THE KRONSTADT UPRISING 1921
by Ida Mett
Originally published in French as
La Commune de Cronstadt, Paris 1938.
First published in English by Solidarity, 1967.
Then by Black Rose Books,
Montréal, Canada, n.d.

VII. Footnotes

1. Introduction by Murray Bookchin

1. In Spain (1936), the Russian Revolution, the Paris Commune, the June uprising of the Parisian Workers in 1848, no less than in revolutionary upsurges today, the most dynamic elements were precisely members of these "transitional classes." In the post, they were mainly craftsmen, workers of peasant origin, and déclassé, all of Marx's jibes to the contrary. Today, they consist of students, youth from nearly all classes, intellectuals, declasses, and in the "Third World," landless labourers and peasants.

2. Cf. "Listen, Marxist!" Anarchos pamphlet. P. 20.

2. Preface to Solidarity Edition.

1. P. Cardan, From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy.

2. For Information concerning their programme see 'The Workers Opposition by Alexandra Kollontai. This was first published in English In Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Dreadnought in 1921.

3. The history of such groups as the Workers Truth' group, or the Workers Struggle' group still remains to be written.

4. An easy enough task after 1936, when some well-known anarchist 'leaders' (sic!) entered the Popular Front government in Catalonia, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War - and were allowed to remain there by the anarchist rank and file. This action, in an area where the Anarchists had a mass basis in the Labour movement - irrevocably damned them. Just as the development of the Russian Revolution had irrevocably damned the Mensheviks, as incapable of standing up to the test of events.

5. Three statements from Trotsky's 'Terrorism and Communism' (Ann Arbor Paperbacks. University of Michigan, 1961) first published in June 1920 will illustrate the point;

'The creation of a socialist society means the organization of the workers on now foundations, their adaptation to those foundations and their labour re-education, with the one unchanging end of the increase in the productivity of labour . . .' (p. 148)

'I consider that If the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we would undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much less painfully. (pp. 162-3)

'We have been more than once accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of our own Party . . . in this substitution of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class . . .' (p. 109)

So much for the 'anti-bureaucratic' antecedents of Trotskyism. It is interesting that the book was highly praised by Lenin. Lenin only took issue with Trotsky on the trade union question at the Central Committee meeting of November 8 and 9, 1920. Throughout most of 1920 Lenin has endorsed all Trotsky's bureaucratic decrees In relation to the unions.

6. For an interesting account of the growth of the Factory Committees Movement - and of the opposition to them of the Bolsheviks at the First All-Russian Trade Union Convention (January 1918), see Maximoff's 'The Guillotine at Work', Chicago, 1940.

7. At the Ninth Party Congress (March 1920) Lenin introduced a resolution to the effect that the task of the unions was to explain the need a 'maximum curtailment of administrative collegla and the gradual introduction of individual management in units directly engaged In production.' (Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution' p. 124)

8. Serge's writings on this matter were first brought to the attention of English-language readers in 1961. This text was later reprinted as a pamphlet.

9. See N.W.'s article In Freedom (28 October 1967) entitled October 1917: No Revolution at All.

10. Pages 9-21, dealing with the role of the Navy in the Russian revolutionary movement have been omitted. Although they contain interesting and important material, which we hope will be translated In due course, they are not essential to the main argument.

11. Lenin proclaimed so explicitly in his 'What Is To Be Done' (1902).

12. In a statement to the 10th Party Congress (1921) Lenin refers to a mere discussion on the trade unions as an 'absolutely impermissible luxury' which 'we' should not have permitted. These remarks speak unwitting volumes on the subject (and incidentally deal decisively with those who seek desperately for an 'evolution' in their Lenin).

4. The Kronstadt Events - Background.

1. Poukhov : the. Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921'. State Publishing House. 'Young Guard' edition, 1931. in the series : 'Stages of the Civil War'.

2. This resolution was subsequently endorsed by all the Kronstadt sailors in General Assembly, and by a number of groups of Red Army Guards. It was also endorsed by the whole working population of Kronstadt in General Assembly. It became the Political Programme of the insurrection. It therefore deserves a careful analysis.

3. The accusation was made in answer to a question put to Trotsky by Wendell Thomas, a member of the New York Commission of Enquiry into the Moscow Trials.

4. Whom has history vindicated in this matter? Shortly before his second stroke, Lenin was to write (Pravda, 28th. January, 1923): 'Let us speak frankly. The inspection now enjoys no authority whatsoever. Everybody knows that there is no worse institution than our inspection'. This was said a bare eighteen months after the suppression of Kronstadt.

