103-106. The experience of the Russian soviets during the period of Menshevik and SR domination and, even more clearly, the experience of the German and Austrian soviets under the domination of the Social Democrats, proved this. 2756 In 1921, during the Russian Civil War, Leon Trotsky was head of the Red Army when it crushed a sailors rebellion in Kronstadt. All the necessary preparations toward this end were already being made. Proofread: Einde O'Callaghan (April 2015). The sailors saw themselves as loyal to the Soviet cause, if not to the Communist rulers. When for the first time in the press I briefly answered the questions of Wendelin Thomas, member of the New York Commission of Inquiry, the Russian Mensheviks paper immediately came to the defense of the Kronstadt sailors and of Wendelin Thomas. Their stated goal was to give all power to the Soviets and not to parties.. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements the animals that we call men will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldier between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.. Popular unrest finally grew into strikes, which led to riots, lockouts, arrests. During the stormy years 1905-1906 several mutinies broke out on Kronstadt. By March 17th the Red Army under his command took control of Krondstadt. But in reality they are its perfidious enemies. Some leaders of the uprising came from among these elements. Simply because it had been guilty of a political error, should the proletarian revolution really have committed suicide to punish itself? . Some left with General Wrangel through the Far East; others left to escape the ravages of the war, or because they had supported one of the defeated sides. After the end of the civil war the policy of War Communism was replaced with the New Economic Policy. Besides these there were many thousands of Latvian workers, mainly former farm laborers, who showed unexampled heroism on all fronts of the civil war. A number of them were part of the Bolshevik movement which took the cruiser Aurora and steamed up the River Nevas in Petrograd where they proceeded to lay siege to the Winter Palace. What remained was the grey mass with big pretensions, but without political education and unprepared for revolutionary sacrifice. The rebellion broke out during the discussion on the so-called "trade union" question. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution. Although Red Army units suppressed the uprising, the general dissatisfaction with the state of affairs could not have been more forcefully expressed. Peasants refused to co-operate in producing food, as the government took away far too much of it. Toggle navigation. With Lenin he succeeded in that goal, wiping out the ruling Romanov family and bringing into being the Soviet Union. We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups. They speculate in cloth, coal, and bread. As yet, the Stalinists cannot openly join this campaign around Kronstadt but even they, of course, rub their hands with pleasure; for the blows are directed against Trotskyism, against revolutionary Marxism, against the Fourth International! Like the Petrograd workers, the Kronstadt sailors demanded the equalization of wages and the end of roadblock detachments which restricted both travel and the ability of workers to bring food into the city. There were no Mensheviks at all in Kronstadt. The present disputes around Kronstadt revolve around the same class axis as the Kronstadt uprising itself, in which the reactionary sections of the sailors tried to overthrow the proletarian dictatorship. Trotsky proved to be an outstanding military leader, as he led the army of 3 million to victory. Kronstadt was (and is) a naval fortress on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all, The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and. Moscow. IV No. Under the pressure of need and deprivation, the workers themselves were episodically divided into hostile camps, depending upon stronger or weaker ties with the village. This memorandum was written between January and early February of 1921 by an agent of the National Centre in Finland.[5]. Liberalization of the economy was not matched by liberalization in the political sphere. [13]) Official Soviet figures claim approximately 1000 rebels were killed, 2000 wounded, 2500 captured, and 8000 defected to Finland, while the Red Army lost 527 killed and 3285 wounded. His parents, David and Anna Bronstein, were prosperous Jewish farmers. Most puerile of all is the argument that there was no uprising, that the sailors had made no threats, that they only seized the fortress and the battleships. In this sense I carry full and complete responsibility for the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. This incident also prompted Lenin to bring an end to his policy of War Communism and bring forth his New Economic Policy, as he realized that the martial law the Bolsheviks were enforcing would inevitably lead to a revolution against them. Other commentators, such as the historian Richard Pipes, have argued that War communism was actually an attempt to immediately implement communist economics and that the Bolshevik leaders expected an immediate and large scale increase in economic output. The assembly adopted the resolutions unanimously, and elected a Revolutionary Committee chaired by Petrichenko. Lenin criticized Trotsky, accusing him of harassing the unions and abandoning his support for the proletariat. Trotsky at the time referred to these sailors as the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution.. The previous month, Lenin had appointed Stalin to the new post of Central Committee General Secretary. All 16 were found guilty and executed. Kronstadt (Russian: , romanized: