Kronstadt

[YKTMX]

Again, this is just hypocricy, quiet a few CC members have defended Kronstadt (which in fact already was the final failure of the Bolshevik revolution and of "Leninism") and other Leninist crimes as neccesary "actions to defend the revolution", where in fact it was quiet the opposite, those people don't have the right to complain at all now.


Firstly, to compare the situation, and therefore what is appropriate and what's not appropriate, in post-revolutionary 1920's Russia and New York 2006 is ridiculous.

Secondly, just for the record, the Kronstadt rebellion was a fascist coup conducted by vicious pogromists. They were offered the chance to surrender to Soviet power, but they choose to go down fighting for White Russia, and they all died.

Good.

[Edelweiss]

Originally posted by [email protected] 22 2006, 01:07 AM

Again, this is just hypocricy, quiet a few CC members have defended Kronstadt (which in fact already was the final failure of the Bolshevik revolution and of "Leninism") and other Leninist crimes as neccesary "actions to defend the revolution", where in fact it was quiet the opposite, those people don't have the right to complain at all now.


Firstly, to compare the situation, and therefore what is appropriate and what's not appropriate, in post-revolutionary 1920's Russia and New York 2006 is ridiculous.

Secondly, just for the record, the Kronstadt rebellion was a fascist coup conducted by vicious pogromists. They were offered the chance to surrender to Soviet power, but they choose to go down fighting for White Russia, and they all died.

Good.
I don't want to turn this thread into a debate on Kronstadt, but it indeed was a workers rebellion defending the true values of the revolution, which had been betrayed by Lenin, the rebelling sailors where in no way affiliated with the reactionary white guards, that is nothing but falsification of history, no matter what your Trot guru is telling you. The Russian revolution died in Kronstadt.

And I'm not comparing Kronstadt to NY 2006. My point is that Leninists who are defending Kronstadt as a "revolutionary necessity", or whatever euphemism they choose to justify that crime, don't have the moral right to complain and whine about the RAAN now, and to even advice non-Leninist to not target them before the revolution. Again, what do you expect, that all non-Leninist communists and anarchists wait until the revolution, just to see history repeating itself and get a head shot? Actually after historical experience of Kronstadt I can understand communists who see the "RAAN line" just as a logical step, as an act of self-defense, although I personally would refrain from this.

[YKTMX]

I don't want to turn this thread into a debate on Kronstadt

Why not? Seems more important than the absolute nonsense being written in the rest of the thread.


but it indeed was a workers rebellion defending the true values of the revolution

A "workers' rebellion" led by Ukranian peasants? :blink:


which had been betrayed by Lenin

Depends what you think the "values" of the revolution were. If you think the values were petty bourgeois reaction and anti-semitism, then I suppose he did "betray" the values.


the rebelling sailors where in no way affiliated with the reactionary white guards

Oh, but they were.

The rebellion was suppressed militarily after the appeal for the categorical lowering of arms was rejected by the sailors. The first attacks ended in failure for the Bolsheviks, but after a regroupment including the enlistment of 320 delegates from the Bolshevik Tenth Party Congress into the ranks, on 10 March the offensive broke through successfully. Some 8,000 Kronstadt rebels fled to Finland, where some, including Petrichenko, openly identified their links with the White army.


http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/bakan/90-krons.htm


no matter what your Trot guru is telling you.

It's amazing how intelligent left-communists can sound like pathetic Stalinist kiddies when they want to. It's like ElijahCraig reborn sometimes.


And I'm not comparing Kronstadt to NY 2006.

That's explicitly what you're doing.


Actually after historical experience of Kronstadt I can understand communists who see the "RAAN line" just as a logical step, as an act of self-defense,

Absolutely, I agree.

The petty bourgeois anti-working class "anarchist" fringe are the direct heirs of the White Guard who rebelled at Kronstadt.

[Wanted Man]

Due to my not being from New York, or even the USA(and not having seen the rest of this topic), I wonder - are the RAAN actually starting to carry out their threats against Leninists as seen in anomaly's sig?

[Comrade Marcel]

Fuck Kronstadt.

[YSR]

Originally posted by Kronstadt sailors demands
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.
Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.
The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.
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.
The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.
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.
The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.
The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
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.
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.
We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.
We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.
We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.
We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.

Yeah, those dirty fascist pogromists at Kronstadt. How could they demand freedom for the anarchists? I don't agree with everything they said, of course, but I think classifying these people are fascists is at best totally misunderstanding them.

Lenin's words:
http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/15.htm

Even he characterizes them as "fools or traitors" rather than pogromists.

I don't know what you guys were talking about in the CC that lead up to this split, but I assume Comrade Marcel's "Fuck Kronstadt" was meant dismissively towards the topic. I disagree, if that is indeed what he is saying. It exists as one of the examples (Soviets in Catalonia being another oft-cited one) of when anarchists and non-Leninist leftists have been destroyed by Leninists. While I respect that they are historical, not modern events, I think that non-hierarchial leftists must keep them in the back of our minds.

[Fistful of Steel]

Originally posted by [email protected] 22 2006, 12:07 AM

Again, this is just hypocricy, quiet a few CC members have defended Kronstadt (which in fact already was the final failure of the Bolshevik revolution and of "Leninism") and other Leninist crimes as neccesary "actions to defend the revolution", where in fact it was quiet the opposite, those people don't have the right to complain at all now.


Firstly, to compare the situation, and therefore what is appropriate and what's not appropriate, in post-revolutionary 1920's Russia and New York 2006 is ridiculous.

Secondly, just for the record, the Kronstadt rebellion was a fascist coup conducted by vicious pogromists. They were offered the chance to surrender to Soviet power, but they choose to go down fighting for White Russia, and they all died.

Good.
Any ideology that comes up that isn't strictly adherent to a Soviet-centered interpretation is immediately called "Fascist". Let's look at the demands issued and see how close to "Fascism" they stand, shall we?

" 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, 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."

1. What do you know, wishing for democracy? Can't have that now can we.
2. What? Freedom of speech and of the press? But how can Comrade Lenin be portrayed as the benefactor of all humanity then?! Freedom is so anti-revolutionary.
3. Freedom of assembly for trade unions? Tut-tut, they just want to get together to kill jews. That explains that.
4. People organizing freely? Hmmm. I'm sure that's exactly what Hitler wanted.
5. Freeing up revolutionaries belonging to lower classes? That's just blasphemy. How can the workers have any rights?
6. They must be looking for more Jews to kill, those dirty fascists.
7. Encouraging democracy and the abolition of a one-party hegemony? Not in my Russia.
8. Less killing is always bad, comrades. Always.
9. Equalization?! No, no, no. Everyone knows that people in the party need special privileges due to all the strenuous thinking and organizing they do.
10. Taking into account the views of workers? How irrelevant. The Great and Noble Lenin is the only one whose views need to be taken into account, of course.
11. And daring to have freedom of action? To raise something as the individual sees fit? This is the parasitic talk of the Petty Bourgeoise! Never mind Lenin's N.E.P. down the road a little. Completely besides the point, of course.
12. A comprehensive understanding of freedom and unity among the Army? What useless drivel. Everyone knows the army is the sole property of the party.
13. A comprehensive understanding of freedom and unity among the people? That'll encourage diversity, and diversity comrades is the weapon of the Capitalists.
14. Again, how can this be thinkable? The all-seeing, all-knowing Vanguard can be the only one's with any control, self-determined workers representatives are counter-revolutionary.
15. See point 11.

(Please understand this is very tongue in cheek to illustrate that the demands of the Kronstadt rebellion were not Fascist at all, and to deem so is merely reactionary propaganda and lies.)

[YKTMX]

Who cares what their "demands" were?

The question for Marxists is what social forces did they represent. What interests?

Lenin and the Bolsheviks said they stood for workers' power in their propaganda and speeches, presumably you lot don't think that was true.

Why is that we're supposed to believe to believe what comrade Petrichenko says and not Lenin?

The fact remains that the leaders of the Putsch were Ukranian peasants, hailing from a region world renowned for its anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism.

[Cult of Reason]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that the activities of Makhno, the Black Army and the Ukrainian peasants were seperate to Kronstadt (although they, too, were crushed by the statists).


Why is that we're supposed to believe to believe what comrade Petrichenko says and not Lenin?

Even if what you say of Petrichenko is true, it is irrelevant to any non-heirarchical organisation. Petrichenko would not have been a leader, assuming that the rebellion was anti-authoriatarian in nature. Of course, disobediance to authority is counter-revolutionary. :angry:

[YKTMX]

Even if what you say of Petrichenko is true, it is irrelevant to any non-heirarchical organisation.

Stupid.

It's "irrelevant" that one of the leaders of the rebellion was a fascist?

This is what makes anarchism so ridiculous.


Petrichenko would not have been a leader, assuming that the rebellion was anti-authoriatarian in nature.

That's a pretty big assumption on your part - what are you basing it on?


Of course, disobediance to authority is counter-revolutionary.

No, but fascist peasants tend to be.

[LSD]

Who cares what their "demands" were?

Ostensibly anyone interested in understanding the causes of the Kronstadt Rebellion.

I understand that to those who take the words of Leon "infallible" Trotsky as gospel, everything else is irrelevent. But, for the rest of us, actual historical details are essential tools in serious historical investigation.

You can claim that the demands were "propaganda" or "fake", but such a contention is frankly laughable. The Kronstadt sailors were not a "government" or a "state", nor did they have any illusions of holding an especially powerful position.

They simply weren't in the business of fucking around and if they were going to make public demands, you'd better believe that they'd be serious about them!

I mean, think for a moment about what you're actually proposing. Are you seriously suggesting that had Lenin suffered a personality shift and suddenly become an actual communist, that had he met the Petropavlovsk/Sevastopol demands, the sailors wouldn't have backed down???

That they would have said sorry, we were only kidding around??? :blink:

Had something that ridiculous actually transpired, there may be a reasonable argument for the Trotskyist side in this, but it didn't. Instead a bunch of Red Army soldiers fought against dictatorship and encircling bureaucracy and laied out a list of irreproachable demands from the so-called "workers' state".

In response they were slaughtered.

So much for "dictatorship of the proletariat". <_<


The question for Marxists is what social forces did they represent. What interests?

Absolutely.

But the answer is much more complex than orthodox Leninists like to pretend.

Were there peasants among the Kronstadt sailors in 1921? There sure were. But there were workers too. There were new recruits, there were veterans, there were revolutionary fighters.

And to imagine that such a disparate collection of soldiers could represent solely the interest of the, miniscule, Russian petty-bourgeois class is ludicrous.

Sure, there was a degree of loyalty to the peasants being brutally suppressed by the Bolsheviks, but the demands of the Kronstadt sailors went well byond peasant or artisan rights. The overwhelming majority, after all, were about the workers and oppressed proletarian organizations.

The Anarchists, the left-communists, they weren&#39;t "petty bourgeois" or "whitists", in fact they had loyally stood by the Bolsheviks throughout the revolution.

For their troubles, they were locked up, shipped out, and executed.

The solidarity shown by the sailors for their fellow lefists was not "treason", it was the highest form of loyality.


Lenin and the Bolsheviks said they stood for workers&#39; power in their propaganda and speeches, presumably you lot don&#39;t think that was true.

Why is that we&#39;re supposed to believe to believe what comrade Petrichenko says and not Lenin?

Because Lenin had, by that time, already demonstrated his propaganda and speeches to be nothing but hot air.

Unlike with the Kronstadt sailors, we actually know what Lenin et al., did upon assuming power and it had nothing to do with "workers&#39; power".

We can never know what Petrichenko "really thought" or what he "might have done". We can&#39;t even really know whether or not he secretly "in league" with the White Army. What we do know, howver, is that 90% of the Kronstadt Sailors&#39; demands were reasonable, fair, and would not have been a problem for any remotely democratic state.

If the Bolshevik government had been the "workers&#39; democracy" that it claimed to be, it would have had zero difficulty allowing free speech or holding free elections.

Instead, Trotsky felt it nescessary to crush one of the bastions of Russian revolutionary fervor and massacre tens of thousands of dedicated leftists.

After all, even if you subscribe to the theory that the "Kronstadt leaders" were "allied" with Whitists, no one can make the claim that the bulk of the sailors were. That kind of massive conspiracy simply wouldn&#39;t have been possible.

Even the most ardent Trotskyist can&#39;t argue with a straight face that such a large and varied group of soldiers could in less than a year go en masse from a body lauded by the Bolsheviks as a paragon of the Red Army, to conniving Whitist traitors.

So, regardless of any "petty-bourgoies planing" going on, if Lenin had merely adhered to basic communist principles, there would have been no chance for any "counter-revolution".

