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An Anarchist FAQ - How do modern day Trotskyists misrepresent Kronstadt?
We have discussed how Trotskyists have followed their heroes Lenin and Trotsky in abusing the facts about the Kronstadt sailors and uprising in previous sections. In section 8, we have indicated how they have selectively quoted from academic accounts of the uprising and suppressed evidence which contradicts their claims. In section 7 we have shown how they have selectively quoted from Paul Avrich's book on the revolt to paint a false picture of the connections between the Kronstadt sailors and the Whites. Here we summarise some of the other misrepresentations of Trotskyists about the revolt.
John Rees, for example, asserts that the Kronstadters were fighting for "soviets without parties." Indeed, he makes the assertion twice on one page. [Op. Cit., p. 63] Pat Stack goes one further and asserts that the "central demand of the Kronstadt rising though was 'soviets without Bolsheviks', in other words, the utter destruction of the workers' state." ["Anarchy in the UK?", Socialist Review, no. 246, November 2000] Both authors quote from Paul Avrich's book Kronstadt 1921 in their articles. Let us turn to that source:
"'Soviets without Communists' was not, as is often maintained by both Soviet and non-Soviet writers, a Kronstadt slogan." [Kronstadt 1921, p. 181]
Nor did they agitate under the banner "soviets without parties." They argued for "all power to the soviets and not to parties." Political parties were not to be excluded from the soviets, simply stopped from dominating them and substituting themselves for them. As Avrich notes, the Kronstadt program "did allow a place for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, alongside the other left-wing organisations . . . Communists . . . participated in strength in the elected conference of delegate, which was the closest thing Kronstadt ever had to the free soviets of its dreams." [Ibid.] The index for Avrich's work handily includes this page in it, under the helpful entry "soviets: 'without Communists.'"
The central demand of the uprising was simply soviet democracy and a return to the principles that the workers and peasants had been fighting the whites for. In other words, both Leninists have misrepresented the Kronstadt revolt's demands and so misrepresented its aims.
Rees goes one step further and tries to blame the Bolshevik massacre on the sailors themselves. He argues "in Petrograd Zinoviev had already essentially withdrawn the most detested aspects of War Communism in response to the strikes." Needless to say, Zinoviev did not withdraw the political aspects of War Communism, just some of the economic ones and, as the Kronstadt revolt was mainly political, these concessions were not enough (indeed, the repression directed against workers rights and opposition socialist and anarchist groups increased). He then states the Kronstadters "response [to these concessions] was contained in their What We Are Fighting For" and quotes it as follows:
"there is no middle ground in the struggle against the Communists . . . They give the appearance of making concessions: in Petrograd province road-block detachments have been removed and 10 million roubles have been allotted for the purchase of foodstuffs. . . But one must not be deceived . . . No there can be no middle ground. Victory or death!"
What Rees fails to inform the reader is that this was written on March 8th, while the Bolsheviks had started military operations on the previous evening. Moreover, the fact the "response" clearly stated "[w]ithout a single shot, without a drop of blood, the first step has been taken [of the "Third Revolution"]. The toilers do not need blood. They will shed it only at a moment of self-defence" is not mentioned. [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 243] In other words, the Kronstadt sailors reaffirmed their commitment to non-violent revolt. Any violence on their part was in self-defence against Bolshevik actions. Not that you would know that from Rees' work. Indeed, as one of Rees' sources indicates, the rebels "had refrained from taking any communist lives. The Soviet Government, on the other hand, as early as March 3, already had executed forty-five seamen at Oranienbaum -- a quite heavy proportion of the total personnel of the men at the Naval Aviation Detachment. These men had voted for the Kronstadt resolution, but did not take arms against the government. This mass execution was merely a prelude to those that took place after the defeat of the mutineers." These executions at Oranienbaum, it should be noted, exceeded the total of 36 seamen who had paid with their lives for the two large rebellions of the 1905 revolution at Kronstadt and Sveaborg. [D. Fedotoff-White, The Growth of the Red Army, p. 156]
Ted Grant, of the UK's Socialist Appeal re-writes history significantly in his work Russia: From revolution to counter-revolution. For example, he claims (without providing any references) that the "first lie" of anti-Bolshevik writers on the subject "is to identify the Kronstadt mutineers of 1921 with the heroic Red sailors of 1917." As we have indicated in section 8, research has proven that over 90% of the sailors on the two battleships which started the revolt had been recruited before and during the 1917 revolution and at least three-quarters of the sailors were old hands who had served in the navy through war and revolution. So was the majority of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Grant asserts that the sailors in 1917 and 1921 "had nothing in common" because those "of 1917 were workers and Bolsheviks." In fact, as we indicated section 9, the Bolsheviks were a minority in Kronstadt during 1917 (a fact even Trotsky admitted in 1938). Moreover, the demands raised in the revolt matched the politics dominant in 1917.
