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An Anarchist FAQ - What was the real relationship of Kronstadt to the Whites?

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An Anarchist FAQ: What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?
What was the real relationship of Kronstadt to the Whites?
< Was the Kronstadt revolt a White plot? | Did the rebellion involve new sailors? >

As we proved in the last section, the Kronstadt revolt was not a White conspiracy. It was a popular revolt from below. However, some Trotskyists still try and smear the revolt by arguing that it was, in fact, really or "objectively" pro-White. We turn to this question now.

We must first stress that the Kronstadters' rejected every offer of help from the National Centre and other obviously pro-White group (they did accept help towards the end of the rebellion from the Russian Red Cross when the food situation had become critical). Historian Israel Getzler stressed that "the Kronstadters were extremely resentful of all gestures of sympathy and promises of help coming from the White-Guardist emigres." He quotes a Red Cross visitor who stated that Kronstadt "will admit no White political party, no politician, with the exception of the Red Cross." [Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921, p. 235]

Avrich notes that the Kronstadter's "passionately hated" the Whites and that "both during and afterwards in exile" they "indignantly rejected all government accusations of collaboration with counterrevolutionary groups either at home or abroad." As the Communists themselves acknowledged, no outside aid ever reached the insurgents. [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 187, p. 112 and p. 123]

In other words, there was no relationship between the revolt and the Whites.

Needless to say, the Whites were extremely happy that Kronstadt revolted. There is no denying that. However, it would be weak politics indeed that based itself on the reactions of reactionaries to evaluate social struggles. If we did then we would have to conclude that the overthrow of Stalinism in 1989 was nothing more than a counter-revolution rather than a popular revolt against a specific form of capitalism (namely state capitalism). Indeed, many orthodox Trotskyists took this position (and supported the attempted coup organised by a section of the Stalinist bureaucracy to re-impose its dictatorship).

Indeed, the Kronstadters themselves acknowledged that the Whites were happy to support their actions (indeed, any actions against the Bolsheviks) but that this joy was for different reasons than theirs:

"The . . . Kronstadt sailors and workers have wrested the tiller from the Communists' hands and have taken over the helm . . . Comrades, keep a close eye upon the vicinity of the tiller: enemies are even now trying to creep closer. A single lapse and they will wrest the tiller from you, and the soviet ship may go down to the triumphant laughter from tsarist lackeys and henchmen of the bourgeoisie.

"Comrades, right now you are rejoicing in the great, peaceful victory over the Communists' dictatorship. Now, your enemies are celebrating too.

"Your grounds for such joy, and theirs, are quite contradictory.

"You are driven by a burning desire to restore the authentic power of the soviets, by a noble hope of seeing the worker engage in free labour and the peasant enjoy the right to dispose, on his land, of the produce of his labours. They dream of bringing back the tsarist knout and the privileges of the generals.

"Your interests are different. They are not fellow travellers with you.

"You needed to get rid of the Communists' power over you in order to set about creative work and peaceable construction. Whereas they want to overthrow that power to make the workers and peasants their slaves again.

"You are in search of freedom. They want to shackle you as it suits them. Be vigilant! Don't let the wolves in sheep's clothing get near the tiller." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2, pp. 187-8]

Of course, this is not enough for the followers of Lenin and Trotsky. John Rees, for example, quotes Paul Avrich to support his assertion that the Kronstadt revolt was, in fact, pro-White. He argues as follows:

"Paul Avrich . . . says there is 'undeniable evidence' that the leadership of the rebellion came to an agreement with the Whites after they had been crushed and that 'one cannot rule out the possibility that this was the continuation of a longstanding relationship.'" [Op. Cit., p. 64]

What Rees fails to mention is that Avrich immediately adds "[y]et a careful search has yielded no evidence to support such a belief." He even states that "[n]othing has come to light to show that . . . any links had existed between the emigres and the sailors before the revolt." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 111] How strange that Rees fails to quote or even mention Avrich's conclusion to his own speculation! As for the post-revolt links between the "leadership" of the rebellion and the Whites, Avrich correctly argues that "[n]one of this proves that there were any ties between the [National] Centre and the Revolutionary Committee either before or during the revolt. It would seem, rather, that the mutual experience of bitterness and defeat, and a common determination to overthrow the Soviet regime, led them to join hands in the aftermath." [Op. Cit., p. 129] Seeing you friends and fellow toilers murdered by dictators may affect your judgement, unsurprisingly enough.

Let us, however, assume that certain elements in the "leadership" of the revolt were, in fact, scoundrels. What does this mean when evaluating the Kronstadt revolt?

