Kronstadt

[Geiseric]

I heard about Kronstadt from some friends, and I looked it up but the info on wiki wasn't so intricate for my tastes. Everything seems to be pretty 1 sided toward the sailors, and I simpithise with them totally, but I decided to ask around revleft what their opinions on it are.

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.

[Aurora]

I heard about Kronstadt from some friends, and I looked it up but the info on wiki wasn't so intricate for my tastes. Everything seems to be pretty 1 sided toward the sailors, and I simpithise with them totally, but I decided to ask around revleft what their opinions on it are.

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.
1) I haven't seen any evidence of that, i think most people who defend the suppression today do so because Kronstadt could have become a weak point where the british fleet could invade, the involvement of the white armies seems to have been exaggerated if not fabricated.
2) iirc Trotsky was in the far east dealing with the last remaining japanese interventionists i think it was Tukhachevsky who was in command of the suppression. Although Trotsky did support the suppression and took full responsibility for it.
3) I don't think they were anarcho-syndicalist infact ive never seen any evidence that they were anarchists at all. The 15 demands they issued can be read on the wikipedia entry, some of them were introduced in the NEP some of them seem feasible and others seem dangerous for the new workers state

[BIG BROTHER]

I heard about Kronstadt from some friends, and I looked it up but the info on wiki wasn't so intricate for my tastes. Everything seems to be pretty 1 sided toward the sailors, and I simpithise with them totally, but I decided to ask around revleft what their opinions on it are.

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.

I don't think there was any infiltration. It had to do more with the scarcity that the civil war brought. This hurt the peasant class the most which the petty-bourgeoisie was quick to bring to its side in this revolt against Soviet Power. Had there been no civil war, there probably wouldn't have been any rebellion as the situation wouldn't have been so dire.

Trotsky was not directly involved with this. However he took full responsibility and supposedly when he got word of this he supported the attack, although it was another Bolshevik the one who actually directed and organized the attack.

The tendencies? well a lot of them were petty-bourgeoisie reactionaries but there were anarchists who also joined them. I think it was a mistake of them to do so as the leadership of the rebellion was completely reactionary.


It is worthy pointing out that before the Red Army went to suppress the revolt, the workers of the town had already moved against the rebellion!
http://www.marxist.com/History-old/Trotsky_was_right.html

In general I view this as something that was necessary due to the danger of the Soviet regime but not desirable by any chance. Or perhaps was this a huge blunder? it could be, I don't think so but it could be...


Have you ever read this? you can see Trotsky's take on it...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm

[L.A.P.]

Oh dear Christ! Shitstorm coming this way!

[syndicat]

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.

the most exhaustive and well informed account of Kronstadt is in "Kronstadt 1917-21" by Israel Getzler.

The bit about French involvement refers to the fact that Chernov, leader of the SRs in exile, was in France. he offered aid but only after the strike got underway. and the rebels rejected the SR offer because of conditions that were put on it.

the leading ideological influence was the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists. this had been the most influential political group in Kronstadt in 1917-18. the main person who articulated the ideas behind the revolt, their main theorist, was Anatoly Lamonov, who was president of the Kronstadt soviet in 1917, and he as the leading figure in the maximalists there. The maximalists were a libertarian socialist group who had worked very closely with the Russian anarcho-syndicalists.

[revolution inaction]

I heard about Kronstadt from some friends, and I looked it up but the info on wiki wasn't so intricate for my tastes. Everything seems to be pretty 1 sided toward the sailors, and I simpithise with them totally, but I decided to ask around revleft what their opinions on it are.

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

no



2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

he was the head of the military, and supported the attack and defended it afterwards.



3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.
there where some anarchist sailors but the majority of them did not identify as such. Anarchists tend to view the demanded of the sailors positively.

It is worth reading http://libcom.org/library/kronstadt-izvestia the news paper produced during the revolt

These accounts of the revolt http://libcom.org/library/-kronstadt-uprising-1921-thorndycraft and http://libcom.org/library/truth-about-kronstadt

Emma Goldman's account of her experiences in Russia
http://libcom.org/library/my-disillusionment-in-russia-emma-goldman
which includes the Kronstadt revolt, although in less detail than the other sources, it it mainly interesting for the background of what was going on in Russia at that time, especially as she started with a vary positive view of the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks.

and http://libcom.org/library/the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control-solidarity-group
also for background about the Russian revolution in general.

[Jose Gracchus]

I heard about Kronstadt from some friends, and I looked it up but the info on wiki wasn't so intricate for my tastes. Everything seems to be pretty 1 sided toward the sailors, and I simpithise with them totally, but I decided to ask around revleft what their opinions on it are.

1. Lenin said that french infiltration was one of the reasons for the mutiny. Is there any merit?

2. What was rotsky's involvement with this? I heard he planned out the battle and oversaw this.

3. What were the sailor's tendencies? I heard they were anarcho syndicalist.

As syndicat well pointed out, the vulgar Marxist "analysis" applied by Bolshevik state apologists immediately following the revolt has passed into the Marxist canon and is dutifully repeated - to this day - by all manner of organizations with a name-brand that requires uncritical support for most of everything that went on in the Kremlin until 1924, 1928, 1956, or 1985. The canonical source is Israel Getzler's Kronstadt: Fate of a Soviet Democracy. Most of then sailors were the same "red sailors" of 1917, and there was no mass-penetration by peasant or "petty bourgeois" elements. It is important to note that it was not an isolated incident, but followed strikes waves in Petrograd by workers and even a few revolts. Kronstadt delegates attempted to exfiltrate the fortress in order to meet with workers and peasants on the mainland, but most were captured. However, as far away as Moscow, workers in some cases did hold strikes and read political statements in solidarity and endorsement of the Kronstadt reform program (Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat).

[Die Neue Zeit]

The problem with Kronstadt is that it occurred a year too late. The Brits were literally waiting on the coast to use the sailors as useful idiots. An MI-LSR relegation of the Bolsheviks to the same dustbin of the Provisional Government for their anti-soviet coups d'etat in 1918 should have occurred earlier before the imperialists could regroup.

[BIG BROTHER]

The links I provided contain very solid arguments in my opinion why suppressing the rebellion was a must and what it happened in the 1st place.

That being said I do not glamorize. I'm sure a good number of the rebels were genuine revolutionary, although the same can not be said for the leadership the path this was taking.

[Paulappaul]

It is worthy pointing out that before the Red Army went to suppress the revolt, the workers of the town had already moved against the rebellion!

The Petrograd workers were under martial law and were on Strike against the government on the days before the Rebellion. So no.

[Jose Gracchus]

The problem with Kronstadt is that it occurred a year too late. The Brits were literally waiting on the coast to use the sailors as useful idiots. An MI-LSR relegation of the Bolsheviks to the same dustbin of the Provisional Government for their anti-soviet coups d'etat in 1918 should have occurred earlier before the imperialists could regroup.

This gets passed around a lot, but I don't see why it is a legitimate argument. Is there a shred of evidence the British Navy had the amphibious assault capacity to opportunistically use the Kronstadt revolt to land on Kronstadt or near Petrograd and somehow (after Wrangel has spiraled the drain) resurrect a dead White movement in the Civil War seems far-fetched to me. If it lasted long, is it being implied the Kronstadters would've gone over to the pro-imperialist side? What evidence is there for this? And as a potential counterfactual, it also presupposes the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state had only forcible repression to rely upon as a solution. If they'd negotiated a settlement - which was offered both by the leaders of the Kronstadt revolt, but by Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik interlocutors on the other side - then maybe there would be no risk. But of course what was at stake was the political monopoly of the Bolshevik party, and the authoritarian prerogatives already claimed by the Soviet state apparatus and bureaucracy. So it was unthinkable to them.

The only imaginable salve to the Revolution I can imagine is either they capitulate to Kronstadt and the anti-government strike and non-party revolutionary workers' movements on political and social concessions. Or the Bolshevik leadership could have attempted to form (though idiotic Menshevik grandstanding kind of ruled this out, and they openly screwed pro-United Front Bolsheviks) a broader coalition from the outset after October. In either case though, the Bolshevik political monopoly is on the cutting block, and that was consistently something intolerable to the senior leadership, Lenin in particular.

[Anarchist Skinhead]

Party Leadership would never cede ANY of their power. it had to end like this and it is just another proof that power corrupts and how authoritarian revolutionaries quickly become opressors themselves.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This gets passed around a lot, but I don't see why it is a legitimate argument. Is there a shred of evidence the British Navy had the amphibious assault capacity to opportunistically use the Kronstadt revolt to land on Kronstadt or near Petrograd and somehow (after Wrangel has spiraled the drain) resurrect a dead White movement in the Civil War seems far-fetched to me.

Not to resurrect a dead White movement, but an outright invasion. Also consider that the Finns were on the doorstep.


If it lasted long, is it being implied the Kronstadters would've gone over to the pro-imperialist side?

Not at all. They'd just be rolled over in the style of divide and conquer.


Or the Bolshevik leadership could have attempted to form (though idiotic Menshevik grandstanding kind of ruled this out, and they openly screwed pro-United Front Bolsheviks) a broader coalition from the outset after October.

Martov was too egotistic at that time. One of his conditions was the Lenin personally wasn't part of the new coalition government. When his group tried to defend soviet sovereignty from 1918 onwards, they failed to break from the Menshevik-Defencists. Hell, at least Bernstein and the renegades Kautsky and Hilferding jumped ship over to the USPD!

[kasama-rl]

Here is my own essay (and thoughts) on Kronstadt from Kasama (http://www.revleft.com/vb/It%20appeared%20on%20Kasama:%20http://kasamaproject.org/2010/06/03/kronstadt-the-maturation-and-dispersal-of-a-revolutionary-core/):

Kronstadt: The Maturation & Dispersal of a Revolutionary Core (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/06/03/kronstadt-the-maturation-and-dispersal-of-a-revolutionary-core/)


I am grateful for Green-Red’s question, which leads us deeper into some questions we have been exploring from a number of sides.
“What happened during the Kronstadt incident? Was it all a White [tsarist] conspiracy?”
For those who unfamiliar with the controversy:

There was an uprising at the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd — against the new Bolshevik government. This 1921 event has been an important episode for anarchists — who identify with the anti-bolshevik rebellion, and who remain outraged by the Bolshevik decision to send in the Red Army to retake Kronstadt by force.