Grant then claims that "almost the entire Kronstadt garrison volunteered to fight in the ranks of the Red Army during the civil war." Are we to believe that the Bolshevik commanders left Kronstadt (and so Petrograd) defenceless during the Civil War? Or drafted the skilled and trained (and so difficult to replace) sailors away from their ships, so leaving them unusable? Of course not. Common sense refutes Grant's argument (and statistical evidence supports this common sense position -- on 1st January, 1921, at least 75.5% of the Baltic Fleet was likely to have been drafted before 1918 and over 80% were from Great Russian areas and some 10% from the Ukraine. [Gelzter, Op. Cit., p. 208]).
Not to be outdone, he then states that the "Kronstadt garrison of 1921 was composed mainly of raw peasant levies from the Black Sea Fleet. A cursory glance at the surnames of the mutineers immediately shows that they were almost all Ukrainians." According to Paul Avrich, "[s]ome three or four hundred names appear in the journal of the rebel movement . . . So far as one can judge from these surnames alone . . . Great Russians are in the overwhelming majority." Of the 15 person Provisional Revolutionary Committee, "three . . . bore patently Ukrainian names and two others. . . Germanic names." [Paul Avrich, Op. Cit., pp. 92-3] Of the three Ukrainians, two were sailors of long standing and "had fought on the barricades in 1917." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 91] So much for a "cursory glance at the surnames of the mutineers." To top it off, he states: "That there were actual counter-revolutionary elements among the sailors was shown by the slogan 'Soviets without Bolsheviks'." Which, of course, the Kronstadt sailors never raised as a slogan!
And Grant talks about the "[m]any falsifications. . . written about this event," that it "has been virtually turned into a myth" and that "these allegations bear no relation to the truth." Truly amazing. As can be seen, his words apply to his own inventions.
Another SWP member, Abbie Bakan, asserts that, for example, "more than three quarters of the sailors" at Kronstadt "were recent recruits of peasant origin" but refuses to provide a source for this claim. ["A Tragic Necessity", Socialist Worker Review, no. 136, November 1990, pp. 18-21] As noted in section 8, such a claim is false. The likely source for the assertion is Paul Avrich, who noted that more than three-quarters of the sailors were of peasant origin but Avrich does not say they were all recent recruits. While stating that there could be "little doubt" that the Civil War produced a "high turnover" and that "many" old-timers had been replaced by conscripts from rural areas, he does not indicate that all the sailors from peasant backgrounds were new recruits. He also notes that "there had always been a large and unruly peasant element among the sailors." [Op. Cit., pp. 89-90]
Bakan asserts that anti-semitism "was vicious and rampant" yet fails to provide any official Kronstadt proclamations expressing this perspective. Rather, we are to generalise from the memoirs of one sailor and the anti-semitic remark of Vershinin, a member of the Revolutionary Committee. Let us not forget that the opinions of these sailors and others like them were irrelevant to the Bolsheviks when they drafted them in the first place. And, more importantly, this "vicious and rampant" anti-semitism failed to mark the demands raised nor the Kronstadt rebels' newspaper or radio broadcasts. Nor did the Bolsheviks mention it at the time.
Moreover, it is true that the "worse venom of the Kronstadt rebels was levelled against Trotsky and Zinoviev" but it was not because, as Bakan asserts, they were "treated as Jewish scapegoats." Their ethnical background was not mentioned by the Kronstadt sailors. Rather, they were strong political reasons for attacking them. As Paul Avrich argues, "Trotsky in particular was the living symbol of War Communism, of everything the sailors had rebelled against. His name was associated with centralisation and militarisation, with iron discipline and regimentation." As for Zinoviev, he had "incurred the sailors' loathing as the party boss who had suppressed the striking workers and who had stooped to taking their own families as hostages." Good reasons to attack them and nothing to do with them being Jewish. [Op. Cit., p. 178 and p. 176]
Bakan states that the "demands of the Kronstadt sailors reflected the ideas of the most backward section of the peasantry." As can be seen from section 3, such a comment cannot be matched with the actual demands of the revolt (which, of course, he does not provide). So what ideas did these demands of the "most backward section of the peasantry" state? Free elections to the Soviets, freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, right of assembly, freedom for trade union and peasant organisations, a conference of workers, soldiers and sailors, liberation of all political, worker and peasant prisoners, equalisation of rations, freedom for peasants as long as they do not employ hired labour, and so on. What would, in other words, be included in most socialist parties programmes and was, in fact, key elements of Bolshevik rhetoric in 1917. And, of course, all of the political aspects of the Kronstadt demands reflected key aspects of the Soviet Constitution.
