the Russian syndicalists. The leading personality of the Maximalists in the 1917 revolution, Anatoly Lamonov, was also the leading articulator of the ideas of the rebellion of March 1921. Getzler also gives factual data to disprove Trotskyist claims that there had been a complete changeover in people in Kronstadt between the October 1917 revolution and the March 1921 rebellion. Soviet records indicate that more than 95% of the crew of the Petropavlovsk, that created the famous 15 point demands, had enrolled in the navy before 1917. They weren't raw peasant recruits, as the Trots have long said.

t..

Aren't they the ones who thought being bourgeois was genetic?

Isn't the argument that that made them stupid, easily led and not proletarianised?