Spartacist English edition No. 59 Spring 2006
Russian Archives Refute Anarchist Lies, Again
Kronstadt 1921: Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution
In March 1921, the garrison of the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt, gateway to revolutionary Petrograd, revolted against the Bolshevik government. The mutineers held Kronstadt for two weeks, until the Soviet regime finally retook it by a direct assault across the ice, at a cost of many lives on both sides. The rebels claimed to be fighting to restore a purified Soviet power freed from the monopoly of the Communists. The Bolsheviks charged that the revolt was a counterrevolutionary mutiny: whatever the sailors’ intentions, it could only aid the forces of capitalist restoration—ranging from avowed democrats to outright monarchists—united behind the White standard of clerical/tsarist reaction. Though militarily repulsed by the Soviet Red Army after nearly three years of civil war, the White Guards and their imperialist patrons remained intent on reversing the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917 and crushing the young Soviet workers state.
Nearly 73 years later, on 10 January 1994, self-selected White Guard heir Boris Yeltsin, president of a now-capitalist Russia, placed his double-headed-eagle seal of approval on the Kronstadt revolt (see “Kronstadt and Counterrevolution: Then and Now,” Workers Vanguard No. 595, 4 March 1994). The fact that Yeltsin, who had led the 1991-92 overturn of the Bolshevik Revolution, “rehabilitated” the Kronstadt mutineers simply confirmed once again whose class interests were served by the 1921 uprising. The Kronstadt mutiny is the center of a great myth, assiduously propagated by anarchists but seized upon by a whole array of anti-revolutionary forces ranging from social democrats to tsarist restorationists. The principal aim of the “hue and cry over Kronstadt” has always been to discredit the Marxists’ struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and in particular to smear Trotskyism, the contemporary embodiment of authentic Leninism.
According to anarchist myth, Kronstadt was the “third toilers’ revolution”—a continuation of the February and October revolutions of 1917—its suppression proof positive of the anti-working-class character of the Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, and of Marxism in general. To wield Kronstadt as an ideological club against Leninism, the anarchists have to insist, against all known facts, that the mutineers of 1921 were the same sailors who had played a vanguard role in 1917 and that they were not linked to the White reactionaries. Yeltsin unwittingly helped drive a nail in the coffin of the Kronstadt myth when, in blessing the mutineers, he also opened the archives for study of the mutiny. This led to the 1999 publication of a huge collection of Russian historical materials by ROSSPEN, the main publishing house associated with the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. The documents in Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda, dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (The 1921 Kronstadt Tragedy, Documents in Two Volumes) (Moscow: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 1999) confirm beyond doubt the counterrevolutionary nature of the Kronstadt rising.
Lenin and Trotsky Told the Truth
Right from the start, the anarchists made common cause with open counterrevolutionaries over Kronstadt. Prominent American anarchist Alexander Berkman’s 1922 pamphlet, The Kronstadt Rebellion, was based largely on a spurious 1921 account entitled The Truth About Kronstadt published by the Social Revolutionaries (SR), bitter opponents of the October Revolution. In 1938, the Kronstadt lie machine was rolled out again—in the form of Ida Mett’s The Kronstadt Commune—this time in an effort to deflect Trotsky’s devastating critique of the role of the CNT anarchist union leaders (in league with the Stalinists) in derailing the Spanish workers revolution. (For more on the Spanish Revolution, see Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain [New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1938].) Shortly before his death in 1945, Voline (V. M. Eichenbaum), a leading Russian anarchist in 1917-21, added his authority to the anti-Bolshevik frame-up with an indictment that relied on the mutineers’ own lying proclamations (Voline, The Unknown Revolution [Kronstadt 1921 Ukraine 1918-21] [New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1955]). Today, a resurgent anarchist trend again seizes on alleged atrocities by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in Kronstadt to inflame anti-communist prejudices among young activists in the post-Soviet era.
Right from the start, Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik spokesmen pointed out that the uprising had been embraced with alacrity and even publicly forecast by the counterrevolution in exile; that former tsarist officers in the Kronstadt garrison like General A. N. Kozlovsky figured prominently in the mutiny; that the Kronstadt sailors of 1921 were no longer the “pride and glory” of the workers revolution, as Trotsky had called them in 1917, but a relatively privileged and demoralized layer tied to the peasant villages. In 1938, as he exposed the perfidy of the anarchist misleaders in Spain, Trotsky also shot down the recycled Kronstadt slanders, writing “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt” and “More on the Suppression of Kronstadt.” He wrote scathingly:
“The Spanish government of the ‘People’s Front’ stifles the socialist revolution and shoots revolutionists. The Anarchists participate in this government, or, when they are driven out, continue to support the executioners. And their foreign allies and lawyers occupy themselves meanwhile with a defense...of the Kronstadt mutiny against the harsh Bolsheviks. What a travesty!”