It is worth pointing out that Stalin had been the chief of the Rabkrin from 1919 till the spring of 1922, when he became General Secretary of the Party. He continued to exercise a strong influence over Rabkrin even after he had formally left it. Lenin, incidentally, had voiced no objection to Stalin's appointment or activities in this post. That only came later. Lenin had in fact defended both Stalin and Rabkrin against some of Trotsky's more farsighted criticisms - see. I. Deutscher, The People Unarmed', pp. 47-48. - Note added in 'Solidarity, Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 27).

5. The entire file of this short lived journal was reprinted as an appendix to a book 'Pravda o Kronshtadta, (The Truth about Kronstadt), published in Prague in 1921.

6. Poukhov: The Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921' in series 'Stages of the Civil War', p. 98, 'Young Guard' edition, 1931, State Publishing House, Moscow.

7. This Kamenev was an ex-Tsarist officer, now collaborating with the Soviet Government. He was a different Kamenev from the one shot by the Stalinists in 1936.

8. Old Bolshevik. President of the Tsentrobalt (Central Committee of the Sailors of the Baltic Fleet) in July 1917. After October Revolution member of the First Soviet of Peoples' Commissars. Together with Antonov Ovasenko and Krylenko was put in charge of Army and Navy.

9. op. cit.

10. Cossack villages. Regiment 560, also composed of Cossacks and Ukrainians, was fighting on the side of Kronstadt.

11. So numerous were the latter that the Finnish Foreign Ministry started discussions with Bersine, the Russian ambassador, with a view to joint frontier guard patrols clearing the corpses from the ice. The Finns feared that hundreds of bodies would be washed on to the Finnish shores, after the ice had melted.

12. On 10th. September 1937, Trotsky wrote in 'Le Lutte Ouvriere' or 'the legend do would have it that Kronstadt 1921 was, a great massacre'.

5. What they Said at the Time

1. Dan, T. "Two years of roaming" (1919-21). In Russian.

2. In 1926 he became a Communist and returned to Russia.

3. Yartchouk. The Kronstadt Revolt. In Russian and Spanish.

4. According to the testimony of well-known Bolsheviks such as Flerovski and Raskolnikov.

5. This idea was later developed by Hermann Sandomirskl, a 'Soviet anarchist'. in an article published in the Moscow Isvestia, on the occasion of Lenin's death.

6. In fact during Denikin's offensive of 1919 they had told their members to enter the Red Army.

7. Ida Matt's quotations from Lenin are wrongly attributed to his article on "The Tax in Kind". This report was delivered at the 10th Party Congress, on March 15, 1921 (Selected Works, Volume 9. p. 107). In fact the quotations relate to an article on 'The Food Tax" (Selected Works. Volume 9, pp. 194-198). (Ed. Solidarity.)

8. The Opritchniks were the personal guard of Ivan the Terrible and at the same time his higher political police force. During the seven years of their existence (1565-1572) they distinguished themselves by their ferocious activity.

9. archine = Russian measure of length.

Kronstadt: last upsurge of the Soviets

1. Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 56-57 (in Russian).

2. It is untrue that the paper of the Kronstadters, the Kronstadt Iavestia, ever spoke of "thousands of people killed" in Petrograd.

3. Officer cadets.

4. Loutovinov committed suicide in Moscow, in May 1924.

5. In his last book, written in the tragic context of an unequal struggle with his mortal enemy, Trotsky made what was for him a great effort at being objective. This is what he says about Kronstadt: "The Stalinist school of falsification is not the only one that flourishes today in the field of Russian history. Indeed, it derives a measure of sustenance from certain legends built on ignorance and sentimentalism, such as the lurid tales concerning Kronstadt, Makhno and other episodes of the Revolution. Suffice it to say that what the Soviet Government did reluctantly at Kronstadt was a tragic necessity; naturally the revolutionary government could not have 'presented' the fortress that protected Petrograd to the insurgent sailors only because a few dubious Anarchists and S.R.'s were sponsoring a handful of reactionary peasants and soldiers in rebellion. Similar considerations were involved in the case of Makhno and other potentially revolutionary elements that were perhaps well-meaning but definitely ill-acting." Stalin by Trotsky. Hollis and Carter (1947). p. 337.

6. Lenin, Selected Works. Lawrence and Wishart (1937). Volume 9, p. 97.

7. Ida Mett is wrong in implying that Stalin was General Secretary of the Party at the time of the events she is describing. The post of General Secretary -- and Stalin's appointment to it (incidentally endorsed by both Lenin and Trotsky) -- only took place in 1922. (Ed. Solidarity).

8. 'open conference'.