Obligatory Kronstadt thread

[Radical Atom]

Sooo... yeah, I'm aware this is a topic that's been long discussed, sectarian shit storms included, but I'm really interested to first learn more about the Kronstadt rebellion (good read recommendations please) and to know what current active users think of the whole kerfuffle. And since the board has been mildly quiet I think the risk is worth it. Please, though, refer from the typical "lul evil authoritarians crushed the sailors cause they hate freedom" and "bleeegh the sailors were czarist and allied agents conspiring for capitalist restoration"; if you can't do better than that simply do not post.
Which events led to Kronstradt? Was the NEP a correct decision? What effects did it have on the Soviet population and Kronstadt's in particular? The RCW was still fresh in the memories of all Soviet citizens, was there a real threat of another international intervention? Was the presence or influence of the whites significant in any way? Of all the possible outcomes why did it go so wrong? Were there no better courses of action?
I know some of the questions could have a thread on their own, but I don't mind walls of text, I enjoy a good read so go ahead.
For anyone not versed into the topic these might be a good introduction:
Victor Serge on Kronstadt from the Marxist Internet Archive:
/archive/serge/1945/memoirs/ch04x.htm
/archive/serge/1938/04/kronstadt.htm
A short debate between Devrim and Random precision which delineates two opposing positions on the issue:
/vb/threads/80959-kronstadt
Thread on the Demands of the Kronstadt rebels:
/vb/threads/182199-Kronstadt-Rebellion-and-the-Bolsheviks

As for my position, I think many conflicts are maliciously labeled as tragedy in order to metaphysically categorize them as some kind of inevitability and/or to blur the line between oppressor and oppressed. This case however, I think was a real tragedy part of a bigger one, the degeneration of the revolution. I can "sympathize" (for the lack of a better word) with both sides especially knowing that they didn't have the benefit of hindsight that we have. However, the demands of the sailors do not seem as outrageous as to trigger the massacre of the entire garrison at the hands of the Red Army.

[ketplaz]

The list of demands from the Kronstadtians were irrealistic and would mean weakening the revolution. Free elections in a peasant-majority nation meant that the peasantry would elect the L Social-Revolutionaries and the fact alone that they would oppose the Brest-Litovsk peace meant that any L Social-Revolutionary government would lead to the defeat of the proletarian revolution. The "socialists" arrested by the Bolsheviks were rightly arrested. Mensheviks and R S-R's were the left wing of the bourgeois reaction. Now, openly revolting? In Kronstadt? That was endangering Petrograd itself. The swift action by the Bolsheviks was to some extent justified.

But assuming that they were foreign agents, assuming no non-revolution-endangering compromise could be reached... (A sentence which strikes to me as ironical since the ones who usually accuse the Bolsheviks of authoritarianism in Kronstadt also denounce any compromises with petit-bourgeois factions...) The actions and the path taken by the Bolsheviks to crush it also retroactively justified the rebellion itself in first place.

It was all in all a very sad event. I must add, however, that if I was Comrade Trotsky and the rebels wouldn't back down after some more time of negotiation, I would have done the same he did. Its way better to fight the degeneration of the revolution while waiting the West to revolt than to fight a much more harsh war to keep the revolution from being drowned in Imperialist bayonets. There is a reason why it's called the dictatorship of the proletariat and not the democratic big happy family of proletariat, peasantry and lumpens.

[Blake's Baby]

It's the 'revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat' not 'the reactionary dictatorship of some jumped-up party bastards'. When the party separates itself from the workers' own organs (ie the soviets) then it's the party that is wrong.

[General Winter]

On January 10, 1994, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree rehabilitated all participants of the Kronstadt uprising.Clearly class evaluation of the event.

[ketplaz]

On January 10, 1994, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree rehabilitated all participants of the Kronstadt uprising.Clearly class evaluation of the event.

That is an evaluation of nothing. Dugin upholds the legacy of the USSR and that doesn't makes him a communist, that makes him an opportunist and a populist.

[General Winter]

That is an evaluation of nothing.

It's the evalution of of the Kronstadt uprising,the point of view of the reactionary.

[Radical Atom]

I picked this up from a much older thread, which I found interesting:


I get that the putting down of the Kronstadt revolt was terrible but in reality what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had tried to implement their demands? I remember that at one point Lenin himself was entertaining the possibility of making the Soviets proper instruments of working-class rule instead of useless shells but he quickly abandoned the idea simply because the bureaucracy was already too large.

From the ICT's article on the events of 1921 (http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2001-08-01/1921-beginning-of-the-counter-revolution):



...in 1921 itself, at the Tenth Party Congress:

"For a brief moment Lenin flirted with the idea of effecting a separation between Party and state. He briefly urged a clear specification and demarcation of the respective spheres of each and proposed that the organs of the state be given much greater autonomy and freedom from Party interference."