—“Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” 15 January 1938
Trotsky also urged his supporters to undertake a more detailed work. The result was “The Truth About Kronstadt” by John G. Wright of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), first published in the SWP’s New International (February 1938) and then in a longer version in an educational bulletin in 1939. Marshaling the historical evidence then available, including the testimony of “the very people who engineered and led and attempted to extend the mutiny,” Wright methodically demonstrated how the Whites supported the uprising and how the sailors were politically driven by their petty-bourgeois class interests and manipulated by the forces of open counterrevolution. (The longer version of Wright’s article can be found in the collection Kronstadt by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky [New York: Pathfinder, 1979].)
Every serious piece of historical research since has vindicated the Bolsheviks. Notably, this includes pro-anarchist historian Paul Avrich’s Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In our review, we recommended the book as the work of a conscientious researcher, who was compelled to conclude that he could “sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them” (“Anarcho-Libertarian Myths Exposed: Kronstadt and Counterrevolution,” WV Nos. 195 and 203, 3 March and 28 April 1978).
Avrich’s research showed that the principal leader of the revolt, a seaman named Stepan Petrichenko, had earlier attempted to join the Whites, then helped turn a mass protest meeting into a decisive break with the Bolshevik government. After the uprising, Petrichenko fled to Finland, which was under the iron rule of former tsarist general and White Guard butcher Baron Mannerheim. Petrichenko openly joined forces with the émigré White Guards concentrated there and endorsed plans for a “temporary military dictatorship” to replace Bolshevik rule. Avrich also discovered a White Guard “Memorandum on the Question of Organizing an Uprising in Kronstadt” that detailed the military and political situation inside the fortress and spoke of having recruited a group of Kronstadt sailors who were preparing to take an active role in a forthcoming uprising there. Nonetheless, Avrich asserted that there was no evidence of links between the Whites and the sailors before the revolt and echoed the common refrain that had the revolt been planned, it would have been launched a few weeks later, after the ice melted and made a Bolshevik ground assault impossible.
The documents assembled in Kronstadt Tragedy definitively put these objections to rest. The collection contains 829 original documents (with an additional 276, in whole or excerpted, in the footnotes), most never before published. These include firsthand accounts by participants in the uprising, among them mutinous sailors and visiting White Guard emissaries, and secret White reports; memoirs and articles by some of the 8,000 mutineers who fled to Finland after the Bolsheviks retook Kronstadt; and records of interrogation of arrested mutineers by the Soviet Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Contemporary Soviet accounts include Baltic Fleet commissar Nikolai Kuzmin’s 25 March 1921 report to the Petrograd Soviet and the first official report on the Cheka investigation, by Special Commissioner Yakov S. Agranov, submitted on 5 April 1921. It is particularly valuable now to be able to see how extensively the accounts of the mutineers who escaped coincide as to the facts with those who confessed while in Soviet hands.
An extensive introduction by Russian historian Yuri Shchetinov, who has done earlier research on Kronstadt, is quite useful, pointing to disputed questions and summarizing relevant archival findings. The documents were culled from a range of Soviet, White Guard, imperialist, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary and anarchist sources and compiled by researchers from nine Russian archives, including the Russian State Military Archive, the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History and the Central Archive of the Federal Security Services (FSB), the political police. The chief researcher for the collection, I. I. Kudryavtsev, helped prepare materials from the FSB archive and was responsible for the footnotes, indices and bibliography. The name index entry for Trotsky claims he was a “member of French Masonic Lodge, expelled apparently in 1916.” This ludicrous libel, reflective of a counterrevolutionary hatred of the Bolshevik leader, flies in the face of Trotsky’s struggle to root out the pernicious influence of Freemasonry in the young French Communist Party, a historic problem in the French workers movement.