That the Bolsheviks wouldn&#39;t even contemplate meeting frankly elementary demands for basic workers&#39; rights is a pretty damning demonstration of just how far they were from being an actual Proletarian "vanguard".


The fact remains that the leaders of the Putsch were Ukranian peasants, hailing from a region world renowned for its anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism.

We&#39;re judging people based on their birthplace now? It doesn&#39;t matter what a person fights for, so long as they come from a "reactionary region", they "must" be the enemy?

Sorry, but that&#39;s utter crap and you know it.

After all, need I remind you that Trotsky himself was born on a Ukrainian farm?

I guess that his upbringing doesn&#39;t matter though. The fact that he came from a Ukrainian peasant family is "irrelevent" whereas the fact that some Kronstadt sailors did is "paramount". :rolleyes:

I suppose that that&#39;s kind of the same logic that says we&#39;re supposed to believe that he was "loyal to the workers" even though he brutally crushed an insurrection that literaly fought for "the equalisation of rations for all workers" and "the liberation of all imprisoned workers".

[YKTMX]

The Kronstadt sailors were not a "government" or a "state", nor did they have any illusions of holding an especially powerful position.


How do you know?

There&#39;s an amazing amount of projection going on here. To Malte, it&#39;s "workers&#39; rebellion" aiming to save the revolution from itself. To Haraldur, it&#39;s anti-authoritarian struggle with a non-hierarchial structure. Now, to LSD, it&#39;s a movement which is not looking for power.

You&#39;re all fantasists.


that had he met the Petropavlovsk/Sevastopol demands, the sailors wouldn&#39;t have backed down???


I don&#39;t know because I don&#39;t have a crystal ball. Neither, I imagine, do you.


In response they were slaughtered.


Quite. The tired, hungry Red Army recruits fought bravely to defend the workers&#39; state. And they won.


So much for "dictatorship of the proletariat".

The problem with your sarcasm here LSD is that it&#39;s hardly sarcastic. The Kronstadt rebels had virtually NO SUPPORT amongst the Russian working class. You&#39;re espousing a thought typical to anarchism: a few revolutionary heroes (fascist peasants, in this instance) can speak for the working class. It&#39;s what we call substitutionism. The Kronstadt rebellion being the ultimate "Propaganda Of The Deed".


Unlike with the Kronstadt sailors, we actually know what Lenin et al., did upon assuming power and it had nothing to do with "workers&#39; power".


Again, it depends on your interpretation of historical events and one&#39;s knowledge of historical materialism.


And to imagine that such a disparate collection of soldiers could represent solely the interest of the, miniscule, Russian petty-bourgeois class is ludicrous.


Where did I suggest that? Petty bourgeois reaction was certainly at the forefront of this. But, as I said, other values specific to the Ukranian peasantry were also expressed (anti-semitism, anti-Bolshevism, fascism).

The rebellion was sort of a ragged cross-class alliance, with competing interests and objectives, tied together by a common antipathy to Bolshevism and Soviet Power.


We can&#39;t even really know whether or not he secretly "in league" with the White Army.

Of course we can&#39;t "know". What we do "know" is that he tried to join the White Army before he was stationed at Kronstadt and he openly declared his allegiance to them once he was hounded out.

Of course, it&#39;s possible he was converted to the Soviet power and workers&#39; democracy while he was at Kronstadt.

Totally absurd and implausible, but possible nonetheless.



Even the most ardent Trotskyist can&#39;t argue with a straight face that such a large and varied group of soldiers could in less than a year go en masse from a body lauded by the Bolsheviks as a paragon of the Red Army, to conniving Whitist traitors.


The sailors weren&#39;t the same people Trotsky had praised.

click (http://www.isreview.org/issues/03/kronstadt.pdf)

Most of the revolutionary heroes had perished defending the workers&#39; state in the early days, only to be replaced by, as we know, conscripts from the Ukraine - many of whom were peasants hostile to Bolsehvism.

It&#39;s the great tragedy of the Kronstadt sailors, many whom gave their lives for socialism, only be besmirched by association with the pogromist rebels in 1921.


It doesn&#39;t matter what a person fights for, so long as they come from a "reactionary region", they "must" be the enemy?


What&#39;s more likely? That the people who came from a region known for anti-semitism and anti-bolshevism were advocates of "soviet power", or that they were anti-semites and anti-communist?

I&#39;m using common sense, you&#39;re the one who&#39;s, once again, guilty of projection.

"I fucking hate Lenin, so everybody else who hated Lenin must think like me".

It&#39;s nonsense. Makhno hated Lenin, but so did General Kornilov.


The fact that he came from a Ukrainian peasant family is "irrelevent" whereas the fact that some Kronstadt sailors did is "paramount".


The Bronstein family recast as anti-semites? :lol:


Far-fetched even for you, no?


suppose that that&#39;s kind of the same logic that says we&#39;re supposed to believe that he was "loyal to the workers" even though he brutally crushed an insurrection that literaly fought for "the equalisation of rations for all workers" and "the liberation of all imprisoned workers".


Once again, the content of their demands is hardly important.

[Fistful of Steel]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23 2006, 01:24 AM

The Kronstadt sailors were not a "government" or a "state", nor did they have any illusions of holding an especially powerful position.


How do you know?

There&#39;s an amazing amount of projection going on here. To Malte, it&#39;s "workers&#39; rebellion" aiming to save the revolution from itself. To Haraldur, it&#39;s anti-authoritarian struggle with a non-hierarchial structure. Now, to LSD, it&#39;s a movement which is not looking for power.

You&#39;re all fantasists.


that had he met the Petropavlovsk/Sevastopol demands, the sailors wouldn&#39;t have backed down???


I don&#39;t know because I don&#39;t have a crystal ball. Neither, I imagine, do you.


In response they were slaughtered.


Quite. The tired, hungry Red Army recruits fought bravely to defend the workers&#39; state. And they won.


So much for "dictatorship of the proletariat".

The problem with your sarcasm here LSD is that it&#39;s hardly sarcastic. The Kronstadt rebels had virtually NO SUPPORT amongst the Russian working class. You&#39;re espousing a thought typical to anarchism: a few revolutionary heroes (fascist peasants, in this instance) can speak for the working class. It&#39;s what we call substitutionism. The Kronstadt rebellion being the ultimate "Propaganda Of The Deed".


Unlike with the Kronstadt sailors, we actually know what Lenin et al., did upon assuming power and it had nothing to do with "workers&#39; power".


Again, it depends on your interpretation of historical events and one&#39;s knowledge of historical materialism.


And to imagine that such a disparate collection of soldiers could represent solely the interest of the, miniscule, Russian petty-bourgeois class is ludicrous.


Where did I suggest that? Petty bourgeois reaction was certainly at the forefront of this. But, as I said, other values specific to the Ukranian peasantry were also expressed (anti-semitism, anti-Bolshevism, fascism).

The rebellion was sort of a ragged cross-class alliance, with competing interests and objectives, tied together by a common antipathy to Bolshevism and Soviet Power.


We can&#39;t even really know whether or not he secretly "in league" with the White Army.

Of course we can&#39;t "know". What we do "know" is that he tried to join the White Army before he was stationed at Kronstadt and he openly declared his allegiance to them once he was hounded out.

Of course, it&#39;s possible he was converted to the Soviet power and workers&#39; democracy while he was at Kronstadt.

Totally absurd and implausible, but possible nonetheless.



Even the most ardent Trotskyist can&#39;t argue with a straight face that such a large and varied group of soldiers could in less than a year go en masse from a body lauded by the Bolsheviks as a paragon of the Red Army, to conniving Whitist traitors.


The sailors weren&#39;t the same people Trotsky had praised.

click (http://www.isreview.org/issues/03/kronstadt.pdf)

Most of the revolutionary heroes had perished defending the workers&#39; state in the early days, only to be replaced by, as we know, conscripts from the Ukraine - many of whom were peasants hostile to Bolsehvism.

It&#39;s the great tragedy of the Kronstadt sailors, many whom gave their lives for socialism, only be besmirched by association with the pogromist rebels in 1921.


It doesn&#39;t matter what a person fights for, so long as they come from a "reactionary region", they "must" be the enemy?


What&#39;s more likely? That the people who came from a region known for anti-semitism and anti-bolshevism were advocates of "soviet power", or that they were anti-semites and anti-communist?

I&#39;m using common sense, you&#39;re the one who&#39;s, once again, guilty of projection.

"I fucking hate Lenin, so everybody else who hated Lenin must think like me".

It&#39;s nonsense. Makhno hated Lenin, but so did General Kornilov.


The fact that he came from a Ukrainian peasant family is "irrelevent" whereas the fact that some Kronstadt sailors did is "paramount".


The Bronstein family recast as anti-semites? :lol:


Far-fetched even for you, no?


suppose that that&#39;s kind of the same logic that says we&#39;re supposed to believe that he was "loyal to the workers" even though he brutally crushed an insurrection that literaly fought for "the equalisation of rations for all workers" and "the liberation of all imprisoned workers".


Once again, the content of their demands is hardly important.
A workers rebellion trying to save the legitimate revolution, an anti-authoritarian struggle, and a movement which is not looking for power are all compatible. Authentically so. It&#39;s very easy to infer from logic that if their demands had been met, then what course would they have taken? They knew they had little chance should the government take a hard-line, they weren&#39;t a bunch of lemmings looking to throw themselves off a cliff, they had genuine demands that shouldn&#39;t even have to be demanded in any real worker&#39;s state. And what, they fought to defend the worker&#39;s state by crushing demands that helped defend and enforce the position of the working class? Right. :rolleyes: And how do you know what the entire working class of Russia wanted? I&#39;m sure that just because Lenin and Trotsky said so is hardly a buyable source of information. Like you said you don&#39;t have a crystal ball. Their demands represented their struggle, it&#39;s nice and all to claim they were reactionary fascists when you have no backing for this whatsoever, other than the attempt of the Leninists to paint the rebellion in an unforgiving light. If you can find some legitimate backing to why the rebellion was anti-jewish and fascist in nature, other than the claims of Lenin and his apologists than perhaps you may have some backing. Otherwise as it stands it was a rebellion calling for a real worker&#39;s state. The content of their demands is everything, it represents what they called for and what they were fighting for. If they weren&#39;t fighting for what they said, then what was it? A veiled attempt at killing jews by liberating workers? :blink:

Furthermore, if their demands were in line with Leninism then why is it that Lenin didn&#39;t just agree to them rather than waste lives of Red Army soldiers and Russian and Ukranian peasants?

[LSD]

How do you know?

How do I know that the isolated and surrounded sailors at Kronstadt did not constitute a "state"?

Well ...because they didn&#39;t.

And, again, to imagine that in that desperate a situation, they would have wasted their time by fucking around and publishing "fake" demands is simply fantastical.

The sailors at Kronstadt were well aware of the precariousness of their position and held no illusions about their "chances". Accordingly they had no patience for the kind of absurdist nonsense you&#39;re accusing them of.

They sought mass support for their rebellion and so publicized what it was they were fighting for.

Doing so disingenuously would have been pointless as had their plan actually worked, it would have resulted in a powefully anti-statist and anti-authoritarian movement taking hold.

If the intent of the sailors was merely, as you suggest, to destabilize the Soviet Government, there were far less politically risky ways to do so. The rebellion at Kronstadt, if successful, would have been equally destabilizing whether they relased demands or not, so if they were really "pogromist" "anti-communists", they wouldn&#39;t have bothered.

The fact that they took the time to write out a very sensible list of what they wanted speaks volumes for their intentions; and the fact that neither you nor any other of Trotsky&#39;s fans have been able to refute that list speaks volumes about Trotsky&#39;s.

Leon Trotsky was interested in the preservation of his party and his position. If he had given a damn for the actual workers, he would have supported the Kronstadt demands in a second.

Again, it doesn&#39;t matter who the sailors were "ethnically". What they wanted was perfectly reasonable and there is not a single good reason why Lenin did not meet their demands.

...not unless, of course, he was a dictator.


I don&#39;t know because I don&#39;t have a crystal ball. Neither, I imagine, do you.

Obviously not, but you are the one making the assertion here. I am extrapolating based on the historical and documentary record, whereas you are relying on crass assertions and birthplace "deduction".

The sailors at Kronstadt rebelled against the Bolshevik state. No one denies that. They, furthermore, released a list of demands which they hoped other Red Army units around the country would rally behind.

Now, these demands are so obviously rational and so obviously nescessary, that you aren&#39;t even attempting to critisize them.

Instead you are proposing the rather spurious contention that the Kronstadt sailors "didn&#39;t really mean it" and they were "just pretending". In defense of this rather astonishing suggestion you offer absolutely nothing save some assorted innuendo and personal attacks.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks siezed power in October of &#39;17, we are to believe that they were "doing it for the workers". Despite their subsequence centralization of power and deconstruction of sovereign workers&#39; power, you want us to believe their revolutionary rhetoric.