How "backward" can you get! Indeed, these "backward" peasants send a radio message marking International Woman's Day, hoping that women would "soon accomplish" their "liberation from every form of violence and oppression." [quoted by Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy, p. 85]
Bakan pathetically acknowledges that their demands included "calls for greater freedoms" yet looks at the "main economic target" (not mentioning they were points 8, 10 and 11 of the 15 demands, the bulk of the rest are political). These, apparently, were aimed at "the programme of forced requisitioning of peasant produce and the roadblock detachments that halted the black market in grain." Given that he admits that the Bolsheviks were "already discussing" the end of these features (due to their lack of success) it must be the case that the Bolsheviks also "reflected the ideas of the most backward section of the peasantry"! Moreover, the demand to end the roadblocks was also raised by the Petrograd and Moscow workers during their strikes, as were most of the other demands raised by Kronstadt. [Paul Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 42] Surely the "most backward section of the peasantry" was getting around in those days, appearing as they were in the higher reaches of the Bolshevik party bureaucracy and the factories of Petrograd and other major cities!
In reality, of course, the opposition to the forced requisitioning of food was a combination of ethical and practical considerations -- it was evil and it was counterproductive. You did not have to be a peasant to see and know this (as the striking workers show). Similarly, the roadblocks were also a failure. Victor Serge, for example, recollected he would "have died without the sordid manipulations of the black market." [Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p.79] He was a government official. Think how much worse it would have been for an ordinary worker. The use of roadblock detachments harmed the industrial workers -- little wonder they struck for their end and little wonder the sailors expressed solidarity with them and included it in their demands. Therefore, nothing can be drawn from these demands about the class nature of the revolt.
In an interesting example of double-think, Bakan then states that the sailors "called for the abolition of Bolshevik authority in the army, factories and mills." What the resolution demanded was, in fact, "the abolition Party combat detachments in all military groups" as well as "Party guards in factories and enterprises" (point 10). In other words, to end the intimidation of workers and soldiers by armed communist units in their amidst! When Bakan states that "the real character of the rebellion" can be seen from the opening declaration that "the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants" he could not have made a truer comment. The Kronstadt revolt was a revolt for soviet democracy and against party dictatorship. And soviet democracy would only abolish "Bolshevik authority" if the existing soviets, as the resolution argued, did not express the will of their electors!
Similarly, he asserts that the Provisional Revolutionary Committee was "non-elected" and so contradicts every historian who acknowledges it was elected by the conference of delegates on March 2nd and expanded by the next conference a few days later. He even considers the fact the delegate meeting's "denial of party members' usual role in chairing the proceedings" as one of many "irregularities" while, of course, the real irregularity was the fact that one party (the government party) had such a "usual role" in the first place! Moreover, given that that Petrograd soviet meeting to discuss the revolt had Cheka guards (Lenin's political police) on it, his notion that sailors guarded the conference of delegates meeting (a meeting held in opposition to the ruling party) was "irregular" seems ironic.
Lastly, he raises the issue of the "Memorandum" of the White "National Centre" and uses it as evidence that "Lenin's suspicion of an international conspiracy linked up with the Kronstadt events has been vindicated." Needless to say, he fails to mention that the historian who discovered the document rejected the notion that it proved that Kronstadt was linked to such a conspiracy (see section 6 for a full discussion). Ironically, he mentions that "[t]wo weeks after the Kronstadt rebellion the ice was due to melt." Two weeks after the rebellion was crushed, of course, and he fails to mention that the "Memorandum" he uses as evidence assumes that the revolt would break out after the ice had melted, not before. While he claims that "[h]olding out until the ice melted was identified as critical in the memorandum," this is not true. The Memorandum in fact, as Paul Avrich notes, "assumes that the rising will occur after the ice has melted." [Op. Cit., p. 237f] No other interpretation can be gathered from the document.
Altogether, Bakan's article shows how deeply the supporters of Leninism will sink to when attempting to discuss the Kronstadt rebellion. Sadly, as we have indicated many, many times, this is not an isolated occurrence.