A new book by French historian Jean-Jacques Marie, of Pierre Lambert’s Parti des Travailleurs (PT), seizes on this libel to impugn the collection as a whole, asserting that the “compilation is endowed with an abundant body of footnotes, which bears the imprint of the political police, the FSB (the former KGB), and is marked by an obsession, rampant among the Russian nationalists, with a supposed Masonic plot” (Jean-Jacques Marie, Cronstadt [Paris: Fayard, 2005]). Yet Marie relies on this compilation for the bulk of his own citations! While the FSB is steeped in Great Russian chauvinism, the libel of Trotsky in Kronstadt Tragedy is singular and is not representative of the collection’s editorial work. Marie’s inordinate concern over a non-existent Masonic obsession in Kronstadt Tragedy says more about the Lambertist PT, whose connections with Freemasonry have long been an open secret on the French left. Among these are the close ties between Lambert, long an official in the Force Ouvrière (FO) trade-union federation, and former FO leader Marc Blondel, an open Mason.
For their part, various anarchist Web sites and ’zines, confronted with the mass of new evidence in Kronstadt Tragedy, have turned to a secondhand commentary by Hebrew University academic Israel Getzler (“The Communist Leaders’ Role in the Kronstadt Tragedy of 1921 in the Light of Recently Published Archival Documents,” Revolutionary Russia, June 2002). Getzler elevates the Agranov report to “pride of place,” though it was rushed out only days after the mutiny and without access to any of the ringleaders nor to many of the documents in the present compilation. Getzler then extracts from this initial report one isolated passage in order to claim that Agranov found “that the sailors’ protest was ‘entirely spontaneous’” and that his “findings flatly contradict the official line.” This is sophistry, not scholarship! The Bolsheviks’ “official line” was not that Kronstadt was a White Guard/imperialist conspiracy from start to finish and top to bottom, but rather that it served the interests of and was fully embraced by the counterrevolution. Even the brief passage Getzler cites from Agranov corroborates this, asserting that “the uprising took on a systematic character and was led by the experienced hand of the old generals” (Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy [our translation]).
In fact, as we shall see, the many documents in Kronstadt Tragedy studiously ignored by Getzler do indeed show that, far from being “entirely spontaneous,” there was a counterrevolutionary conspiracy at the heart of the Kronstadt “toilers’ revolution.” They flesh out, in unambiguous detail, the scale and scope of organized White Guard activity in and around Kronstadt, meshing with the anonymous memorandum uncovered by Avrich. Indeed, one of the newly published documents is by the prominent White agent believed by Avrich to have authored that memorandum, counterrevolutionary National Center operative G.F. Tseidler, who boasts how right-wing émigrés from Finland (cloaked as a Red Cross delegation) were welcomed to Kronstadt by Petrichenko and other mutiny leaders. Another report, by a leading White agent resident in Finland, General G.E. Elvengren, not only credits a White Guard organization in Kronstadt with fomenting the uprising but explains why it was launched earlier than planned. Of particular interest in demonstrating a hidden hand behind the uprising are the numerous firsthand accounts that testify to the systematic deception employed by Petrichenko and his allies in order to bring a section of the garrison out with them.
In preparing this article, we also studied a number of other Russian-language materials, including both primary and secondary sources. Among these is a series of articles on the Kronstadt mutiny published throughout 1930-31 in the Leningrad historical journal Krasnaia Letopis’, including an analysis by Soviet historian A.S. Pukhov of how the social composition of the Kronstadt garrison changed between 1917 and 1921. We also consulted with Yuri Shchetinov, who wrote the introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy, and obtained from him excerpts of his earlier book, Kronshtadt, mart 1921 g. (Kronstadt, March 1921), whose publication was halted in 1992 after Yeltsin took the reins of power. All translations from Kronstadt Tragedy and other Russian-language sources are ours.
The Class Character of the Kronstadt Mutiny
In “The Truth About Kronstadt,” Trotskyist John G. Wright punctured the anarchist fairy tale that the Kronstadt rebels were just a mass of undifferentiated toilers fighting selflessly for the ideal of “free soviets.” This notion obscures the distinct—and, at times, opposed—class forces operating. Rejecting a materialist class understanding, anarchists divide the world into powerful and powerless, rich and poor, lumping the peasant small-property holder and the urban factory worker together into a classless “people.” But the peasant is not inherently collectivist and anti-capitalist; rather he is essentially a primitive small businessman who wants low prices on the things he buys and high prices on the things he sells. As Wright observed:
“The supposition that soldiers and sailors could venture upon an insurrection under an abstract political slogan of ‘free soviets’ is absurd in itself.... These people could have been moved to an insurrection only by profound economic needs and interests. These were the needs and interests of the fathers and brothers of these sailors and soldiers, that is, of peasants as traders in food products and raw materials. In other words the mutiny was the expression of the petty bourgeoisie’s reaction against the difficulties and privations imposed by the proletarian revolution.”
