10 Why did the Petrograd workers
not support Kronstadt?
For Trotskyists, the inaction of the Petrograd workers
during the revolt is a significant factor in showing its
"backward peasant" character. Trotsky, for example, argued
that from "the class point of view" it is "extremely
important to contrast the behaviour of Kronstadt to that
of Petrograd in those critical days." He argues that
the "uprising did not attract the Petrograd workers.
It repelled them. The stratification proceeded along
class lines. The workers immediately felt that the
Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite side of
the barricades -- and they supported the Soviet
power. The political isolation of Kronstadt was the
cause of its internal uncertainty and its military
defeat." [Lenin and Trotsky, Kronstadt, pp. 90-1]
Firstly, it should be noted that Trotsky's claims in 1937
are at odds with his opinion during the crisis. In a cable
dated March 5th, 1921, to a member of the Council of Labour
and Defence Trotsky insisted that "only the seizure of Kronstadt
will put an end to the political crisis in Petrograd." [quoted
by Israel Getzler, "The Communist Leaders' Role in the Kronstadt
Tragedy of 1921 in the Light of Recently Published Archival
Documents", Revolutionary Russia, pp. 24-44, Vol. 15, No. 1,
June 2002, p. 32] Thus, in 1921, Trotsky was well aware of the
links between the Kronstadt revolt and the Petrograd strikes,
seeing the destruction of the former as a means to defeating
the latter. Simply put, the crushing of Kronstadt would give
the rebel workers in Petrograd a clear message of what to
expect if they persisted in their protests.
Secondly, needless to say, Trotsky's later arguments leave a
lot to be desired. For example, he fails to note (to use Victor
Serge's words -- see
section 5)
that the state and Communist Press "was positively
berserk with lies." The press and radio campaign
directed against Kronstadt stated that the revolt
had been organised by foreign spies and was led by
ex-Tsarist generals.
On 5th March the Petrograd Defence Committee put out a call
to the insurgents, inviting them to surrender. It stated:
"You are being told fairy tales when they tell you that
Petrograd is with you or that the Ukraine supports you.
These are impertinent lies. The last sailor in Petrograd
abandoned you when he learned that you were led by generals
like Kozlovskv. Siberia and the Ukraine support the Soviet
power. Red Petrograd laughs at the miserable efforts of a
handful of White Guards and Socialist Revolutionaries."
[cited by Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising, p. 50]
These lies would, of course, alienate many workers in Petrograd.
Two hundred emissaries were sent from Kronstadt to distribute
their demands but only a few avoided capture. The Party had
brought the full weight of its propaganda machine to bear,
lying about the revolt and those taking part in it. The government
also placed a "careful watch" on the "trains from Petrograd to
mainland points in the direction of Kronstadt to prevent any
contact with the insurgents." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 140 and
p. 141]
Unsurprising, in such circumstances many workers, soldiers and
sailors would have been loath to support Kronstadt. Isolated
from the revolt, the Petrograd workers had to reply on official
propaganda (i.e. lies) and rumours to base any judgement
on what was happening there. However, while this is a factor
in the lack of active support, it is by no means the key one.
This factor, of course, was state repression. Emma Goldman
indicates the situation in Petrograd at the time:
"An exceptional state of martial law was imposed throughout the
entire province of Petrograd, and no one except officials with
special passes could leave the city now. The Bolshevik press
launched a campaign of calumny and venom against Kronstadt,
announcing that the sailors and soldiers had made common cause
with the 'tsarist General Kozlovsky;' they were thereby declaring
the Kronstadters outlaws." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2, p. 171]
Given what everyone knew what happened to people outlawed by the
Bolsheviks, is it surprising that many workers in Petrograd (even
if they knew they were being lied to) did not act? Moreover,
the threat made against Kronstadt could be seen on the streets
of Petrograd:
"On March 3 [the day after the revolt] the Petrograd Defence
Committee, now vested with absolute power throughout the
entire province, took stern measures to prevent any further
disturbances. The city became a vast garrison, with troops
patrolling in every quarter. Notices posted on the walls
reminded the citizenry that all gatherings would be
dispersed and those who resisted shot on the spot. During
the day the streets were nearly deserted, and, with the
curfew now set at 9 p.m., night life ceased altogether."
[Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 142]
Berkman, an eyewitness to the repression, states that:
"The Petrograd committee of defence, directed by Zinoviev,
its chairman, assumed full control of the city and Province
of Petrograd. The whole Northern District was put under
martial law and all meetings prohibited. Extraordinary
precautions were taken to protect the Government
institutions and machine guns were placed in the
Astoria, the hotel occupied by Zinoviev and other high
Bolshevik functionaries. The proclamations posted on the
street bulletin boards ordered the immediate return of
all strikers to the factories, prohibited suspension of
work, and warned the people against congregating on the
streets. 'In such cases', the order read, 'the soldiery
will resort to arms. In case of resistance, shooting on
the spot.'
"The committee of defence took up the systematic 'cleaning
of the city.' Numerous workers, soldiers and sailors suspected
of sympathising with Kronstadt, placed under arrest. All
Petrograd sailors and several Army regiments thought to be
'politically untrustworthy' were ordered to distant points,
while the families of Kronstadt sailors living in Petrograd
were taken into custody as hostages." [The Russian
Tragedy, p. 71]
However, part of the Petrograd proletariat continued to strike
during the Kronstadt events. Strikes were continuing in the
biggest factories of Petrograd: Poutilov, Baltisky, Oboukhov,
Nievskaia Manoufactura, etc. However, the Bolsheviks acted
quickly shut down some of the factories and started the
re-registration of the workers. For workers to be locked
out of a factory meant to be "automatically deprived of
their rations." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 41]
At the "Arsenal" factory, "the workers organised a mass meeting on
7th March, (the day the bombardment of Kronstadt began). This
meeting adopted a resolution of the mutinous sailors! It elected
a commission which was to go from factory to factory, agitating
for a general strike." [Mett, Op. Cit., p. 52] The Cheka confirms
this event, reporting to Zinoviev on March 8th that "[a]t a rally
of workers of the Arsenal Plant a resolution was passed to join the
Kronstadt uprising. The general meeting had elected a delegation
to maintain contact with Kronstadt." This delegation had already
been arrested. This was a common practice and during this period
the Cheka concentrated its efforts on the leaders and on
disrupting communication: all delegates to other workplaces,
all Mensheviks and SRs who could be found, all speakers at
rallies were being arrested day after day. On the day the
Bolsheviks attacked Kronstadt (March 7th) the Cheka reported
that it was launching "decisive actions against the workers."
[quoted by Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil
War, p. 396]
These "decisive actions" involved a "massive purge of Petrograd
factories and plants." The Communists "suppressed the workers'
uprising in Petrograd in the first days of March." Unlike
the Kronstadt sailors, the workers did not have weapons and
"were essentially defenceless vis-a-vis the Cheka." [Brovkin,
Op. Cit., p. 396]
The state of siege was finally lifted on the 22nd of March,
five days after the crushing of Kronstadt.
In these circumstances, is it surprising that the Petrograd
workers did not join in the rebellion?
Moreover, the Petrograd workers had just experienced the
might of the Bolshevik state. As we noted in
section 2,
the events in Kronstadt were in solidarity with the strike
wave in Petrograd at the end of February. Then the Bolsheviks
had repressed the workers with "arrests, the use of armed
patrols in the streets and in the factories, and the closing
and re-registration of an enterprise labour force." [Mary
McAuley, Op. Cit., p. 409]
A three-man Defence Committee was formed and Zinoviev
"proclaimed martial law" on February 24th (this was later
"vested with absolute power throughout the entire province"
on March 3rd). [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 39 and p. 142] As
part of this process, they had to rely on the kursanty
(Communist officer cadets) as the local garrisons had
been caught up the general ferment and could not be
relied upon to carry out the government's orders.
Hundreds of kursanty were called in from neighbouring
military academies to patrol the city. "Overnight
Petrograd became an armed camp. In every quarter
pedestrians were stopped and their documents checked
. . . the curfew [was] strictly enforced." The
Petrograd Cheka made widespread arrests. [Avrich,
Op. Cit., pp. 46-7]
As can be seen, Trotsky is insulting the intelligence of his
readers by arguing that the lack of support in Petrograd for
Kronstadt reflected "class lines." Indeed, by failing
to mention (to use Emma Goldman's words) "the campaign
of slander, lies and calumny against the sailors" conducted
by the Soviet Press (which "fairly oozed poison against the
sailors") or that "Petrograd was put under martial law"
Trotsky, quite clearly, "deliberately falsifies the
facts." [Trotsky Protests Too Much]
Ida Mett states the obvious:
"Here again Trotsky is saying things which are quite untrue.
Earlier on we showed how the wave of strikes had started in
Petrograd and how Kronstadt had followed suit. It was against
the strikers of Petrograd that the Government had to organise
a special General Staff: the Committee of Defence. The repression
was first directed against the Petrograd workers and against
their demonstrations, by the despatch of armed detachments
of Koursantys.
"But the workers of Petrograd had no weapons. They could not
defend themselves as could the Kronstadt sailors. The military
repression directed against Kronstadt certainly intimidated the
Petrograd workers. The demarcation did not take place 'along
class lines' but according to the respective strengths of the
organs of repression. The fact that the workers of Petrograd
did not follow those of Kronstadt does not prove that they
did not sympathise with them. Nor, at a later date, when
the Russian proletariat failed to follow the various
'oppositions' did this prove that they were in agreement
with Stalin! In such instances it was a question of the
respective strengths of the forces confronting one
another." [Mett, Op. Cit., p. 73]
So, unlike the Kronstadt sailors, the Petrograd workers did
not have arms and so could not take part in an "armed revolt"
against the well armed Red Army unless part of that force
sided with the strikers. The Communist leaders recognised
this danger, with untrustworthy troops being confined to their
barracks and in place of regular troops they had shipped
in kursanty (they had obviously learned the lessons of
the 1917 February revolution!). Ultimately, the city was
"appeased by concessions and cowed by the presence of
troops." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 200]
Not that this was the first time Trotsky confused force
with class. In his infamous work Terrorism and Communism
he defended the fact of Communist Party dictatorship (i.e.
"of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets
the dictatorship of our party"). He argued that "it can
be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of
the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship
of the party" and that there is "no substitution at all" when
the "power of the party" replaces that of the working class.
The rule of the party "has afforded to the Soviets the
possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments
of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour."
[Terrorism and Communism, p. 109] He
continued by arguing:
"But where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us,
that it is just your party that expresses the interests
of historical development? Destroying or driving underground
the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political
competition with you, and consequently you have deprived
yourselves of the possibility of testing your line of action.
"This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the
course of the revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms
assume an open character, and the political struggle swiftly
passes into a civil war, the ruling party has sufficient
material standard by which to test its line of action,
without the possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske
crushes the Communists, but they grow. We have suppressed
the Mensheviks and the S.R.s-and they have disappeared.