When Kronstadt, however, rises up and make similar demands, when it flies the banner for workers&#39; rights, suddenly rhetoric is irrelevent.

You&#39;ll excuse me if I don&#39;t quite follow your logic.


Quite. The tired, hungry Red Army recruits fought bravely to defend the workers&#39; state.

And what "workers&#39; state" was that?

The one that abolished the indepdent Soviets? The one that subordinated all production to the party? The one that demanded "singular leadership" and "absolute control"?

Well, we agree on the "state" part, but the "workers" had very little to do with it. <_<


The Kronstadt rebels had virtually NO SUPPORT amongst the Russian working class.

That&#39;s because, as you well know, the Bolsheviks engaged in a relentless campaign of vilification which cast the Kronstadt sailors as being everything short of satanic.

In the early 1920s, the technology was simply not there for a lone groups of sailors to counter the propaganda of a dedicated state machinery.

And, incidently, need I really remind you of the countless workers&#39; insurrections that have failed to gain mass support? Of the, for example, German "revolutions", the ones the Lenin placed so much of his hope in?

Does the fact that the German workers never rose up en masse really mean that none of the attempts at proletarian revolution were genuinine?

Surely you are not that politically naive&#33;


The rebellion was sort of a ragged cross-class alliance, with competing interests and objectives, tied together by a common antipathy to Bolshevism and Soviet Power.

There was certainly an aversion to Bolshevism, but if they had been "antipathic" to "soviet power", their first demand would not have been for "free soviets"&#33;

Yes, there was a number of competing interests and objectives, but the one unifying theme was a desire for a free and representative government that was not subject to the totalitarian controls of one man and his associates.

Frankly, that seems pretty reasonable.


The sailors weren&#39;t the same people Trotsky had praised.

They were the same people who in May of 1920 lead the celebtrations; who in October of that same year were praised by the Bolshevik party as heroes of the revolution and acclaimed as the "saviours" of Petrograd.

Is it really possible that "no one noticed" that these "heroes" had been "inflitrated" or "suppanted" by "pogromists"?

How come none of the "old" Kronstadters reported this "influx" of "fascists? How come as late as 6 months before the rebellion, the Bolsheviks were still pointing them out as a paragon of Red Army virtue?

These Ukrainian "fascists" must have been the smartest fucking people on earth to fool that many people for that long. Seriously, one wonders how people this brilliant didn&#39;t manage to stage a better insurrection&#33;

You&#39;d think that with brains like that they&#39;d have been able to take on the entire Red Army single handed&#33; :lol:

Or, maybe, could it be that they were exactly what they claimed to be? :o


Most of the revolutionary heroes had perished defending the workers&#39; state in the early days, only to be replaced by, as we know, conscripts from the Ukraine

And these "conscripts" then spent years along side the surviving "revolutioanry heroes" fighting for the revolution and "workers&#39; state".

And by the time 1921 rolled around, they understood enough to know what a real "workers&#39; state" was and what the Bolshevik state was.

When the workers in Petrograd were suppressed and coerced and when the central government refused to hear their concerns; the soldiers at Kronstadt did the same thing they did in 1917 and sided with the Proletariat.

Now, you can insist that this was "artificial" or that it was a "conspiracy", but the facts speak for themselves. And, again, personalities aside, if the Bolsheviks had truly been the Proletarian "vanguard" they claimed to be, they would have met the demands of the Kronstadt sailors.

If those demands had been a bluff, the Bolsheviks would have masterfully called it and exposed their duplicity; if they had been genuine, they would have averted another civil war and saved thousands of lives.

Either way, it was the right thing to do.

Not that that mattered to Leon "kill &#39;em all" Trotsky... <_<


What&#39;s more likely? That the people who came from a region known for anti-semitism and anti-bolshevism were advocates of "soviet power", or that they were anti-semites and anti-communist?

Again, we&#39;ll never know what any of the "personal feelings" of the sailors were or what they "really thought" about Jews or anyone else. But we do know that their insurrection didn&#39;t start until after the Petrograd protests and the first rumblings of rebellion were directly caused by the Trubotchny mill strike.

Does that really sound like the reaction of "anti-communists"?

Many of the sailors may have been from conservative families, but their actions were definitively revolutionary. They were not fighting on behalf of fascists or antisemites, they were demanding the freedom of leftists and the equalization of workers&#39; rations.

"Fascists" do not call for the liberation of anarchists and left-communists, nor do they demand free elections&#33;


The Bronstein family recast as anti-semites?

Far-fetched even for you, no?

I didn&#39;t say anything about antisemitism, and you can&#39;t get out of this one that easily.

If the sailors at Kronstadt "must" have been reactionary "pogromist" petty-bourgeois peasant fascist anti-semites because of the place they were born, then likewise mustn&#39;t Trotsky have been a reactionary peasant petty-bourgeois fascist because of ther place he was born?

No, Trotsky&#39;s family was not antisemitic. But it was especially wealthy and it was composed of Ukrainian farmers&#33;

Again, you simply cannot have this both ways.

Either material conditions are capable of changing class allegiance, or people are "irrevocably" a product of their parents&#39; politics.

So...which one is it?


Once again, the content of their demands is hardly important.

Well, "once again", that&#39;s a ludicrous position to hold.

It&#39;s akin to the rightist conspiracy theory that the Russian Revolution was bankrolled and controlled by evil Zionist Jews.

After all, if we ignore every single thing that Lenin and Trotsky ever said, we can ascribe to them pretty much any motive we want&#33;

That&#39;s what you&#39;re trying to do with the Kronstadt sailors. In the same way that neonazis claim that Lenin and Trotky&#39;s "jewish heritage" meant that their calls for workers&#39; liberation "must have been fake"; you are claiming that the Kronstadt sailors&#39; Ukrainian heritage meant that their demands for worker&#39;s rights "must have been fake".

Obviously, neither argument is sound.

If the Kronstadters hadn&#39;t really "meant" any of their demands, it would have been apparent the moment the Bolsheviks met them. And, again, there is not a single good reason why they couldn&#39;t have done that.

If, as you claim, they were mere a propagandistic formalism and if, accordingly, the sailors fought on despite the Bolshevik government accepting them, then Trotsky would have had a decent case for attacking.

But, of course, that never happened.

[Edelweiss]

The rebellion was sort of a ragged cross-class alliance, with competing interests and objectives, tied together by a common antipathy to Bolshevism and Soviet Power.

Damn it, don&#39;t you get it? The rebellion of Kronstadt was comitted by Soviets who didn&#39;t wanted to let the new "workers and peasant state" going in a fatal direction which hadn&#39;t to anything at all to do with the ideals they fought for before. Kronstadt was a stronghold of Soviet power before, your stupid consipracy theories about evil outside powers leading that rebellion is truely ridiculous, and I guess you don&#39;t even believe that yourself...

[Messiah]

Originally posted by Fistful of Steel
They knew they had little chance should the government take a hard-line, they weren&#39;t a bunch of lemmings looking to throw themselves off a cliff, they had genuine demands that shouldn&#39;t even have to be demanded in any real worker&#39;s state.

This sums up the logical and sane position very nicley.

Besides, what was with that lame pot shot at anarchism? It has been anarchists who have always been on the forefront of the democratic movement, and had Lenin and the Bolsheviks had any sense at all, they would have seen this. Nevermind, they saw it, and it didn&#39;t fit in their vision of what they wanted the USSR to be.

And further, if we&#39;re just looking at the political spectrum at all, it was never the big C Communists of the USSR that were polar opposite of fascism, it was and has always remained always anarchism.

[Lamanov]

This is an OK work: Kronstadt Commune (http://www.prole.info/articles/kronstadt.html) by Ida Mett.

[bunk]

Originally posted by DJ&#045;[email protected] 23 2006, 11:25 AM
This is an OK work: Kronstadt Commune (http://www.prole.info/articles/kronstadt.html) by Ida Mett.
Is it the same as the the book The Kronstadt Uprising by her as well?

[Martin Blank]

Contrary to a lot of mythology on this board -- from the RAANcids, anarkiddies, etc. -- I come to the question of Kronstadt (and Russia) from the perspective of a Myasnikovist (which, if you had to pin a named "ism" on me, this would be it).

I would start this by highly recommending that people on both sides read Paul Avrich&#39;s Kronstadt 1921. It&#39;s one of the best-researched books on the subject, and it disspells a lot of mythology presented by both sides.

Was Kronstadt the "end of the Russian Revolution"? No. That took place earlier, in fact. The abolition of workers&#39; control of industry in favor of one-man management in 1920 brought that aspect of the revolution to a crashing end, and the restoration of elements of the old tsarist bureaucracy and state as "specialists" in 1919 brought with it a renewed dual power situation in the Soviet republic. The revolution was over, but the question of which class was in power was still being decided.

At that time, I would argue, the workers still were the ruling class, but it was being challenged openly, internally and externally. Economically, they had lost control, but politically, which is where such questions are decided, it was still being fought -- with the working class still holding the high ground ... for the moment (and having to contend with a leadership that was concilliatory to the class enemy).

Was Kronstadt a "White Guard-led" insurrection? Again, no. But that is really the wrong way to pose the question. It should be asked: Would the victory at Kronstadt have opened the door to counterrevolution? The answer there is yes. A victory by the Kronstadt rebels would have so weakened the tenuous hold on power that the Bolsheviks had, as well as the even more tenuous hegemony of the soviets as they were, that those White forces that fled to Finland and Turkey, could have rolled into Soviet Russia and swept aside what remained of what would have been a disintegrating Red Army.

They may not have wanted it, but the Kronstadt rebels would have soon found themselves facing off with well-armed and organized White Armies, with no help from a fractured Soviet government, a splintered Red Army and demoralized soviets. They may have wanted "Soviets without Bolsheviks". They would have likely gotten that, quickly followed by Russia without soviets, and then a White bullet in their head.

Was Kronstadt a victory for the Soviet republic? Yes and no -- mostly no, in my opinion. Of course, the fact that the Red Army took Kronstadt makes it a victory. But it was a "victory" like Bunker Hill was a "victory" for the British during the American Revolution: any more such "victories" would have ruined them. The Red Army lost 10,000 soldiers in the battle, compared to the Kronstadters&#39; 600. In addition, they lost the propaganda battle -- as we can still see today. All the Soviet republic won was breathing space, and they squandered that too.

Were the Kronstadt sailors of 1921 the same as those of 1917? No. The sailors of 1917 were the cream of the Revolution, and they volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Few people, communists or anarchists, think about the fact that the Bolshevik-led Soviet republic allowed so many of their most adept and educated worker-communists to volunteer to die in the Civil War. That decision resulted in incalculable loss of trained and organized workers who not only knew what it would take to build toward a classless society, but also could have trained workers across the country in how to manage their workplaces democratically.

When the Soviet government hailed the Kronstadt sailors at anniversary celebrations, they were hailing mostly the dead. Only a small core of the original 1917 Kronstadt sailors were still there in 1921. Those who took their place were young peasants driven to the cities due to war or crop failures. And, yes, they did bring with them socially backward consciousness; this is reflected, albeit slightly, in their demands, as well as in their statements. There is nothing socially progressive about the anti-Semitism from the Kronstadt rebels that Avrich documents.

Moreover, those few remaining 1917 Kronstadt sailors actually fought against the rebels, issuing their own declaration calling for an end to the "counterrevolutionary putsch" and arming themselves against the rebels. Much of this was done out of self-defense; shortly after the rebellion began, many of these 1917 Kronstadt sailors found themselves arrested for refusing to follow the orders of the rebels. (There was a new book published in 1999 in Russia, Kronstadt Tragedy 1921, that has details that Avrich&#39;s book lacks. However, those details only reinforce much of what Avrich discovered.)

Were the demands of the Kronstadt rebels supportable? Some yes. Some no. It&#39;s best to go through them, though, to see what each one was about.


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.

Supportable. Certainly, in 1921, new elections in the soviets is a supportable demand, and it should be by secret ballot and preceded by free electoral propaganda. The question is, though, who will be participating in this electoral activity?


2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

Again, supportable, but only to a point. Which "Anarchists"? Which "Left Socialist parties"? If they are anarchists and Left Socialist parties that have not declared for the Whites and/or raised arms against the Soviet republic, then this is a supportable demand.


3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.

This is a little vague. What is a "trade union ... organization"? Is it a trade union? Is it a fraction or caucus in a trade union? Is it a union-based organization? These organizations deserve the rights mentioned above, and more. However, there have been times when scab elements looking to destabilize a trade union form what they call a "union organization", which is a base of activity for breaking the union.