Harding later tells us that Lenin recognised “almost instantly” that his proposal would not work. But this was because the situation in 1921 made it impossible to re-write the past. The Bolsheviks could not abandon state power because the soviets were already empty shells.


Simply put there were no other options in Russia at the time besides the degeneration of the revolution in the face of the failure of the world revolution.

So really, what would the granting of the Kronstadter's demands done to change the course of the revolution in concrete terms?


Any thoughts on this?

[Sewer Socialist]

yeah, it seems like the revolution / civil war may have been a pyrrhic victory at that point, but kronstadt was nailing the coffin shut.

i mean, how long do people have to serve in the army / navy before they're "proletarian" enough for the dotp transitional state, by the standards of those who denounce the mutineers as "peasants"?

[Ismail]

i mean, how long do people have to serve in the army / navy before they're "proletarian" enough for the dotp transitional state, by the standards of those who denounce the mutineers as "peasants"?You could serve for fifty years and it wouldn't change what class you belong to. Peasant soldiers were fighting for their land against deposed landowners. At the end of the day they would be returning home to their small plots of land. The Red Army obviously worked to educate them with the proletarian ideology, but as Lenin noted the peasants were "practical" people; they had to see with their own eyes the superiority of socialism in the countryside in order to be won over to it. That was impossible to do in starving, blockaded, war-torn Soviet Russia.

[General Winter]

Any thoughts on this?

BTW,Soviets and the revolution are are impossible without the Bolsheviks. Such Soviets necessarily turns into religious or semi-religious communities (alike Protestant groups in the times of the early colonization of America) or return people to the original model of existence. In Russia this led to the creation of rural communities ruled by rich peasants, who did their best to suppress their neighbors.

Because vanguard appears in any case, that's the way any society works - it necessarily creates a governing body.And then the only question is - on what ideological position the vaguard stands. In the 20th century only Bolshevism was a successor of humanism : this is the right to education, the right to health care and many other things. And no one else wanted this for everyone.

[Heretek]

BTW,Soviets and the revolution are are impossible without the Bolsheviks. Such Soviets necessarily turns into religious or semi-religious communities (alike Protestant groups in the times of the early colonization of America) or return people to the original model of existence. In Russia this led to the creation of rural communities ruled by rich peasants, who did their best to suppress their neighbors.

Because vanguard appears in any case, that's the way any society works - it necessarily creates a governing body.And then the only question is - on what ideological position the vaguard stands. In the 20th century only Bolshevism was a successor of humanism : this is the right to education, the right to health care and many other things. And no one else wanted this for everyone.

I suppose we're doomed then, the Bolsheviks are dead and rot.

What in the hell is this? 'Necessarily creates a governing body?' What is the fucking point then? How can you possibly be a communist if this is your reasoning? Communism is a classless, Stateless, society created by the struggle of workers against capitalism. Where at all does that leave room for a 'government,' an inherent construction to create class divisions, an elite and the not, the privileged and the oppressed?

[General Winter]

Just for the record,communist society is not an unruly mob,it 'll have a regulatory body too,and this has nothing to do with class division,opression etc.

Any revolution creats a vanguard who lead it.Any who attacks it attacks the revolution,such is dialectic.

[Radical Atom]

I find greatly appalling the utter contempt for the working class and worker's organizations that lies within tankie esotericism.

Since you've made patently clear that you either have no fucking clue of what the Soviets were or how they functioned or you are purposely misrepresenting them here's a little reminder:

Soviets were democratically elected local, municipal and regional workers' councils. Soviets were representatives of workers, peasants and soldiers in a given locale (rural soviets were a mix of peasants and soldiers, while urban soviets were a mix of workers and soldiers). The Soviets were bodies whose members were volunteers; people who were involved did so to strengthen their class position in Russian politics. Soviets gained political power after the Bolshevik revolution, acting as the local executive bodies of government. Delegates were elected from Soviets to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/a/l.htm#arcs), where the foundation of the Soviet government was intended to rest. Gradually, however, soviets began to lose their power because of the extremely harsh conditions brought on by the Civil War (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/events/r/u.htm#rcw), and by the late 1920s became top-down extensions of the "Communist" party.