This criterion is sufficient for us." [Op. Cit.,
pp. 109-10]
An interesting criterion, to say the least. The faulty
logic he displayed with regards to Petrograd and Kronstadt
had a long history. By this logic Hitler expressed the "interests
of historical development" when the German Communists and
Trotskyists "disappeared" by leaps and bounds. Similarly,
the Trotskyists in Russia "disappeared" under Stalin. Is
this a Trotskyist justification of Stalinism? All it
proves is the power of the repressive system -- just as
the "passivity" of the Petrograd workers during the Kronstadt
revolt indicates the power of the Bolshevik regime rather than
the class basis of the Kronstadt uprising.
On this theme, we can see the depths which Trotskyists go to
re-write history from Pierre Frank's "Introduction" to the work
Kronstadt. He decides to quote Paul Avrich's work (after, of
course, warning the reader that Avrich "is not a Bolshevik or a
Trotskyist" and his "political features are blurred"). Frank
states that Avrich "done his work conscientiously, without
skipping over the facts." It is a shame that the same cannot
be said of Frank! Frank states that Avrich "discusses the
strikes in Petrograd preceding Kronstadt and comes to the
following conclusion":
"For many intellectuals and workers, moreover, the Bolsheviks,
with all their faults, were still the most effective barrier
to a White resurgence and the downfall of the revolution.
"For these reasons, the strikes in Petrograd were fated
to lead a brief existence. Indeed, they ended almost as
suddenly as they had begun, never having reached the
point of armed revolt against the regime." [Lenin and
Trotsky, Op. Cit., pp. 24-35]
It is the "moreover" in the first paragraph that gives the
game away. Avrich lists a few more reasons than the one listed
by Frank. Here is what Avrich actually lists as the reasons
for the end of the strike wave:
"after several days of tense excitement, the Petrograd
disturbances petered out . . . The concessions had done
their work, for more than anything else it was cold
and hunger which had stimulated popular disaffection.
Yet there is no denying that the application of military
force and the widespread arrests, not to speak of the
tireless propaganda waged by the authorities had been
indispensable in restoring order. Particularly impressive
in this regard was the discipline shown by the local
party organisation. Setting aside their internal disputes,
the Petrograd Bolsheviks swiftly closed ranks and
proceeded to carry out the unpleasant task of repression
with efficiency and dispatch . . .
"Then, too, the collapse of the movement would not have
come so soon but for the utter demoralisation of
Petrograd's inhabitants. The workers were simply too
exhausted to keep up any sustained political activity
. . . What is more, they lacked effective leadership
and a coherent program of action. In the past these
had been supplied by the radical intelligentsia . . .
[but they] were themselves in no condition to lend
the workers any meaningful support, let alone active
guidance . . . they now felt too weary and terrorised
. . . to raise their voices in opposition. With most
of their comrades in prison or exile, and some already
executed, few of the survivors were willing to risk
the same fate, especially when the odds against them
were so overwhelming and when the slightest protest
might deprive their families of their rations. For
many intellectuals and workers, moreover, the Bolsheviks,
with all their faults, were still the most effective barrier
to a White resurgence and the downfall of the revolution.
"For these reasons, the strikes in Petrograd were fated
to lead a brief existence. Indeed, they ended almost as
suddenly as they had begun, never having reached the
point of armed revolt against the regime." [Paul
Avrich, Kronstadt, pp. 49-51]
As can be seen, Frank "skips over" most of Avrich's
argument and the basis of his conclusion. Indeed,
what Frank calls Avrich's "conclusion" cannot be
understood by providing, as Frank does, the last
reason Avrich gives for it.
The dishonesty is clear, if not unexpected nor an
isolated case. John Rees, to use another example,
states that the revolt was "preceded by a wave of
serious but quickly resolved strikes." [Rees, Op. Cit.,
p. 61] No mention that the strikes were "resolved"
by force nor that the Kronstadt revolt was not only
"preceded" by the strikes but was directly inspired by
them, was in solidarity with them and raised many
of the same demands!
Similarly, he argues that the Kronstadters' "insistence
that they were fighting for a 'third revolution', freedom
of expression and for 'soviets without parties' [although,
in fact, they never raised that slogan and so we have to
wonder who Rees is quoting here] has convinced many historians
that this revolt was fundamentally distinct from the White
Rebellions." But this, apparently, is not the case as "one
must be careful to analyse the difference between the conscious
aims of the rebels and the possible outcome of their actions.
The Bolshevik regime still rested on the shattered remnants
of the working class. The Kronstadt sailors' appeals to the
Petrograd workers had met with little or no response."
[Op. Cit., p. 63]
One has to wonder what planet Rees is on. After all, if the
Bolsheviks had rested on the "shattered remnants of the
working class" then they would not have had to turn
Petrograd into an armed camp, repress the strikes, impose
martial law and arrest militant workers. The Kronstadt sailors
appeals "met with little or no response" due to the Bolshevik
coercion exercised in those fateful days. To not mention the
Bolshevik repression in Petrograd is to deliberately deceive
the reader. That the Kronstadt demands would have met with
strong response in Petrograd can be seen from the actions of
the Bolsheviks (who did not rest upon the workers but rather
arrested them). Given that the Kronstadt demands simply reflected
those raised by the Petrograd strikers themselves we can
safely say that Rees is talking nonsense (see
section 4).
Moreover, the sailors' resolution had meet with strong support
from the workers of Kronstadt. Thus Rees' "class analysis" of
the Kronstadt revolt is pathetic and has no bearing to the
reality of the situation in Petrograd nor to the history of
the revolt itself.
As can be seen, any attempt to use the relative inaction
of the Petrograd workers as evidence of the class nature
of the revolt has to do so by ignoring all the relevant
facts of the situation. This can go so far as to selectively
quote from academic accounts to present a radically false
conclusion to that of the misused author's.
The lack of foreign intervention during the Kronstadt
revolt suggests more than just the fact that the revolt
was not a "White conspiracy." It also suggests that
the White forces were in no position to take advantage
of the rebellion or even support it.
This is significant simply because the Bolsheviks and their
supporters argue that the revolt had to be repressed simply
because the Soviet State was in danger of White and/or
foreign intervention. How much danger was there? According
to John Rees, a substantial amount:
"The Whites, even though their armies had been beaten
in the field, were still not finished -- as the emigre
response to the Kronstadt rising shows . . . They had
predicted a rising at Kronstadt and the White National
Centre abroad raised a total of nearly 1 million French
Francs, 2 million Finnish marks, £5000, $25,000 and 900
tons of flour in just two weeks; Indeed, the National
Centre was already making plans for the forces of the
French navy and those of General Wrangel, who still
commanded 70,000 men in Turkey, to land in Kronstadt
if the revolt were to succeed." [Op. Cit., pp. 63-4]
To back up his argument, Rees references Paul Avrich's
book. We, in turn, will consult that work to evaluate his
argument.
Firstly, the Kronstadt revolt broke out months after the end
of the Civil War in Western Russia. Wrangel had fled from the
Crimea in November 1920. The Bolsheviks were so afraid of White
invasion that by early 1921 they demobilised half the Red Army
(some 2,500,000 men). [Paul Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 13]
Secondly, the Russian emigres "remained as divided and
ineffectual as before, with no prospect of co-operation
in sight." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 219]
Thirdly, as far as Wrangel, the last of the White
Generals, goes, his forces were in no state to re-invade
Russia. His troops were "dispersed and their moral sagging"
and it would have taken "months . . . merely to mobilise
his men and transport them from the Mediterranean to the
Baltic." A second front in the south "would have meant
almost certain disaster." Indeed, in a call issued by
the Petrograd Defence Committee on March 5th, they asked
the rebels: "Haven't you heard what happened to Wrangel's men,
who are dying like flies, in their thousands of hunger and
disease?" The call goes on to add "[t]his is the fate that
awaits you, unless you surrender within 24 hours." [Avrich,
Op. Cit., p. 219, p. 146 and p. 105]
Clearly, the prospect of a White invasion was slim. This
leaves the question of capitalist governments. Avrich has
this to say on this:
"Apart from their own energetic fund-raising campaign,
the emigres sought the assistance of the Entene powers.
. . . the United States government, loath to resume
the interventionist policies of the Civil War, turned
a deaf ear to all such appeals. The prospects of British
aid were even dimmer . . . The best hope of foreign
support came from France . . . the French refused to
interfere either politically or militarily in the
crisis." [Op. Cit., pp. 117-9]
The French government had also "withdrew its recognition of Wrangel's
defunct government" in November 1920 "but continued to feed his
troops on 'humane grounds,' meanwhile urging him to disband."
[Op. Cit., p. 105]
Thus, the claim that foreign intervention was likely seems
without basis. Indeed, the Communist radio was arguing that
"the organisation of disturbances in Kronstadt have the sole
purpose of influencing the new American President and changing
his policy toward Russia. At the same time the London Conference
is holding its sessions, and the spreading of similar rumours
must influence also the Turkish delegation and make it more
submissive to the demands of the Entente. The rebellion the
Petropavlovsk crew is undoubtedly part of a great conspiracy
to create trouble within Soviet Russia and to injure our
international position." [quoted by Berkman, The Russian
Tragedy, p. 71] Lenin himself argued on March 16th that "the
enemies" around the Bolshevik state were "no longer able to
wage their war of intervention" and so were launching a press
campaign "with the prime object of disrupting the negotiations
for a trade agreement with Britain, and the forthcoming trade
agreement with America." [Lenin and Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 52]
The demobilising of the Red Army seems to confirm this perspective.
Moreover, these governments had to take into account
of its own working class. It was doubtful that they
would, after years of war, been able to intervene,
particularly if there was a clearly socialist revolt
coming from below. Their own working class, in such a
situation, would have prevented intervention by
foreign capitalist states (a fact Lenin acknowledged
in July 1921 [Lenin and Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 62]).
So in spite of massive social unrest and the revolt of a
key fortress protecting Petrograd, the Western powers took
no action. The Whites were disorganised and could only raise
non-military supplies (none of which reached Kronstadt). Could
this situation have changed if Kronstadt had spread to the
mainland? It is doubtful simply because the Western governments,
as Lenin argued, had to take into account the anti-interventionist
position of their own working classes. The Whites had no military
forces available (as the Bolsheviks themselves argued). Avrich
notes it would have taken months for these forces to reach
Kronstadt by which time soviet democracy would have been
consolidated and ready to protect itself.
Even if we assume that Kronstadt had survived until the ice
melted while Petrograd remained under Bolshevik dictatorship
it, again, is doubtful that it would have been the basis
for renewed White attacks. Neither Wrangel's troops nor
foreign government forces would have been welcomed by Red
Kronstadt. While non-military aid would have been welcome
(i.e. food supplies and so on), it is hard to believe that
the Conference of Delegates would have allowed troops to
arrive or pass them by to attack Petrograd. Simply put,
the Kronstadters were fighting for soviet power and were
well aware that others may try to support the revolt for
their own, anti-revolutionary, reasons (see
section 7).