4. The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

Interesting, the way this is formulated. They want the Soviet government to give them a platform for their propaganda. You would think that, if these rebels really believed in self-organization, they would have phrased this as a call to "non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors" to organize it themselves.


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.

Another vague demand. Who defines "political prisoners"? Were those SRs who attempted to assassinate Lenin "political prisoners"? Were those anarchists who sabotaged production of armaments in the middle of the Civil War "political prisoners"? Certainly, there were political prisoners at the time (Myasnikov was one of them), but a call phrased this way doesn&#39;t mean to only release those who were imprisoned solely because of their political opposition to the policies of the Soviet government.


6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.

Supportable.


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.

The political sections of the Red Army were, technically speaking, not party organs. However, given the conditions of the real world, they were all dominated by the Bolsheviks. Instead of calling for an end to political sections, which were there to educate soldiers and sailors about why they were fighting, the role of the soviets and Soviet republic, etc., they should have called for the legalization of all political movements that supported the soviet system and the opening of the political sections of the military to all those parties.

To simply abolish the political section would have cut the military loose from the soviets and Soviet government, making it and its commanders even less accountable.


8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

No. The local militia detachments that were organized between towns and the countryside existed to enforce anti-hoarding and anti-profiteering laws. This is where we really begin to see the social backwardness of the peasantry coming through in the demands.


9. The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

Supportable. The unequal relationship was one of the problems that came along with the petty-bourgeois "specialists" in the state and economic management. Since food rations were the equivalent of wages at the time, this is little more than calling for equalization of wages. (Of course, this would have had more moral force behind it if the leaders of the rebellion practiced what they preached&#33;)


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.

Again, no. The Red Guards (Bolshevik armed groups) had every right to be included in the line of battle in the Red Army, and workers had the right to organize themselves into detachments of Red Guards in the factories. The factories themselves had their own defense detachments, composed of party and non-party workers. The Red Guards were organized semi-independently, but coordinated with the factory defense units, just as they did before the Revolution.


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.

Hell no&#33; This is nothing but demanding state-organized guaranteeing of the continued existence of the petty bourgeoisie -- much like the NEP a year later.


12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.

No comment necessary.


13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

Again, no comment necessary.


14. We demand the institution of mobile workers&#39; control groups.

What is a "mobile workers&#39; control group"? Is it a group of workers that would go from workplace to workplace teaching workers how to organize themselves and implement workers&#39; control of production? If so, then yes, yes, YES&#33; This could have been a way to plan out the transition back to direct workers&#39; control of production.


15. We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.

No, no, NO&#33; Again with the attempt to artificially maintain the petty bourgeoisie.

All in all, the demands reflect differing class viewpoints: both proletarian and petty-bourgeois.

In the final analysis, I cannot say that I would have supported the Kronstadt rebellion. The overall effect its victory would have had, at that time in history, would have been worse than what existed. At the same time, I cannot support the solution the Soviet government had to the Kronstadt situation. It did more harm than good and made the Bolsheviks look like what their critics said they were.

From a strictly military point of view, a seige and small-unit warfare within the city, building up to a tighter seige of the fortress itself that could be held until the rebels surrendered, would have been a better plan of action. It may not have looked as "romantic" as the charge across the ice did, but it would have been more effective and resulted in less loss of life. Trotsky&#39;s lack of tactical sense really came through in his handling of Kronstadt.

Miles

[YKTMX]

How do I know that the isolated and surrounded sailors at Kronstadt did not constitute a "state"?



No, how do you know they didn&#39;t aspire to an "especially powerful position"?


And, again, to imagine that in that desperate a situation, they would have wasted their time by fucking around and publishing "fake" demands is simply fantastical.


I never said they were "fake" demands, I said the content of their demands is unimportant. I have no idea whether they "wanted" the things they demanded, or whether it was really an excercise in what you rather nicely called "propagdandistic formalism". It&#39;s not important.

What is important is that the rebellion, indirectly or directly, would have led to a White government.



They sought mass support for their rebellion and so publicized what it was they were fighting for.


Yes, which they never received.


The rebellion at Kronstadt, if successful, would have been equally destabilizing whether they relased demands or not, so if they were really "pogromist" "anti-communists", they wouldn&#39;t have bothered.


Three things, which perhaps you may consider as possibilities:

1) They wanted, as you suggested, mass support. If they had simply let Petrichenko (the leader of the Military Revolutionary Committee and supporter of the White Guard) draft the "demands", it would probably have been an even greater failure than it was in terms of popular support.

"1. We demands Jews removed from all positions in the Soviet government"
"2. We demand the reconstitution of Orthodoyx Christianity as the state religion".
"3. We demand new elections to constituent assembly."

etc, etc

2) If they had openly declared their aims, the Soviet government wouldn&#39;t have wasted as much time as they did in putting it down. The fact that their aims were nominally "appealing" gave them time to arrange a proper defense. It gave succour to their backers on the Polish border. The Soviet government tried to negotiate, the Petrograd Soviet tried to arrange a delegation to meet the sailors. They weren&#39;t interested. A so-called "workers&#39; rebellion" that won&#39;t even meet the workers to discuss their demands. This is the absurdist quality about the Kronstadt rebellion.


What they wanted was perfectly reasonable and there is not a single good reason why Lenin did not meet their demands.


Firstly, it&#39;s not about what Lenin wants. Lenin did not have singular control over decision making in the Soviet republic.

And, as I&#39;ve been suggesting, the nature of the demands themselves is unimportant when compared to where capitulation to the rebels would have inexorably lead.


The one that abolished the indepdent Soviets? The one that subordinated all production to the party? The one that demanded "singular leadership" and "absolute control"?

Can we just keep this on the rebellion itself please.


That&#39;s because, as you well know, the Bolsheviks engaged in a relentless campaign of vilification which cast the Kronstadt sailors as being everything short of satanic.


Their "demands" were published though, were they not?


In the early 1920s, the technology was simply not there for a lone groups of sailors to counter the propaganda of a dedicated state machinery.


Kronstadt was one of the major naval bases in Russia. It was packed with heavily armed soliders. You&#39;re attempting to enfeeble them so that the Soviet reaction seems "barbaric". It&#39;s a neat rhetorical trick, if slightly (very) dishonest.


And, incidently, need I really remind you of the countless workers&#39; insurrections that have failed to gain mass support?

Slight difference. The Kronstadt rebellion was led by counter revolutionary peasants, not "workers".


Of the, for example, German "revolutions", the ones the Lenin placed so much of his hope in?


Now it seems you wan&#39;t to talk about the German revolution&#33; I&#39;d love to, why don&#39;t you start a thread? It&#39;s better than your glib liners about major historical processes.


Does the fact that the German workers never rose up en masse really mean that none of the attempts at proletarian revolution were genuinine?


Well, that&#39;s just ridiculous. Of course they rose up, that&#39;s why they call it the "German Revolution" - the clue&#39;s in the name.

It never took a revolutionary socialist direction, which is something different.


Surely you are not that politically naive&#33;


:rolleyes: Quite. From the man who thinks the German revolution never happened.


Yes, there was a number of competing interests and objectives, but the one unifying theme was a desire for a free and representative government that was not subject to the totalitarian controls of one man and his associates.


If you consider Wrangel representative, then yes.


Frankly, that seems pretty reasonable.

Perhaps...


How come as late as 6 months before the rebellion, the Bolsheviks were still pointing them out as a paragon of Red Army virtue?


No doubt there were some revolutionary heroes still staged there before and during the revolt. Some may have even joined the revolt. Unfortunately, this doesn&#39;t alter the fact of where the revolt would have lead had it been successful.


These Ukrainian "fascists" must have been the smartest fucking people on earth to fool that many people for that long.

I don&#39;t quite see the point you&#39;re making.

Presumably Trotsky didn&#39;t actually go and personally interview every soldier in May 1920 before he praised the Kronstadt sailors. In fact, he probably knew that Kronstadt sailors were now mostly peasant conscripts from the Ukraine. The praise he heaped upon them was for the sailors, but in an abstract, historical sense, rather than for those "specific sailors". We see this all the time in "celebrations" of this kind.

And, you seem to be missing the rather obvious point THEY DID do the things you would expect of counterrevolutionaries in the end. So the fact they did it later rather than sooner seems to me to be rather unimportant. How are you to know what the tactics of the sailors were?


the soldiers at Kronstadt did the same thing they did in 1917 and sided with the Proletariat.

The proletariat was on the other side this time.


Now, you can insist that this was "artificial" or that it was a "conspiracy"

Where did I mention "conspiracy"?


And, again, personalities aside, if the Bolsheviks had truly been the Proletarian "vanguard" they claimed to be, they would have met the demands of the Kronstadt sailors.


You can keep saying this &#39;till you are blue in the face. It doesn&#39;t make it true.


those demands had been a bluff, the Bolsheviks would have masterfully called it and exposed their duplicity

But, as I said, the Bolsheviks were willing to negotiate the demands with the sailors. They were willing to send "non-party workers" to the base and have them discuss the issue. If the sailors were solely concerned with helping Soviet democracy, surely they would negotiate the content of their demands?

Instead, they choose to fire at the ice and drown Red Army recruits in the icy water.

Real heroes.


Does that really sound like the reaction of "anti-communists"?


We know that anti-communists continually cling to the actions of the "oppressed workers". The Pope supported Solisadarsnosc. Presumably this made him a revolutionary hero. :lol:


They were not fighting on behalf of fascists or antisemites, they were demanding the freedom of leftists and the equalization of workers&#39; rations.


As I said, I don&#39;t want to discuss the content of their demands. But fair to say, their call from "free speech" for parties who had openly declared their counter revolutionary tendecies is one of the more "revealing" demands the soldiers made.


If the sailors at Kronstadt "must" have been reactionary "pogromist" petty-bourgeois peasant fascist anti-semites because of the place they were born, then likewise mustn&#39;t Trotsky have been a reactionary peasant petty-bourgeois fascist because of ther place he was born?


I never said they "must" have been those things. I merely asked if it was likely that a naval base made up of Ukranian peasants would display those characteristics. To which you&#39;re saying, NO, THEY WERE ALL REVOLUTIONARY HEROES&#33;

In any case, many of the leaders openly declared their White allegiance after the rebellion, so this is all a bit academic.

For your part, a more intelligent, and plausible, argument would be, yes, maybe they were Whites, but the Soviet regime was so decrepit that it needed to be torn down by any means neccessary.


No, Trotsky&#39;s family was not antisemitic. But it was especially wealthy and it was composed of Ukrainian farmers&#33;


Trotsky&#39;s family were fairly prosperous - not "peasants" in the traditional sense.


If the Kronstadters hadn&#39;t really "meant" any of their demands, it would have been apparent the moment the Bolsheviks met them. And, again, there is not a single good reason why they couldn&#39;t have done that.


No, the point is, where would have a rebel victory led? That&#39;s why the demands are unimportant. If you&#39;ll read the article I linked to, you&#39;ll see that the White Guard had predicted a rebellion at Kronstadt (I wonder how&#33;) and that the defeated Whites were "regrouping", waiting for a crucial fracture in the Soviet Republic. Kronstadt may have been it, but thankfully it wasn&#39;t.

[LSD]

No, how do you know they didn&#39;t aspire to an "especially powerful position"?

I don&#39;t, which is why I never said that.

Perhaps you misunderstood me, but what I said was that they had no illusions of holding (at that time) a particularly powerful position. In other words, they were aware that their situation was fundamentally tenuous.

Accordingly, they would not have bothered with phony demands&#33;


I never said they were "fake" demands, I said the content of their demands is unimportant. I have no idea whether they "wanted" the things they demanded, or whether it was really an excercise in what you rather nicely called "propagdandistic formalism". It&#39;s not important.

Of course it&#39;s "important", it helps us to understand what they were fighting for and what it would have taken to end the rebellion peacefully.

Again, your argument is akin to saying that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish conspiracy to oppress the workers. By dismissing everythign that was said and the principles that were fought for, it is possible to impart any motive to anyone.

Especially, when one is unsuccessful in one&#39;s efforts, it&#39;s easy to say that one was "faking". But it&#39;s still not good history to do so.


What is important is that the rebellion, indirectly or directly, would have led to a White government.

Utter and complete nonesnse.

Firstly, the rebellion didn&#39;t lead to a "white government" and secondly, the rebels did not indicate a single iota of whitist loyality.

This assertion of yours is entirely groundless and bears no resemblance to reality. It doesn&#39;t matter how many times you repeat it, your "will" cannot erase the evidence of history.

We know what Kronstadt rebellions was fought for and we can surmise what adopting its demands would have lead to.

Neither has anything to do with the White Army&#33;


They wanted, as you suggested, mass support. If they had simply let Petrichenko (the leader of the Military Revolutionary Committee and supporter of the White Guard) draft the "demands", it would probably have been an even greater failure than it was in terms of popular support.