I would like to sketch a brief analysis — and relate it to the controversies around Nepal, and our own strategic challenges. Feel free to flesh this out further — since I am not going to do more than sketch the details of these events. Feel free to provide links to various accounts. And certainly, jump in if you want to dispute my points below.

The first thing to know about Kronstadt is that this is the story of how a revolutionary core gets displaced and spread too thin — by all the challenges of actually leading a revolution. I’m going to simplify things somewhat by saying that at some point, the advanced in society give rise to a revolutionary people, out of which congeals a partisan revolutionary core.
In order to wage and win a revolution in our era there needs to be the emergence of a revolutionary people — i.e. a section of the people who consciously wants a particular kind of radical change and who (over time) have become more and more deeply connected (in an organic way) to the various currents of organized political trends.

Without that you can’t move from protest and opposition to actually taking power. And without that (even more important) you can’t actually continue the revolution and transform society.

And without finding “successors to the revolutionary cause” — i.e. new and younger waves of a revolutionary people in the midst of new challenges, the revolution itself will degrade, and ultimately reverse.

http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/kronstadt_1919_color-1.jpg (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/kronstadt_1919_color-1.jpg)

I think there is value in looking at previous revolutionary history in relation to this concept of a revolutionary people — and its contradictions.

In regard to Kronstadt:

Kronstadt is the island base of the Russian navy at the entrance to Petrograd. As the 1917 revolutionary year unfolded, Kronstadt emerged as a powerful center of radical activity — where anarchists and Bolsheviks had special influence among the militant roughneck sailors. They were among the most radical among the armed forces — at a time when the fight for the Petrograd garrison was a key part of revolutionary preparations.

The days of July involved teams of these sailors arriving armed to demonstrate for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. And it involved the contradictions between Lenin (and the bolshevik leadership) with the impatience of these advanced (who wanted “Revolution Now!” despite the estimation of Lenin that it was ripening but not yet possible). Streetfighting erupted under the leadership of the Bolshevik Military Organization — which whipped the reactionary forces in the capital into a frenzy.

These sailors and of course the Bolshevik Military Organization played a key role in the events that followed — and were naturally very respected among revolutionaries and the more radical sections of the people (concentrated in the many layers of Soviet councils).

http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/kronstadt-map.gif?w=100 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/kronstadt-map.gif)
click for location of Kronstadt

Flash forward 3 or 4 hard years:

The seizure of power in 1917 was followed by several years of civil war. This had a profound effect on the strongest revolutionary cores. First, they were dispersed from their point of emergence. They went on revolutionary missions the length and bredth of the war front. The most radical workers and sailors became the core (and leaders) of the Red Army.
The other result is that many of the most advanced simply died in battle — as the shocktroops at one key moment after another.

Meanwhile, back behind the front, in places like the Petrograd factory districts and Kronstadt, a parallel set of results was happening: the people there were deprived of their most radical vanguard. And, at the same time, economic conditions worsened — as civil war disrupted the traffic in firewood, coal and food. Plus the horrific burden of civil war was added onto the already horrific years of world war.

Kronstadt, which had been the center of radical activity, was filled with raw recruits from the countryside. And the Petrograd factories were either shut down or their workforce now filled with new workers who had not gone through the storms of 1917.

In other words, the Kronstadt of 1921 was not politically the same as the Kronstadt of 1917. Life is not frozen. Things change.

Quite simply in 1921, the whole burden of civil war brought about a new crisis — this time with the Bolsheviks in power. At the very moment when the white armies were at the brink of defeat a wave of anti-government resistance and strikes broke out in the capital.

There were strikes against the Bolshevik government in the factories. A process of fragmentation happened within the Bolshevik party itself — as organized factions moved to sharper and sharper opposition to the party leadership. And, in the famous base at Kronstadt, a new wave of activists led the sailors to rise in revolt against the revolutionary government.
The demands mainly had to do with the awful conditions — cold, hunger, and continuing death from continuing war. But (not surprisingly give the history of Russia) the revolts were also packaged as a “third wave” of the revolution (i.e. that the February revolution had given rise to the October Revolution, which was now giving rise to an even more radical and authentic third revolution, led by anarchists and other left opponents of the Bolsheviks).

Ii’m simplifying of course, and if we zoom back a major backdrop for all of this was the desperation among peasants broadly through the heartland of Russia. The civil war had disrupted and ruined both harvests and transport. The war had disrupted industry — so the cities had little to give the farmers in exchange for food. And in the extremes of war, the Communists (and their Red Army) had been forced to adopt expropriation from the peasants — i.e. under a doctrine of so-called “war commnism” they simply took what they needed to feed their troops, without having anything to give in exchange. And often whole expeditions went out into the countryside that (using any means necessary) forced the farmers to give up their hidden grain supplies.

This too could only go on for a limited time, and revolts started to become more and more powerful in the countryside — and it was reflected among workers and soldiers (in the cities, and even in the Red Army) who had close connections to the countryside.

Lenin’s government responded to this crisis in several ways:

First, they moved to wrap up the civil war (including accepting the loss of places like Finland, Poland and the Baltic states where they had not yet defeated the white forces). they had bit off all they could chew.

Second, they retreated from the “war communism” phase of the civil war. And in particular, they conceded a great deal to the demands of the peasants — calling off expropriations. Their “New Economic Policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy)” allowed a great deal of capitalism: opening market conditions in food, allowing foreign investment in state owned Soviet enterprises, allowing the development of a merchant capitalist class (of speculators) called NEP-men to facilitate the movement of goods and food.

Third, the Soviet government defended the revolution and its own existence the full means at its disposal. (And I am asserting here that the defense of the revolution was in separable at that point from the defense of that government.) The famous climax of this was the retaking of Kronstadt by the Red Army soldiers, who crossed the ice of the frozen gulf.
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/map-of-the-kronstadt-suppression.jpg?w=200 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/map-of-the-kronstadt-suppression.jpg)c
lick to enlarge

This fighting was the kind that is hardest for revolutionary soldiers — because they were not facing the Cossaks of Denikin or the Czech reactionary troops of Siberia. They were shooting at soldiers of beloved Kronstadt — it was a fight that had erupted within the revolution, under extreme conditions. And the Red Army suppressed the revolt at Kronstadt. It was said that the soldiers wept as they crossed the ice.

Some remarks on this:

a) Political and military forces start to splinter under extreme stress. In a bitterly fought civil war, all the forces were shattering — the Whites and the Reds. And victory in warfare often belongs to the “last man standing.” In this case, the threatened collapse of the revolution into chaos came (luckily) just as the main forces of Whites had been marginalized. And so Lenin was able to combine new peacetime policies (NEP) along with a vigorous defense of revolutionary power.

b) It is true that left forces fighting the Bolsheviks “objectively” served the victory of the extreme right. No other force was going to continue to press ahead the revolution. Even if the anarchists claimed to want a “third revolution” (and even if they believed that was their goal) — this was impossible. It would not and could not happen. The loss of Red Petrograd to the Bolsheviks, the eruption of chaos and infighting on a grand scale, could only have had one result: the collapse of the 1917 revolution itself, and the emergence (in one form or another) of a Themidorian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermidorian_Reaction) rightwing restoration.

c) In answer to Green-Red’s original queston: Objective and subjective are not the same thing. Objectively the disturbances of 1921 did represent a last hope of counterrevolution. But this does not mean that the fighters or leaders of this Kronstadt revolt were themselves necessarily subjectively white guard agents. There were probably reactionaries of various kinds agitating at the margins, exploiting the extreme suffering and despair of the people, and taking advantage of the absence and decimation of the most advanced workers and soldiers. But these events were not simply white guard actions or the product of conspiracies of reactionaries. Life is more complex than that. And the Soviet era legacy of equating “objective” impact with “subjective” intent is one we should lay aside. (And we have discussed this repeatedly on this site).

d) In the various disputes of anarchists and communists, Kronstadt is the source of one common theme: Anarchists often argue that “You guys will kill us once the revolution starts.” And this argument is used to justify both crude sectarian posturing and some crude anti-communist politics. In fact, I think it is ahistorical.

The main thing that happened to the many anarchist forces during the Russian revolution is that they became communists. The main thing revolutionary communists do to the most sincere and revolutionary anarchists is recruit them. This was true of the Wobblies and the many currents of syndicalists around the world. The shooting at Kronstadt was not some communist vendetta against anarchists — but an extreme and sorrowfilled defense of the revolution (at a moment when everything threatened to come apart). And I think that we are not stuck on some historical treadmill where we can see the future by reading the past: We ourselves can carve out what our coming revolutionary movement will be like. We ourselves can decide how to cross-pollinate.

Reconception of communist theory requires a reconsideration of old assumptions (about state forms, democracy, political discipline, factionalism among revolutionaries and more) — I don’t mean an abandonment of inherited Marxism-Leninism (I am personally, as i often state, quite serious and firm about my communism and Maoism — understood hopefully in the critical and creative sense that I associated precisely with Mao and Lenin) But I do mean that we should take a time to critically revisit many things we were given as settled orthodoxies — and invite others to reengage with us over these questions.

e) People who think revolution is mainly about “strategic will” are confused when revolutionaries employ complex tactics. The complex revolutionary years of Nepal have been both an example of this — and a wonderful opportunity to unlearn a certain infantilism and naive rigidity.

After the audacious days of October and the bitter combat of the civil war, Lenin (in 1921) suddenly talked openly about instituting “state capitalism” in the newly nationalized industries. He made deals with foreign imperialists (both the German military and then foreign corporations). He reinstituted capitalism in the countryside (when many of his own militants assumed that “war communism” was the wave of the future, not a temporary expediency.) As a historical note, the conservative American president Herbert Hoover made his reputation (and his presidential aspirations) based on his involvement in western “relief efforts” inside Soviet Russia.