So it seems that the possibility of foreign intervention was
not a real threat at the time. The arguments of Lenin at the
time, plus the demobilisation of the Red Army, points in
that direction. Moreover, the total lack of response by
Western governments during the revolt indicates that they
were unlikely to take advantage of continuing unrest in Kronstadt,
Petrograd and other towns and cities. Their working classes,
sick of war and class consciousness enough to resist another
intervention in Russia, would have been a factor in this
apathetic response. Wrangel's troops, as the Bolsheviks
were aware, were not a threat.
The only real threat to Bolshevik power was internal --
from the workers and peasants the Bolsheviks claimed
to be representing. Many of the ex-soldiers swelled
the ranks of peasant guerrilla forces, fighting the
repressive (and counter-productive) food collection
squads. In the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks were fighting
the remnants of the Makhnovist army (a fight, incidentally,
brought upon the Bolsheviks by themselves as they had
betrayed the agreements made with the anarchist forces
and attacked them once Wrangel had been defeated).
Thus the only potential danger facing the "soviet power" (i.e.
Bolshevik power) was soviet democracy, a danger which had
existed since the October revolution. As in 1918, when the
Bolsheviks disbanded and repressed any soviet electorate
which rejected their power, they met the danger of soviet
democracy with violence. The Bolsheviks were convinced that
their own dictatorship was equivalent to the revolution
and that their power was identical to that of the working
class. They considered themselves to be the embodiment of
"soviet power" and it obviously did not bother them that
the demand for free soviets can hardly be considered as
actions against the power of the soviets.
In such circumstances, the Bolshevik government viewed
the Kronstadt revolt not as socialists should but rather
as a ruling class. It was suppressed for "reasons of state"
and not to defend a revolutionary regime (which was, by
this stage, revolutionary in name only). As Bakunin had
argued decades before, the "workers' state" would not remain
controlled by the workers for long and would soon became
a dictatorship over the proletariat by an elite which
claimed to know the interests of the working class better
than they did themselves (see
section 15).
The only possible justification for maintaining the party
dictatorship was the argument that soviet democracy would
have lead to the defeat of the Communists at the polls
(which would mean recognising it was a dictatorship over
the proletariat and had been for some time). This would,
it is argued, have resulted in (eventually) a return of the
Whites and an anti-working class dictatorship that would
have slaughtered the Russian workers and peasants en mass.
Such a position is self-serving and could have been used
by Stalin to justify his regime. Unsurprisingly enough,
the Hungarian Stalinists argued after crushing the 1956
revolution that "the dictatorship of the proletariat, if
overthrown, cannot be succeeded by any form of government
other than fascist counter-revolution." [quoted by Andy
Anderson, Hungary '56, p. 101] And, of course, an even
more anti-working class dictatorship than Lenin's did appear
which did slaughter the Russian workers and peasants en mass,
namely Stalinism. No other option was possible, once party
dictatorship was fully embraced in 1921 (repression against
dissidents was more extreme after the end of the Civil War
than during it). It is utopian in the extreme to believe that
the good intentions of the dictators would have been enough to
keep the regime within some kind of limits. Thus this argument
is flawed as it seriously suggests that dictatorship and bureaucracy
can reform itself (we discuss this in more detail in
section 13).
Trotskyists have, in general, two main lines of attack with
regards the Kronstadt revolt. The main one is the claim that
the garrison in 1921 was not of the same class composition
as the one in 1917. This meant that the 1921 revolt expressed
the peasant counter-revolution and had to be destroyed. We
have indicated that, firstly, the garrison was essentially
the same in 1921 as it had been in 1917 (see
section 8).
Secondly, we have shown that politically the ideas expressed
in its program were the same as those in 1917 (see
section 9).
Thirdly, that this program had many of the same points
as strikers resolutions in Petrograd and, indeed, were
more socialist in many cases by clearly calling for soviet
democracy rather the constituent assembly (see
section 4).
Now we turn to the second excuse, namely that the country was
too exhausted and the working class was decimated. In such
circumstances, it is argued, objective conditions meant that
soviet democracy was impossible and so the Bolsheviks had
to maintain their dictatorship at all costs to defend what
was left of the revolution. Leninist Pat Stack of the
British SWP is typical of this approach. It is worth
quoting him at length:
"Because anarchists dismiss the importance of material
reality, events such as the 1921 Kronstadt rising against
the Bolshevik government in Russia can become a rallying
cry. The revolutionary Victor Serge was not uncritical
of the Bolshevik handling of the rising, but he poured
scorn on anarchist claims for it when he wrote, 'The
third revolution it was called by certain anarchists
whose heads were stuffed by infantile delusions.'
"This third revolution, it was argued, would follow the
first one in February 1917 and the second in October.
The second had swept away the attempts to create
capitalist power, had given land to the peasants
and had extracted Russia from the horrible imperialist
carnage of the First World War. The revolution had
introduced a huge literacy programme, granted women
abortion rights, introduced divorce and accepted the
rights of the various Russian republics to self
determination. It had done so, however, against a
background of a bloody and horrendous civil war
where the old order tried to regain power. Sixteen
imperialist powers sent armies against the regime,
and trade embargoes were enforced.
"The reality of such actions caused huge suffering throughout
Russia. The regime was deprived of raw materials and fuel,
transportation networks were destroyed, and the cities began
running out of food. By 1919 the regime only had 10 percent
of the fuel that was available in 1917, and the production
of iron ore in the same year stood at 1.6 percent of that
in 1914. By 1921 Petrograd had lost 57 percent of its
population and Moscow 44.5 percent. Workers were either
dead, on the frontline of the civil war, or were fleeing
the starvation of the city. The force that had made the
revolution possible was being decimated. . .
"The choice facing the regime in Russia was either to crush
the uprising and save the revolution, or surrender to the
rising and allow the forces of reaction to march in on their
back. There was no material basis for a third way. A destroyed
economy and infrastructure, a population faced with starvation
and bloody war, and a hostile outside world were not circumstances
in which the revolution could move forward. Great efforts would
have to be made to solve these problems. There were no overnight
solutions and preserving the revolutionary regime was crucial.
Ultimately real solutions could only be found if the revolution
were to spread internationally, but in the meantime to have
any chance of success the regime had to survive. Only the right
and the imperialist powers would have benefited from its
destruction." ["Anarchy in the UK?", Socialist Review,
no. 246, November 2000]
Anarchists, in spite of Stack's assertions, were and are well
aware of the problems facing the revolution. Alexander Berkman
(who was in Petrograd at the time) pointed out the "[l]ong
years of war, revolution, and civil struggle" which "had bled
Russia to exhaustion and brought her people to the brink of
despair." [The Russian Tragedy, p. 61] Like every worker,
peasant, sailor and soldier in Russia, anarchists knew
(and know) that reconstruction would not take place
"overnight." The Kronstadters' recognised this in the
first issue of their newspaper Izvestiia:
"Comrades and citizens, our country is passing through
a tough time. For three years now, famine, cold and
economic chaos have trapped us in a vice-like grip. The
Communist Party which governs the country has drifted
away from the masses and proved itself powerless to
rescue them from a state of general ruination . . .
All workers, sailors and Red soldiers today can clearly
see that only concentrated efforts, only the concentrated
determination of the people can afford the country
bread, wood and coal, can clothe and shoe the people
and rescue the Republic from the impasse in which it
finds itself." [cited in No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2,
p. 183]
In the Kronstadt Izvestiia of March 8 they wrote that
it was "here in Kronstadt that the foundation stone was
laid of the Third Revolution that will smash the last
shackles on the toiler and open up before him the broad new
avenue to socialist construction." They stress that the
"new revolution will rouse the toiling masses of the Orient
and Occident. For it will offer the example of fresh socialist
construction as opposed to mechanical, governmental 'Communist'
construction." [Op. Cit., p. 194] Clearly, the Kronstadt
rebels knew that construction would take time and were
arguing that the only means of rebuilding the country was
via the participation of what of left of the working class
and peasantry in free class organisations like freely
elected soviets and unions.
The experience of the revolt provides evidence that
this analysis was far from "utopian." A Finish
reporter at Kronstadt was struck by the "enthusiasm"
of its inhabitants, by their renewed sense of purpose
and mission. Avrich argues that for a "fleeting interval
Kronstadt was shaken out if its listlessness and despair."
[Kronstadt, p. 159] The sailors, soldiers and civilians
sent their delegates to delegates, started to re-organise
their trade unions and so on. Freedom and soviet democracy
was allowing the masses to start to rebuild their
society and they took the opportunity. The Kronstadter's
faith in "direct mass democracy of and by the common
people through free soviets" did seem to be justified
in the response of the people of Kronstadt. This suggests
that a similar policy implemented by the workers who had
just organised general strikes, demonstrations and protest
meetings all across Russia's industrial centres was not
impossible or doomed to failure.
Indeed, this wave of strikes refutes Stack's claim that
"[w]orkers were either dead, on the frontline of the civil
war, or were fleeing the starvation of the city. The force
that had made the revolution possible was being decimated."
Clearly, a sizeable percentage of the workers were still
working and so not dead, on the frontline or fleeing the
cities. As we discuss below, approximately one-third of
factory workers were still in Petrograd (the overall
decrease of urban working people throughout Russia exceeded
50 percent [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 24]). The working class,
in other words, still existed and were able to organise
strikes, meetings and mass demonstrations in the face of
state repression. The fact, of course, is that the majority
of what remained of the working class would not have voted
Communist in free soviet elections. Thus political
considerations have to be factored in when evaluating
Stack's arguments.
The question for anarchists, as for the Kronstadt rebels,
was what the necessary pre-conditions for this reconstruction
were. Could Russia be re-built in a socialist way while
being subject to a dictatorship which crushed every sign
of working class protest and collective action? Surely
the first step, as Kronstadt shows, would have to be the
re-introduction of workers' democracy and power for only
this would give allow expression to the creative powers
of the masses and interest them in the reconstruction of
the country. Continuing party dictatorship would never
do this:
"by its very essence a dictatorship destroys the creative
capacities of a people. . . The revolutionary conquest could
only be deepened through a genuine participation of the masses.
Any attempt to substitute an 'elite' for those masses could
only be profoundly reactionary.
"In 1921 the Russian Revolution stood at the cross roads.
The democratic or the dictatorial way, that was the question.