Neither of us know what Petrichenko "really wanted", but the fact that he did not personally "draft" the demands belies the Bolshevik myth of a "white lead conspiracy".

Clearly it was the bulk of the sailors who formulated the demands and not any "white leadership". That&#39;s why they, overwhelmingly, are proletarian and communist in nature.

Your slander and name-calling aside, you have still not actually given a single solid reason why Lenin couldn&#39;t concede that the Kronstadt workers were correct.

Was his pride really so imporant that he could not admit a mistake?

Even Trotsky, later in life, acknowldged that many of those early Bolshevik policies were "mistakes"; so why not take the knock and move on?

There was no need to put Petrichenko in charge of anything or to abandon even a single principle of the revolution. All that the "workers" government had to do was accept a set of demands for workers&#39; rights.

Would that really have been so difficult?


If they had openly declared their aims, the Soviet government wouldn&#39;t have wasted as much time as they did in putting it down. The fact that their aims were nominally "appealing" gave them time to arrange a proper defense.

If these demand were so "nominaly appealing" (I notice that you still fail to seriously critisize them), why not meet them?

If it was just a cheap rhetorical trick, an attempt at destabilization, the Bolsheviks could have easily headed it off by merely acknowledging and adopting the proposals that you yourself call "appealing"&#33;

Instead they wasted thousands of lives, massacred their revolutionary brothers, and a few years later betrayed everything that the revolution had stood for by murdering the free Soviet and introducing the NEP.

For all the Trotkyist insistance that Kronstadt was fighting for "petty-bourgeois values" or a "capitalist restoration", the actual demands of the rebelling soldiers was infinitely more communist in spirit than the policies ultimately adopted by Lenin.

If anything played into the hands of the petty-bourgeois and their supporters it was the New Economic Policy. The rebels at Kronstadt, for their part, merely wanted workers&#39; freedom.


The Soviet government tried to negotiate, the Petrograd Soviet tried to arrange a delegation to meet the sailors. They weren&#39;t interested. A so-called "workers&#39; rebellion" that won&#39;t even meet the workers to discuss their demands. This is the absurdist quality about the Kronstadt rebellion.

Complete and utter rubbish.

Only three days after the rebellion began, the government was already committed to military attack.

And in terms of the "workers" of Petrograd, if they had truly been as "loyal" to the Bolsheviks as you are implying, there would have been no need for the brutally draconian measures utilized during the rebellion.

The entire city of Petrograd was put under marshall law and the workers were unrelentingly bombarded by anti-Kronstadt propaganda painting the rebels as outright agents of the Black Hundred.

Even Bolshevik sympathizers would later admit that most of this rhetoric was false, but it did its job nonetheless.


And, as I&#39;ve been suggesting, the nature of the demands themselves is unimportant when compared to where capitulation to the rebels would have inexorably lead.

Who said anything about "capitulation"? In this context, what does "capitulation" even mean?

It was the rebels who were encircled and sieged, not the other way around. All that the Bolsheviks had to do to difuse the situation was accept their demands and allow real workers&#39; democracy.

That that option never even occured to them is just more damning proof of the corrupt and authoritarian nature of the Bolshevik party.


Their "demands" were published though, were they not?

Not really, no.

They were released, but the Bolsheviks ensured that they never filtered down to the actual industrial workers. Furthermore, they put the entire city of Petrograd under marshall law, outlawed any protest, and made it a criminal offense to support the Kronstadt rebellion&#33;

Would all of that truly been nescessary had there been no risk of popular support?

The Bolsheviks were well aware of the danger of allowing the workers to know "too much". Indeed, in Trotsky&#39;s own words "only the seizure of Kronstadt will put an end to the political crisis in Petrograd".

Kronstadt rose up in solidarity with striking workers and it fought on behalf of proletarian principles. No matter how much you try to besmirch the personalities involved, that political character cannot be denied.

Again, the majority of the issued demands would have been easily accepted by any truly "socialist" state. Indeed, they should have even been nescessary as they were so fucking basic to communist principles of organization.

If the Bolsheviks had truly been the "revolutionary vanguard" of Trotskyist propaganda, they would have met most of the demands, freed the soviets, and held free elections.

Unfortunately, in the end, Lenin and his gang put their power above their principles and massacred their earstwhile "comrades".

And it wouldn&#39;t be the last time... <_<


Kronstadt was one of the major naval bases in Russia. It was packed with heavily armed soliders. You&#39;re attempting to enfeeble them so that the Soviet reaction seems "barbaric". It&#39;s a neat rhetorical trick, if slightly (very) dishonest.


It was one fortress with no supply line fighting against the entire Bolshevik power structure and the bulk of the massive Red Army.

It&#39;s no "rhetorical trick" to say that they were in desperate straits, it&#39;s merely the reality of the situation.


Slight difference. The Kronstadt rebellion was led by counter revolutionary peasants, not "workers".

So you keep insisting. But labeling them "counter-revolutionary" does not make them "counter-revolutionary".

Nor does the country of their birth.


Well, that&#39;s just ridiculous. Of course they rose up, that&#39;s why they call it the "German Revolution" - the clue&#39;s in the name.

If the bulk of the German proletariat had risen up, it would have succeded in overthrowing capitalism.

As we both know, that didn&#39;t happen.

Again, the failure of a revolution to secure sufficient popular support does not indicate that that revolution was not "genuine". Conditions are often simply not conducive to mass consciousness, especially when there is a power state structure fighting on the other side.


No doubt there were some revolutionary heroes still staged there before and during the revolt. Some may have even joined the revolt. Unfortunately, this doesn&#39;t alter the fact of where the revolt would have lead had it been successful.

Recent documents indictate that as much as 90% of the Kronstadt sailors were veterans from as far back as WWI. Now, it&#39;s possible that the number is lower than that, but the fact remains that a sizable portion of the sailors in question were workrers and certainly experienced revolutioanry fighters.

Remember, Kronstadt had never been a loyal Bolshevik area. It had been one of the critical bastions of support for the revolution, but in Lenin&#39;s own words at the time, they were mostly "anarchists" and "left communists".

That didn&#39;t mean that Lenin refused their assistance, of course. He gladly welcomed their contribution. But once he assumed power and began to deconstruct the very workers&#39; structures that he had been ostensibly fighting for, the left-of-Lenin character of Kronstadt once again reemerged.

This time, of course, Lenin was not willing to tolerate their failure to "tow his line" and so had them all exterminated.

So much for "unity"&#33;


And, you seem to be missing the rather obvious point THEY DID do the things you would expect of counterrevolutionaries in the end.

You mean join up with the Whites?

Again, for the record most did not. Petrichenko did, as did some orther "leaders". But most of the sailors were captured or killed by the Bolsheviks, so we really don&#39;t know what they "might have done".

What we do know is that, despite any "secret loyalties" that Petrichenko may or may not have had, not a single scrap of assistance was ever sent by the White Army to Kronstadt and the soldiers there repeatedly refused to associate themselves with the Whitists.

Was the White Army glad that a part of the Red Army had rebelled? Of course. Any distraction or inconvienience for the Reds was to their advantage and in military parlance, the "enemy of my enemy is my friend".

But need I remind you that the German government escorted Lenin back into Russia in the spring of 1917? That the Kaiser saw him as an "ally" at that time?

The Bolsheviks&#39; insistance that the Kronstadt sailors were traitors because they were fighting against their government during a critical war is exactly the same as the insistance by the Czarist government 4 years earlier that the revolution was a "german plot" to "undermine Russian solidarity".

In both cases, the enemies being spoke of were glad to see insurrections, but in both cases they also had nothing to do with them.


But, as I said, the Bolsheviks were willing to negotiate the demands with the sailors. They were willing to send "non-party workers" to the base and have them discuss the issue. If the sailors were solely concerned with helping Soviet democracy, surely they would negotiate the content of their demands?

The Kronstadt rebellion started on March 2, on March 5, the Bolsheviks issued an ultimatum of absolute surrender.

They also captured the families of the rebellion sailors and threatened to kill them unless the fort stood down.

At what point did they attempt "negotiation"?

The Petrograd Soviet (at this point entirely controlled by the Bolsheviks) did try and send a representative and Kronstadt replied favourably. The sailors asked that they not send him immediately as they wished to clarify first exactly who he would be representing.

Furethermore, anarchists like Goldman and Berkman offered to serve as intermediaries, but were throroughly dismissed the Bolshvevik government which, as we now know, had decdied by at least March 5 to militarily attack Kronstadt regardless of what else happened.

The sailors were, understantable, weary of trusting the government of Lenin, but they were absolutely consistant in their demands. It would have been a simple matter to take up Goldman&#39;s or Berkman&#39;s offer and open a true dialogue.

Instead they chose extermination.


As I said, I don&#39;t want to discuss the content of their demands. But fair to say, their call from "free speech" for parties who had openly declared their counter revolutionary tendecies is one of the more "revealing" demands the soldiers made.

They demanded "free speech" solely for the Anarchists and left socialists. Groups which had consistantly supported the Bolsheviks during the revolution and civil war and which, afterwards had had their members locked up, shipped out, and executed.

It&#39;s understandably that during a life-or-death war, free speech could not be afforded to traitors or whitist loyalists; but that wasn&#39;t what they wanted&#33;

The Russian Revolution was not a "Bolshevik" revolution, it was a people&#39;s revolution and the Bolsheviks did not have the right to direct the course it would follow.

The Anarchists, the Left-Socialists, they had an important role to play and they had strong support across the country. Trotsky claims that "no one thought" about them (ostensibly because they were so unimportant), but if this were true, what harm would granting them free speech do?

If they really had no support among the masses and the Bolsheviks were truly as "popular" as they claim, why not allow other revolutionary leftist voices be heard?

In short, what were they afraid of??? :o


I never said they "must" have been those things. I merely asked if it was likely that a naval base made up of Ukranian peasants would display those characteristics.

It&#39;s not a matter of "likelyhoods", it&#39;s what happened&#33;

That&#39;s the nature of history, material conditions move events in varied and often unpredictable ways.

Who would have imagined that celebrations of International Women&#39;s Day would result in the overthrow of the 200 year old Romanov dynasty? Nonetheless it&#39;s what happened.

Similarly, whether they were "perfect revolutionaries" or not, the sailors at Kronstadt rose up in solidarity with the oppressed workers of Petrograd and demanded basic communist rights.

Again if they had been bluffing, the Bolsheviks could have called it and ended the stand-off without any blood shed. If they were serious, it would have been a great blow for workers&#39; liberation.

Either way, there were no good reasons not to accept the bulk of the Kronstadt proposals. It honestly doesn&#39;t even matter whether the sailors "meant" them or not&#33;

If the fort had fought on even after their terms were accepted, again, their duplicity would be revealed and the Red Army would be justified in attacking. That never happened, however, and despite your "crystal ball" use of ethnicity, we can never know what "might have happened".

Too bad. It almost certainly would have been better than what did. :(


For your part, a more intelligent, and plausible, argument would be, yes, maybe they were Whites, but the Soviet regime was so decrepit that it needed to be torn down by any means neccessary.

Except they weren&#39;t whites and had absolutely no contact with or support from the White Army.

Did the "Soviet regime" need to be "torn down"? Yes, but the whites weren&#39;t any better and certainly would not have created a more egalitarian state.

Luckily, the Kronstadt rebels were just as opposed to the Whites as they were to the Bolsheviks&#33; What they wanted was a true workers&#39; republic, something much closer to actual Marxist "socialism" than the autocracy that Lenin had in mind.

Today we realize that a true communist society was impossible in Russia and that a "world revolution" was not on the horizon.

Regardless, following the revolution, the Russian people could have created a truly progressive social democracy and lead the world in terms of freedom, equality, and social welfare.

Instead they allowed the Bolsheviks to retain absolute command and create on of the most oppressive and despicable governmnts in the history of the world.

In a unique instance of political presience, the revolutionary soldiers at Kronstadt realized what was to come and bravely tried to prevent it.

They failed, of course.


Trotsky&#39;s family were fairly prosperous - not "peasants" in the traditional sense.

You&#39;re still ducking the issue.

Your fundamental claim with regards to Kronstadt is that, what they said notwithstanding and what they overtly fought for notwithstanding, their place of birth makes anything that they did inherently reactionary.

You have actually said directly that their demands "don&#39;t matter" because, as Trotstky famously put it, we "can&#39;t judge people based on what they say about themselves".

Well, if that&#39;s true, then mustn&#39;t the same apply to the good Leon himself? Mustn&#39;t we ignore all of his "revolutionary" rhetoric and judge him solely by his place of birth and class origins?