At the time, from 1918-`927, the enemies of Bolshevism clucked their tongues, remarking how the ultra-radical Bolsheviks had been forced to retreat to capitalism, and had started shooting their own sailors — and insisting that this proved the impracticality of the October revolution and the opportunist lack of principles of a Lenin. (We have quoted Lenin’s reply (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/09/v-i-lenin-on-climbing-steep-mountains/)to the Kauskyist and Menshevik sniping, earlier on Kasama.)

A related historical note: Fanni Kaplan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanni_Kaplan), the woman who tried to assassinate Lenin at the start of the civil war (1918) explained that she shot him because Lenin (in her opinion) had made deals with foreign imperialists. “you will have read in the newspapers that I shot at Lenin. I do not think I succeeded in killing him. If I regret anything, it is only that. He is a traitor to the Revolution. I lay the responsibility for the treacherous peace with Germany and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at his feet.”

f) Every capitalist roader in history has elevated and praised the NEP — not as a temporary concession to capitalism (under the duress of seven years of the most horrific war and radical upheaval), but as a rood to socialism. The same way that Liu in China wanted “consolidate New Democracy,” there were those in the Soviet Union who wanted to make the NEP permanent. And so the concessions to capitalism (made by revolutionaries) became a rallying point for restoration of capitalism (proclaimed by capitalist roaders). And here too (as with Kronstadt) there was a process of development — as the market conditions needed by a ruined economy became the basis for the rise of powerful capitalist forces in the countryside, forces that one way or another needed to be engaged by new waves of socialist revolution. (One interesting point made, i believe by my favorite Sheila Fitzpatrick is that the Baptist youth organizations grew more rapidly during the 1920s in the Soviet countryside than the Communist youth organizations Komsomol– a remarkable and revealing fact to understand.)

Back to the Complexities of a Revolutionary People:

* In the July days, the most advanced in the revolution had extreme impatience with Lenin — who refused to allow their mass actions to become an attempt at power (during the summer of 1917), but who then turned around and organized a revolt in October (after the watershed events of September).

* From the victory of the revolution, many of its opponents accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of selling out (to foreign powers, to foreign capitalists, to state capitalism, etc.)

* There were major necessary concessions of many kinds required in the course of the revolution (that each time seemed shocking, truly shocking, to the advanced and the party members at the beginning).

* Decisions had to be made based on the overall needs of the revolution, not the moods and expectations of the advanced. The Bolsheviks needed a mass line — they needed to bring the advanced with them, and reach the broader population by mobilizing the advanced. But winning the advanced to the policies of each moment was its own complex process, and it is not at all the case that the most advanced and revolutionary workers and sailors automatically understood or embraced the policies of their own party.

* The “revolutionary people” (and the advanced) were a living process — that went through changes. The advanced matured into a revolutionary force — not just in 1905, or during the war, but month by month in 1917. And then they were extracted from their place among the people by the demands of the revolution itself — as they became decimated as shock troops of the fighting, and also came to form the framework of a new state and army. The next advance of the revolution (which came in the late twenties) needed a new generation, and a NEW forging of a revolutionary people — to carry out the collectivization and socialist industrialization of the Soviet Union (and to beat back the NEP-men and aspiring capitalists of agriculture both politically and economically).

There is more… but I’ll let others comment first.

[Jose Gracchus]

Not to resurrect a dead White movement, but an outright invasion. Also consider that the Finns were on the doorstep.

Moscow was in the midst of concluding trade concessions with the British at the same time, so I doubt this seriously. An invasion is not simply mounted, guaranteed success, and successful by default. And again, they need not to risk the fortress being compromised by impasse and armed struggle, when they had the option to negotiate. Again, the onus is on you to demonstrate the military means, including landing forces and artillery support, was in theater to mount a credible strategic military threat. Saying "the British are coming!" and that's it, over and over doesn't cut it.

Again, this looks to be an excuse, oft-used and never justified by evidence.


Martov was too egotistic at that time. One of his conditions was the Lenin personally wasn't part of the new coalition government. When his group tried to defend soviet sovereignty from 1918 onwards, they failed to break from the Menshevik-Defencists. Hell, at least Bernstein and the renegades Kautsky and Hilferding jumped ship over to the USPD!

Agreed.

I'll move on to this Kasama bit in a little while.

[Anarchist Skinhead]

Kasama- sometimes its better to say nothing than to say nothing using so many words. I am glad you informed me that Anarchists hostility towards communists is ahistorical- of course we are just silly and have absolutely no reasons for that. :rolleyes: What an utter load of bollocks ...and so predictable as well.

[Anarchist Skinhead]

:rolleyes:

[Aurora]

Anarchists tend to view the demanded of the sailors positively.
Which demands do they view positively?


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 held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections.
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 associations.
4)The organisation, at the latest on 10 March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers 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.

[Devrim]

The problem with Kronstadt is that it occurred a year too late. The Brits were literally waiting on the coast to use the sailors as useful idiots.

Do you know what the word literally means? The Brits weren't literally waiting on the coast as the Gulf of Finland was icebound. The British navy had been stationed in the Baltic until after the treaty of Tartu, one year earlier, but had then withdrawn.

One of the prime reasons for the withdrawal was that they were actually afraid of losing their ships to the Russians after the mutinies that took place on HMS Vindictive, and HMS Delhi as well as other ships. Of course, it is not impossible that the British would have tried to intervene again. There previous intervention in Northern Russia had been pretty much a disaster, with mass desertions and mutinies, and even the right wing press was against further intervention in Russia with the Daily Express stating that "the frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier". Nevertheless, it is possible to believe that they could have attempted another intervention.

To say that they were "literally waiting on the coast to use the sailors as useful idiots" is just untrue.

Devrim

[Devrim]

Kronstadt, which had been the center of radical activity, was filled with raw recruits from the countryside

This is another myth that doesn't stand up to any analysis of the factual data.

I have posted on this topic before so I will just cut and paste the post:


RP, despite not arguing that the sailors were ‘tsarist[s], priest[s], or other expected counter-revolutionary’, still puts forward the idea that ‘However, the fact is that the sailors at Kronstadt in 1921 were not the same sailors who were stationed there during the October Revolution’. This seems to go along with all of the other lies that were circulated by the RCP(B) at the time, but has like the rest been thoroughly refuted.

In ‘Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy’ , the academic, Israel Getzler, who had access to previous unavailable Soviet Military sources analysed much of the data about Kronstadt. On the two major battleships the Petropavlovsk, where the revolt started, and the Sevastopol, over 90% of sailors for whom the data is available had joined the navy either before or during the revolution.

“[I]... that the veteran politicized Red sailor still predominated at Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, both renowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195, having joined in the years 1914-16. Only some 137 sailors or 6.8% 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. 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% are likely to have been drafted into the fleet before 1918. Over 80% were drawn from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine, and 9% from Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland.
...
Nor, as has so often been claimed, did new recruits, some 400 of whom Yasinsky had interviewed, arrive in numbers large enough to dilute or even 'demoralize' Kronstadt's Red sailors. As Evan Mawdsley has found, 'only 1,313 of a planned total of 10,384 recruits had arrived' by 1 December 1920 and even they seem to have been stationed in the barracks of the Second Baltic Crew in Petrograd.”

Devrim

[Jose Gracchus]

[snip, a lot of rhetoric and vague models of revolution]

Kronstadt is the island base of the Russian navy at the entrance to Petrograd. As the 1917 revolutionary year unfolded, Kronstadt emerged as a powerful center of radical activity — where anarchists and Bolsheviks had special influence among the militant roughneck sailors. They were among the most radical among the armed forces — at a time when the fight for the Petrograd garrison was a key part of revolutionary preparations.

The days of July involved teams of these sailors arriving armed to demonstrate for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. And it involved the contradictions between Lenin (and the bolshevik leadership) with the impatience of these advanced (who wanted “Revolution Now!” despite the estimation of Lenin that it was ripening but not yet possible). Streetfighting erupted under the leadership of the Bolshevik Military Organization — which whipped the reactionary forces in the capital into a frenzy.

These sailors and of course the Bolshevik Military Organization played a key role in the events that followed — and were naturally very respected among revolutionaries and the more radical sections of the people (concentrated in the many layers of Soviet councils).

Somewhat understates just how important and central this revolutionary manpower had been to the exceptional events in Petrograd of 1917, but otherwise okay.


Flash forward 3 or 4 hard years:

The seizure of power in 1917 was followed by several years of civil war. This had a profound effect on the strongest revolutionary cores. First, they were dispersed from their point of emergence. They went on revolutionary missions the length and bredth of the war front. The most radical workers and sailors became the core (and leaders) of the Red Army.

The other result is that many of the most advanced simply died in battle — as the shocktroops at one key moment after another.

Meanwhile, back behind the front, in places like the Petrograd factory districts and Kronstadt, a parallel set of results was happening: the people there were deprived of their most radical vanguard. And, at the same time, economic conditions worsened — as civil war disrupted the traffic in firewood, coal and food. Plus the horrific burden of civil war was added onto the already horrific years of world war.

Kronstadt, which had been the center of radical activity, was filled with raw recruits from the countryside. And the Petrograd factories were either shut down or their workforce now filled with new workers who had not gone through the storms of 1917.

In other words, the Kronstadt of 1921 was not politically the same as the Kronstadt of 1917. Life is not frozen. Things change.

Funny I literally anticipated this above. The basic line all apologists for the Bolsheviks is the crude lie - never backed up with evidence, ever since Trotsky et al repeated their calumnies and lies, and Trotsky published The Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt - that it was just a bunch of peasant elements.

Notice the use of "people" in this case is necessary for a Maoist to avoid sounding silly adopting Trotsky's line that this was peasant infiltration into the ranks of the true revolutionary workers and sailors. This is of course awkward considering that it is in fact upon the peasantry that the social basis for most Maoist revolutionary movements has rested (and could hardly be otherwise, as the mass working class is ipso facto connected to the process of production and can hardly remove itself to the countryside for people's war) predominantly on a peasant social basis. I consider myself eclectic and sympathetic to some anarchist as well as Maoist ideas on the peasantry, so I myself have no problem with this stance. However, it does come across here quite clearly, the amount of rhetorical flipping required to square this circle.