By lumping together bourgeois and proletarian democracy the
Bolsheviks were in fact condemning both. They sought to
build socialism from above, through skilful manoeuvres of
the Revolutionary General Staff. While waiting for a world
revolution that was not round the corner, they built a state
capitalist society, where the working class no longer had
the right to make the decisions most intimately concerning
it." [Mett, Op. Cit., pp. 82-3]
The Russian revolution had faced economic crisis all through 1917
and 1918. Indeed, by the spring of 1918 Russia was living through
an almost total economic collapse, with a general scarcity of
all resources and mass unemployment. According to Tony Cliff
(the leader of the SWP) in the spring of 1918 Russia's
"[w]ar-damaged industry continued to run down. 'The bony hand
of hunger' . . . gripped the whole population . . . One of the
causes of the famine was the breakdown of transport. . .
Industry was in a state of complete collapse. Not only was
there no food to feed the factory workers; there was no
raw materials or fuel for industry. The oilfields of the
Baku, Grozny and Emba regions came to a standstill. The
situation was the same in the coalfields. The production
of raw materials was in no better a state . . . The collapse
of industry meant unemployment for the workers." [Lenin:
The Revolution Besieged, vol. 3, pp. 67-9] The industrial workforce
dropped to 40% of its 1917 levels. The similarities to Stack's
description of the situation in early 1921 is striking.
Does this mean that, for Leninists, soviet democracy was impossible
in early 1918 (of course, the Bolsheviks in practice were making
soviet democracy impossible by suppressing soviets that elected the
wrong people)? After all, in the start of 1918 the Russian
Revolution also faced a "destroyed economy and infrastructure, a
population faced with starvation and bloody war, and a hostile
outside world." If these "were not circumstances in which the
revolution could move forward" then it also applied in 1918
as well as in 1921. And, if so, then this means admitting that
soviet democracy is impossible during a revolution, marked as it
will always be marked by exceptionally difficult circumstances.
Which, of course, means to defend party power and not soviet
power and promote the dictatorship of the party over the
working class, positions Leninists deny holding.
Incredibly, Stack fails to even mention the power and privileges
of the bureaucracy at the time. Officials got the best food,
housing and so on. The lack of effective control or influence
from below ensured that corruption was widespread. One of the
leaders of the Workers' Opposition gives us an insight of the
situation which existed at the start of 1921:
"The rank and file worker is observant. He sees that so far
. . . the betterment of the workers' lot has occupied the
last place in our policy . . . We all know that the housing
problem cannot be solved in a few months, even years, and
that due to our poverty, its solution is faced with serious
difficulties. But the facts of ever-growing inequality between
the privileged groups of the population in Soviet Russia
and the rank and file workers, 'the frame-work of the
dictatorship', breed and nourish the dissatisfaction.
"The rank and file worker sees how the Soviet official
and the practical man lives and how he lives . . .
[It will be objected that] 'We could not attend to that;
pray, there was the military front.' And yet whenever
it was necessary to make repairs to any of the houses
occupied by the Soviet institutions, they were able
to find both the materials and the labour." [Alexandra
Kollontai, The Workers' Opposition, p. 10]
A few months earlier, the Communist Yoffe wrote to Trotsky
expressing the same concerns. "There is enormous inequality,"
he wrote, "and one's material position largely depends on
one's post in the party; you'll agree that this is a
dangerous situation." [quoted by Orlando Figes, A People's
Tragedy, p. 695] To talk about anarchists dismissing the
importance of material reality and a "revolutionary regime"
while ignoring the inequalities in power and wealth, and
the bureaucratisation and despotism which were their root,
is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black!
Under the harsh material conditions facing Russia at the time,
it goes without saying that the bureaucracy would utilise its
position to gather the best resources around it. Indeed, part
of the factors resulting in Kronstadt was "the privileges
and abuses of commissars, senior party functionaries and
trade union officials who received special rations,
allocations and housing and . . . quite openly enjoying
the good life." [Getzler, Op. Cit., p. 210] Stack fails
to mention this and instead talks about the necessity of
defending a "workers' state" in which workers had no power
and where bureaucratic abuses were rampant. If anyone is denying
reality, it is him! Thus Ciliga:
"The Soviet Government and the higher circles in the Communist
Party applied their own solution [to the problems facing the
revolution] of increasing the power of the bureaucracy. The
attribution of powers to the 'Executive Committees' which had
hitherto been vested in the soviets, the replacement of the
dictatorship of the class by the dictatorship of the party,
the shift of authority even within the party from its members
to its cadres, the replacement of the double power of the
bureaucracy and the workers in the factory by the sole power
of the former - to do all this was to 'save the Revolution!'
[. . .] The Bureaucracy prevented the bourgeois restoration
. . . by eliminating the proletarian character of the
revolution." [Op. Cit., p. 331]
Perhaps, in light of this, it is significant that, in his list of
revolutionary gains from October 1917, Stack fails to mention what
anarchists would consider the most important, namely workers'
power, freedom, democracy and rights. But, then again, the
Bolsheviks did not rate these gains highly either and were more
than willing to sacrifice them to ensure their most important gain,
state power (see
section 15
for a fuller discussion of this issue).
Again, the image of revolution gains a victory over its content!
When Stack argues that it was necessary to crush Kronstadt to "save
the revolution" and "preserv[e] the revolutionary regime" we feel
entitled to ask what was there left to save and preserve? The
dictatorship and decrees of "Communist" leaders? In other words,
party power. Yes, by suppressing Kronstadt Lenin and Trotsky
saved the revolution, saved it for Stalin. Hardly something to
be proud of.
Ironically, given Stack's assertions that anarchists ignore
"material reality", anarchists had predicted that a revolution
would be marked by economic disruption. Kropotkin, for example,
argued that it was "certain that
the coming Revolution . . . will burst upon us in the
middle of a great industrial crisis . . . There are
millions of unemployed workers in Europe at this moment.
It will be worse when Revolution has burst upon us . . .
The number of the out-of-works will be doubled as soon
as barricades are erected in Europe and the United
States . . . we know that in time of Revolution exchange
and industry suffer most from the general upheaval . . .
A Revolution in Europe means, then, the unavoidable
stoppage of at least half the factories and workshops."
He stressed that there would be "the complete
disorganisation" of the capitalist economy and that
during a revolution "[i]nternational commerce will come
to a standstill" and "the circulation of commodities and
of provisions will be paralysed." [The Conquest of Bread,
pp. 69-70 and p. 191]
Elsewhere, he argued that a revolution would
"mean the stoppage of hundreds
of manufactures and workshops, and the impossibility of
reopening them. Thousands of workmen will find no employment
. . . The present want of employment and misery will be
increased tenfold." He stressed that "the reconstruction
of Society in accordance with more equitable principles
will necessitate a disturbed period" and argued that
any revolution will be isolated to begin with and so
(with regards to the UK) "the imports of foreign corn will
decrease" as will "exports of manufactured wares." A
revolution, he argued, "is not the work of one day. It
means a whole period, mostly lasting for several years,
during which the country is in a state of effervescence."
To overcome these problems he stressed the importance
of reconstruction from the bottom up, organised directly
by working people, with local action being the basis
of wider reconstruction. The "immense problem -- the
re-organisation of production, redistribution of wealth
and exchange, according to new principles -- cannot be
solved by . . . any kind of government. It must be a natural
growth resulting from the combined efforts of all interested
in it, freed from the bonds of the present institutions. It
must grow naturally, proceeding from the simplest up to
complex federations; and it cannot be something schemed by
a few men and ordered from above. In this last shape it
surely would have no chance of living at all." [Act for
Yourselves, pp. 71-2, p. 67, pp, 72-3, pp. 25-6 and p. 26]
Anarchists had predicted the problems facing the Russian
Revolution decades previously and, given the lack of success
of Bolshevik attempts to solve these problems via centralism,
had also predicted the only way to solve them. Far from
ignoring "material reality" it is clear that anarchists
have long been aware of the difficulties a revolution
would face and had organised our politics around them. In
contrast, Stack is arguing that these inevitable effects
of a revolution create "circumstances" in which the revolution
cannot "move forward"! If this is so, then revolution is
an impossibility as it will always face economic disruption
and isolation at some stage in its development, for a longer
or shorter period. If we base our politics on the "best-case
scenario" then they will soon be proven to be lacking.
Ultimately, Stack's arguments (and those like it) are the ones
which ignore "material reality" by arguing that Lenin's state
was a "revolutionary regime" and reconstruction could be anything
but to the advantage of the bureaucracy without the active
participation of what was left of the working class. Indeed,
the logic of his argument would mean rejecting the idea of
socialist revolution as such as the problems he lists will
affect every revolution and had affected the Russian
Revolution from the start.
The problems facing the Russian working class were difficult
in the extreme in 1921 (some of which, incidentally, were due
to the
results of Bolshevik economic policies which compounded
economic chaos via centralisation), but they could never be
solved by someone else bar the thousands of workers taking
strike action all across Russia at the time: "And if the
proletariat was that exhausted how come it was still capable
of waging virtually total general strikes in the largest and
most heavily industrialised cities?" [Ida Mett, Op. Cit.,
p. 81]
So, as far as "material reality" goes, it is clear that it is
Stack who ignores it, not anarchists or the Kronstadt rebels.
Both anarchists and Kronstadters recognised that the country
was in dire straits and that a huge effort was required for
reconstruction. The material basis at the time offered two
possibilities for reconstruction -- either from above or from
below. Such a reconstruction could only be socialist in
nature if it involved the direct participation of the working
masses in determining what was needed and how to do it. In
other words, the process had to start from below and no
central committee utilising a fraction of the creative
powers of the country could achieve it. Such a bureaucratic,
top-down re-construction would rebuild the society in a way
which benefited a few. Which, of course, was what happened.
John Rees joins his fellow party member by arguing that the
working class base of the workers' state had "disintegrated"
by 1921. The working class was reduced "to an atomised,
individualised mass, a fraction of its former size, and
no longer able to exercise the collective power that it
had done in 1917." The "bureaucracy of the workers' state
was left suspended in mid-air, its class base eroded and
demoralised." He argues that Kronstadt was "utopian" as "they
looked back to the institutions of 1917 when the class which
made such institutions possible no longer had the collective
capacity to direct political life." [Rees, Op. Cit., p. 65 and
p. 70]
There are two problems with this kind of argument. Firstly,
there are factual problems with it. Second, there are
ideological problems with it. We will discuss each in
turn.
The factual problems are clear. All across Russia in
February 1921 the Russian working class were going on
strike, organising meetings and demonstrations. In
other words, taking collective action based on
demands collectively agreed in workplace meetings.