Firstly, we must point out that this "leadership" was elected by and under the control of the "conference of delegates," which was in turn elected by and under the control of the rank-and-file sailors, soldiers and civilians. This body met regularly during the revolt "to receive and debate the reports of the Revolutionary committee and to propose measures and decrees." [Getzler, Op. Cit., p. 217] The actions of the "leadership" were not independent of the mass of the population and so, regardless of their own agendas, had to work under control from below. In other words, the revolt cannot be reduced to a discussion of whether a few of the "leadership" were "bad men" or not. Indeed, to do so just reflects the elitism of bourgeois history.

And Rees does just that and reduces the Kronstadt revolt and its "ideology" down to just one person (Petrichenko). Perhaps we can evaluate Bolshevism with this method? Or Italian Socialism. After all, influential figures in both these movements ended up making contacts and deals with extremely suspect organisations and acting in ways we (and the movements they sprang from) would oppose. Does that mean we gain an insight into their natures by mentioning Stalin's or Mussolini's later activities? Or evaluating their revolutionary nature from such individuals? Of course not. Indeed, Rees's article is an attempt to argue that objective circumstances rather than Bolshevism as such lead to Stalinism. Rather than do the same for Kronstadt, he prefers to concentrate on an individual. This indicates a distinctly bourgeois perspective:

"What passes as socialist history is often only a mirror image of bourgeois historiography, a percolation into the ranks of the working class movement of typically bourgeois methods of thinking. In the world of this type of 'historian' leaders of genius replace the kings and queens of the bourgeois world. . . . The masses never appear independently on the historic stage, making their own history. At best they only 'supply the steam', enabling others to drive the locomotive, as Stalin so delicately put it . . . This tendency to identify working class history with the history of its organisations, institutions and leaders is not only inadequate -- it reflects a typically bourgeois vision of mankind, divided in almost pre-ordained manner between the few who will manage and decide, and the many, the malleable mass, incapable of acting consciously on its own behalf . . . Most histories of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution rarely amount to more than this." ["Solidarity's Preface" to Ida Mett's The Kronstadt Uprising, pp. 18-9]

Secondly, the question is one of whether workers are in struggle and what they aim for and definitely not one of whether some of the "leaders" are fine upstanding citizens. Ironically, Trotsky indicates why. In 1934, he had argued "[a]nyone who had proposed that we not support the British miners' strike of 1926 or the recent large-scale strikes in the United States with all available means on the ground that the leaders of the strikes were for the most part scoundrels, would have been a traitor to the British and American workers." ["No Compromise on the Russian Question", Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1934-40), p. 539]

The same applies to Kronstadt. Even if we assume that some of the "leadership" did have links with the National Centre (an assumption we must stress has no evidence to support it), this in no way invalidates the Kronstadt revolt. The movement was not produced by the so-called "leaders" of the revolt but rather came from below and so reflected the demands and politics of those involved. If it was proved, as KGB and other soviet sources argued, that some of the "leaders" of the Hungary uprising of 1956 had CIA links or were CIA agitators, would that make the revolution and its workers' councils somehow invalid? Of course not. If some of the "leadershp" were scoundrels, as Trotsky argued, this does not invalid the revolt itself. The class criteria is the decisive one.

(As an aside, we must point out that Trotsky was arguing against those claiming, correctly, that to unconditionally defend the Soviet Union was to give an endorsement to Stalinism. He stated immediately after the words we have quoted above: "Exactly the same thing applies to the USSR!" However, there was a few obvious differences which invalidates his analogy. Firstly, the Stalinist leadership was exploiting and oppressing the workers by means of state power. Trade Union bureaucrats, for all their faults, are not mass murdering butchers at a head of a dictatorship defended by troops and secret police. Secondly, strikes are examples of proletarian direct action which can, and do, get out of control of union structures and bureaucrats. They can be the focal point of creating new forms of working class organisation and power which can end the power of the union bureaucrats and replace it with self-managed strikers assemblies and councils. The Stalinist regime was organised to repress any attempts at unseating them and was not a form of working class self-defence in even the limited form that trade unions are.)