Here is the truth, however:


"Yasinky's impression that the veteran politicized Red sailor still predominated in Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, both renowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195 having joined in the years 1914-16. Only 137 sailors or 6.8% 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. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5% are likely to have been drafted into the fleet before 1918. Over 80% were drawn from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine, and 9% from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland.

One reason for the remarkable survival in Kronstadt of these veteran sailors, albeit in great diminished numbers, was precisely the difficulty in trainin, in war-time conditions, a new generation competent in the sophisticated technical skills required on Russia's ultra-modern battleships, and indeed, in the fleet generally.

Nor, as has so often been claimed, did new recruits, some 400 of whom Yasinky had interviewed, arrive in numbers large enough to dilute of even 'demoralize' Kronstadt's Red sailors. As Evan Mawdsley has found, 'only 1,313 of a planned total of 10,384 recruits had arrived' by 1 December 1920 and even they seem to have stationed in the barracks of the Second Baltic Crew in Petrograd.

Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 207-208.

So, as it can be seen, the claims that the substantive human composition of the Kronstadt sailors had dramatically changed are simple fabrication. Leaving aside Jesuitical casuistry in defining what qualifies as an authentically "revolutionary people", the fact is the Kronstadt sailors remained the masses who were conscious and revolutionary in 1917, but apologists find wanting for reasons I cannot locate anywhere aside from doctrinal inconvenience and awkwardness. The axiom that Lenin Was Right (TM) must not be abridged, it seems. This of course leaves aside the question of why in a workers' and peasants' state, solidarity and representation across the revolutionary class alliance that formed the purported basis for Soviet power, peasants 'wouldn't count', which goes completely unjustified.


Quite simply in 1921, the whole burden of civil war brought about a new crisis — this time with the Bolsheviks in power. At the very moment when the white armies were at the brink of defeat a wave of anti-government resistance and strikes broke out in the capital.

Perhaps this is precisely because the watchword of Bolshevik excuses and apologia for state terror, expropriations, and the Gleichschaltung of the soviets, was "its the war!" Hence, oppositional elements waited til Soviet power was not in immediate risk from counterrevolutionaries and imperialists before rising up.


There were strikes against the Bolshevik government in the factories. A process of fragmentation happened within the Bolshevik party itself — as organized factions moved to sharper and sharper opposition to the party leadership. And, in the famous base at Kronstadt, a new wave of activists led the sailors to rise in revolt against the revolutionary government.

The demands mainly had to do with the awful conditions — cold, hunger, and continuing death from continuing war. But (not surprisingly give the history of Russia) the revolts were also packaged as a “third wave” of the revolution (i.e. that the February revolution had given rise to the October Revolution, which was now giving rise to an even more radical and authentic third revolution, led by anarchists and other left opponents of the Bolsheviks).

There was quite a developed strike and oppositional workers' movement; there were strike actions (though not the majority) in direct support of the Kronstadt program, together with political statements endorsing it.

The "third revolution" was more an eager slogan than a reality. The Kronstadt program did not suggest anything more significant than a political and economic settlement, negotiation, and a re-opening of soviet democracy. It did not foresee or call for a dismemberment or elimination of the Bolshevik party or even leadership. There were Communists who collaborated with the revolt, in fact.


Ii’m simplifying of course, and if we zoom back a major backdrop for all of this was the desperation among peasants broadly through the heartland of Russia. The civil war had disrupted and ruined both harvests and transport. The war had disrupted industry — so the cities had little to give the farmers in exchange for food. And in the extremes of war, the Communists (and their Red Army) had been forced to adopt expropriation from the peasants — i.e. under a doctrine of so-called “war commnism” they simply took what they needed to feed their troops, without having anything to give in exchange. And often whole expeditions went out into the countryside that (using any means necessary) forced the farmers to give up their hidden grain supplies.

This too could only go on for a limited time, and revolts started to become more and more powerful in the countryside — and it was reflected among workers and soldiers (in the cities, and even in the Red Army) who had close connections to the countryside.

Lenin’s government responded to this crisis in several ways:

First, they moved to wrap up the civil war (including accepting the loss of places like Finland, Poland and the Baltic states where they had not yet defeated the white forces). they had bit off all they could chew.

Second, they retreated from the “war communism” phase of the civil war. And in particular, they conceded a great deal to the demands of the peasants — calling off expropriations. Their “ New Economic Policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy)” allowed a great deal of capitalism: opening market conditions in food, allowing foreign investment in state owned Soviet enterprises, allowing the development of a merchant capitalist class (of speculators) called NEP-men to facilitate the movement of goods and food.

The proposals for trade liberalization and increased commerce between countryside and urban centers in the Kronstadt program was actually less radical than NEP.


Third, the Soviet government defended the revolution and its own existence the full means at its disposal. (And I am asserting here that the defense of the revolution was in separable at that point from the defense of that government.)

Here we go. All the exposition in this essay is really to say this. By axiom, the Bolshevik government was legitimate, by definition the only salvation of the revolution, and they had a right to keep power by any means, no matter what the intervention or ruckus of "really existing" revolutionary workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors, that purportedly was the basis of the legitimacy of the regime. Since this is all true by axiom, by definition, all facts must subordinate to this maxim. With predictable results.


The famous climax of this was the retaking of Kronstadt by the Red Army soldiers, who crossed the ice of the frozen gulf.

This fighting was the kind that is hardest for revolutionary soldiers — because they were not facing the Cossaks of Denikin or the Czech reactionary troops of Siberia. They were shooting at soldiers of beloved Kronstadt — it was a fight that had erupted within the revolution, under extreme conditions. And the Red Army suppressed the revolt at Kronstadt. It was said that the soldiers wept as they crossed the ice.

LOL. This is rich. A kind of after-the-fact, well, we had to butcher them, despite the calls on both sides of the harbor for political settlement, negotiation, and the like. And we're not talking about property owners, or people arguing for the restoration of wage labor. In fact, the Kronstadters were more radical than NEP Bolsheviks; they claimed economic legitimacy and proof against state harassment only for those peasants who employed no labor.

In fact, the Red Army could not be trusted to assault Kronstadt as they had many Whites, due to proletarian solidarity. On the contrary, in opposing the Kronstadt rebels, the Bolsheviks were forced to mobilize undergraduate Red Army officer cadets, and even the delegates of the Party Congress and other senior bodies: 15-30% average party element in ordinary units, and an astronomical 60-70% in “crack units”; the Red Army units, however provisioned, agitated, propagandized, etc. was not to be trusted to assault Kronstadt, so low had morale plunged in the face of attacking organized workers and sailors who agitated for free and fair soviet elections. The army had to be radically reorganized so proper client elements to the party-state patronage system were in the driver's seat and holding most of the guns. The Bolsheviks knew what military mutinies could spell for authoritarian governments, from personal experience.

Getzler, Kronstadt, pp. 243.

Rather than quibble piecemeal over the program and your claims, I will simply provide it:


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.From, Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune

As can be seen, this is not a particularly radical document. In principle, the political democratic demands do not meet the level of Rosa Luxembourg's "extreme democracy" - where even overt counterrevolutionaries are permitted to organize and compete in political and electoral freedom -, on the contrary, Kronstadt democracy only claims legitimacy for overtly pro-revolutionary socialist parties and organizations. Hardly "Soviets without Communists" as often alleged; this is Soviets without only Communists.

Some remarks on this:

a) Political and military forces start to splinter under extreme stress. In a bitterly fought civil war, all the forces were shattering — the Whites and the Reds. And victory in warfare often belongs to the “last man standing.” In this case, the threatened collapse of the revolution into chaos came (luckily) just as the main forces of Whites had been marginalized. And so Lenin was able to combine new peacetime policies (NEP) along with a vigorous defense of revolutionary power.

What Lenin did was lean upon petty bourgeois of his creation, and wealthier peasants, for some breathing room against the resurgent workers in the cities, who were pushing for non-Communist revolutionary activity in the soviets and in the unions, were pushing for more control over production etc. Lars T. Lih covers in detail how the Bolsheviks moved to base themselves on petty proprietors as their support among militant workers flagged.

What you failed to mention in your casual brush over of faction-formation in the party was the most significant of these factions, the Workers' Opposition and the Group of Democratic Centralism, were addressing precisely these material concerns. The silencing of the WOs and DCs was, if anything, the extinction of any substantively sincere workers' vanguard that yet remained, in the Communist Party.


b) It is true that left forces fighting the Bolsheviks “objectively” served the victory of the extreme right. No other force was going to continue to press ahead the revolution. Even if the anarchists claimed to want a “third revolution” (and even if they believed that was their goal) — this was impossible. It would not and could not happen. The loss of Red Petrograd to the Bolsheviks, the eruption of chaos and infighting on a grand scale, could only have had one result: the collapse of the 1917 revolution itself, and the emergence (in one form or another) of a Themidorian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermidorian_Reaction) rightwing restoration.

Where is the social or class basis for this magical right-wing reaction after Wrangel had been driven into the Black Sea? The capitalists have been expropriated. The Bolsheviks are stoking class warfare in the countryside against kulaks and parasitical farming elements. This is just, pardon my French, pulling shit out of your ass. Where's the organizational substrate that you, as a Leninist, surely believe class politics must originate from? Where were the countless White Guardists and Black Hundreds? The Kronstadt program did not call for an end to the Communist party, or an immediate collapse of the Soviet government. It called for free and fair elections to new soviets by secret ballot and with free participation, propaganda, and agitation by all pro-revolutionary socialists, workers, and peasants; it was a call for a negotiated settlement to reverse the degeneration of the revolution. Similar strives and elements of the worker movement were occurring simultaneously in Petrograd and Moscow (where they were definitely workers' organizations and strike actions in direct support of Kronstadt). The Bolsheviks turned their back on the possibility of rejuvenated soviet democracy and non-party working-class participation.