One factory would send delegates to others, urging
them to join the movement which soon became a general
strike in Petrograd and Moscow. In Kronstadt, workers,
soldiers and sailors went the next step and organised
a delegate conference. In other places they tried to
do so, with various degrees of success. During the
strikes in Petrograd "workers from various plants
elected delegates to the Petrograd Assembly of
Plenipotentiaries" which raised similar demands as
that of Kronstadt. Its activities and other attempts
to organise collectively were obviously hindered by
the fact the Cheka arrested "all delegates to other
enterprises" the strikers sent. Brovkin states that
following the example of Petrograd, "workers in some
cities set up assemblies of plenipotentiaries" as
well. In Saratov "such a council grew out of a strike
co-ordination committee." [V. Brovkin, Behind the
Lines of the Russian Civil War, p. 393, p. 396 and
p. 398]
Any claim that the Russian working class had no capacity
for collective action seems invalidated by such events. Not
that Rees is not unaware of these strikes. He notes that
the Kronstadt revolt was "preceded by a wave of serious
but quickly resolved strikes." [Op. Cit., p. 61] An
"atomised, individualised mass" which was "no longer
able to exercise the collective power" being able to
conduct a "wave of serious . . . strikes" all across
Russia? That hardly fits. Nor does he mention the
repression which "quickly resolved" the strikes and
which, by its very nature, atomised and individualised
the masses in order to break the collective action being
practised.
The fact that these strikes did not last longer of course
suggests that the strikers could not sustain this activity
indefinitely. However, this was more a product of state
repression and the lack of rations while on strike than
any objectively predetermined impossibility of collective
decision making. The workers may have been too exhausted
to wage indefinite general strikes against a repressive
state but that does not imply they could not practice
continual collective decision making in less extreme
circumstances in a soviet democracy.
Of course, these striking workers would have been
unlikely to voted Communist en mass if free soviet
elections were organised (in Kronstadt, Communists
made up one-third of the conference of delegates).
Thus there were pressing political reasons to
deny free elections rather than an objective
impossibility. Moreover, the actions of the
Soviet state were designed to break the collective
resistance of the working force. The use of armed
patrols on the streets and in the factories, and
the closing and re-registration of an enterprise
labour force were designed to break the strike
and atomise the workforce. These actions would not
have been needed if the Russian working class was,
in fact, atomised and incapable of collective
action and decision making.
The size of the working class in 1921 was smaller in
1921 than it was in 1917. However, the figures for
May 1918 and 1920 were nearly identical. In 1920,
the number of factory workers in Petrograd was 148,289
(which was 34% of the population and 36% of the number
of workers in 1910). [Mary McAuley, Op. Cit., p. 398]
In January 1917, the number was 351,010 and in April
1918, it was 148,710. [S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd,
p. 245] Thus factory worker numbers were about 40% of
the pre-Civil War number and remained so throughout
the Civil War. A proletarian core remained in every
industrial town or city in Russia.
Nor was this work force incapable of collective action
or decision making. All through the civil war they organised
strikes and protests for specific demands (and faced
Bolshevik repression for so doing). In March 1919,
for example, tens of thousands of workers went on strike
in Petrograd. The strikes were broken by troops. Strikes
regularly occurred throughout 1919 and 1920 (and, again,
usually met with state repression). In 1921, the strike
wave resurfaced and became near general strikes in many
cities, including Petrograd and Moscow (see
section 2).
If the workers could organise strikes (and near general
strikes in 1921), protest meetings and committees to
co-ordinate their struggles, what could stop them starting
to manage their own destinies? Does soviet democracy become
invalid once a certain number of workers is reached?
Given that Rees gets the key slogan of Kronstadt wrong
(they called for all power to the soviets and not to
parties rather than Rees' "soviets without parties")
it is hard to evaluate whether Rees claims that without
Bolshevik dictatorship the Whites would inevitably have
taken power. After all, the Kronstadt delegate meeting had
one-third Communists in it. Ultimately, he is arguing
that working people cannot manage their own fates themselves
without it resulting in a counter-revolution!
In addition, the logic of Rees' argument smacks of
double-think. On the one hand, he argues that the
Bolsheviks represented the "dictatorship of the
proletariat." On the other hand, he argues that
free soviet elections would have seen the Bolsheviks
replaced by "moderate socialists" (and eventually
the Whites). In other words, the Bolsheviks did not,
in fact, represent the Russian working class and
their dictatorship was over, not of, the
proletariat. The basic assumption, therefore, is
flawed. Rees and his fellow Trotskyists seriously
want us to believe that a dictatorship will not
become corrupt and bureaucratic, that it can
govern in the interests of its subjects and, moreover,
reform itself. And he calls the Kronstadters "utopians"!
Given these factors, perhaps the real reason for the lack
of soviet democracy and political freedom and rights was
that the Bolsheviks knew they would lose any free elections
that would be held? As we noted in
section 2, they had
not been shy in disbanding soviets with non-Bolshevik majorities
before the start of the civil war nor in suppressing strikes
and workers' protests before, during and after the Civil War.
In effect, the Bolsheviks would exercise the dictatorship of
the proletariat over and above the wishes of that proletariat
if need be (as Trotsky made clear in 1921 at the Tenth Party
Congress). Thus the major factor restricting soviet democracy
was Bolshevik power -- this repressed working class collective
action which promoted atomisation in the working class and
the unaccountability of the Bolshevik leadership. The
bureaucracy was "left suspended in mid-air" simply because
the majority of the workers and peasants did not support
it and when they protested against the party dictatorship
they were repressed.
Simply put, objective factors do not tell the whole story.
Now we turn to these objective factors, the economic breakdown
affecting Russia in 1921. This is the basis for the ideological
problem with Rees' argument.
The ideological problem with this argument is that both Lenin
and Trotsky had argued that revolution inevitably implied
civil war, "exceptional circumstances" and economic crisis.
For example, in Terrorism and Communism Trotsky argued
that "[a]ll periods of transition have been characterised
by . . . tragic features" of an "economic depression" such
as exhaustion, poverty and hunger. Every class society "is
violently swept off [the arena] by an intense struggle,
which immediately brings to its participants even greater
privations and sufferings than those against which they rose."
He gave the example of the French Revolution "which attained
its titanic dimensions under the pressure of the masses
exhausted with suffering, itself deepened and rendered more acute
their misfortunes for a prolonged period and to an extraordinary
extent." He asked: "Can it be otherwise?" [Terrorism
and Communism, p. 7]
Indeed, he stressed that "revolutions which drag into their
whirlpool millions of workers" automatically affect the
"economic life of the country." By "[d]ragging the mass of
the people away from labour, drawing them for a prolonged
period into the struggle, thereby destroying their connection
with production, the revolution in all these ways strikes
deadly blows at economic life, and inevitably lowers
the standard which it found at its birth." This affects
the socialist revolution as the "more perfect the
revolution, the greater are the masses it draws in;
and the longer it is prolonged, the greater is the destruction
it achieves in the apparatus of production, and the more
terrible inroads does it make upon public resources. From
this there follows merely the conclusion which did not
require proof -- that a civil war is harmful to economic
life." [Ibid.]
Lenin in 1917 argued the similarly, mocking those who
argued that revolution was out of the question because
"the circumstances are exceptionally complicated." He
noting that any revolution, "in its development, would give
rise to exceptionally complicated circumstances" and that
it was "the sharpest, most furious, desperate class war
and civil war. Not a single great revolution in history
has escaped civil war. No one who does not live in a shell
could imagine that civil war is conceivable without
exceptionally complicated circumstances. If there were
no exceptionally complicated circumstances there would
be no revolution." [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?,
p. 80 and p. 81]
A few months early, Lenin argues that "[w]hen unavoidable
disaster is approaching, the most useful and indispensable
task confronting the people is that of organisation. Marvels
of proletarian organisation -- this is our slogan at the
present, and shall become our slogan and our demand to an
even greater extent, when the proletariat is in power. . .
There are many such talents [i.e. organisers] among the
people. These forces lie dormant in the peasantry and the
proletariat, for lack of application. They must be mobilised
from below, by practical work . . ." [The Threatening
Catastrophe and how to avoid it, pp. 49-50]
The problem in 1921 (as during the war), of course, was that
when the proletariat did organise itself, it was repressed
as counterrevolutionary by the Bolsheviks. The reconstruction
from below, the organisation of the proletariat, automatically
came into conflict with party power. The workers and peasants
could not act because soviet and trade union democracy would
have ended Bolshevik dictatorship.
Therefore, Rees' and Stack's arguments fail to convince. As
noted, their ideological gurus clearly argued that revolution
without civil war and economic exhaustion was impossible.
Sadly, the means to mitigate the problems of Civil War and
economic crisis (namely workers' self-management and power)
inevitably came into conflict with party power and could not
be encouraged. If Bolshevism cannot meet the inevitable problems
of revolution and maintain the principles it pays lip-service
to (i.e. soviet democracy and workers' power) then it clearly
does not work and should be avoided.
Stack's and Rees' argument, in other words, represents the bankruptcy
of Bolshevik ideology rather than a serious argument against the
Kronstadt revolt.
Another Trotskyist argument against Kronstadt and in favour
of the Bolshevik repression is related to the country was
exhausted argument we discussed in the
last section. It
finds its clearest expression in Victor Serge's argument:
"the country was exhausted, and production practically
at a standstill; there was no reserves of any kind, not
even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The
working-class elite that had been moulded in the struggle
against the old regime was literally decimated. The Party,
swollen by the influx of power-seekers, inspired little
confidence . . . Soviet democracy lacked leadership,
institutions and inspiration . . .
"The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for
freely-elected soviets into one for 'Soviets without
Communists.' If the Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was
only a short step to chaos, and through chaos to a peasant
rising, the massacre of the Communists, the return
of the emigres, and in the end, through the sheer force of
events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian."
[Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 128-9]
Serge supported the Bolsheviks, considering them as the
only possible means of defending the revolution. Some
modern day Leninists follow this line of reasoning
and want us to believe that the Bolsheviks were defending
the remaining gains of the revolution. What gains, exactly?
The only gains that remained were Bolshevik power and
nationalised industry -- both of which excluded the
real gains of the Russian Revolution (namely soviet
power, the right to independent unions and to strike,
freedom of assembly, association and speech for working
people, the beginnings of workers' self-management of
production and so on). Indeed, both "gains" were the
basis for the Stalinist bureaucracy's power.
Anarchists and libertarian Marxists who defend the Kronstadt
revolt and oppose the actions of the Bolsheviks are not foolish
enough to argue that Kronstadt's "third revolution" would have
definitely succeeded. Every revolution is a gamble and may fail.
As Ante Ciliga correctly argues:
"Let us consider, finally, one last accusation which is
commonly circulated: that action such as that at Kronstadt
could have indirectly let loose the forces of the
counter-revolution. It is possible indeed that even
by placing itself on a footing of workers' democracy
the revolution might have been overthrown; but what
is certain is that it has perished, and that it has
perished on account of the policy of its leaders. The
repression of Kronstadt, the suppression of the democracy
of workers and soviets by the Russian Communist party,
the elimination of the proletariat from the management
of industry, and the introduction of the NEP, already
signified the death of the Revolution." [Op. Cit., p. 335]
No revolution is guaranteed to succeed. The same with Kronstadt's
"Third Revolution." Its call for soviet power may have lead to
defeat via renewed intervention. That is possible -- just as it
was possible in 1917. One thing is sure, by maintaining the
Bolshevik dictatorship the Russian Revolution was crushed.
