Kronstadt Rebellion -- Help ?

[Coggeh]

I'm doing the Kronstadt rebellion as my leaving cert project in history and was wondering could anyone help me find sources i can use for it .
a book representing both sides written about it ...

Diary entries ? things like that .

Any help would be greatly welcomed .

[Devrim]

Libcom has some interesting stuff on Kronstadt including translations of every issue of Kronstadt Izvestia http://libcom.org/tags/kronstadt

Devrim

[Tower of Bebel]

Lenin on Kronstadt: http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...921/mar/15.htm
Libcom on the Russian Revolution (lots of works on Kronstadt too):
http://libcom.org/tags/russian-revolution

[Led Zeppelin]

Libcom is a garbage source biased from a pro-anarchist viewpoint.

I'm not sure why Rakunin, a Marxist, cited that as a good source.

Anyway, here are some good articles on the issue:

Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt

More on the Suppression of Kronstadt

And also, Rosa posted a good article on the matter, but I'm not sure what the link to it is, hopefully she'll see this thread and repost it.

[Tower of Bebel]

I'm not sure why Rakunin, a Marxist, cited that as a good source.

Ah, that's because I trust Coggy. I have posted a link to libcom because it has some information on the subject, though I don't agree with certain analyses.

I hoped others would post other links, as I searched for other articles but I was inable to find any.

[Coggeh]

Thats the thing i am a Marxist but yet I'm really divided on this issue so i want to look into it as much as i can . I read some stuff on libcom before about it and some articles from Trotsky and ones supporting Trotsky and I'm still very confused so I thought it would be a good project to do .

[Coggeh]

Thanks for all the links btw comrades

[Random Precision]

Well, the firsthand accounts I know of are by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman- two anarchists who still had pull at the time in the Petrograd Soviet and tried unsuccessfully to mediate between the sailors and the Bolsheviks. Obviously they're quite biased however. There's also Victor Serge's "Memoirs of a Revolutionary" which has some good stuff. Serge was an anarchist who became a Bolshevik, but was rather ambivalent about his party crushing the rebellion. The best secondhand account is "Kronstadt 1921" by Paul Avrich. He's an anarchist historian, but he maintains throughout the book that the Bolsheviks were (from their point of view at least) justified in crushing the rebellion. His account really dispels a lot of mythical thinking about it from both sides.

[Devrim]

Libcom is a garbage source biased from a pro-anarchist viewpoint.

I'm not sure why Rakunin, a Marxist, cited that as a good source.

was wondering could anyone help me find sources i can use for it .
a book representing both sides written about it ...

I think the bit in bold answers your question.

There is actually some quite good stuff there including a long extract from Serge's 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary',which is a good read in itself.

Little by little, the truth broke through the smoke screen laid down by the press, whose mendacity now knew no bounds. And that was our press, the press of our revolution, the first socialist press in history, therefore the first incorruptible, unbiased press in history. Even in the past, to be sure, it had now and then laid itself open, to some extent, to the charge of demagogy (of a warm, sincere kind, however) and had used violent language about its opponents. But in doing so it had stayed within the rules of the game, and had, in any case, acted understandably. Now, however, lying was its settled policy. The Petrograd Pravda informed its readers that Kouzmin, Commissar for the navy and the army, had been manhandled during his imprisonment at Kronstadt, and had narrowly escaped summary execution - on written orders from the counter-revolutionaries. I knew Kouzmin, an energetic, hard-working soldier, a teacher of military science, grey from tip to toe; his uniform, even his wrinkled face were grey. He 'escaped' from Kronstadt and turned up at Smollny.
'It is hard to believe.' I said to him , 'that they intended to shoot you. Did you really see any such order?'
He looked embarrassed, and did not answer for a moment.
'Oh, one always exaggerates a bit. There was a threatening note.'

Serge is generally treated as a reliable witness. Even for those who support the suppression of Kronstadt surely the fact that the part had to resort to lies to mobilise against the uprising says something.

Israel Getzler's 'Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy' is quite new, and was written with access to new data. It is certainly interesting particulary on the point of class composition in the fleet:

... that the politicized Red sailor still predominated at Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlosk and the Sevastopol, both reknowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195, having joined in the years 1914-16. Only 137 sailors or 6.8% were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5% are likely to have been drafted from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine and 9% from Finland, Latvia and Poland.

If this is true (and nobody has disputed it), it destroys the argument about the sailors being peasants. If we take this information as being representative of the Kronstadt rebels as a whole it would suggest that 59% of the sailors had been there since at least 1916 whilst 93.9% had been there at the time of the October revolution, hardly a great change in the composition of the garrison from when it was the ‘stronghold of the revolution’ in 1917.

Devrim