I have to this day not seen one substantive attempt at shoring up what the material and class basis would be for some magic opportunistic White or imperialist intervention or assault. Just because Lenin presented everything in the form of "either me and us or the Tsar", doesn't make it true. Where is your evidence?


c) In answer to Green-Red’s original queston: Objective and subjective are not the same thing. Objectively the disturbances of 1921 did represent a last hope of counterrevolution. But this does not mean that the fighters or leaders of this Kronstadt revolt were themselves necessarily subjectively white guard agents. There were probably reactionaries of various kinds agitating at the margins, exploiting the extreme suffering and despair of the people, and taking advantage of the absence and decimation of the most advanced workers and soldiers. But these events were not simply white guard actions or the product of conspiracies of reactionaries. Life is more complex than that. And the Soviet era legacy of equating “objective” impact with “subjective” intent is one we should lay aside. (And we have discussed this repeatedly on this site).

Its sad that this piece of Jesuitical casuistry is actually a retreat from the orthodox apologist position - that of pure and total fabrication, that Kronstadt was in fact some White or imperialist plot (interestingly enough, the substance of their program and struggle reached as far as Moscow workers).


d) In the various disputes of anarchists and communists, Kronstadt is the source of one common theme: Anarchists often argue that “You guys will kill us once the revolution starts.” And this argument is used to justify both crude sectarian posturing and some crude anti-communist politics. In fact, I think it is ahistorical.

The main thing that happened to the many anarchist forces during the Russian revolution is that they became communists. The main thing revolutionary communists do to the most sincere and revolutionary anarchists is recruit them. This was true of the Wobblies and the many currents of syndicalists around the world. The shooting at Kronstadt was not some communist vendetta against anarchists — but an extreme and sorrowfilled defense of the revolution (at a moment when everything threatened to come apart). And I think that we are not stuck on some historical treadmill where we can see the future by reading the past: We ourselves can carve out what our coming revolutionary movement will be like. We ourselves can decide how to cross-pollinate.

Kronstadt is indeed a primitive basis for anarchists to make the claim, since it was not an anarchist uprising, simply one anarchists are renown for their sympathy for, since everyone Trotsky and right holds up the apologist line. However, since anarchists were among the first victims of state terror and political repressions in 1918, I do not disagree with their point of view here. The betrayal of the Makhnovshchina by Trotsky, after Wrangel had been defeated in detail with their invaluable help and comradarie (and despite previous betrayals), more than proves the point without resort to Kronstadt.


Reconception of communist theory requires a reconsideration of old assumptions (about state forms, democracy, political discipline, factionalism among revolutionaries and more) — I don’t mean an abandonment of inherited Marxism-Leninism (I am personally, as i often state, quite serious and firm about my communism and Maoism — understood hopefully in the critical and creative sense that I associated precisely with Mao and Lenin) But I do mean that we should take a time to critically revisit many things we were given as settled orthodoxies — and invite others to reengage with us over these questions.

e) People who think revolution is mainly about “strategic will” are confused when revolutionaries employ complex tactics. The complex revolutionary years of Nepal have been both an example of this — and a wonderful opportunity to unlearn a certain infantilism and naive rigidity.

After the audacious days of October and the bitter combat of the civil war, Lenin (in 1921) suddenly talked openly about instituting “state capitalism” in the newly nationalized industries. He made deals with foreign imperialists (both the German military and then foreign corporations). He reinstituted capitalism in the countryside (when many of his own militants assumed that “war communism” was the wave of the future, not a temporary expediency.) As a historical note, the conservative American president Herbert Hoover made his reputation (and his presidential aspirations) based on his involvement in western “relief efforts” inside Soviet Russia.

At the time, from 1918-`927, the enemies of Bolshevism clucked their tongues, remarking how the ultra-radical Bolsheviks had been forced to retreat to capitalism, and had started shooting their own sailors — and insisting that this proved the impracticality of the October revolution and the opportunist lack of principles of a Lenin. (We have quoted Lenin’s reply (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/09/v-i-lenin-on-climbing-steep-mountains/)to the Kauskyist and Menshevik sniping, earlier on Kasama.)

A related historical note: Fanni Kaplan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanni_Kaplan), the woman who tried to assassinate Lenin at the start of the civil war (1918) explained that she shot him because Lenin (in her opinion) had made deals with foreign imperialists. “you will have read in the newspapers that I shot at Lenin. I do not think I succeeded in killing him. If I regret anything, it is only that. He is a traitor to the Revolution. I lay the responsibility for the treacherous peace with Germany and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at his feet.”

This is a broad false equivalency fallacy, where you paint up everyone from a Left SR terrorist like Fanni Kaplan in the wake of the political marginalization of the LSRs and other pro-revolutionary socialists in 1918, as well as their shut-out from the negotiations of Brest-Litovsk, with the political opportunism of right-wing German Social Democrats, Mensheviks, ad nauseum.

Again, the rank-and-file revolutionary elements in this period increasingly abandoned the party, or formed apart from it. In their single-minded focus on maintaining unchallenged (even from within the revolutionary consensus) party control, they sidelined actual revolutionary workers eager to participate both in the managerial and soviet apparatus (Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat) and turned increasingly to rapprochement with imperialist powers, international capitalist trade, and internal petty proprietors and merchants for breathing room against the background of the collapse of even intra-party democracy and the end to any authentic pretense of the Bolshevik party-state resting on a social basis of a class alliance of workers and non-kulak peasantry (Lars T Lih).


f) Every capitalist roader in history has elevated and praised the NEP — not as a temporary concession to capitalism (under the duress of seven years of the most horrific war and radical upheaval), but as a rood to socialism. The same way that Liu in China wanted “consolidate New Democracy,” there were those in the Soviet Union who wanted to make the NEP permanent. And so the concessions to capitalism (made by revolutionaries) became a rallying point for restoration of capitalism (proclaimed by capitalist roaders).

And here we enter the netherworld of vague impressionistic analysis and assigning of various cliques in what amounts to palace intrigue the role of somehow being "capitalist roaders" or "revolutionaries" based on possession of correct lines. This kind of axiomatic thinking runs contrary to Marx's method and class analysis. On what material and real class basis (e.g., class as understood by Marx - that is to say, relation to production -, not qualitative political sympathies that particular Communists one does not like possess for particular capitalist reforms) were there "capitalist roaders" within a substantively workers' party, and revolutionaries on the other hand? By what class basis were the Kronstadt sailors who represented the maximum consciousness in 1917 "objectively" counter-revolutionary in 1921? And appeals to axioms do not qualify as counter-arguments of substance.


And here too (as with Kronstadt) there was a process of development — as the market conditions needed by a ruined economy became the basis for the rise of powerful capitalist forces in the countryside, forces that one way or another needed to be engaged by new waves of socialist revolution. (One interesting point made, i believe by my favorite Sheila Fitzpatrick is that the Baptist youth organizations grew more rapidly during the 1920s in the Soviet countryside than the Communist youth organizations Komsomol– a remarkable and revealing fact to understand.)

Working class and peasant organization collapsed in the wake of 1921 because it became obvious you had to either buy into the patronage and graft and privileged institutions of the party-state in order to get political influence, or you would be marginalized or killed. This is the most obvious and parsimonious answer, but one you're obliged to think out of existence. Again, Simon Pirani in The Russian Revolution in Retreat covers the closure of Bolshevik tolerance for workers' organization in the 1920-1924 period, focusing on Moscow in particular, with direct reference to Cheka and other archival support.

Back to the Complexities of a Revolutionary People:

* In the July days, the most advanced in the revolution had extreme impatience with Lenin — who refused to allow their mass actions to become an attempt at power (during the summer of 1917), but who then turned around and organized a revolt in October (after the watershed events of September).

* From the victory of the revolution, many of its opponents accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of selling out (to foreign powers, to foreign capitalists, to state capitalism, etc.)

* There were major necessary concessions of many kinds required in the course of the revolution (that each time seemed shocking, truly shocking, to the advanced and the party members at the beginning).

* Decisions had to be made based on the overall needs of the revolution, not the moods and expectations of the advanced. The Bolsheviks needed a mass line — they needed to bring the advanced with them, and reach the broader population by mobilizing the advanced. But winning the advanced to the policies of each moment was its own complex process, and it is not at all the case that the most advanced and revolutionary workers and sailors automatically understood or embraced the policies of their own party.

Its quite obvious to those with minds clear to think, ears to hear, and eyes to see what this means in practice. The leadership will tell you what to think, what to know, what to do. Lenin didn't want the revolutionary masses to seize power in July because he knew he couldn't parlay that into a Bolshevik government at that time.

This is all just casuistry to evacuate the idea of a vanguard of the proletariat or a proletariat's most advanced revolutionary elements of any (to the extent there was) substantive meaning. "Their" purported party in this case is there to agitate and advance...unless the middle class lawyers in charge decide that it leaves poor political prospects for their party (i.e., cannot translate them personally into government). You've reduced the concept down to mere rhetoric, to be dismissed as inconvenient when you think it is leading to incorrect political stances.


* The “revolutionary people” (and the advanced) were a living process — that went through changes. The advanced matured into a revolutionary force — not just in 1905, or during the war, but month by month in 1917. And then they were extracted from their place among the people by the demands of the revolution itself — as they became decimated as shock troops of the fighting, and also came to form the framework of a new state and army. The next advance of the revolution (which came in the late twenties) needed a new generation, and a NEW forging of a revolutionary people — to carry out the collectivization and socialist industrialization of the Soviet Union (and to beat back the NEP-men and aspiring capitalists of agriculture both politically and economically).

There is more… but I’ll let others comment first.

This is just nonsense. As pointed out above, the sailors and workers of Kronstadt remained Red and revolutionary and conscious and were literally the same beloved Red supporters lauded in 1917. As Simon Pirani proved, the old canard about the working class being too decimated to organize and apply political consciousness to the ongoing tasks of the revolution is simply a fabrication. They in fact did continue to do so, even under substantial - even escalating - state repression. The mystery is how these historical facts of the labor and revolutionary movement remain invisible to so many latter-day revolutionaries. The Kronstadt revolt and its program, and the Petrograd and Moscow workers movements, including dissident Communists, remain a powerful counterpart to the Bolshevik CC line, which remains obligatory for most, regardless of evidence to the contrary, who look to Lenin's revolutionary legacy. This is tragic, because while many lessons are to be learned from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, there are also lessons to be made against them. If you insist, I can provide substantial documentations about non-party, counter-party, non-partisan, or merely anti-government worker organization in 1921, that belies this distortion of the record, and the class struggle of the revolutionary masses.