— Wright, “The Truth About Kronstadt”
The workers revolution in Russia took place in a backward, overwhelmingly peasant country, creating, in Trotsky’s words, a dictatorship of the proletariat resting on the poor peasantry. The long-term existence of Soviet Russia could only be assured through the spread of socialist revolution to the advanced industrial powers of West Europe and the rest of the world. In the meantime, the support or neutrality of the peasant masses was key to safeguarding the revolution. This meant winning over the poorer peasants with consumer goods, tractors and other manufactured products, ultimately laying the basis for a rural proletariat based on large-scale, collectivized farming.
But in the winter of 1920-21, Soviet Russia lay in ruins after seven years of imperialist war and civil war. The armies of 14 capitalist states had invaded revolutionary Russia. These provided assistance to capitalist-restorationist armies led by former tsarist military commanders Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel, Yudenich and others, who ravaged the country and systematically massacred Jews and Communists, as well as militant workers and recalcitrant peasants. Industry and transport were paralyzed and major cities depopulated, as the starving foraged for food. In the countryside, famine and pestilence on a scale not seen in centuries had driven the villages to the point of cannibalism. All this was exacerbated by an imperialist economic blockade. The policies the Bolsheviks improvised to cope with these calamities were dubbed “War Communism.” At their core was seizure of grain from the peasantry in order to feed the cities and provision the Red Army. Throughout the Civil War, the mass of the peasantry accepted this as a lesser evil than the return of the White gentry.
By the fall of 1920, the main White and imperialist forces had finally been routed. But White troops still occupied the shores of the Black Sea near Georgia; the Japanese army remained in Russia’s Far East until the end of 1922, and Wrangel still commanded up to 80,000 men under arms in Turkey. Then peasant resentment exploded. Shchetinov notes, “Towards the end of 1920 and the beginning of 1921, armed uprisings flared up in the Tambov and Voronezh gubernias, in the Central Volga region, in the Don Basin, the Kuban, and in Western Siberia. Anti-Bolshevik rebels numbered at that time over 200,000” (Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy). These included some among the more than two million soldiers who had been demobilized from the Red Army with the end of the Civil War. In the Ukraine a substantial peasant partisan army, gathered around the anarchist adventurer Nestor Makhno, was now in revolt against Soviet power. As Trotsky observed:
“Only an entirely superficial person can see in Makhno’s bands or in the Kronstadt revolt a struggle between the abstract principles of Anarchism and ‘state socialism.’ Actually these movements were convulsions of the peasant petty bourgeoisie which desired, of course, to liberate itself from capital but which at the same time did not consent to subordinate itself to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie does not know concretely what it wants, and by virtue of its position cannot know.”
— “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt”
These peasant stirrings and revolts provided fertile soil for organized counterrevolutionary agitation and conspiracies.
These conditions directly influenced developments in Kronstadt. While the tsarist army had been overwhelmingly peasant in composition, the Baltic Fleet—with its reliance on engineering and technical skills—had a slim working-class majority in 1917. But as the most class-conscious fighters went off to the front lines of the Civil War or to take over administrative and command positions in the apparatus of the new workers state, they were replaced by more backward and more heavily peasant layers—including, by 1920-21, a sizable number of peasant recruits from the rebellious parts of the Ukraine.
Another factor affecting Kronstadt was the deep division within the Communist Party over where to go from “War Communism” and how to reinvigorate the smychka, the alliance of the peasantry with the workers state. In the months before the mutiny, a sharp dispute broke out pitting Trotsky against Lenin in the so-called “trade-union debate.” Seizing on Trotsky’s wrong-headedness, Zinoviev mobilized his own base in the Petrograd-Kronstadt area against Trotsky, whom he saw as a rival within the party leadership. Zinoviev opened the floodgates of the Kronstadt party organization to backward recruits while encouraging a poisonous atmosphere in the inner-party dispute. The rot in the Kronstadt Communist Party organization was a critical factor in allowing the mutiny to proceed, as Agranov noted in his Cheka report.
Kronstadt Erupts
The Kronstadt revolt began in the wake of workers’ protests that started in Petrograd on February 20 when a fuel crisis forced the closure of major factories. Through a combination of concessions to the workers and arrests of key Menshevik agitators, the government quickly quelled the protests without any bloodshed. But rumors of workers being shot and factories bombarded nonetheless made their way to Kronstadt on February 25.