Kronshtadt, IPA: [krntat]) is a Russian port city in Kronshtadtsky District of the federal city of Saint Petersburg, located on Kotlin Island, 30 km (19 mi) west of Saint Petersburg, near the head of the Gulf of Finland.It is linked to the former Russian capital by a combination levee-causeway-seagate, the St Petersburg Dam, part of . As a result, a series of workers' strikes and peasants' rebellions, such as the Tambov rebellion rolled over the country. They considered it their duty to extinguish the fire as soon as it started, thereby reducing to a minimum the number of victims. The rebels, moreover, allowed Kalinin [a leading Communist] to return to Petrograd, though he would have made a valuable hostage. During the Soviet period the bourgeoisie has appeared principally in the guise of kulaks (i.e., the top stratum of the petty bourgeoisie), the socialist intelligentsia, and now in the form of the Communist bureaucracy. However, a third stroke virtually silenced Lenin and Stalin was free to completely push Trotsky out of power. Whether correct or not, in any case it was precisely these considerations which determined my attitude. They based themselves on the peasant part of the fleet and of the shore garrison. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Without this, criticism is reduced to sentimental lamentation of the pacifist kind in the spirit of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and their latest imitators. The rebellion served notice to Lenin that the level of discontent in the country was rising, as the Kronstadt sailors had been loyal to the regime. Underground organizers sent by the SRs and the White officers tried to link the military uprising with the movement of the discontented workers. Kronstadt Uprising Sections Primary Sources Student Activities References The sailors at the Kronstadt naval base had long been a source of radical dissent. Demoralization based on hunger and speculation had in general greatly increased by the end of the civil war. That is why it so readily covered the confusion of its demands and hopes, now with the Anarchist banner, now with the populist, now simply with the Green. Counterposing itself to the proletariat, it tried, flying all these banners, to turn the wheel of the revolution backwards. The commanding personnel of the fleet was isolated and terrified. Zinovievs resolution received, probably, 90% of the votes. Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies. They were discontented and confused but they saw no way out. He was exiled and later assassinated by Soviet agents. [Avrich, 212-123][6], The Petrograd workers were under martial law and could offer little support to Kronstadt. Though not a significant post at the time, it gave Stalin control over all party-member appointments. One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago, but only yesterday. With private industry and trade proscribed and the newly-constructed state unable to adequately perform these functions, much of the Russian economy ground to a standstill. It does not occur to him that one might detest the savage in the Kremlin and his cruel regime and yet not exonerate Leon Trotsky from the crime against the sailors of Kronstadt. Kronstadt sailors, these purest of the pure. In February, he wrote a testament expressing his final thoughts for posterity and forcibly denied Stalin's accusations. It was not like the sugar-sweet idealizations after the event. However by 1921 Russia was fighting a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and the White Army opposition. Only some 137 sailors or 6.8 percent were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution. Production of cotton, for example, fell to 5 percent, and iron to 2 percent, of the prewar level. It also details plans regarding White army and French government support for the Kronstadt sailors' March rebellion. Kronstadt differed from a long series of other petty-bourgeois movements and uprisings only by its greater external effect. 750 to 1,486 sentenced to a five year forced labor. Whether there were any needless victims I do not know. He waged Russia's 1917 revolution alongside .css-47aoac{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;text-decoration-color:inherit;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:#A00000;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-47aoac:hover{color:#595959;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;}Vladimir Lenin. In January 1907, Trotsky escaped prison and traveled to Europe, where he spent 10 years in exile in various cities, including Vienna, Zurich, Paris and New York, spending much of the time writing for Russian revolutionary journals, including Pravda, and advocating an anti-war policy. If, for example, we began to take as pure gold the innumerable proclamations of Negrin, Companys, Garcia Oliver, and Company, we would have to recognize these gentlemen as fervent friends of socialism. During the years of the revolution we clashed not a few times with the Cossacks, the peasants, even with certain layers of workers (certain groups of workers from the Urals organized a volunteer regiment in the army of Kolchak!). It also didn't help that some members of the Soviet leadership, including Lenin, became involved in military strategy, redirecting the Red Army's efforts and countermanding some of Trotsky's orders. The general spirit of the meeting made an extremely unfavorable impression upon me. Tony Cliff, defending Bolshevik policy, states that "the number of industrial workers in Russia, always a minority, fell from 3 million in 1917 to 1,240,000, a decline of 58.7 percent, in 1921-22. That bitter winter saw Kronstadt, like most other cities in Russia, hungry and discontented. It repelled them. During the early years of the Social