[Jose Gracchus]

As an aside, mod, anyone, I've repeatedly tried to edit this post, and even before posting during preview, and it keeps inserting breaks into my blockquotes where I try to eliminate them and consolidate the blockquotes. Any help? It even breaks up quotes in sentence (as with my quotation of Getzler).

[RED DAVE]

The problem with Kronstadt is that it occurred a year too late. The Brits were literally waiting on the coast to use the sailors as useful idiots. An MI-LSR relegation of the Bolsheviks to the same dustbin of the Provisional Government for their anti-soviet coups d'etat in 1918 should have occurred earlier before the imperialists could regroup.Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

RED DAVE

[kasama-rl]

Thanks for responding in such detail. I think that your response will be helpful -- in that people will be able to evaluate our arguments side by side.

I am looking forward to re-examining the data cited above that seeks to deny that there was much Kronstadt turnover. I must say I'm skeptical at the start -- because all the serious sources I have read argue that there was such turnover -- and that (in particular) the most radical and experienced leaders among the sailor had left Kronstadt (on various missions, to build the Red Army, to take other posts, etc.)

This is not to say that everyone on Kronstadt was some reactionary or backward element -- but rather that the sophistication to find orientation in increasingly difficult times had been watered down by the demands of civil war.

In some ways what stands out to me is that our view of the actual situation is not that different. You write for example:

"Again, the rank-and-file revolutionary elements in this period increasingly abandoned the party, or formed apart from it. In their single-minded focus on maintaining unchallenged (even from within the revolutionary consensus) party control, they sidelined actual revolutionary workers eager to participate both in the managerial and soviet apparatus (Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat) and turned increasingly to rapprochement with imperialist powers, international capitalist trade, and internal petty proprietors and merchants for breathing room against the background of the collapse of even intra-party democracy and the end to any authentic pretense of the Bolshevik party-state resting on a social basis of a class alliance of workers and non-kulak peasantry (Lars T Lih)."

I think that this is essentially true (leaving aside matters of tone etc.) There was an increasingly single-minded focus on "holding things together" as the strains of continuing war brought all the linkages of revolutionary movement, revolutionary power and revolutionary alliance to the breaking point. And as the Bolsheviks responded to the "splintering", and refused to permit new waves of disorder, and sought to use compromise to end the crises... they were trying to work their way out of an impending collapse/defeat for the revolution.

They succeeded, as we know, but just barely... but like all moments of desperation, their choices left scars and problems for the future.

For now, I have to say that I stand by my argument and analysis. And I believe that the dynamics of the situation rested on the exhaustion of the war, the weakening of political consciousness and communist organization among the sailors, and a mistaken hope that another revolution might solve problems (rather than shatter the revolutionary process).

Also: I think that there is a lot to learn from this experience -- since the categories of "advanced" and "revolutionary" change (often rapidly) with changes in events. There are complexities in the emergence and continuation of a revolutionary people (and problems of remaining unified under difficult and often confusing choices).

This was a moment when it almost all "came apart" -- and where once united revolutionary forces started to splinter. Our response should not be to demonize one side or the other -- but to understand how such things happen in revolutions, and how desperate choices are sometimes posed.

[kasama-rl]

Some specific issues:

You write:
"Notice the use of "people" in this case is necessary for a Maoist to avoid sounding silly adopting Trotsky's line that this was peasant infiltration into the ranks of the true revolutionary workers and sailors. This is of course awkward considering that it is in fact upon the peasantry that the social basis for most Maoist revolutionary movements has rested (and could hardly be otherwise, as the mass working class is ipso facto connected to the process of production and can hardly remove itself to the countryside for people's war) predominantly on a peasant social basis. I consider myself eclectic and sympathetic to some anarchist as well as Maoist ideas on the peasantry, so I myself have no problem with this stance. However, it does come across here quite clearly, the amount of rhetorical flipping required to square this circle."

You are inventing controversies here.

First, as a Maoist, I have no problem sharing an argument with Trotsky if he is right.

The point is not that peasants are always reactionary. (Which would be silly and ahistorical). In many historical cases, peasants have been very revolutionary -- and this was true both in the Russian revolution and in the Chinese revolution (in different ways).

But it is true that the Civil War strained the PARTICULAR relations of the central revolutionary government and the peasantry. This is not a general historical observation about the peasantry (their potential etc) -- but a particular observation about the dynamics of one moment.

There was a growing dissaffection among the peasantry because (in many ways) they bore a special brunt of the civil war burden, and were (obviously) removed from the revolution's ideological and political storm centers.

Holding this view, does not require (as you imply) doublethink.

[kasama-rl]

You write:


"And here we enter the netherworld of vague impressionistic analysis and assigning of various cliques in what amounts to palace intrigue the role of somehow being "capitalist roaders" or "revolutionaries" based on possession of correct lines. This kind of axiomatic thinking runs contrary to Marx's method and class analysis. On what material and real class basis (e.g., class as understood by Marx - that is to say, relation to production -, not qualitative political sympathies that particular Communists one does not like possess for particular capitalist reforms) were there "capitalist roaders" within a substantively workers' party, and revolutionaries on the other hand? By what class basis were the Kronstadt sailors who represented the maximum consciousness in 1917 "objectively" counter-revolutionary in 1921? And appeals to axioms do not qualify as counter-arguments of substance."

Obviously your comment here doesn't do the controversy justice. And my reply won't either.

But I will agree with you on this: The Maoist understanding of capitalist restoration does not rest on Marx's view of class analysis. Marx had no experience withthe class struggle under socialism, he has no way of anticipating the forms it would take. And no one would have predicted that the real danger to socialism would come from within (the party and state), in addition to the anticipated dangers from without.

It is mechanical and axiomatic thinking to assume we should rest content with Marx in analyzing phenomena half a century after his death. In fact we needed new science, and even the Bolsheviks (lenin, stalin, trotsky) did not have a handle on what was happening around them.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Use the 'Quote' function, comrade!

[syndicat]

I am looking forward to re-examining the data cited above that seeks to deny that there was much Kronstadt turnover. I must say I'm skeptical at the start -- because all the serious sources I have read argue that there was such turnover -- and that (in particular) the most radical and experienced leaders among the sailor had left Kronstadt (on various missions, to build the Red Army, to take other posts, etc.)



you mean Leninist sources. Israel Getzel definitively dismisses the "change of personel" argument in "Kronstadt 1917-21." he shows that the average year of entering the navy for the people who were at Kronstadt in 1921 was before the onset of the revolution in 1917. Getzler also points out that the Russian warships were state of the art for that time and had a lot of equipment that required a lot of training. During the period of the civil war the Soviet government didn't have the means to train replacements. Also, the naval base at Kronstadt had a lot of supporting industry for the navy which also required various kinds of skills...factories making dive equipment and torpedos and so on.

Also, the leading articulator of the ideology of the revolt was Anatoly Lamonov. Lamonov wrote many of the articles in the Izvestia of the revolt. Lamonov was president of the Kronstadt soviet in 1917. He was the leading figure in the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists in 1917, and again at the time of the revolt in 1921. The maximalists were a libertarian socialist political group and Getzler's book shows that they were the dominant political force in Kronstadt in the fall of 1917 and early 1918. the Maximalists were politically very close to the anarcho-syndicalists.

the strike at Kronstadt began when it did because it was a sympathy strike with the general strike in St Petersburg...being ruthlessly crushed with martial law by the Communist regime. the 15 demands of the revolt show that the Kronstadt rebels were committed to soviet democracy...just as Kronstadters were in 1917. this was why they rejected aid offered by Victor Chernov of the SR party. Chernov's condition was that they endorse the constituent assembly, which the Kronstadt soviet had always opposed in 1917...and did so again in 1921.

[Devrim]

The maximalists were a libertarian socialist political group

I don't really see this at all. Certainly the Maximalists worked with the anarchists, but early they had worked with the Bolsheviks. I don't see that calling them libertarian socialist has any real meaning unless it means 'non anarchist socialists that anarchists like', which is a a pretty meaningless definition apart from for those trying to build up some sort of political genealogy.

I think that the SRs in general came from a completely different tradition from both the anarchists and marxists, a sort of peasant radicalism/populism. They held various conceptions completely opposed to what I think you would view as those as essential to anarchism such as denying the necessity for workers' control for example. Over the years they were influenced by anarchist idea, but also by Marxist ones.

I think it is a bit of a misrepresentation to be honest. Otherwise I agree with all of your points there.

Devrim

[syndicat]

i totally disagree with you. the maximalists advocated for the reconstruction of governance in Russia on the basis of a horizontal federaion of horizontal soviets, not the top-down soviets with power concentrated in the hands of party leaders, like the St Petersburg and Moscow soviets. they called this a "Toilers' Republic." And this was a position they shared with most of the libertarian Left in Russia at that time. The advocated and defended direct democracy. the Kronstadt soviet itself was built on direct democracy. there were weekly assemblies in all the workplaces, ships and military units.

at the time of the debate at the first All-Russian Trade Union Conference, when GP Maximov, for the Russian anarcho-syndicalists, put forward the proposal for a national congress of factory committees, defended the autonomy of the factory committee movement, and workers management, the only other political force at the congress who voted in support of the syndicalists were the maximalists. The maximalists worked with the syndicalists and the Nabat federation on the administrative council of the revolutionary zone in eastern Ukraine, the council to which Makhno's army was supposedly accountable. In the Bakers Union, large parts of the union were under libertarian left control due to an allliance between the syndicalists and maximalists. As Getzler shows, the maximalists and syndicalists also worked together in a tight alliance in Kronstadt in the fall of 1917 and early 1918. so if in fact the maximalists worked closely with the syndicalists and shared many positions in common, and had the same conflicts with the Marxist parties (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), it would be totally arbitrary to not call the maximalists "libertarian socialists."

[Die Neue Zeit]

What Lenin did was lean upon petty bourgeois of his creation, and wealthier peasants, for some breathing room against the resurgent workers in the cities, who were pushing for non-Communist revolutionary activity in the soviets and in the unions, were pushing for more control over production etc. Lars T. Lih covers in detail how the Bolsheviks moved to base themselves on petty proprietors as their support among militant workers flagged.