Trotsky came from a wealthy Ukrainian petty-bourgeois family. Precisely the class position that you claim was behind the "pogromists" of Kronstadt.

If we are to look solely at class position, and, for the sake of argument, accept every single one of your assertions about the sailors at Kronstadt, then what we are left with is a Urkainian petty-bourgeois general fighting Ukrainian peasant sailors.

Neither has any inherent "claim" to proletarian allegiance, and so we are forced to look at what they were actually fighting for.

Now, both sides claim that they were fighting for the "soviets" and the "workers. But Trotsky was a member of the government that was brutally suppressing Soviet power and that had just crushed the Petrograd strikes.

The Kronstadt sailors, however, were former revolutionary fighters who only rebelled following the brutal suppression of workers&#33;

Sorry, but if you want to ignore everything that people said and judge them only on their actions, the sailors at Kronstadt come out looking much better than big daddy Trotsky.

Again, you simply cannot have this both ways&#33;


No, the point is, where would have a rebel victory led?

No, the real point is what would have "rebel victory" have been?

Kronstad had no capacity to attack any other position. Nor did it have the force to launch another civil war. The sailors there consistantly rejected any assistance from the White Army and refused an allegiance with them until after they were crushed by the Bolsheviks.

So what exactly was "victory" in their estimation? What would have made them stand down?

Well, from all the historical and documentary evidence available, it is clear that they saw themselves as the vanguard of a "third revolution". That they wished to have their revolutionary message spread across the counry and inspire other military and workers groups to rise up.

Obviously that didn&#39;t happen and thanks to Bolsehvik propaganda, their message never really got to the people they wanted it to.

But the idea that their "victory" would have lead to a White victory is simply ridiculous.

If the revolution was really so tenuous that it needed Bolshevik "iron discipline" to keep it going; if it really could not have survived geniunely communist reforms, then it was never truly revolutionary to begin with.

The White Army did not want a reenvigored proletariat, nor did it have any interest in free Soviets or "workers&#39; control groups". Regardless, that was what Kronstadt demanded and it was what it was fighting for.

If its demands had been met, it would have resulted in a massive restructuring of the Soviet system, one that would have decentralized and liberalized governance and production and accordingly made it harder for any external force to sieze control.

Of course it also would have reduced the power of the "Bolshevik state" and that was something which Lenin was not prepared to tolerate. In his own words "they don&#39;t want a white government, but they don&#39;t want ours either".

Any true revolutionary would put the revolution ahead of petty political interests, but for the Bolsheviks, for Lenin, for Ziminov, for Trotsky; they had become so warped and so corrupt that they genuinely saw their power to be synonymous with revolutionary "victory".

Despite not being workers themselves and despite their having crushed the actual organs of workers&#39; democacy; Lenin and Trotsky still considered themselves "vanguards" of the proletariat and so the only people "qualified" to speak on "their behalf".

We all know where such arrogance leads.

[YKTMX]

Of course it&#39;s "important", it helps us to understand what they were fighting for and what it would have taken to end the rebellion peacefully.


Sadly, it doesn&#39;t.

As Marxists, we look beyond the immediate rhetoric of a situation into the underlying factors and social forces which it&#39;s representing.

The bourgeois revolutions promised "equality" and "freedom", but instead delivered massive inequality and servitude.


By dismissing everythign that was said and the principles that were fought for, it is possible to impart any motive to anyone

No, it&#39;s entirely possible. Once again, the soldiers at Kronstadt may or not have been "genuine" in attempting to "restore" Soviet democracy. Just as Petrichenko and the other leaders may have been genuine in wishing to restore military rule. The only thing that matters in the final instance is this: where would the rebellion have led had it been successful in overthrowing Bolshevik rule?

We can&#39;t "know" this, of course. But we can have very good estimations.

I&#39;ve offered one - a resurgent White offensive and probably a second foreign invasion, boosted by a discontented peasantry. Resulting in, eventually, a holocaust of the Soviet workers and a fascist regime in Russia which would have aligned itself with the Axis powers in the Second World War.


But it&#39;s still not good history to do so.


What&#39;s "not good history" is your outright refutation of Historical Materialism. Post-modernist bollocks about the "truth" of the Kronstadt rebellion lying solely in the written word of the Kronstadt sailors. Rubbish&#33;


the rebels did not indicate a single iota of whitist loyality.


Once again, if you&#39;ll read the article, you&#39;ll see that during the rebellion the rebels were constantly in touch with overt or covert White groups, looking for support. And it&#39;s inevitable. If you cut yourself off from the Soviet government, then the Whites are the only people you can turn to.


Neither of us know what Petrichenko "really wanted", but the fact that he did not personally "draft" the demands belies the Bolshevik myth of a "white lead conspiracy".



This word "conspiracy" again. I&#39;ve never used it, you&#39;ve introduced it completely of your own volition.


Your slander and name-calling aside, you have still not actually given a single solid reason why Lenin couldn&#39;t concede that the Kronstadt workers were correct.


Firstly, the Kronstadt fascist peasants (just as plausible as "workers", if not more so) were not "right".

I have no problem in admitting mistakes were made by the Soviet government, no problem at all.

What I won&#39;t bow to is Anarchist mythology about the Russian revolution - a process they were never keen on in the first place. Your claims about the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt rebels simply doesn&#39;t stand up to the historical record as I understand it.


There was no need to put Petrichenko in charge of anything or to abandon even a single principle of the revolution.

Petrichenko was the Leader of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the main body of the rebellion. He wasn&#39;t an obscure figure.


All that the "workers" government had to do was accept a set of demands for workers&#39; rights.


I accept there were problems with the Soviet system in 1921 - absolutely I accept that. And I accept tha a section (although in the anarchist mythology, this becomes "everybody", of course) of the class was not pleased with the progess being made in terms of the economy or Soviet democracy. Which is why groups like the Workers&#39; Opposition sprung up and made demands very similar to those made by the rebels.

Here&#39;s the difference:

Do you express differences with Communist Party policy in the framework of Soviet institutions and decision making bodies (which still had a part to play, unlike under Stalin)? Or, do you stage a mutiny at the naval base and try and stage a putsch against the government with the White Army on the border?

It&#39;s interesting - it reveals an essential conflict between Marxism on one hand and, well, Anarchism et al. on the other.

Interestingly, for anybody interested, volunteers from the Tenth Party Congress, including members of the Workers&#39; Opposition, were part of the second wave of the Red Army after the rebels had slaughtered the initial attackers.

That&#39;s proletarian solidarity, and that&#39;s what I support.


I&#39;ll leave it at that, if you don&#39;t mind.

I&#39;m trying to study stagflation for an economics exam I&#39;ve got coming up.

[LSD]

As Marxists, we look beyond the immediate rhetoric of a situation into the underlying factors and social forces which it&#39;s representing.

And the Kronstadt sailors in 1921, which again were mostly composed of pre-WWI revolutionary veterans, were representing the Proletarian class, even though many of them were not born into that class.

The rebellion was, again, a reaction to the oppression of the Petrograd workers and the Bolshevik crushing of the strikes and fought for the freedom of all workers.

Class position and social forces do not operate "secretly" or "invisibly", they are manifested in action&#33; One cannot detatch a movement&#39;s beliefs from its social role, they are one in the same.

A truly "fascist" rebellion not only represents fascist tendencies, but it manifests fascist beliefs.

When a movement rises up in the name of proletarian rights and communist principles, then by definition, it has adopted proletarian values.

Bourgeois revolutions may speak tritely of "freedom", but universally, their practical demands are for "property" and capitalism. Again, their positions reflect their class; it does not "emege" from some sort of idealist conspiracy of lies.

Obviously sometimes politics can transcend conditions and some people are particularly adept at playing the propaganda game. But to imagine that poor desperate soldiers, standing up against the immense might of the Bolshvik army, would spend their time dreaming up "fake" demands is ludicrous.

The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 represented a continuation of the Kronstadt battles of 1917. It was an attempt by dedicated revolutionaries to maintain the gains for which they had fought.

Nothing more, nothing less.


Once again, the soldiers at Kronstadt may or not have been "genuine" in attempting to "restore" Soviet democracy. Just as Petrichenko and the other leaders have been genuine in wishing to restore military rule. The only thing that matters in the final instance is this: where would the rebellion have led had it been successful in overthrowing Bolshevik rule?

Firstly, the sailors at Kronstadt had no change of "overthrowing Bolshevik rule", nor did they actually call for the disbandment or destruction of the Bolshevik party.

Now, given what we know now, maybe they should have, but as it was they still had a degree of faith in the "revolutionary leadership" and actually expected that, if pressured enough, the Bolsheviks would conced to Proletarian interests.

Not one of the demands required that the Bolsehviks step down. They would have required they cede some of their absolute power, but that&#39;s to be expected in a democratic system.

Lenin, however, was clearly not interested in democracy of any kind and rather than allow a genuine workers&#39; republic to emerge, he brutally crushed an suppressed a group of Red Army soldiers that even you know admit "may have been &#39;genuine&#39; in attempting to &#39;restore&#39; Soviet democracy".

Obviously, again, none of can now what "would have happened" or what anyone "really wanted". But we do know that the Kronstadt demands were reasonable, proletarian, and perfectly possible.

And despite the enormous number of words that you have now spend on this topic, you have still not offered a single reason why the Bolshevik government could not have adopted them.


I&#39;ve offered one - a resurgent White offensive and probably a second foreign invasion, boosted by a discontented peasantry. Resulting in, eventually, a holocaust of the Soviet workers and a fascist regime in Russia which would have aligned itself with the Axis powers in the Second World War.

Wow, that&#39;s a pretty fantastical theory you&#39;ve got there. :lol:

It&#39;s also slightly ironic given that the Soviet Government was aligned with the Axis powers at the start of the Second World War.

It was only Hitler&#39;s duplity and racist expansionism that lead to the "Great Patriotic War" and that would have happened no matter what the governing system of Russia.


What&#39;s "not good history" is your outright refutation of Historical Materialism. Post-modernist bollocks about the "truth" of the Kronstadt rebellion lying solely in the written word of the Kronstadt sailors. Rubbish&#33;

I never claimed that we should solely trust the Kronstadters descriptions of themselves. But I reject the riduculous notion that we should ignore the demands they made or the principles they espoused.

Obviously we need to look at more than mere words, but the problem is that, in this case, there wasn&#39;t much else.

After declaring their rebellion and releasing their demands, the rebels were immediately attacked by overwhelming Red Army strength. They didn&#39;t have a chance to effect any of their ideas or "reveal" any of their "intentions".

Accordingly, all that we have to work with is the documentary evidence of the situation. And, yes, the demands that the sailors made. The ones that the Bolshevik government refused to consider and that you have yet to successfuly refute.

It is, again, possible that there was a "conspiracy" going on or that there were "pogromists" or "fascists" among the Kronstadt ranks. But if so, their interests did not dominate the rebellion.

Therefore, the Bolsheviks had a remarkably opportunity to play to the genuinly progressive part of the insurrection and, in so doing, marginalize any reactionary element.

Instead they chose whole-scale slaughter and authoritrian suppression.


Once again, if you&#39;ll read the article, you&#39;ll see that during the rebellion the rebels were constantly in touch with overt or covert White groups, looking for support.

Absolute bullshit.

When the rebellion was nearing its end and the situation was desperate, the rebels called for aid from the only people willing to give it. But before that, they would only allow the Red Cross in and even then carefuly and skeptically.

Surviving records and interviews show that even the Red Cross was aware that the rebels had no loyalty to the Whitists and that the rejected any offers of alliance.

Hell, even Lenin acknowledged that the Kronstadters "don&#39;t want a white government". He was equally aware, however, that "they don&#39;t want [a Bolshevik one] either".

In the end, the victory of his party was more important to him than the victory of the proletariat.


What I won&#39;t bow to is Anarchist mythology about the Russian revolution - a process they were never keen on in the first place.

"Not keen on"?

The "heroic soldiers of Kronstadt", the "revolutionary heroes" from 1917 were, in Lenin&#39;s own words, mostly "Anarchists&#33;

The Anarchist and left-communist forces were absolutely loyal to the revolution and stood by the Bolsheviks 100% both during and after the Octorber revolution.

Once they secured state power, however, the Bolsheviks had their former allies arrested and killed. In the words of Marxism-Leninism, they "used them".

If anything, the Anarchists were too trusting. If they had known what Lenin was planning they never would have allowed the Bolsheviks to assume the powers they did.

Unfortunately, the left has always had a problem with trusting "saviours" at their word. Just look at what happened in the Chinese or Iranian revolutions. Popular demagogues are never true allies of the working class.

Without exception, they have been seduced and corrupted by power.