The only alternative to the "third revolution" would have
been self-reform of the party dictatorship and, therefore,
of the soviet state. Such an attempt was made after 1923 by
the Left Opposition (named "Trotskyist" by the Stalinists
because Trotsky was its main leader). John Rees discusses
the Left Opposition, arguing that "without a revival of
struggle in Russia or successful revolution elsewhere" it
"was doomed to failure." [Op. Cit., p. 68] Given the logic
of Serge's arguments, this is the only option left for
Leninists.
How viable was this alternative? Could the soviet dictatorship
reform itself? Was soviet democracy more of a danger than the
uncontrolled dictatorship of a party within a state marked by
already serious levels of corruption, bureaucracy and despotism?
History provides the answer with the rise of Stalin.
Unfortunately for the Left Opposition, the bureaucracy had
gained experience in repressing struggle in breaking the wave
of strikes in 1921 and crushing the Kronstadt rebellion. Indeed,
Rees incredulously notes that by 1923 "the well-head of renewal
and thorough reform -- the activity of the workers -- had dried
to a trickle" and yet does not see that this decline was aided
by the example of what had happened to Kronstadt and the repression
of the 1921 strike wave. The Left Opposition received the
crop that Lenin and Trotsky sowed the seeds of in 1921.
Ironically, Rees argues that the Stalinist bureaucracy could
betray the revolution without "an armed counter-revolutionary
seizure of power" (and so "no martial law, no curfew or street
battles") because of "the atomisation of the working class."
However, the atomisation was a product of the armed
counter-revolutionary activities of Lenin and Trotsky in
1921 when they broke the strikes and crushed Kronstadt
by means of martial law, curfew and street battles. The
workers had no interest in which branch of the bureaucracy
would govern and exploit them and so remained passive. Rees
fails to see that the Stalinist coup simply built upon the
initial counter-revolution of Lenin. There was martial
law, curfew and street battles but they occurred in 1921,
not 1928. The rise of Stalinism was the victory of one
side of the new bureaucratic class over another but that
class had defeated the working class in March 1921.
As for the idea that an external revolution could have
regenerated the Soviet bureaucracy, this too was
fundamentally utopian. In the words of Ida Mett:
"Some claim that the Bolsheviks allowed themselves such
actions (as the suppression of Kronstadt) in the hope of
a forthcoming world revolution, of which they considered
themselves the vanguard. But would not a revolution in
another country have been influenced by the spirit of
the Russian Revolution? When one considers the enormous
moral authority of the Russian Revolution throughout the
world one may ask oneself whether the deviations of this
Revolution would not eventually have left an imprint on
other countries. Many historical facts allow such a
judgement. One may recognise the impossibility of genuine
socialist construction in a single country, yet have doubts
as to whether the bureaucratic deformations of the Bolshevik
regime would have been straightened out by the winds coming
from revolutions in other countries." [Op. Cit., p. 82]
The Bolsheviks had already been manipulating foreign Communist
Parties in the interests of their state for a number of years.
That is part of the reason why the Left-Communists around
Pannekoek and Gorter broke with the Third International
later in 1921. Just as the influence of Lenin had been a key
factor in fighting the anti-Parliamentarian and libertarian
communist tendencies in Communist Parties all across the
world, so the example and influence of the Bolsheviks would
have made its impact on any foreign revolution. The successful
revolutionaries would have applied such "lessons" of October
such as the dictatorship of the proletariat being impossible
without the dictatorship of the communist party, centralism,
militarisation of labour and so on. This would have distorted
any revolution from the start (given how obediently the
Communist Parties around the world followed the insane
policies of Stalinism, can we doubt this conclusion?).
Not that the Left Opposition's political platform could have
saved the revolution. After all, it was utopian in that it
urged the party and state bureaucracy to reform itself as
well as contradictory. It did not get at the root of the
problem, namely Bolshevik ideology. The theoretical
limitations of the "Left Opposition" can be found in more
detail in section 3 of the
appendix on "Were any of the Bolshevik oppositions a real alternative?".
Here we will restrict ourselves to
looking at The Platform of the Opposition written in 1927
(unless otherwise specified all quotes come from this document).
It urged a "consistent development of a workers' democracy in
the party, the trade unions, and the soviets" and to "convert the
urban soviets into real institutions of proletarian power." It
states that "Lenin, as long ago as in the revolution of 1905,
advanced the slogan of soviets as organs of the democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants." The Kronstadt
sailors argued the same, of course, and were branded "White
Guardists" and "counter-revolutionary". At the same time as this
call for democracy, we find affirmation of the "Leninist principle"
("inviolable for every Bolshevik") that "the dictatorship of the
proletariat is and can be realised only through the dictatorship
of the party." It repeats the principle by mentioning that "the
dictatorship of the proletariat demands a single and united
proletarian party as the leader of the working masses and the
poor peasantry." It stresses that a "split in our party, the
formation of two parties, would represent an enormous danger
to the revolution." This was because:
"Nobody who sincerely defends the line of Lenin can entertain
the idea of 'two parties' or play with the suggestion of a split.
Only those who desire to replace Lenin's course with some other
can advocate a split or a movement along the two-party road.
"We will fight with all our power against the idea of two parties,
because the dictatorship of the proletariat demands as its very core
a single proletarian party. It demands a single party. It demands
a proletarian party -- that is, a party whose policy is determined
by the interests of the proletariat and carried out by a proletarian
nucleus. Correction of the line of our party, improvement of its
social composition -- that is not the two-party road, but the
strengthening and guaranteeing of its unity as a revolutionary
party of the proletariat."
We can note, in passing, the interesting notion of party (and
so "proletarian" state) policy "determined by the interests of
the proletariat and carried out by a proletarian nucleus" but
which is not determined by the proletariat itself. Which
means that the policy of the "workers' state" must be determined
by some other (unspecified) group and not by the workers. What
possibility can exist that this other group actually knows
what is in the interests of the proletariat? None, of course,
as any form of democratic decision can be ignored when those
who determine the policy consider the protests of the proletariat
to be not "in the interests of the proletariat."
This was the opinion of Trotsky, who argued against the
Workers' Opposition faction of the Communist Party who urged
re-introducing some elements of democracy at the Tenth
Party Conference at the time of the Kronstadt uprising (while,
of course, keeping the Communist Party dictatorship intact).
As he put it, they "have come out with dangerous slogans.
They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have
placed the workers' right to elect representatives above
the party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its
dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the
passing moods of the workers' democracy!" He continued
by stating that the "Party is obliged to maintain its
dictatorship . . . regardless of temporary vacillations
even in the working class . . . The dictatorship does not
base itself at every moment on the formal principle of a
workers' democracy." [quoted by M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks
and Workers' Control, p. 78]
Thus the call for democracy is totally annulled by other
arguments in the Platform, arguments which logically
eliminates democracy and results in such acts as the
repression of Kronstadt (see
section 15).
The question, of course, arises as to how democracy can
be introduced in the soviets and unions when party
dictatorship is essential for the "realisation" of the
"proletarian" dictatorship and there can only be one
party? What happens if the proletariat vote for someone
else (as they did in Kronstadt)? If "proletarian"
dictatorship is impossible without the dictatorship of the
party then, clearly, proletarian democracy becomes meaningless.
All the workers would be allowed to do would be to vote for
members of the same party, all of whom would be bound by
party discipline to carry out the orders of the party
leadership. Power would rest in the party hierarchy and
definitively not in the working class, its unions or
its soviets (both of which would remain mere fig-leafs
for party rule). Ultimately, the only guarantee that the
party dictatorship would govern in the interests of the
proletariat would be the good intentions of the party.
However, being unaccountable to the masses, such a
guarantee would be worthless -- as history shows.
Kronstadt is the obvious end result of such politics. The
starting point was the disbanding of soviets which had
been elected with a majority of "wrong" parties (as the
Bolsheviks did in early 1918, before the start of the
civil war). While the Platform may be useful as an
expression of the usual Leninist double-think on the
"workers' state", its practical suggestions are useless.
Unlike the Kronstadt Platform, it was doomed to failure
from the start. The new bureaucratic class could only be
removed by a "third revolution" and while this, possibly,
could have resulted in a bourgeois counter-revolution the
alternative of maintaining Bolshevik dictatorship would
inevitably have resulted in Stalinism. When supporters
of Bolshevism argue that Kronstadt would have opened the
gate to counter-revolution, they do not understand that
the Bolsheviks were the counter-revolution in 1921 and
that by suppressing Kronstadt the Bolsheviks not only
opened the gate to Stalinism but invited it in and gave
it the keys to the house.
The Platform, moreover, smacks of the re-writing of history
Trotsky correctly accused Stalinism of.
It argues, for example, that the urban soviets "in recent
years have been losing importance. This undoubtedly reflects
a shift in the relation of class forces to the disadvantage
of the proletariat." In fact, the soviets had lost their
importance since the October revolution (see
section 2
for details). The "shift" in the relation of class forces
started immediately after the October revolution, when the
real gains of 1917 (i.e. soviet democracy, workers' rights
and freedom) were slowly and surely eliminated by the bureaucratic
class forming around the new state -- a class who could justify
their actions by claiming it was in the "interests" of the
masses whose wishes they were ignoring.
As regards the Communist Party itself, it argues for introducing
("in deeds and not words") "a democratic regime. Do away with
administrative pressure tactics. Stop the persecution and
expulsion of those who hold independent opinions about party
questions." No mention, of course, that these tactics were
used by Lenin and Trotsky against Left-wing dissidents after
the October revolution.
The Left-Communists in early 1918 were subject to such
pressure. For example, they were ousted from leading
positions in the Supreme Economic Council in March 1918.
After their views were denounced by Lenin a "campaign was
whipped up in Leningrad which compelled Kommunist [their
paper] to transfer publication to Moscow . . . After the
appearance of the first issue of the paper a hastily
convened Leningrad Party Conference produced a majority
for Lenin and 'demanded that the adherents of Kommunist
cease their separate organisational existence.'" The
paper lasted four issues, with the last having to be
published as a private factional paper. The issue had
been settled by a high pressure campaign in the
Party organisation, backed by a barrage of violent
invective in the Party press and in the pronouncements
of the Party leaders. [Maurice Brinton, Op. Cit.,
pp. 39-40]
Similarly, the Workers' Opposition three years later also
experienced them. At the Tenth Party congress, A. Kollontai
(author of their platform) stated that the circulation
of her pamphlet had been deliberately impeded. "So
irregular were some of these that the Moscow Party
Committee at one stage voted a resolution publicly
censuring the Petrograd organisation 'for not observing
the rules of proper controversy.'" The success of the
Leninist faction in getting control of the party machine
was such that "there is serious doubt as to whether they
were not achieved by fraud." [Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 75
and p. 77] Victor Serge witnessed the rigging of an
election to ensure Lenin's victory in the trade union
debate. [Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 123] Kollontai
herself mentions (in early 1921) that comrades "who dare
to disagree with decrees from above are still being
persecuted." [our emphasis, The Workers' Opposition,
p. 22]
The Platform states that "the dying out of inner-party democracy
leads to a dying out of workers' democracy in general -- in the
trade unions, and in all other nonparty mass organisations."