What you failed to mention in your casual brush over of faction-formation in the party was the most significant of these factions, the Workers' Opposition and the Group of Democratic Centralism, were addressing precisely these material concerns. The silencing of the WOs and DCs was, if anything, the extinction of any substantively sincere workers' vanguard that yet remained, in the Communist Party.

[...]

Again, the rank-and-file revolutionary elements in this period increasingly abandoned the party, or formed apart from it. In their single-minded focus on maintaining unchallenged (even from within the revolutionary consensus) party control, they sidelined actual revolutionary workers eager to participate both in the managerial and soviet apparatus (Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat) and turned increasingly to rapprochement with imperialist powers, international capitalist trade, and internal petty proprietors and merchants for breathing room against the background of the collapse of even intra-party democracy and the end to any authentic pretense of the Bolshevik party-state resting on a social basis of a class alliance of workers and non-kulak peasantry (Lars T Lih).

Are you sure it's Lars Lih who said this and not Mike Macnair in his Permanent Revolution video? Source? :confused:

[Amphictyonis]

A lesson on what not to do in the future socialist revolution(s) as far as the Anarchist/Marxist fracture . Modern Marxists and Anarchists need to reconcile our differences, concede points, come to an agreement concerning the use of the state to abolish capital. I personally think taking over the state will be necessary to abolish capitalism. Either that or a massive mass movement/cultural shift which as Orwell said would let us shake the state off ourselves as a horse would shake off flies. I do agree with anarchists on the nature of hierarchy but I just can't envision a state being abolished by force, especially with the current strength, complexity and budget of the US military and intelligence systems.

[syndicat]

A lesson on what not to do in the future socialist revolution(s) as far as the Anarchist/Marxist fracture . Modern Marxists and Anarchists need to reconcile our differences, concede points, come to an agreement concerning the use of the state to abolish capital. I personally think taking over the state will be necessary to abolish capitalism. Either that or a massive mass movement/cultural shift which as Orwell said would let us shake the state off ourselves as a horse would shake off flies. I do agree with anarchists on the nature of hierarchy but I just can't envision a state being abolished by force, especially with the current strength, complexity and budget of the US military and intelligence systems.


this alleged conflict between anarchism and marxism is a myth. the conflict is between the libertarian socialist left and Leninism and social democracy. and it's highly unlikely that this conflict can be overcome.

if you can conceive of the workers taking over the running of the industries, why can you not also conceive of the military and other state personnel, sympathizing with this movement and defying their bosses?

[Anarchist Skinhead]

well- not that much of a myth. Anarchists will always be in confict with any kind of imposed authority, whatever its name. We simply don't believe that state can be "used", it has to be abolished and history proved us right again and again.

[revolution inaction]

well- not that much of a myth. Anarchists will always be in confict with any kind of imposed authority, whatever its name. We simply don't believe that state can be "used", it has to be abolished and history proved us right again and again.

some marxists agree with this.

[syndicat]

well- not that much of a myth. Anarchists will always be in confict with any kind of imposed authority

not so. in a revolution the working class collectively imposes a new form of social organization, based on common ownership and workers management. this is a form of collective social authority, and it is imposed through mass revolutionary struggle and new social institutions, which have the authority to make the decisions in workplaces and society.

[Anarchist Skinhead]

Yes, but people ACTUALLY have influence over those decisions so I fail to see how it is imposed?
Anyway, we are digressing, its a thread about Kronstadt ;)

[syndicat]

In majoritarian direct democracy there is no assumption that everybody agrees with every decision. And libertarian socialism would have to be opposed against the wishes of the currently dominating classes.

[S.Artesian]

As The Inform Candidate has detailed in this thread, and Syndicat [I believe] showed in a previous thread, this notion that the "class origin" of the Kronstadt sailors had changed between 1917 and 1921 is pure baloney. This was an ideological claim, created and based on all lies, and one single fact, that one fact being that the victors get to write the history.

The sociological analysis of the background of the sailors puts the truth opposite the ideology; the actions of the Bolsheviks after Kronstadt puts the lie to the claim that the rebellion had to be crushed lest the British use it to undermine soviet power; or that the rebellion itself would have restored capitalism to Russia.

What is more accurate regarding the make-up and historical origins of the conflicting parties is that the Bolsheviks 1921 were no longer the same Bolsheviks as those of 1917. The "draw down" of the proletarian elements in the party from 1918 has tremendous impacts; party work among workers was practically suspended for periods in 1918 and 1919; the factory committees where the Bolsheviks had their deepest connections with workers in Moscow for example, ceased to be the vehicles of the "self-movement" of the class; and the entire policy of the militarization of labor, which Lenin supported until mid 1920, although so many "Leninists" want to hold Trotsky alone responsible, drove even greater wedges between the workers and the party.

[Amphictyonis]

DbaizDSg1YU

[Amphictyonis]

this alleged conflict between anarchism and marxism is a myth. the conflict is between the libertarian socialist left and Leninism and social democracy. and it's highly unlikely that this conflict can be overcome.

if you can conceive of the workers taking over the running of the industries, why can you not also conceive of the military and other state personnel, sympathizing with this movement and defying their bosses?

Because the military and intelligence system more so than not churns out very loyal subjects unlike wage slaves working for a master.

[kasama-rl]

Syndicat writes:


"you mean Leninist sources.'Please don't put words in my mouth. You imply that I only read sources that reinforce my pre-existing thesis.

The opposite is the case: To actually understand what really happened, we obviously need to read many difference sources, and evaluate what is known.

To be honest, the official (leninist) histories of the Soviet Union are not particularly factual or reliable. Only a fool would read those official histories and assume they are accurate.

[Jose Gracchus]

Syndicat writes:

Please don't put words in my mouth. You imply that I only read sources that reinforce my pre-existing thesis.

The opposite is the case: To actually understand what really happened, we obviously need to read many difference sources, and evaluate what is known.

To be honest, the official (leninist) histories of the Soviet Union are not particularly factual or reliable. Only a fool would read those official histories and assume they are accurate.

Lets see those reputable sources then, rather than vague on-your-own-authority assertions that they surely exist.

[Jose Gracchus]

Thanks for responding in such detail. I think that your response will be helpful -- in that people will be able to evaluate our arguments side by side.

That's the idea.


I am looking forward to re-examining the data cited above that seeks to deny that there was much Kronstadt turnover. I must say I'm skeptical at the start -- because all the serious sources I have read argue that there was such turnover -- and that (in particular) the most radical and experienced leaders among the sailor had left Kronstadt (on various missions, to build the Red Army, to take other posts, etc.)

What sources? I've given you Chicago-style citations of specific scholarly works, full quotations, with specific pages provided. You may return the favor.


This is not to say that everyone on Kronstadt was some reactionary or backward element -- but rather that the sophistication to find orientation in increasingly difficult times had been watered down by the demands of civil war.

I read this three times and I still have no idea what it means in practice. Maybe I question whether you can conceive of political sophistication in a (or to be fair, at least this) revolutionary context that is in any sense capable of opposing the party lines. I cannot identify any principles, models, or logical arguments that allow for the possibility of identifying sophistication and revolutionary fervor objectively here in your arguments. It seems to me that behind them lurks the pretense that the 'correct line' is first judged, and then the behavior of the workers and organizations in relation to that already-judged correct line. Hence the powerful aversion to the preponderance of evidence that argues the kind of workers in both human raw material (i.e., they are literally the same masses of individual people in the same or similar social contexts), and also their activity, organization, and political rhetoric, etc. But if not organically out of this mass, what is the revolutionary class? Some philosophical abstraction to be fashioned out of thin air by those who have read Marx?

I'm being quite honest with you, I cannot follow a method here. It feels to me more like Catholic theology.


In some ways what stands out to me is that our view of the actual situation is not that different. You write for example:

"Again, the rank-and-file revolutionary elements in this period increasingly abandoned the party, or formed apart from it. In their single-minded focus on maintaining unchallenged (even from within the revolutionary consensus) party control, they sidelined actual revolutionary workers eager to participate both in the managerial and soviet apparatus (Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat) and turned increasingly to rapprochement with imperialist powers, international capitalist trade, and internal petty proprietors and merchants for breathing room against the background of the collapse of even intra-party democracy and the end to any authentic pretense of the Bolshevik party-state resting on a social basis of a class alliance of workers and non-kulak peasantry (Lars T Lih)."

I think that this is essentially true (leaving aside matters of tone etc.) There was an increasingly single-minded focus on "holding things together" as the strains of continuing war brought all the linkages of revolutionary movement, revolutionary power and revolutionary alliance to the breaking point. And as the Bolsheviks responded to the "splintering", and refused to permit new waves of disorder, and sought to use compromise to end the crises... they were trying to work their way out of an impending collapse/defeat for the revolution.

Correction: I made a mistake, it was Mike Macnair, not Lars T. Lih who published on the matter of petty proprietors and coordinators/bureaucrats/spetsy/intelligenty/etc..

Your account, in current scholarship, is simply ahistorical. I mean from well within even leftist and Leninist historians (Pirani researched and wrote The Russian Revolution in Retreat as a Trotskyist and MacNair is a former Marxist-Leninist).