There were very intense debates in the mass meetings at the university on the on-going situation, real-life experiences and the alternatives the future opened up, but in October the situation changed: the debates did not die down, quite the contrary, they matured into an open struggle, which, in turn, began to establish a general organisation, which not only led the struggle but guided and cohered the massive debate. The need to regroup, unite and to unify the various centres of the strikes was raised very clearly by the Moscow workers. The congress of railway workers had been able to provide a program of economic and political demands in relation to the situation and in accord with the real practicalities facing the working class. Debate, unified organisation, a programme of struggle: these were the three pillars on which the soviets were built. So it is clear then that it's the convergence of initiatives and proposals from different sectors of the working class that gave rise to the soviets and absolutely not the "plans" of some minority. The soviets were the concrete expression of what, some 60 years earlier in the Communist Manifesto, looked likeautopian formulation: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority".

Meetings of the Soviet were the antithesis of a bourgeois parliament or a disputation among academic scholars. "There was no trace of magniloquence, that ulcer of representational institutions! The questions under discussion - the spreading of the strike and demands to be addressed to the Duma - were of a purely practical nature and were debated briefly, energetically and in a businesslike manner. One felt that every atom of time was accounted for. The slightest tendency towards rhetoric was firmly checked by the chairman with the stern approval of the entire meeting."

This lively and practical debate, at once profound and concrete, revealed a transformation in the consciousness and the social psychology of the workers and was a powerful factor in developing these. Consciousness is the collective understanding of the social situation and its perspectives, of the real power that comes from mass action, and of the need to set goals, distinguish friends from enemies, and elaborate a vision of the future world. But at the same time social psychology is a factor that is both distinct from but that exists alongside consciousness; a factor that is expressed in the moral and living attitudes of workers, in their contagious solidarity, in their empathy with others, in their open-mindedness and learning and in their selfless devotion to the common cause.
This mental transformation may appear utopian and impossible to those who only see workers through the prism of everyday life where they may appear as atomised robots without the least initiative or collective sentiment, destroyed by the weight of competition and rivalry. It's the experience of massive struggle and the development of the workers' councils that is the engine of such a transformation, as Trotsky says: "Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology."

So whatever this pathetic anticommunist caricature you've put up in your post is, it has nothing to do with the reality of the Soviets before and during the USSR (before their "disbandment"). Comparing Soviets to colonial settlements... what the fuck.

It'd be comical, nay hysterical if it weren't so fucking insulting how you accuse the Soviets of all things, of having some kind of "natural" predisposition to superstition and backwardness (not even right wing cold warriors would dare to make such a titanically moronic attack against the soviets), this coming from the same people who made "communism" compatible with national chauvinism, ethnic cleansing (ask the Crimean Tatars), wage slavery and imperialism; who cowardly capitulated to backwardness by criminalizing abortion and homosexuality.
But no, no, no, it's not the tankies who are predisposed to backwardness ... Right? "Cuz such iz dialectic". Hegel must be rolling in his grave faster than a frisbee in a washing machine... inside a tornado.
Are you really that oblivious to the fact that you feel the need to spew this crap because if you faced reality your little stalinist fantasy would be utterly unsustainable? Seriously, this isn't too far off evolutionary psychology or human nature "arguments".
You are basically making the religious argument that without a "Big Other" people are going to go back to a "primitive" uncivilized savage state.

Here's some advice: try to actually analyze critically reality and apply your findings into your ideology instead of uncritically applying your simple, reductionist, out of touch ideological justifications for your flimsy politics to very complex real and practical problems. But, then again, when did one of your ilk let material reality and facts get on the way of the pretty politically superficial identity they've built around themselves?

There's already a thread on the vanguard party, if you are that incontinent about your essentialist, anti-worker, anti-materialist bullshit, you can offer your special brand of political diarrhea there.

[Radical Atom]

More reading material on Workers' Councils for those interested:
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/140/workers-councils-01
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/141/workers-councils-02

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It's the evalution of of the Kronstadt uprising,the point of view of the reactionary.

Or it's just a shitty stab at guilt by association. A supporter of the Kronstadt uprising might as well say "German intelligence let Lenin go to Moscow, so clearly the Bolshevik takeover must have just been a plot by the Kaiser and the German Imperialists!"

[John Nada]

Or it's just a shitty stab at guilt by association. A supporter of the Kronstadt uprising might as well say "German intelligence let Lenin go to Moscow, so clearly the Bolshevik takeover must have just been a plot by the Kaiser and the German Imperialists!"Or Yeltsin had a fucked up sense of humor. That was just a couple months after he shelled the Russian Parliament, killing dozens, if not hundreds.

[Blake's Baby]

I think the suppression of the Kronstadt Commune - which included the majority of the Bolshevik Party in Kronstadt - killed more communists than the shelling of the Russian Parliament in 1993.

[thamexper]

there are a lot of useful information. OK all, Thanks

[Radical Atom]

Is there a good account of the negotiations? I doubt either party truly wanted events to occur the way they did.