Democratic Party, there were often disputes among the party's leadership over its form and strategy. The peasants seized and divided the land most often under the leadership of the soldiers and sailors arriving in their home districts. The rebellion was crushed by Red Army troops under Trotsky's command. The Kronstadt SRs quickly went over into opposition to Kerensky and formed one of the shock brigades of the so-called left SRs. The rebellion took place in the first weeks of March, 1921 in Kronstadt, a naval fortress on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland that served as the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and as a guardpost for the approaches to Petrograd, now Saint Petersburg 35 miles away. But even they were identified by a method of negative selection as politically unreliable and of little use for the civil war. Among them were real revolutionists, like Zhuk and Zhelezniakov, but these were the elements most closely linked to the Bolsheviks. Stepan Petrichenko, a leader of the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921, was himself a Ukrainian peasant. By 1922, the pressures of revolution and injuries from an earlier assassination attempt had taken their toll on Lenin. Submitted by Ed on September 8, 2006 The Kronstadt rebellion took place in the first weeks of March, 1921. Idealists and pacifists always accused the revolution of excesses. Already on March 2 the Government issued a prikaz (order) signed by Lenin and Trotsky, which denounced the Kronstadt movement as in mutiny against the Communist authorities. The Bolsheviks, fortunately, belonged to a different school. As commissar of war in the new Soviet government, he helped defeat forces opposed to Bolshevik control. Over the next ten days three bloody assaults were launched against the fortress. For lack of data I cannot undertake to decide now, a posteriori, who should have been punished and how. He quickly consolidated his power and started lining up allies against Trotsky. Many rebels escaped across the ice into Finland; many were killed in the fighting, and many who survived were executed or sent to prison camps. To take documents into consideration does not mean to take them at their face value. Search. Is this not childish prattle? Trotsky tried to reconcile the two factions, resulting in numerous clashes with both groups' leaders. 4 No. He was exiled and later assassinated by Soviet agents. Ramon Mercader, an undercover agent for the Soviet Union's secret police, attacked Trotsky with a mountaineering ice ax, puncturing his skull. Dandified and well-fed sailors, communists in name only, produced the impression of parasites in comparison with the workers and Red Army men of that time. At the moment of the highest peak of the revolution they are of course attenuated, but only to appear later at a new stage in all their sharpness. Rations consisted of only 1000 calories a day. On February 28, in response to the delegates' report of heavy-handed Bolshevik repression of strikes in Petrograd (claims which might have been inaccurate or exaggerated[2]), the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol held an emergency meeting which approved a resolution raising fifteen demands[3]: Of the 15 demands, only two were related to what Marxists term the "petty-bourgeoisie," the reasonably wealthy peasantry and artisans. I do not reject it. It was a rude shock to the Bolsheviks when the red sailors of Kronstadt went into open rebellion in March 1921. The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. But the number of peasant households (not individuals which is many times greater) had risen with the parcelization of land from 16.5 million in early 1918 to over 25 million households by 1920, an increase of some 50 percent. They did not want to recognize either the Reds or the Whites and shunned the city parties. Avrich rejects the idea that the "Memorandum" explains the revolt: Nothing has come to light to show that the Secret Memorandum was ever put into practice or that any links had existed between the emigres and the sailors before the revolt. Wright in the New International (February 1938). The need for supplies would have made the fortress directly dependent upon the foreign bourgeoisie and their agents, the White emigres. His legacy of being the most brilliant intellect of the Communist Revolution and his reputation as a tireless worker, rousing public speaker and decisive administrator was restored. The Social Revolutionaries and the Anarchists, hurrying from Petrograd, adorned the uprising with noble phrases and gestures. Such is the course of the revolution as a whole. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article The Kronstadt Uprising was a 1921 insurrection of Soviet sailors, soldiers and civilians against the Bolshevik government in the Russian port city of Kronstadt. As the Red Army closed in on Kotlin Island, Lenin explained to the tenth party congress: "We must bear in mind that the bourgeoisie is trying to pit the peasants against . When Pavel Vasiliev (chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet) and Nikolai Kuzmin (Political Commissar of the Baltic Fleet) threatened the committee with retribution the next day, they were arrested and imprisoned. As early as the days of the October uprising, detachments of Kronstadt sailors were being sent to help Moscow. The regime of the NEP could only gradually pacify the peasant, and, after him, the discontented sections of the army and the fleet. The political isolation of Kronstadt was the cause of its internal uncertainty and its military defeat. The equalization of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs. But in such conditions the dictatorship would in general be unnecessary. We must recognize social and political differences. The turning point was the Kronstadt rebellion at the naval base in early March, 1921. The reason was of a political nature. The exchange rate of the U.S. dollar, which had been two rubles in 1914, rose to 1,200 in 1920. "[20], Supporters of this view claim that the majority of the sailors in the Baltic Fleet stationed at Kronstadt were recent recruits of peasant origin. The Kronstadt naval base situated on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland was a base for the Russian Baltic Fleet which defended the approaches to Petrograd (the city we now know as St. Petersburg). 