More from Pirani:

"This stratum [the 'ruling stratum - later class'], as it existed during the Russian civil war, could not meaningfully be called a ruling class: a ruling elite formed around the party, Red army commanders and state officials, yes, but no social class with clearly defined collective interests. Nevertheless, despite this absence of a ruling class, exploitative social relationships based on alienated labour reappeared. The state played a central role in this. As the Bolsheviks contended with the economic breakdown, the campaigned, and turned the trades unions and factory committees to campaign for labour discipline; and they combined labour mobilization techniques with labour compulsion measures, including militarization...." (p. 6)Further:


"The political crisis of 1921 pushed the Bolsheviks to adapt to the NEP which in turn paved the way for economic recovery. The Bolsheviks' chosen path was to conduct the economic revival under the leadership of the party and the state; the working class was consigned to the area of production and kept out of the process of political decision-making. A social contract, as I describe it in Chapter 4, took shape, and was accepted by most workers: living standards improved consistently, in exchange for both increased labour discipline and productivity, and the surrender of political power to the party. This is the central theme of this book. The working class gained in terms of living standards, but paid a heavy price in terms of its collective consciousness and political development." (p. 8)
...
"It has been argued above that Russia during the civil war had no ruling class. The gap was not properly filled in the post-civil war period either. The landed gentry and capitalist class had been broken up. The new Soviet ruling class had not yet coalesced from the groups of officials who would join its ranks. The working class ruled in name only, ceding political power to the Bolshevik party. That party found itself, and the state that it controlled, playing an extraordinarily important role, not only in rebuilding the economy, but in recreating a ruling class. Moshe Lewin observed that it was a superstructure, 'suspended temporarily in a kind of vacuum', that had to recreate its own base." (p. 9)Lastly, on the formation of that 'new ruling class':

"This book endeavours to place changes in Bolshevik politics and ideology, including the use of mobilization techniques, in the context of changing class relations. In counterpoint to working-class formation, the new Soviet ruling class was taking shape. The party elite acted as a centre of gravity around which this class gathered, and the party as a whole adapted its policies to the elite's interests. The later chapters of this book trace this process as it unfolded in the first years of NEP. Industrial workers and other party activists were sucked into the party-state apparatus, a process that the Moscow party secretary compared dispairingly to the action of a pump. Other social groups that went on to become constituernt elements of the Soviet ruling class - factory managers, party cell leaders, and specialists - found themselves, from the start, in an antagonistic relationship with workers. Notwithstanding the discomfort felt by many party members at these hostilities, the party as an organization reinforced the evolving hierarchy. At the same time, the party elite consolidated its control of the whole party, a process that culminated in the defeat of the left opposition in 1923. Between the civil war and the mid 1920s, the party was transformed from a military-political fighting organization to an administrative machine for implementing decisions taken at the top. in terms of socialist theory, it is concluded, that, in view of the role that the state played in these events, the characterization of its as a 'workers' state' needs to be questioned." (p. 12)What more is there to be said? Regardless of the personal, intellectual or moral, sincerity of the leadership and party-state elite figures, the Bolsheviks ceased to be in any substantive or meaningful sense a "workers' party" and their state to be a "workers' and peasants' state". That is, if we are keeping with logical and Marxian methods here. Historical claims must be justified by evidence, and perhaps a model of history or change can come out of that. But it must have meaningful definitions and mechanisms which are not ad hoc hypotheses and where independent determinations can be made.

I have seen no evidence that the Bolsheviks - much less the workers they are supposed to be representing, as a pretext for this whole discussion - seriously believed Kronstadt was about a White intervention. These were by 1920 war-tested, made-on-the-job statesmen and strategic planners. Trotsky had assimilated the military spetsy into the RKKA. Are you telling me there remains no authentic evidence today that the Bolshevik and Red Army leadership had no idea about the content of the revolt? (Hint, Kalinin, the Head of State, gave a speech to the dissenting soviet and was thereby personally present). The "revolt" actually began as a call for political action: the Kronstadt soviet wanted to send delegates to the Petrograd strikers to discuss their grievances and to circulate their program, and perhaps hold new elections. Why, preytell, does this qualify as quote "new waves of disorder"? Why would negotiated political settlement permitting participation of only pro-revolutionary, pro-soviet power non-party workers or peasants and their organizations, socialists and socialist parties, and anarchists into soviet elections, a review of political prisoners, free propaganda only within this context. To be quite honest, the Bolsheviks could yet have probably co-opted any government opposition. So I think there's no plausible motive other than shuttering possibilities for participative popular politics and any authentic workers' and peasants' democracy. The government was unwilling to accept any challenge or input into how they did business. Not even from bona fide revolutionary workers, peasants, and intellectuals - including Communist Party members. This is about whether the party-state leadership had to mind any organized and deliberate challenges to the leadership. Hence the following formation of a tacit social contract with the workers while removing them from public decision-making. Hence banning party factions. Hence seeking support from small capitalists and merchants and kulaks.

Its simple. What evidence do you have that the Bolsheviks were in any substantive sense still a workers' party? That is, a party of the militant proletariat, an instrument of its activists and organization, this party base authentically democratically controls the center, as per its fundamental principles? Because to me it looks like the party filled with specialists, bureaucrats, professional commanders, and increasingly became dominated top-down by a self-selecting caste of often non-proletarian leadership. It then excluded all substantive means by which the proletariat militant could influence or control policy and public decision-making. The principle that the Bolshevik elite of 1917 had a divine right to dominate the Soviet state, at the exclusion of the militant revolutionary elements of the class upon which its fundamental claim of legitimacy rested, was fully accepted within the leadership by 1920. Therefore, when this legitimate base attempted to reassert itself, even weakly, it was considered an existential threat to the Bolshevik leadership. I don't think their intentions or sincerity really matter. I don't think an alchemical change in society and social relations and with means of social and class analysis occurs when the revolutionary party comes to power and the property relations of the country are significantly changed once. There are still relations of production. I don't stop using the same tools.


For now, I have to say that I stand by my argument and analysis. And I believe that the dynamics of the situation rested on the exhaustion of the war, the weakening of political consciousness and communist organization among the sailors, and a mistaken hope that another revolution might solve problems (rather than shatter the revolutionary process).

There were still militant workers and large populations of workers involved in production during the Civil War. Some sectors, due to military orders, significantly expanded, and even had privileged rations (and saw their organizations largely survive the war, apart from the obvious stresses of political repression). The political consciousness of the sailors did not change since 1917. They largely supported the Communist Party and Soviet state leadership on its "exigencies of the Civil War" excuse. But by Wrangel's driving into the sea in 1920, the militant workers and sailors (including pro-Communist workers and Communist Party members) throughout the strike movements, non-party workers' opposition movements, both in Petrograd and Moscow and especially in Kronstadt, eventually proposed political programs that were unacceptable to the leadership. They did not attack, and even inadequately defended, the Fortress, up until the designs of the government were clear. It was a proposal for political negotiation and settlement, and an appeal to be allowed to organize. There was no threat of armed force, no zeal for new revolution ("Third Revolution" is an off-hand slogan used to much affect by anarchists, but this was not the substance of the uprising), and they explicitly did not call for the expulsion of leadership, or the Communist Party. They called for free, fair soviet elections by secret ballot for all proletarian, peasant, and socialist elements who stood for the revolution and for soviet power, and either matters of political reform and settlement. Not revolutionary expulsion of Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee. I can only wonder what the motive is for this allusion, but I think it is to allude to readers that the Kronstadt Rebellion had probable counterrevolution on its hands unless it was crushed. I think that is absurd.

The very proposal and suggestion to form a plenary congress of delegates from Kronstadt and the Petrograd factories caused government hysteria about White Guardists and French imperialists and Tsarist generals. You may have abandoned this line, but in appraising the government's actions, you are ignoring their own public line at the time.


Also: I think that there is a lot to learn from this experience -- since the categories of "advanced" and "revolutionary" change (often rapidly) with changes in events. There are complexities in the emergence and continuation of a revolutionary people (and problems of remaining unified under difficult and often confusing choices).

An explanation of how we can define those terms usefully, and how this process is laid out historically and systemically as well.


This was a moment when it almost all "came apart" -- and where once united revolutionary forces started to splinter. Our response should not be to demonize one side or the other -- but to understand how such things happen in revolutions, and how desperate choices are sometimes posed.

In short, the very central - in fact, the only - claim of verifiable fact found in your article, regarding the composition of the uprising, has been shown to be incorrect within the preponderance of evidence. You're free to actually provide refuting evidence.

Ironically, the reasoning applied, that the Kronstadt uprising was not as authentically proletarian and revolutionary as the selfsame sailors and workers (and by extension, the same goes for the striking and militant workers and workers' opposition in Petrograd and Moscow) in 1917. It is in fact untrue. But the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state at this point had highly degraded itself as an instrument of the militant working class. So if legitimacy is the militant revolutionary elements of the revolutionary classes taking control of production and public decision-making, it was the government which was acting substantially counter-revolutionary in this sense.

I think you should provide a shred of evidence to support your assertions if you expect to be taken seriously. You've simply withdrawn from serious questions, waved off evidence you dislike, failed to produce your own, and proceeded to repeat your assertions on fiat and allusion. That doesn't qualify as making your argument.

[Die Neue Zeit]

MacNair is a former Marxist-Leninist

Huh? :confused:

Macnair is a former "Mandelite"/USFI Trotskyist.

[Jose Gracchus]

Huh? :confused:

Macnair is a former "Mandelite"/USFI Trotskyist.

Really? My mistake then. I thought he was a former member of the Moscovite British CP

[RED DAVE]

well- not that much of a myth. Anarchists will always be in confict with any kind of imposed authority, whatever its name. We simply don't believe that state can be "used", it has to be abolished and history proved us right again and again.We know that the bourgeois state can't be used. Only Stalinists, Maoists and social democrats believe that.


The issue between many Marxists and anarchists concerns a workers state. I find the attitude of many anarchists towards a revolutionary workers state to be adolescent.

RED DAVE

[Anarchist Skinhead]

state is a state my friend. Nobody that will end up with power in his/her hands will ever give it up later on, I think its absolutely naive to think that state can slowly dissapear as many marxists tried to convince me. But again, sorry for the off top, this is about Kronstad

[syndicat]

Please don't put words in my mouth. You imply that I only read sources that reinforce my pre-existing thesis.



I don't know what you've read. but you're putting forward a Leninist line on Kronstadt....like your weasel words about it being "the last hope of the counterrevolution"...what crap!

as Inform Candidate says, let's see what your sources are then?

[Jose Gracchus]

Its positively scandalous the leadership could so little trust the Red Army to crush the revolt, that they had to pack the units with party members and party veterans, and have members of the Party Congress (and even Central Committee!) personally lead the assault.

For those that believe "people's" or "workers'" armies are part of the revolutionary forces, that is pretty damning the extent to which they feared proletarian revolutionary solidarity.

[S.Artesian]

That's a small scandal, compared to painting the rebels as White Guards, counterrevolutionaries, and even that doesn't compare to slaughtering them after seizing the fortress.