Delegations of sailors from the warships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol went to Petrograd and saw that these rumors were false. When they returned to Kronstadt on February 27, they did not, however, dispel the lies. Instead, fresh lies were heaped on—including that thousands of sailors in Petrograd had been arrested. Arms were distributed to the Kronstadt sailors. Shipboard meetings on February 28 were quickly followed by a March 1 mass meeting in Kronstadt’s Anchor Square, which adopted a program of demands, and a delegated meeting on March 2 to discuss new elections to the local soviet. Communist speakers at these meetings were cut off.
Baltic Fleet commissar Kuzmin and two other Communist leaders were arrested at the March 2 meeting—supposedly to ensure “true freedom” for the elections! When the delegates balked at a proposal to arrest all other Communists at the meeting, this was met with a dramatic—and utterly baseless—announcement that armed Communist detachments were about to surround the hall and arrest all the participants. What ensued is vividly described in a Communist eyewitness account quoted by Shchetinov:
“In the panicked commotion a vote on something was rushed through. A few minutes later the chair of the meeting, Petrichenko, quieting down the meeting, announced that ‘The Revolutionary Committee, formed of the presidium and elected by you, declares: “All Communists present are to be seized and not to be released until the situation is clarified”.’ In two, three minutes, all Communists present were seized by armed sailors.”
— quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy
In fact, the “Provisional Revolutionary Committee” (PRC) had already “elected” itself and sent messages to the various Kronstadt posts the night before, declaring: “In view of the situation in Kronstadt at this time, the Communist Party is removed from power. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is in charge. We ask that non-party comrades take control into their hands” (“To All Posts of Kronstadt,” 2 March 1921, 1:35 a.m.; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Here was an early taste of “free soviets,” anarchist-style!
Once the mutiny was under way, over 300 Communists were imprisoned; hundreds more fled. Agranov pointed out:
“The repression carried out by the PRC against those Communists who remained faithful to the communist revolution fully refutes the supposedly peaceful intentions of the rebels. Virtually all the minutes of the PRC sessions indicate that the struggle against the Communists still at large, and against those still in prison, remained an unrelenting focus of their attention. At the last phase, they even resorted to threats of field courts martial, in spite of their declared repeal of the death penalty.”
— Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium, 5 April 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy
It was the commandant of the prison, none other than an anarchist named Stanislav Shustov, who proposed shooting the leading Communists. In his report to the 25 March 1921 session of the Petrograd Soviet, fleet commissar Kuzmin described how the threat of mass executions was nearly carried out. Early on the morning of March 18, Shustov set up a machine gun outside the cell, which contained 23 prisoners. He was prevented from slaughtering the Communists only by the advance of the Red Army across the ice.
A Program of Counterrevolution
As Lenin noted, “There was very little that was clear, definite and fully shaped” about the Kronstadt demands (“The Tax in Kind,” 21 April 1921). They included new elections to the soviets; no restrictions on the anarchist and left socialist parties; no controls on trade-union or peasant organizations; freeing Menshevik and SR prisoners and those arrested in recent rural and urban unrest; equalization of rations; and pivotally, the demand to “grant the peasants full freedom of action on all land as they wish, and the right to own cattle, which they should tend to themselves, i.e., without the use of hired labour” (March 1 Resolution; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Had this petty-bourgeois program of unrestricted trade and opposition to any economic planning actually been carried out, it would have rapidly generated a new capitalist class from among the most successful peasants, artisans and enterprise managers and opened the door to a return of the old capitalists and the imperialists.
The program was carefully crafted with the peasant prejudices of the sailors in mind. The mutineers demanded the abolition of the political departments and Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and of Communist patrols in the factories. The call for “all power to the soviets and not the parties” was simply petty-bourgeois demagogy designed to swindle the masses of sailors into supporting counterrevolution. In practice, it meant “Down with the Communists!” The more far-sighted adherents of counterrevolution understood that if the Communists were driven from power, whatever the slogans, it would be a short step to restoring capitalist rule. In the pages of his Paris-based newspaper, Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) leader Pavel Miliukov counseled his fellow reactionaries to accept the call, “Down with the Bolsheviks! Long live the Soviets!” As this would likely mean only a temporary passing of power to “the moderate Socialists,” argued the shrewd bourgeois Miliukov, “not only the Monarchists but other candidates for power living abroad have no rhyme or reason for being in a hurry” (Poslednie Novosti, 11 March 1921; quoted in Wright, “The Truth About Kronstadt”).