I accept there were problems with the Soviet system in 1921 - absolutely I accept that. And I accept tha a section (although in the anarchist mythology, this becomes "everybody", of course) of the class was not pleased with the progess being made in terms of the economy or Soviet democracy. Which is why groups like the Workers&#39; Opposition sprung up and made demands very similar to those made by the rebels.

And do you remember what happened to them?

Did any of their demands get implemented? Were any of their proposals effected?

As I recall, the WO was effectively smashed and the leadership dispersed; some arrested, some executed, some shipped off to scandinavia.

If anything, the history of the WO shows just how pointless it would have been to try and work from "within the system". That kind of idealist reformism simply doesn&#39;t work in the face of a bureaucratic instition as oppressive and autocratic as the Bolshevik party state machine.


Do you express differences with Communist Party policy in the framework of Soviet institutions and decision making bodies (which still had a part to play, unlike under Stalin)? Or, do you stage a mutiny at the naval base and try and stage a putsch against the government with the White Army on the border?

You do whatever you can.

In this case, the "Soviet institutions" were no longer indepdendent and were gradually coming under the complete and total domination of the top-heavy Bolshevik state.

Again, it was only after the mill strikes and Petrograd protests were suppressed; it was only after the Petrograd Soviet was co-opted that the soldiers at Kronstadt rose up.

If there had been an opportunity to "work within the system", they almost certainly would have taken it, but that simply didn&#39;t exist at that time and place.

And, "interestingly", it&#39;s worth noting that following the masacre at Kronstadt and the Bolshevik victory, the Kronstadt Soviet was completely disolved and the "workers" for whom the Red Army was ostensibly fighting were put under the absolute control of the military.

I don&#39;t doubt that the vast majority of the Red Army soldiers storming Kronstadt truly believe that they were fighting on behalf of their class and revolution ...but they had been decieved.

Many of them never realized this deception, but many did. Interviews following the "victory" show that a good number of Red Army recruits regretted their role in the defeat of Kronstadt and realized that they had been misled by their superiors.

That&#39;s the real trajedy of the situation, of course, it was workers against workers. Both sides believed that they were saving the revolution and both fought bravely.

The only true villains in this piece was the Bolshevik party which suppressed information, clamped down on workers, and captured civlians families to "hostage" them.

If the Red Army had only realized what the Kronstadt sailors were actually fighting for, they would have joined them in a second.

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks were better politicians than anyone could have imagined. They new how to play the press game better than anyone and they successfuly manipulated everyone involved.

How "revolutionary"... <_<

[rebelworker]

I think its very telling that the red army officers lined up macheinguns BEHIND the advancing troups to prevent them from getting any funny ideas and retreating.

Many of the red armycorps new they had been deceived and werent too eager to kill thier revolutionary brothers.

I think its also very insightful that you said Makhno the leader of the "facist" Ukranian peasants army "hated lenin". If this is the case i wonder why he wnet through the trouble to meet with him.

On his meeting with lenin on a personal level Makhno found him an interesting fellow.

The Anarchist peasant army did for three years in the Ukrain what the Bolsheviks could not, resist both the Ukranian Monarchists and the invading german amry, the whole time the Makhnovists were in an alliance with the Bolsheviks.

As for the claims of anti semetism, its true as with all of europe includng russia there was a great deal of anti semetism amon the populus. The exception with the Anarchist army being that Makhno personally shot one of his officers infront of a general assembly for the crime of participating in an anti semetic pogrom.

The Charge of makhnovist anti semetism is based on outright lies that were part of Trotrskys campaign of slander against the anarchists before he was to betray them and militarily wipe them out.

Trotsys lies against the Ukranian anarchists is now well documented, often the Bolshevik part paper would contradidct itself from month to month. From what I have read about kronstadt It appears that trotsky and the Bolshevik beurocracy brought out the same toolbox in their process of slander based on outright lies.

I think a probklem trots have in their analysis is that the dont see things from the point of view of workers and peasants, only from official state propghanda.

It might be hard for you to understand how opression under the capitalists and the Bolsheviks feels like the same thing for us, and history has shown your arguments about gradual withering of the state and transition to communism being total horseshit. So guess what, next time you try to eliminate workers controll hopefully we wont wait as long as Kronstadt to do something about it.

"Beat the Whites untill they&#39;re Red, beat the Reds untill they&#39;re Black"
-Saying from the final days of the Makhnovchina

[IronColumn]

Paul Avrich&#39;s "Kronstadt 1921" is recommended for anyone who&#39;s interested.

[Eoin Dubh]

On the 1917 Kronstadt Sailors: "the pride and glory of the revolution.... the reddest of the red" - Leon Trotsky in 1917, after the revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion

[Brownfist]

I really think we need to remember that in the 1910&#39;s and 20&#39;s the difference between communists and anarchists were never really as marked as they are today. Part of the more marked divisions I think today come from the experience of the Kronstadt rebellion and how it has been historically and theoretically argued today. Having said that we need to historicize both the Bolshevik reaction to the rebellion and the causes for the Kronstadt rebellion. I think we need to historicize the events of the Kronstadt rebellion and not impose current theoretical divisions onto a movement that did not have such clear distinctions. Thus, it would be simplistic to argue that because the Kronstadt rebellion occurred it was counter-revolutionary, but it would be similarly disingenious to argue that the putting down of the Kronstadt rebellion was the end of Bolshevism. I think those who see the Bolshevik reaction as unneccesary and cruel need to remember that the country was in civil war and these things happen in civil war. Civil wars are never planned neatly. I think often it is too simple for us to look back and say "oh that happened and that was terrible" without understanding the context in which an event occured. However, having said that it does not absolve the Red Army&#39;s response as I am sure other alternative responses could have been enacted.

[rebelworker]

I agree, but the point is that revolutionas or civil wars are never clean.

People who think radical change will ever be clean should seriously take a look at what we are up aginst and what has happened in history.

The point is that authoritarian organizing will lead to tragedy, history has clearly shown this, Kronstadt is just one exampleout of many, the russian example is alos just one period out of many.

Any time a centralised political body has tried to do good in the name of the masses there has been serrious problems. The fact that the public is more educated than ever before make the need for centralisation less important(if it ever realy was).

Bolsheviks continue to support crimes against other revolutionaries, this is the problem today.

This isnt just about leninists killing anarchists, its about a model of chnge that is in effect counter revolutionary and based in anti working class sentiment(stupid peasants/workers were just being manipulated so we had to manipulate them).

For real revolutionary solidarity,
Dave

[YKTMX]

Originally posted by Eoin [email protected] 24 2006, 08:19 PM
On the 1917 Kronstadt Sailors: "the pride and glory of the revolution.... the reddest of the red" - Leon Trotsky in 1917, after the revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion
That article is a disgrace.

I&#39;ve tried to mend it, but to no avail.

I&#39;ve already answered the "point" about Trotsky&#39;s praise for the sailors in this thread.

[Edelweiss]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23 2006, 12:43 PM
Contrary to a lot of mythology on this board -- from the RAANcids, anarkiddies, etc. -- I come to the question of Kronstadt (and Russia) from the perspective of a Myasnikovist (which, if you had to pin a named "ism" on me, this would be it).

I would start this by highly recommending that people on both sides read Paul Avrich&#39;s Kronstadt 1921. It&#39;s one of the best-researched books on the subject, and it disspells a lot of mythology presented by both sides.

Was Kronstadt the "end of the Russian Revolution"? No. That took place earlier, in fact. The abolition of workers&#39; control of industry in favor of one-man management in 1920 brought that aspect of the revolution to a crashing end, and the restoration of elements of the old tsarist bureaucracy and state as "specialists" in 1919 brought with it a renewed dual power situation in the Soviet republic. The revolution was over, but the question of which class was in power was still being decided.

At that time, I would argue, the workers still were the ruling class, but it was being challenged openly, internally and externally. Economically, they had lost control, but politically, which is where such questions are decided, it was still being fought -- with the working class still holding the high ground ... for the moment (and having to contend with a leadership that was concilliatory to the class enemy).

Was Kronstadt a "White Guard-led" insurrection? Again, no. But that is really the wrong way to pose the question. It should be asked: Would the victory at Kronstadt have opened the door to counterrevolution? The answer there is yes. A victory by the Kronstadt rebels would have so weakened the tenuous hold on power that the Bolsheviks had, as well as the even more tenuous hegemony of the soviets as they were, that those White forces that fled to Finland and Turkey, could have rolled into Soviet Russia and swept aside what remained of what would have been a disintegrating Red Army.

They may not have wanted it, but the Kronstadt rebels would have soon found themselves facing off with well-armed and organized White Armies, with no help from a fractured Soviet government, a splintered Red Army and demoralized soviets. They may have wanted "Soviets without Bolsheviks". They would have likely gotten that, quickly followed by Russia without soviets, and then a White bullet in their head.

Was Kronstadt a victory for the Soviet republic? Yes and no -- mostly no, in my opinion. Of course, the fact that the Red Army took Kronstadt makes it a victory. But it was a "victory" like Bunker Hill was a "victory" for the British during the American Revolution: any more such "victories" would have ruined them. The Red Army lost 10,000 soldiers in the battle, compared to the Kronstadters&#39; 600. In addition, they lost the propaganda battle -- as we can still see today. All the Soviet republic won was breathing space, and they squandered that too.

Were the Kronstadt sailors of 1921 the same as those of 1917? No. The sailors of 1917 were the cream of the Revolution, and they volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Few people, communists or anarchists, think about the fact that the Bolshevik-led Soviet republic allowed so many of their most adept and educated worker-communists to volunteer to die in the Civil War. That decision resulted in incalculable loss of trained and organized workers who not only knew what it would take to build toward a classless society, but also could have trained workers across the country in how to manage their workplaces democratically.

When the Soviet government hailed the Kronstadt sailors at anniversary celebrations, they were hailing mostly the dead. Only a small core of the original 1917 Kronstadt sailors were still there in 1921. Those who took their place were young peasants driven to the cities due to war or crop failures. And, yes, they did bring with them socially backward consciousness; this is reflected, albeit slightly, in their demands, as well as in their statements. There is nothing socially progressive about the anti-Semitism from the Kronstadt rebels that Avrich documents.

Moreover, those few remaining 1917 Kronstadt sailors actually fought against the rebels, issuing their own declaration calling for an end to the "counterrevolutionary putsch" and arming themselves against the rebels. Much of this was done out of self-defense; shortly after the rebellion began, many of these 1917 Kronstadt sailors found themselves arrested for refusing to follow the orders of the rebels. (There was a new book published in 1999 in Russia, Kronstadt Tragedy 1921, that has details that Avrich&#39;s book lacks. However, those details only reinforce much of what Avrich discovered.)

Were the demands of the Kronstadt rebels supportable? Some yes. Some no. It&#39;s best to go through them, though, to see what each one was about.


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.

Supportable. Certainly, in 1921, new elections in the soviets is a supportable demand, and it should be by secret ballot and preceded by free electoral propaganda. The question is, though, who will be participating in this electoral activity?


2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

Again, supportable, but only to a point. Which "Anarchists"? Which "Left Socialist parties"? If they are anarchists and Left Socialist parties that have not declared for the Whites and/or raised arms against the Soviet republic, then this is a supportable demand.


3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.

This is a little vague. What is a "trade union ... organization"? Is it a trade union? Is it a fraction or caucus in a trade union? Is it a union-based organization? These organizations deserve the rights mentioned above, and more. However, there have been times when scab elements looking to destabilize a trade union form what they call a "union organization", which is a base of activity for breaking the union.


4. The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

Interesting, the way this is formulated. They want the Soviet government to give them a platform for their propaganda. You would think that, if these rebels really believed in self-organization, they would have phrased this as a call to "non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors" to organize it themselves.


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.

Another vague demand. Who defines "political prisoners"? Were those SRs who attempted to assassinate Lenin "political prisoners"? Were those anarchists who sabotaged production of armaments in the middle of the Civil War "political prisoners"? Certainly, there were political prisoners at the time (Myasnikov was one of them), but a call phrased this way doesn&#39;t mean to only release those who were imprisoned solely because of their political opposition to the policies of the Soviet government.


6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.

Supportable.


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.

The political sections of the Red Army were, technically speaking, not party organs. However, given the conditions of the real world, they were all dominated by the Bolsheviks. Instead of calling for an end to political sections, which were there to educate soldiers and sailors about why they were fighting, the role of the soviets and Soviet republic, etc., they should have called for the legalization of all political movements that supported the soviet system and the opening of the political sections of the military to all those parties.

To simply abolish the political section would have cut the military loose from the soviets and Soviet government, making it and its commanders even less accountable.


8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

No. The local militia detachments that were organized between towns and the countryside existed to enforce anti-hoarding and anti-profiteering laws. This is where we really begin to see the social backwardness of the peasantry coming through in the demands.


