Kronstadt - split from IBRP

Here's an article published in Kronstadt Izvestia (of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee) #6, march 8 1921, right after the first shots were fired by government led troops. It's an interesting text and deserves attention:

WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR

Carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its emancipation. The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement of the human personality.
The power of police-gendarme monarchism passed into the hands of usurpers, the Communists, who brought to the laborers, instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chamber of the Cheka. With their horrors, they have many times exceeded the gendarme government of the tsarist regime.
Bayonets, bullets and the harsh cries of the oprichniks from the Cheka, there is what the toiler in Soviet Russia gained after many battles and sufferings. The Communist authorities have replaced the hammer and sickle, glorious arms of the laboring state, in fact with the bayonet and prison bars. They have done this for the sake of preserving a calm, unsaddened life for the new bureaucracy of Communist commissars and bureaucrats.
But what is most putrid and criminal of all is the creation by the Communists of a moral cabal. They have laid hand even on the laborers’ internal world, forcing them to think in their way alone.
With the aid of the bureaucratic trade unions, they have tied the workers to their benches, having made labor not a joy, but a new serfdom. To protests by peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and by workers, forced into strikes by the very condition of life, they answer with mass executions, and with such bloodthirstiness that they don’t have to borrow any from the tsarist generals.
Laboring Russia, first to raise the red banner of labor’s liberation, is soaked through with the blood of those tortured for the glory of the Communist dominion. In this sea of the blood, the Communists drown all the great and light voices and slogans of the laboring revolution.
It has become ever more sharply visible, and now is completely apparent, that the R.C.P is not defender of the laborers, as it has presented itself. Rather, the interests of the laboring mass are foreign to it. Having achieved power, it fears only to lose it, and for this end all means are allowable: slander, violence, fraud, murder, and revenge on the families of rebels.
The long patience of the laborers has come to an end.
The country, in battle with oppression and violence, is lit here and there with the glow of uprisings. Worker stoppages have flared up, but the Bolshevist okhranniks*** have not slept, and have taken all measures to avoid and repress the unavoidable 3rd Revolution.
But it has arrived all the same, and is being carried out by the hands of laborers. The Communist generals see clearly that this is the people, convinced of those generals’ betrayal of the ideas of socialism, who have arisen. They shake in their skins, knowing that there is no place for them to hide from the toilers’ anger. All the same, they try, with the help of their oprichniks, to frighten the rebels with prisons, executions and other bestialities. But life itself under the yoke of the Communist dictatorship has become more terrible than death.
The rebellious laboring mass has come to understand that in battle with the Communists, and with the renewed serfdom they have given, there can be no middle ground. It is necessary to carry through to the end. They pretend to make concessions: in Petrograd Province they remove the anti-profiteer roadblock detachments, 10 million in gold is assigned for purchase of produce abroad. But it is necessary to point out that behind this bait is hidden the iron hand of the master. This is the hand of a dictator who desires, having waited out the unrests, to compensate his concessions a hundred-fold.
No, there can be no middle ground. Victory or Death!
This is exemplified by Red Kronstadt, terror of counterrevolutionaries of right and left.
Here a great new revolutionary step has been taken. Here has been raised the banner of a rebellion for liberation from the three year violence and oppression of Communist dominion, which has eclipsed the three-hundred year yoke of monarchism. Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the Third Revolution, which is breaking the last fetters from the laboring masses, and opening a wide new path for socialist creativity. This new revolution stirs the laboring masses of both East and West, being an example of the new socialist construction, opposed to the bureaucratic Communist “creativity.” It convinces the laboring masses abroad, by the testimony of their own eyes, that everything created here until now by the will of workers and peasants was not socialism.
Without a single shot, without a drop of blood, the first step has been completed. The laborers do not need blood. They spill it only in moments of self defense. We have enough restraint, despite all the disgraceful acts of the Communists, to not be limited by their isolation from the life of society. We do this in order that they would not obstruct the revolutionary work with false and spiteful agitation.
The workers and peasants advance unstoppably, leaving behind themselves both the Uchredilka with its bourgeois structure, and the Communist Party dictatorship with its Cheka and state capitalism, a deadly noose which has snared the neck of the laboring masses, and threatens to strangle them absolutely.
The present Revolution gives the laborers the possibility of having, finally, their own freely elected Soviets, working without any and all violent party pressure, and to reform the bureaucratic trade unions into free organizations of workers, peasants and the laboring intelligentsia. At last, the police stick of the Communist autocracy is broken.

Revolutionary minorities at the turn of the century bore all the hallmarks of a previous period of capitalist development which prepared them only poorly for the changes that were to come.

There were clearly genuine revolutionaries in a variety of organisations from both anarchist and marxist traditions and both played their part as best they could in the Russian Revolution and the later German Revolution. There is little to gain from projecting our current organisations backward into the roles of our predecessors, but we do need, with the benefit of hindsight, to understand the extent to which those revolutionary minorites were scarred by their pasts. Sadly it seems that the desperate desire for todays pathetically small revolutionary groups, to maintain a largely fictitious continuity with the groups from that era and beyond often gets in the way of that exercise.

Certainly it is the case that the Bolsheviks for instance, did not break as decisively as some claim from the weaknesses of the Social Democratic tradition from which they emmerged. It is hardly the case that the failure of the Russian Revolution was a result of purely external influences, important though they were.

Since this thread started with Kronstadt I would recomend the old 'Wildcat' No 15 article 'The Hunt for Red October' as a counterweight to some of both the Left Communist and Anarchist arguments around this issue.

Interested in this question... are you saying if 'internal' influences were different, the Russian Revolution could have succeeded?

Or have I misunderstood?

Anyone else, please feel free to intervene in support/opposition...

Oliver Twister is probaly right here - my shorthand was a bit sloppy. But the impications, and subsequent impact on the development of revolutionary politics might haver been a good deal more positive had there been a clearer and earlier break with the Social Democracy. The fact that these issues are still trawled over so much is, in part, a reflection of the harm caused by the particular turn taken by the unfortunate co-incidence of external force and Social Democratic weaknesses amongst both the 'revolutionary' and 'reformist' wings of that movement.

Of course all this is just idle speculation. The important point is simply not to reproduce today the political weaknesses of past revolutionary organisations even when at the height of their influence.