In fact, the opposite causation is correct. The dying out
of workers' democracy in general leads to a dying out of
inner-party democracy. The dictatorship of the party by necessity
clashes with the "democratic dictatorship of the working masses
and the poor peasantry." As the party dictatorship replaces
the working masses, eliminating democracy by the dictatorship
of a single party, democracy in that party must wither. If the
workers can join that party and influence its policies then
the same problems that arose in the soviets and unions appear
in the party (i.e. voting for the wrong policies and people).
This necessitates a corresponding centralisation in power
within the party as occurred in the soviets and unions, all
to the detriment of rank and file power and control.
As Ida Mett argued:
"There is no doubt that the discussion taking place within
the [Communist] Party at this time [in early 1921] had profound
effects on the masses. It overflowed the narrow limits the
Party sought to impose on it. It spread to the working class
as a whole, to the solders and to the sailors. Heated local
criticism acted as a general catalyst. The proletariat had
reasoned quite logically: if discussion and criticism were
permitted to Party members, why should they not be permitted
to the masses themselves who had endured all the hardships
of the Civil War?
"In his speech to the Tenth Congress -- published in the Congress
Proceedings -- Lenin voiced his regret at having 'permitted' such
a discussion. 'We have certainly committed an error,' he said,
'in having authorised this debate. Such a discussion was harmful
just before the Spring months that would be loaded with such
difficulties.'" [The Kronstadt Uprising, pp. 34-5]
Unsurprisingly, the Tenth Congress voted to ban factions within
the Party. The elimination of discussion in the working class
led to its ban in the party. Having the rank-and-file of the
Party discuss issues would give false hopes to the working
class as a whole who may attempt to influence policy by
joining the party (and, of course, vote for the wrong people
or policies).
Thus the only alternative to Kronstadt's "Third Revolution"
and free soviets was doomed to failure.
Lastly, we should draw some parallels between the fates
of the Kronstadt sailors and the Left Opposition.
John Rees argues that the Left Opposition had "the whole
vast propaganda machine of the bureaucracy . . . turned
against them," a machine used by Trotsky and Lenin in 1921
against Kronstadt. Ultimately, the Left Opposition "were
exiled, imprisoned and shot," again like the Kronstadters and
a host of revolutionaries who defended the revolution but
opposed the Bolshevik dictatorship. [Op. Cit., p. 68]
As Murray Bookchin argued:
"All the conditions for Stalinism were prepared for by the
defeat of the Kronstadt sailors and Petrograd strikers."
["Introduction", Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising,
p. 13]
Thus, the argument that Kronstadt was "utopian" is false.
The third revolution was the only real alternative in
Bolshevik Russia. Any struggle from below post-1921 would
have raised the same problems of soviet democracy and
party dictatorship which Kronstadt raised. Given that
the Left Opposition subscribed to the "Leninist principle"
of "the dictatorship of the party," they could not appeal
to the masses as they would not vote for them. The arguments
raised against Kronstadt that soviet democracy would lead
to counter-revolution are equally applicable to movements
which appealed, as Rees desires, to the Russian working
class post-Kronstadt.
In summary, the claim that Kronstadt would inevitably
have lead to an anti-proletarian dictatorship fails. Yes,
it might have but the Bolshevik dictatorship itself was
anti-proletarian (it had repressed proletarian protest,
organisation, freedom and rights on numerous occasions)
and it could never be reformed from within by the very
logic of its "Leninist principle" of "the dictatorship
of the party." The rise of Stalinism was inevitable after
the crushing of Kronstadt.
14 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.
The rationales used by Lenin, Trotsky and their followers
are significant aids to getting to the core of the Bolshevik
Myth. These rationales and activities allow us to understand
the limitations of Bolshevik theory and how it contributed
to the degeneration of the revolution.
Trotsky stated that the "Kronstadt slogan" was "soviets
without Communists." [Lenin and Trotsky, Kronstadt, p. 90]
This, of course, is factually incorrect. The Kronstadt slogan
was "all power to the soviets but not to the parties" (or
"free soviets"). From this incorrect assertion, Trotsky argued
as follows:
"to free the soviets from the leadership [!] of the Bolsheviks
would have meant within a short time to demolish the soviets
themselves. The experience of the Russian soviets during the
period of Menshevik and SR domination and, even more clearly,
the experience of the German and Austrian soviets under the
domination of the Social Democrats, proved this. Social
Revolutionary-anarchist soviets could only serve as a bridge
from the proletarian dictatorship. They could play no other
role, regardless of the 'ideas' of their participants. The
Kronstadt uprising thus had a counterrevolutionary character."
[Op. Cit., p. 90]
Interesting logic. Let us assume that the result of free
elections would have been the end of Bolshevik "leadership"
(i.e. dictatorship), as seems likely. What Trotsky is arguing
is that to allow workers to vote for their representatives
would "only serve as a bridge from the proletarian dictatorship"!
This argument was made (in 1938) as a general point and is
not phrased in terms of the problems facing the Russian
Revolution in 1921. In other words Trotsky is clearly arguing
for the dictatorship of the party and contrasting it to soviet
democracy. So much for "All Power to the Soviets" or "workers'
power"!
Indeed, Trotsky was not shy in explicitly stating this on occasion.
As we noted in
section 13,
the Left Opposition based itself
on "Leninist principle" ("inviolable for every Bolshevik") that
"the dictatorship of the proletariat is and can be realised only
through the dictatorship of the party." Trotsky stressed ten years
later that the whole working class cannot determine policy in the
so-called "workers' state" (as well as indicating his belief that
one-party dictatorship is an inevitable stage in a "proletarian"
revolution):
"The revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party is for
me not a thing that one can freely accept or reject: It is an
objective necessity imposed upon us by the social realities
-- the class struggle, the heterogeneity oof the revolutionary
class, the necessity for a selected vanguard in order to
assure the victory. The dictatorship of a party belongs to
the barbarian prehistory as does the state itself, but we can
not jump over this chapter, which can open (not at one stroke)
genuine human history. . . The revolutionary party (vanguard)
which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses
to the counter-revolution . . . Abstractly speaking, it would
be very well if the party dictatorship could be replaced by
the 'dictatorship' of the whole toiling people without any
party, but this presupposes such a high level of political
development among the masses that it can never be achieved
under capitalist conditions. The reason for the revolution
comes from the circumstance that capitalism does not permit
the material and the moral development of the masses." [Trotsky,
Writings 1936-37, pp. 513-4]
This is the very essence of Bolshevism. Trotsky is clearly
arguing that the working class, as a class, is incapable
of making a revolution or managing society itself -- hence
the party must step in on its behalf and, if necessary,
ignore the wishes of the people the party claims to
represent. To re-quote Trotsky's comments against the
Workers' Opposition at the Tenth Party Congress in early
1921: "They have made a fetish of democratic principles!
They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives
above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert
its dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the
passing moods of the workers' democracy!" He stressed that
the "Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship . . .
regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working
class . . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every
moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy."
[quoted by M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control,
p. 78]
In 1957, after crushing the 1956 workers' revolution, the
Hungarian Stalinists argued along exactly the same lines
as Trotsky had after the Bolsheviks had crushed Kronstadt.
The leader of the Hungarian Stalinist dictatorship argued
that "the regime is aware that the people do not always know
what is good for them. It is therefore the duty of the
leadership to act, not according to the will of the people,
but according to what the leadership knows to be in the
best interests of the people." [quoted by Andy Anderson,
Hungary '56, p. 101]
Little wonder, then, that Samuel Farber notes that "there is
no evidence indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream
Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers' control or
of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these
losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement
of War Communism by NEP in 1921." [Before Stalinism, p. 44]
Such a perspective cannot help have disastrous consequences
for a revolution (and explains why the Bolsheviks failed to
pursue a peaceful resolution to the Kronstadt revolt). The
logic of this argument clearly implies that when the party
suppressed Kronstadt, when it disbanded non-Bolshevik soviets
in early 1918 and robbed the workers and soviets of their
power, the Bolsheviks were acting in the best interests
of masses! The notion that Leninism is a revolutionary
theory is invalidated by Trotsky's arguments. Rather than
aim for a society based on workers' power, they aim for a
"workers' state" in which workers delegate their power to
the leaders of the party. Which confirmed Bakunin's argument
that Marxism meant "the highly despotic government of the
masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or
pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they
will be liberated from the cares of government and included
in entirety in the governed herd." [Statism and Anarchy,
pp. 178-9]
Such an approach is doomed to failure -- it cannot produce
a socialist society as such a society (as Bakunin stressed)
can only be built from below by the working class itself.
As Vernon Richards argues:
"The distinction between the libertarian and authoritarian
revolutionary movements in their struggle to establish
the free society, is the means which each proposes should
be used to this end. The libertarian maintains that the
initiative must come from below, that the free society
must be the result of the will to freedom of a large
section of the population. The authoritarian . . .
believes that the will to freedom can only emerge once
the existing economic and political system has be replaced
by a dictatorship of the proletariat [as expressed by
the dictatorship of the party, according to Trotsky]
which, as the awareness and sense of responsibility
of the people grows, will wither away and the free
society emerge.
"There can be no common ground between such approaches.
For the authoritarian argues that the libertarian
approach is noble but 'utopian' and doomed to failure
from the start, while the libertarian argues on the
evidence of history, that the authoritarian methods
will simply replace one coercive state by another,
equally despotic and remote from the people, and
which will no more 'wither away' than its capitalist
predecessor." [Lessons of the Spanish Revolution,
p. 206]
Modern day Leninists follow Trotsky's arguments (although they
rarely acknowledge where they logically led or that their
heroes explicitly acknowledged this conclusion and justified
it). They do not state this position as honestly as did
Trotsky.
Chris Bambery of the British SWP, for example, argues in his
article "Leninism in the 21st century" that "in Lenin's
concept of the party, democracy is balanced by centralism"
and the first of three reasons for this is:
"The working class is fragmented. There are always those who
wish to fight, those who will scab and those in between. Even
in the soviets those divisions will be apparent. Revolutionary
organisation does not aspire to represent the working class as
a whole. It bases itself on those workers who want to challenge
capitalism, and seeks to organise those to win the majority of
workers to the need to take power." [Socialist Review, no.