John Rees continues by arguing that:

"As it became clear that the revolt was isolated Petrichenko was forced to come to terms with the reality of the balance of class forces. On 13 March Petrichenko wired David Grimm, the chief of the National Centre and General Wrangel's official representative in Finland, for help in gaining food. On 16 March Petrichenko accepted an offer of help from Baron P V Vilkin, an associate of Grimm's whom 'the Bolsheviks rightly called a White agent.' None of the aid reached the garrison before it was crushed, but the tide of events was pushing the sailors into the arms of the Whites, just as the latter had always suspected it would." [Op. Cit., p. 64]

We should note that it was due to the "food situation in Kronstadt . . . growing desperate" that Petrichenko contacted Grimm. [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 121] If the revolt had spread to Petrograd and the striking workers there, such requests would have been unnecessary. Rather than isolation being due to "the reality of the balance of class forces" it was due to the reality of coercive forces -- the Bolsheviks had successfully repressed the Petrograd strikes and slandered the Kronstadt revolt (see section 10). As historian V. Brovkin notes, the "key here us that the Communists suppressed the workers uprising in Petrograd in the first days of March. The sailors' uprising in Kronstadt, which was an outgrowth of the uprising in Petrograd, was now cut off from its larger social base and localised on a small island. From this moment on the Kronstadt sailors were on the defensive." [Behind the Lines during the Civil War, pp. 396-7]

So, given that the Bolshevik dictatorship had lied to and repressed the Petrograd working class, the Kronstadters had few options left as regards aid. Rees's argument smacks of the "logic" of Right as regards the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban revolution and the Sandinistas. Isolated, each of these revolts turned to the Soviet Union for aid thus proving what the Right had always known from the start, namely their objectively Communist nature and their part in the International Communist Conspiracy. Few revolutionaries would evaluate these struggles on such a illogical and narrow basis but Rees wants us to do so with Kronstadt.

The logic of Rees arguments was used by the Stalinists later. Indeed, he would have to agree with Stalinists that the fact the Hungarian revolution of 1956 called on Western aid against the Red Army shows that it was objectively counter-revolutionary and pro-capitalist, just as the Communist Party bureaucrats had argued. The fact that during that revolt many messages of support for the rebels also preached bourgeois values would also, according to Rees's logic, damn that revolt in the eyes of all socialists. Similarly, the fact that the Polish union Solidarity got support from the West against the Stalinist regime does not mean that its struggle was counter-revolutionary. So the arguments used by Rees are identical to those used by Stalinists to support their repression of working class revolt in the Soviet Empire. Indeed, orthodox Trotskyists also called "Solidarnosc" a company union of the CIA, bankers, the Vatican and Wall Street for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland and considered the fall of the Soviet Union as a defeat for the working class and socialism, in other words, a counterrevolution. As evidence they pointed to the joy and support each generated in Western elite circles (and ignored the popular nature of those revolts).

In reality, of course, the fact that others sought to take advantage of these (and other) situations is inevitable and irrelevant. The important thing is whether working class people where in control of the revolt and what the main objectives of it were. By this class criteria, it is clear that the Kronstadt revolt was a revolutionary revolt as, like Hungry 1956, the core of the revolt was working people and their councils. It was they who were in control and called the tune. That Whites tried to take advantage of it is as irrelevant to evaluating the Kronstadt revolt as the fact that Stalinists tried to take advantage of the Spanish struggle against Fascism.

Moreover, in his analysis of the "balance of class forces", Rees fails to mention the class which had real power (and the related privileges) in Russia at the time -- the state and party bureaucracy. The working class and peasantry were officially powerless. The only influence they exercised in the "workers' and peasants state" was when they rebelled, forcing "their" state to make concessions or to repress them (sometimes both happened). The balance of class forces was between the workers and peasants and ruling bureaucracy. To ignore this factor means to misunderstand the problems facing the revolution and the Kronstadt revolt itself.

Lastly, we must comment upon the fact that members of Kronstadt's revolutionary Committee took refuge in Finland along with "[s]ome 8,000 people (some sailors and the most active part of the civilian population)." [Mett, Op. Cit., p. 57] This was as the Bolsheviks had predicted on March 5th ("At the last minute, all those generals, the Kozlovskvs, the Bourksers, and all that riff raff, the Petrichenkos, and the Tourins will flee to Finland, to the White guards" [cited by Mett, Op. Cit., p. 50]). However, this does not indicate any "White guardist" connections. After all, where else could they go? Anywhere else would have been in Soviet Russia and so a Bolshevik prison and ultimately death. The fact that active participants in the revolt ended up in the only place they could end up to avoid death has no bearing to that nature of that revolt nor can it be used as "evidence" of a "white conspiracy."

In other words, the attempts of Trotskyists to smear the Kronstadt sailors with having White links is simply false. The actions of some rebels after the Bolsheviks had crushed the revolt cannot be used to discredit the revolt itself. The real relationship of the revolt to the Whites is clear. It was one of hatred and opposition.