9. The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

Supportable. The unequal relationship was one of the problems that came along with the petty-bourgeois "specialists" in the state and economic management. Since food rations were the equivalent of wages at the time, this is little more than calling for equalization of wages. (Of course, this would have had more moral force behind it if the leaders of the rebellion practiced what they preached&#33;)


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.

Again, no. The Red Guards (Bolshevik armed groups) had every right to be included in the line of battle in the Red Army, and workers had the right to organize themselves into detachments of Red Guards in the factories. The factories themselves had their own defense detachments, composed of party and non-party workers. The Red Guards were organized semi-independently, but coordinated with the factory defense units, just as they did before the Revolution.


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.

Hell no&#33; This is nothing but demanding state-organized guaranteeing of the continued existence of the petty bourgeoisie -- much like the NEP a year later.


12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.

No comment necessary.


13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

Again, no comment necessary.


14. We demand the institution of mobile workers&#39; control groups.

What is a "mobile workers&#39; control group"? Is it a group of workers that would go from workplace to workplace teaching workers how to organize themselves and implement workers&#39; control of production? If so, then yes, yes, YES&#33; This could have been a way to plan out the transition back to direct workers&#39; control of production.


15. We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.

No, no, NO&#33; Again with the attempt to artificially maintain the petty bourgeoisie.

All in all, the demands reflect differing class viewpoints: both proletarian and petty-bourgeois.

In the final analysis, I cannot say that I would have supported the Kronstadt rebellion. The overall effect its victory would have had, at that time in history, would have been worse than what existed. At the same time, I cannot support the solution the Soviet government had to the Kronstadt situation. It did more harm than good and made the Bolsheviks look like what their critics said they were.

From a strictly military point of view, a seige and small-unit warfare within the city, building up to a tighter seige of the fortress itself that could be held until the rebels surrendered, would have been a better plan of action. It may not have looked as "romantic" as the charge across the ice did, but it would have been more effective and resulted in less loss of life. Trotsky&#39;s lack of tactical sense really came through in his handling of Kronstadt.

Miles
I apreciate your attempt of an actually divert analysis of Kronstadt, Miles. Unlike the Leninist drones, you are not just repeating the same old Leninist bullshit line over and over again.

It may be true that some of the demands of the rebbeling sailors where questionable, and even petty-bourgeois, it also may be true that a military victory of the Konstadt rebels would have meant the the replacement of the Bolsheviks with far more reactionary forces.

But still, what can&#39;t be ignored is the fact that the Kronstadt rebellion did represent a significant part of the proletariat and of public will. Still the Bolsheviks refused from the beginning to enter any political process and real, political negotioations with the anarchists and left-socialists. Instead, they prefered a military solutions, which ended up in a massacre. I can&#39;t see any reason which could justify this.

[Morpheus]

I think those who see the Bolshevik reaction as unneccesary and cruel need to remember that the country was in civil war and these things happen in civil war.

No it wasn&#39;t; the civil war ended a few months previously. Kronstadt was part of a wave of worker & peasant rebellions that swept Russia shortly after the civil war ended. The end of the civil war was the cause of those rebellions. During the war, many people who didn&#39;t support the bolsheviks didn&#39;t rebel against them because they preferred the bolsheviks to the Whites. With the end of the war, the bolsheviks could no longer use the White Menace to scare people into submission, and rebellions ensued. These rebellions were a major reason for the New Economic Policy - the Bolsheviks changed gears so as to better contain rebellion.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25 2006, 02:19 PM
But still, what can&#39;t be ignored is the fact that the Kronstadt rebellion did represent a significant part of the proletariat and of public will. Still the Bolsheviks refused from the beginning to enter any political process and real, political negotioations with the anarchists and left-socialists. Instead, they prefered a military solutions, which ended up in a massacre. I can&#39;t see any reason which could justify this.
I tend to think that "represent" may not be the right word to use here. For certain, Kronstadt mirrored much of the discontent that had been bubbling to the surface in cities like Petersburg, but the Kronstadters also had their own agenda, which was not necessarily the same as that of the workers who were striking two months before. True, there was some overlap, but it seems that was mostly because the Kronstadters had the time and ability to see the effectiveness of some of the demands raised in the January 1921 strikes. Whether they actually saw those demands as necessary or central to their own agenda is another question.

(I tend to lean in the direction of saying that the inclusion of the demand about equalization of rations, which was a central slogan of the strikes of January 1921, was put in rather opportunistically. I mean, the slogan was being raised, along with the demand for increased heating rations, in response to the excuses offered by the Bolsheviks. Every time the workers would ask why there was no heat, little food or such similar things, the Bolsheviks replied that it was due to problems with hoarding and profiteering. The workers found themselves striking for greater enforcement of the laws against such practices, which would have been enforced by the local militia detachments -- the same detachments the Kronstadters want abolished in No. 8 of their demands.)

I think it is true that the "negotiations" staged by the Bolsheviks were not really meant to initiate a dialogue with anyone. I can understand why, even if I think it was a problem. By the beginning of 1921, the Bolsheviks were a raw nerve; three years of Civil War, and all that entails, had worn them down and stressed them out. I can imagine that, if they had them at the time and knew what to do with them, the Bolsheviks probably would have just sent bomber planes to pummel the fortress into dust and be done with it -- the people be damned. I do think they were at that level of exhaustion and intolerance.

I think this shows through in the tactical mistakes the Bolsheviks made militarily in dealing with Kronstadt. I can just imagine what those professionally-trained sailors and marines who were allied with Petrochenko thought when they looked across the ice and saw three divisions of the Red Army preparing a frontal assault. "Are they really that stupid?" would have been my first thought.

A frontal assault. Across ice. Against a fortress bristling with artillery. Honestly, the Red Army commanders were asking for it. If I had been there in the aftermath of this, I would have demanded the resignation of every commander who took those soldiers across the ice, including Trotsky. It was a huge military blunder.

This, though, brings us to the question of whether it was a "massacre". Again, I think that&#39;s the wrong term. "Bloodbath" would be more accurate. A massacre implies that the dying was almost exclusively on one side. If that&#39;s what you want to imply, then it was not the Kronstadters who were massacred, but the Red Army soldiers. Again, only 600 Kronstadt rebels died (albeit out of a total force of about 3,200), compared to 10,000 Red Army troops (from a force of, IIRC, about 50,000). Each side lost roughly one-fifth of their forces. That is a bloodbath by anyone&#39;s definition.

Miles

[Poum_1936]

I would have demanded the resignation of every commander who took those soldiers across the ice, including Trotsky. It was a huge military blunder.


Trotsky didnt lead the attack. He took responsibility for it being the military commisar and a member of the government.

I think is was Tuchovesky, or something similar to that lead the attack.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 04:01 PM

I would have demanded the resignation of every commander who took those soldiers across the ice, including Trotsky. It was a huge military blunder.


Trotsky didnt lead the attack. He took responsibility for it being the military commisar and a member of the government.

I think is was Tuchovesky, or something similar to that lead the attack.
As Commissar of War, it was ultimately Trotsky&#39;s decision, and he should have been removed for it. The same goes for Tukhachevsky.

Miles

[rebelworker]

I think its interesting that about every bolshevik responsible for the operation was dead at the hnds of other bolsheviks within a few years.

The Ida Mett book mentioned in this thread has a full list.

I understand the arguments about war fatigue and all that.
This is exactly the point, humans are inperfect and the bolshevik model dose not take this into account, to the contrary it opens the door for widespread abuse.

The dictatorship of the party, and central leadership are inherently flawed structurally.
History hs shown this without a doubt.

This kind of unaccountable hierarchy is what workering people have been fighting against for all these years.

[Poum_1936]

Yes, dictatorship of the party was flawed. It&#39;s one of those "emergmency" measures the Bolsheviks used to defend the revolution. It was never meant to be permenant. But that&#39;s all relative on who you talk to. On the other hand, the typical anti Bolshevik criticism is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fascists from the get go and never gave a hoot about the working class. But this debate can go on and on without any concensus from ethier side.

My point is, I honestly dont think anyone defends the idea of dictatorship of the party as an applicable means to an end this day in age. Of course, that exceptional circumstances card could always be pulled out again. But I cant come up with a situation at the moment that would warrant such a move. It would take quite alot for me to accept such a manouver again, something like...

-A Civil War
-Terrorist attacks
-Foriegn intervention
-Economic Collapse
-A World War
-Peasant Revolts
-Mutineering Fortresses

:P I kid though.

[Janus]

If Krondstadt was a White revolt because there was some White support then what about the Red Army? During the civil war, there were White officers in it since Trotsky was mainly the organizational person.


I think is was Tuchovesky, or something similar to that lead the attack.
Yeah, it was Tukhachevsky. He was working in the interests of his party at this time but was later purged by Stalin.

[YKTMX]

Originally posted by CommunistLeague+Apr 27 2006, 10:07 PM--> (CommunistLeague @ Apr 27 2006, 10:07 PM)
[email protected] 27 2006, 04:01 PM

I would have demanded the resignation of every commander who took those soldiers across the ice, including Trotsky. It was a huge military blunder.


Trotsky didnt lead the attack. He took responsibility for it being the military commisar and a member of the government.

I think is was Tuchovesky, or something similar to that lead the attack.
As Commissar of War, it was ultimately Trotsky&#39;s decision, and he should have been removed for it. The same goes for Tukhachevsky.

Miles [/b]
What other means of attack/solution would you have offered?

For the reasons we&#39;ve been discussing, the rebellion had to be put down as quickly as possible. Considering that there was no "aerial" option at the time, a land assault was always on the cards.

In any case, from my point of view, as I&#39;ve said, the sacrifice of the thousands of Red Army soldiers (many of whom were volunteers) is the real act of bravery in that whole sorry episode.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by [email protected] 29 2006, 02:24 AM
What other means of attack/solution would you have offered?

For the reasons we&#39;ve been discussing, the rebellion had to be put down as quickly as possible. Considering that there was no "aerial" option at the time, a land assault was always on the cards.

In any case, from my point of view, as I&#39;ve said, the sacrifice of the thousands of Red Army soldiers (many of whom were volunteers) is the real act of bravery in that whole sorry episode.
I answered this in my initial response: small-unit warfare and a seige of the eastern fortresses (where the rebels were).

Here is a map of Petersburg and Kronstadt (apologies for it being so large).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Umgebung_von_St._Petersburg_%28Einseitige_Farbkart e%29.jpg

Here is another map that shows how the battle actually went.

http://homepage.mac.com/gowithflo/krondweb/krondresearch/map01b.jpg

As you can see, the western (particularly southwestern) areas of the island were not part of the rebels&#39; defense plan. They concentrated on the eastern fortresses, where the fleet was stationed and where the city was.

If I was the one looking at the tactical situation in March 1921, my orders would have been to flank the rebels by doing some light demonstrating up front (just enough to make them think the invasion was coming) while moving the bulk of my forces to make the crossing along the southwestern edge of the island. Those forces would have moved to take control of the western part of the island (to prevent escape), and then southeast, toward the city, meeting up with the militia detachments organized by the "1917 Kronstadters" who organized against the rebellion.

When the rebels received word of the landing on the west of the island, they likely would have shifted their forces in that direction, if only to defend themselves. When the guns of the fortresses went silent, I would have committed regiment-sized units to cross the ice to see if an eastern invasion was now possible. If so, then more units would have been sent. Eventually, the rebels would have had to retreat all the way back to the Konstantin and Menshikov fortresses. I would have put them under seige and waited them out. They were going nowhere and making no headway in their campaign at that point.

Politically, I would have went through the list of demands, picked out what was supportable (as I did in my first post) and strongly recommended implementing them. Facts are facts. There was a lot of discontent in the Soviet republic in late 1920 and early 1921. That needed to be addressed. In my view, the Kronstadt rebels attempted to seize on those demands to gain support for their rebellion. So, to undercut that support, I would have recommended that those demands that mirrored what the workers were raising -- new elections to the soviets, equalization of rations, etc. -- be immediately implemented.

The sacrifice of Red Army soldiers was unnecessary and wasteful. What makes it worse is that most of those who were in the front line of battle were party volunteers -- worker-Bolsheviks who were more needed in the factories, because of their knowledge and ability to educate their co-workers about how to run the workplaces themselves, than on the ice. It may have been a "real act of bravery", but that&#39;s not the point. The Union soldiers at Fredericksburg or the Confederate soldiers in Pickett&#39;s Charge at Gettysburg were real brave, too. The point is that they did not need to be sacrificed.

Trotsky considered the deaths of those 10,000 soldiers to have sent a "message" to the rebels that they meant business. To me, the only message it sends is that he didn&#39;t give a tinker&#39;s damn about the lives of these "workers in uniform". For that, he should have been removed from his positions.

Miles