4, April 1938, pp. [21] He later acknowledged that many of his fellow mutineers were peasants from the south who were in sympathy with the peasant opposition movement against the Bolsheviks. Those attacking troops were mostly young, and as they moved in to attack they were flanked from behind by Cheka agents armed with machine guns that were ready to kill any one of those soldiers that didnt carry out orders. On forged papers, he changed his name to Leon Trotsky, a moniker he would use the rest of his life. Vicious fighting ensued throughout the city, and by March 18, the revolt was crushed. The characteristics of a party are determined considerably more by its social composition, its past, its relation to different classes and strata, than by its oral and written declarations, especially during a critical moment of civil war. It requires, however, a few trifles: an equal and, moreover, an extremely high, development of the toiling masses. The Kronstadt Soviet, run by loyal Bolsheviks, called a public meeting for 1 March in response to the insurgent demands. While in jail, Trotsky was admitted to the Bolshevik Party and released soon after. In the factories there was dull discontent. But the damage was done, and Trotsky had lost much of his political influence over the dispute. Of course, Makhno called this the Anarchist struggle with the state. In reality, this was a struggle of the infuriated petty property owner against the proletarian dictatorship. in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. Ninety percent of all wages were "paid with goods" (payment in form of goods, rather than money). Many of the Kronstadt sailors originated from peasant families so they despised the privileges the leaders of the Bolshevik Party received. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 75 percent of its population; Moscow lost 50 percent. From different fronts I sent dozens of telegrams about the mobilization of new reliable detachments from among the Petersburg workers and the Baltic sailors. Transcription/HTML Markup: Einde OCallaghan for the Trotsky Internet Archive. Trotsky disagreed and resigned from this post. The overwhelming majority of the sailor communists who supported Zinovievs resolution took part in the rebellion. He disapproved of the provisional government because he felt it was ineffectual. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5 percent are likely to have been drafted into the fleet before 1918. During the 1930s, Stalin conducted political purges and named Trotsky, in absentia, a major conspirator and enemy of the people. War communism aggravated many hardships experienced by the population as a result of the war. .css-m6thd4{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;display:block;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;font-family:Gilroy,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.2;font-weight:bold;color:#323232;text-transform:capitalize;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-m6thd4:hover{color:link-hover;}}Hakeem Jeffries, Hunter Biden and Other Presidential Problem Kids, These Are the Major 2024 Presidential Candidates, Controversial Judge Aileen Cannon Not Out Just Yet, Russia Wants to Arrest Senator Lindsey Graham, Inside Jimmy and Rosalynn Carters 76-Year Love, 10 Wild Things George Santos Has Said and Done, Sen. John Fetterman Wants to Talk About Depression, 6 Key Players in Donald Trumps Indictment. The naval base of Kronstadt lies on Kotlin Island near the head of the Gulf of Finland. The crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk passed a resolution on February 8 1921 demanding election, freedom of speech, rights of assembly and free trade, release of political prisoners, abolishment of political sections within the armed forces, granting of peasant freedom and other rights which were being denied to them by the Bolsheviks. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside. Translated: By The New International. While it was still in progress, the government announced the abolition of grain requisitions, replacing them with a tax in kind. The army's first orders were to neutralize the White Army (Socialist revolutionaries opposed to Bolshevik control) during the Russian Civil War. This social and political characterization of Kronstadt which, if desired, could be substantiated and illustrated by many facts and documents, is already sufficient to illuminate the upheavals which occurred in Kronstadt during the years of the civil war and as a result of which its physiognomy changed beyond recognition. A revolution is possible when the vanguard is able to lead the majority of the proletariat. The rebellion had a startling effect on Lenin, because the Kronstadt sailors had been among the strongest supporters of the Bolsheviks. The play upon the revolutionary authority of Kronstadt is one of the distinguishing features of this truly charlatan campaign. But I was not at all sure in advance of its success. When parlor pinks try to mark out a different route for the October Revolution, after the event, we can only respectfully ask them to show us exactly where and when their great principles were confirmed in practice, at least partially, at least in tendency? Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. And their foreign allies and lawyers occupy themselves meanwhile with a defense of the Kronstadt mutiny against the harsh Bolsheviks. Kronstadt signaled for many a turning point in history when the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came to power preaching empowerment and egalitarianism were utilizing state terror to ensure they stayed in power. The shift in different stages of the revolution, like the transition from revolution to counterrevolution, is directly determined by changing political relations between the minority and the majority, between the vanguard and the class. The experience of the ensuing twelve months was required to convince the party of the need for the new course. [17] Trotsky, however, responded that Goldman's criticisms were mainly perfunctory, and ignored the differing social composition between the pro-Bolshevik Kronstadt Uprising of 1917 and the mainly "petty bourgeois" Kronstadt Uprising of 1921. The decision to suppress the rebellion by military force, if the fortress could not be induced to surrender, first by peace negotiations, then through an ultimatum this general decision was adopted with my direct participation. [18], Defenders of the Bolshevik policy, such as Abbie Bakan of the Socialist Workers Party, UK, have claimed that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same sailors as those who had been revolutionary heroes in 1917. This asserted that the revolt had "undoubtedly been prepared by French counterintelligence" and that the Petropavlovsk resolution was a "SR-Black Hundred" resolution (SR stood for "Social Revolutionaries," a democratic socialist party that had been dominant in the soviets before the return of Lenin, and whose right-wing had refused to support the Bolsheviks; the "Black Hundreds" were a reactionary, indeed proto-fascist, force dating back to before the revolution which attacked Jews, labor militants and radicals, among others). Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries who would lead a large contingent of non-party supporters. Only yesterday I happened across the following lines in a Mexican weekly which is both reactionary Catholic and democratic: Trotsky ordered the shooting of 1,500 (?) Trotsky wanted to wait out the German government, in hopes that it would be defeated by the Allies or suffer internal insurrection. The rebellion served notice to Lenin that the level of discontent in the . Long ago we formulated those lessons of October which have not only a Russian but an international significance. He was clearly positioned as the Soviet Union's number-two man, next to Lenin. Whoever so desires may on this basis reject (in little articles) revolution in general. Before and after the Red Army's victory over the Kronstadt sailors in March of 1921, Lenin and Trotsky's interpretation of events dominated the Soviet and foreign press. Just as the petty bourgeoisie is ground economically between the millstones of big capital and the proletariat, so the peasant partisan detachments were pulverized between the Red Army and the White. Most of the Kronstadt Anarchists represented the city petty bourgeoisie and stood upon a lower revolutionary level than the SRs. "Kapinallisen salaisuus" ("The Secret of a Rebel"), Kronstadtin kapina 1921 ja sen perilliset Suomessa (Kronstadt Rebellion 1921 and Its Descendants in Finland), Kronstadtin kapina 1921 ja sen perilliset Suomessa, Kronstadt 1921 Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution, Ida Mett's pamphlet of the Kronstadt Commune, New York Times archives of the ending of the rebellion, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Kronstadt_rebellion&oldid=1103114, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License, c. first assault: 10,073, second assault: 25,000 to 30,000, c. 1,000 killed in battle and 1,200 to 2,168 executed. Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters. Another million people had fled Russia. 8, August 1938, pp. The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie. He reasoned that this would give officials a tighter control over labor and facilitate a greater integration between government and the proletariat. Firstly, they failed to deliver aid to the rebels nor get French aid to them. In this lies the whole secret. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik government instituted a policy of War Communism. There would be no need either for violent revolution or for the dictatorship which is an inevitable consequence of revolutionary victory. The class struggle produces a vanguard that absorbs the best elements of the class. No one else has even tried to suggest any other lessons. The Spanish revolution is negative confirmation of the lessons of October. And the severe critics are silent or equivocal. The Sailors needed no outside encouragement to raise the banner of insurrection. Indeed, the "Memorandum" states that "one must not forget that even of the French Command and the Russian anti-Bolshevik organisations do not take part in the preparation and direction of the uprising, a revolt in Kronstadt will take place all the same during the coming spring, but after a brief period of success it will be doomed to failure." 4, April 1938, pp. Stalin then set out to assassinate Trotsky. They themselves did not clearly understand that what their fathers and brothers needed first of all was free trade. On the part of the Petrograd committee the campaign was carried on in an extremely demagogic manner. Only because of this change in mood could the Whites partially attract the peasants, and even the half-peasants-half-workers, of the Urals to their side.
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