What could the demand for “free soviets” mean in the context of Soviet Russia in 1921? Many of the most advanced workers had fought in the Red Army and perished or been drafted into important administrative posts. With the factories decimated and deprived of their best elements, the soviets atrophied. The regime of workers democracy was preserved by the layer of cadre in the Communist Party.
The revolutionary-minded elements of all the socialist and anarchist tendencies had gone over to the Bolsheviks, either individually or in regroupments. In 1917, the anarchists had briefly enjoyed some influence among the more volatile elements of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison because of their militant posture against the capitalist Provisional Government. After the October Revolution, the best of the anarcho-syndicalists, like Bill Shatov, a Russian American who had been a prominent Wobbly in the U.S., sided with the Bolsheviks in defense of the workers revolution. Those who didn’t turned to criminality and terror against the workers state, from staging armed robberies to bombing Moscow Communist Party headquarters in 1919. The “socialist” parties that had joined the Provisional Government, the Mensheviks and Right SRs, were by 1921 empty shells and lackeys of counterrevolution. The Left SRs, after briefly serving in the Soviet government, joined in 1918 in underground terror against the workers state. The Mensheviks’ posture of abiding by Soviet legality was dropped at every chance of a capitalist overthrow of the Soviet republic.
In Petrograd the remnants of the SRs, Mensheviks and various anarchists banded together in an “Assembly of Plenipotentiaries of the Factories and Shops of Petrograd.” This shadowy, unelected bloc collaborated with the newly formed monarchist Petrograd Combat Organization (PCO), as the PCO itself asserted (PCO Report to Helsinki Department of National Center, no earlier than 28 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). The PCO even printed the Mensheviks’ leaflets! On March 14, the Assembly issued a leaflet in solidarity with Kronstadt that said not one word about socialism or soviets, but instead called for an uprising against “the bloody communist regime” in the name of “all power to the people” (“Appeal to All Citizens, Workers, Red Army Soldiers and Sailors,” 14 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).
Despite lies spun by the press of the mutineers claiming mass uprisings in Petrograd and Moscow, even Menshevik leader Fyodor Dan admitted in a 1922 book that “There were no plenipotentiaries” and that “the Kronstadt mutiny was not supported by the Petersburg workers in any way” (quoted in “The Mensheviks in the Kronstadt Mutiny,” Krasnaia Letopis’, 1931, No. 2). “The workers immediately felt that the Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite side of the barricades—and they supported the Soviet power,” explained Trotsky (“Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” 15 January 1938). It is noteworthy that even the wing of the Communist Party that most zealously sought to champion the immediate economic interests of the workers, the semi-syndicalist Workers Opposition, participated in the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising.
Duplicity and Deception
The Agranov report noted that “all participants of the mutiny carefully hid their party physiognomy under the flag of being non-party” (Agranov, Report to Cheka Presidium). The mutiny leaders skillfully felt their way. For example, PRC chief Petrichenko pulled back after his proposed call to enfranchise all socialist parties was met with an angry rebuff from sailors at a March 1 meeting preceding the Anchor Square rally. According to Kuzmin, the crowd shouted at Petrichenko: “That’s freedom for the right SRs and Mensheviks! No! No way!… We know all about their Constituent Assemblies! We don’t need that!” (Kuzmin Report, Stenographic Report of Petrograd Soviet, 25 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). Petrichenko’s duplicity in calling for “free soviets” was already demonstrated in Avrich’s Kronstadt 1921. Other PRC members were also opponents of soviet power: two were Mensheviks; a third was a member of the bourgeois Kadets, while the chief editor of the rebels’ newspaper, Izvestia of the PRC, Sergei Putilin had been a long-time Kadet supporter. One of the Mensheviks, Vladislav Valk, openly advocated the Constituent Assembly, i.e., a bourgeois parliament. The Kadet on the PRC, Ivan Oreshin, captured the cynicism with which the leaders manipulated the sailors. Writing in an émigré newspaper shortly after the mutiny, he commented:
“The Kronstadt uprising broke out under the pretext of replacing the old Soviet, whose mandate had run out, with a new one based on secret balloting. The question of universal suffrage, extending the vote also to the bourgeoisie, was carefully avoided by the orators at the [March 1] demonstration. They did not want to evoke opposition among the insurgents themselves that the Bolsheviks could make use of.... They did not speak of the Constituent Assembly, but the assumption was that it could be arrived at gradually, via freely elected soviets.”
Oreshin, Volia Rossii (April-May 1921); quoted in Shchetinov, Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy
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