248, January 2001]
This, of course, has exactly the same basis of Trotsky's
defence of the need of party dictatorship and why Kronstadt
was counterrevolutionary. Bambery notes that even "in the
soviets" there will be "divisions." Thus we have the basic
assumption which, combined with centralisation, vanguardism
and other aspects of Bolshevism, leads to events like Kronstadt
and the destruction of soviet power by party power. The
arguments for centralisation mean, in practice, the
concentration of power in the centre, in the hands of
the party leaders, as the working masses cannot be trusted
to make the correct ("revolutionary") decisions. This
centralised power is then used to impose the will of
the leaders, who use state power against the very class
they claim to represent:
"Without revolutionary coercion directed against the
avowed enemies of the workers and peasants, it is
impossible to break down the resistance of these
exploiters. On the other hand, revolutionary coercion
is bound to be employed towards the wavering and unstable
elements among the masses themselves." [Lenin, Collected
Works, vol. 42, p. 170]
In other words, whoever protests against the dictatorship
of the party.
Of course, it will be replied that the Bolshevik dictatorship
used its power to crush the resistance of the bosses (and
"backward workers"). Sadly, this is not the case. First,
we must stress that anarchists are not against defending
a revolution or expropriating the power and wealth of the
ruling class, quite the reverse as this is about how a
revolution does this. Lenin's argument is flawed as it
confuses the defence of the revolution with the defence of
the party in power. These are two totally different things.
The "revolutionary coercion" Lenin speaks of is, apparently,
directed against one part of the working class. However, this
will also intimidate the rest (just as bourgeois repression
not only intimidates those who strike but those who may think
of striking). As a policy, it can have but one effect -- to
eliminate all workers' power and freedom. It is the violence
of an oppressive minority against the oppressed majority, not
vice versa. Ending free speech harmed working class people.
Militarisation of labour did not affect the bourgeoisie.
Neither did eliminating soviet democracy or union independence.
As the dissident (working class) Communist Gavriii Miasnokov
argued in 1921 (in reply to Lenin):
"The trouble is that, while you raise your hand against the
capitalist, you deal a blow to the worker. You know very well that
for such words as I am now uttering hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of workers are languishing in prison. That I myself remain at
liberty is only because I am a veteran Communist, have suffered
for my beliefs, and am known among the mass of workers. Were it
not for this, were I just an ordinary mechanic from the same
factory, where would I be now? In a Cheka prison or, more likely,
made to 'escape,' just as I made Mikhail Romanov 'escape.' Once
more I say: You raise your hand against the bourgeoisie, but it is
I who am spitting blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws are
being cracked." [quoted by Paul Avrich, G. T. Miasnikov and the
Workers' Group]
This can be seen from the make-up of Bolshevik prisoners. Of the
17 000 camp detainees on whom statistical information was available
on 1 November 1920, peasants and workers constituted the largest
groups, at 39% and 34% respectively. Similarly, of the 40 913
prisoners held in December 1921 (of whom 44% had been committed
by the Cheka) nearly 84% were illiterate or minimally educated,
clearly, therefore, either peasants of workers. [George Leggett,
The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police, p. 178] Unsurprisingly,
Miasnikov refused to denounce the Kronstadt insurgents nor would
he have participated in their suppression had he been called upon
to do so.
Thus, the ideas of centralisation supported by Leninists are
harmful to the real gains of a revolution, namely working class
freedom and power (as we noted in
section 12,
some of them
do not even mention these when indicating the gains of 1917).
Indeed, this can be seen all through the history of Bolshevism.
Bambery states (correctly) that "Lenin and the Bolsheviks
initially opposed" the spontaneously formed soviets of 1905.
Incredulously, however, he assigns this opposition to the
assertion that their "model of revolution was still shaped
by that of the greatest previous revolution in France in 1789."
[Ibid.] In reality, it was because they considered, to quote
a leading Bolshevik, that "only a strong party along class
lines can guide the proletarian political movement and preserve
the integrity of its program, rather than a political mixture
of this kind, an indeterminate and vacillating political
organisation such as the workers council represents and cannot
help but represent." [P. N. Gvozdev, quoted by, Oskar Anweilier,
The Soviets, p. 77]
The soviet, in other words, could not represent the interests
of the working class because it was elected by them! Trotsky
repeated this argument almost word for word in 1920 when he
argued that "it can be said with complete justice that the
dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means
of the dictatorship of the party" and that there is "no
substitution at all" when the "power of the party" replaces
that of the working class. The party, he stressed, "has
afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming
transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into
the apparatus of the supremacy of labour." [Communism
and Terrorism] How labour could express this "supremacy"
when it could not even vote for its delegates (never mind
manage society) is never explained.
In 1905, the Bolsheviks saw the soviets as a rival to their
party and demanded it either accept their political program or
simply become a trade-union like organisation. They feared
that it pushed aside the party committee and thus led to
the "subordination of consciousness to spontaneity."
[Oskar Anweilier, Op. Cit., p. 78] This was following
Lenin in What is to be Done?, where he had argued that
the "spontaneous development of the labour movement leads
to it being subordinated to bourgeois ideology." [Essential
Works of Lenin, p. 82] This perspective is at the root
of all Bolshevik justifications for party power after
the October revolution.
Such a combination of political assumptions inevitably
leads to such events as Kronstadt. With the perception
that spontaneous developments inevitably leads to
bourgeois domination, any attempt to revoke Bolshevik
delegates and elect others to soviets must represent
counter-revolutionary tendencies. As the working class
is divided and subject to "vacillations" due to "wavering
and unstable elements among the masses themselves,"
working class people simply cannot manage society themselves.
Hence the need for "the Leninist principle" of "the
dictatorship of the party." And, equally logically, to
events like Kronstadt.
Thus Cornellius Castoriadis:
"To manage the work of others -- this is the beginning and
the end of the whole cycle of exploitation. The 'need' for
a specific social category to manage the work of others in
production (and the activity of others in politics and in
society), the 'need' for a separate business management and
for a Party to rule the State -- this is what Bolshevism
proclaimed as soon as it seized power, and this is what it
zealously laboured to impose. We know that it achieved its
ends. Insofar as ideas play a role in the development of
history -- and, in the final analysis, they play an enormous
role -- the Bolshevik ideology (and with it, the Marxist
ideology lying behind it) was a decisive factor in the
birth of the Russian bureaucracy." [Political and Social
Writings, vol. 3, p. 104]
Moreover, the logic of the Bolshevik argument is flawed:
"if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look
after their own interests themselves, how is it that they
will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who
must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this
problem of social alchemy, of producing a genius from the
votes of a mass of fools? And what will happen to the
minorities which are still the most intelligent, most
active and radical part of a society?" [Malatesta,
Anarchy, p. 53]
Hence the need for soviet democracy and self-management, of
the demands of the Kronstadt revolt. As Malatesta put it,
"[o]nly freedom or the struggle for freedom can be the
school for freedom." [Life and Ideas, p. 59] The "epic
of Kronstadt" proves "conclusively that what belongs
really to the workers and peasants can be neither
governmental nor statist, and what is governmental
and statist can belong neither to the workers nor
the peasants." [Voline, The Unknown Revolution,
p. 503]
Anarchists are well aware that differences in political
perspective exists within the working class. We are also
aware of the importance of revolutionaries organising
together to influence the class struggle, raising the
need for revolution and the creation of working class
organisations which can smash and replace the state with
a system of self-managed communes and workers' councils.
However, we reject the Bolshevik conclusion for centralised
power (i.e. power delegated to the centre) as doomed to
failure. Rather, we agree with Bakunin who argued that
revolutionary groups must "not seek anything for themselves,
neither privilege nor honour nor power" and reject "any
idea of dictatorship and custodial control." The "revolution
everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control
must always belong to the people organised into a free
federation of agricultural and industrial associations . . .
organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary
delegations . . . [who] will set out to administer public
services, not to rule over peoples." [Michael Bakunin:
Selected Writings, p. 172]
Anarchists seek to influence working people directly, via
their natural influence in working class organisations
like workers' councils, unions and so on. Only by discussion,
debate and self-activity can the political perspectives
of working class people develop and change. This is impossible
in a centralised system based on party dictatorship. Debate
and discussion are pointless if they have no effect on the
process of the revolution nor if working people cannot elect
their own delegates. Nor can self-activity be developed if
the government uses "revolutionary coercion" against "waving
or unstable elements" (i.e. those who do not unquestioningly
follow the orders of the government or practice initiative).
In other words, the fact Bolshevism uses to justify its support
for party power is, in fact, the strongest argument against it.
By concentrating power in the hands of a few, the political
development of the bulk of the population is hindered.
No longer in control of their fate, of their revolution,
they will become pray to counter-revolutionary tendencies.
Nor was the libertarian approach impossible to implement during
a revolution or civil war. Anarchists applied their ideas
very successfully in the Makhnovist movement in the Ukraine.
In the areas they protected, the Makhnovists refused to
dictate to the workers and peasants what to do:
"The freedom of the peasants and workers, said the Makhnovists,
resides in the peasants and workers themselves and may
not be restricted. In all fields of their lives it is
up to the workers and peasants to construct whatever
they consider necessary. As for the Makhnovists -- they
can only assist them with advice, by putting at their
disposal the intellectual or military forced they need,
but under no circumstances can the Makhnovists prescribe
for them in advance." [Peter Arshinov, The History of
the Makhnovist Movement, p. 148]
The Makhnovists urged workers to form free soviets and
labour unions and to use them to manage their own fates.
They organised numerous conferences of workers' and peasants'
delegates to discuss political and military developments
as well as to decide how to re-organise society from the
bottom up in a self-managed manner. After they had liberated
Aleksandrovsk, for example, they "invited the working
population to participant in a general conference of the
workers of the city . . . and it was proposed that the
workers organise the life in the city and the functioning
of the factories with their own forces and their own
organisations." [Op. Cit., p. 149] In contrast, the
Bolsheviks tried to ban congresses of workers', peasants'
and soldiers' delegates organised by the Makhnovists
(once by Dybenko and once by Trotsky). [Op. Cit., pp. 98-104
and 120-5]
The Makhnovists replied by holding the conferences anyway,
asking "[c]an there exist laws made by a few people who
call themselves revolutionaries, which permit them to outlaw
a whole people who are more revolutionary than they are
themselves?" and "[w]hose interests should the revolution
defend: those of the Party or those of the people who set
the revolution in motion with their blood?" Makhno himself
stated that he "consider[ed] it an inviolable right of the
workers and peasants, a right won by the revolution, to call
conferences on their own account, to discuss their affairs."
[Op. Cit., p. 103 and p. 129]
These actions by the Bolsheviks should make the reader ponder
if the elimination of workers' democracy during the civil war
can be fully explained by the objective conditions facing
Lenin's government or whether Leninist ideology played an
important role in it. Indeed, the Kronstadt revolt occurred,
in part, because in February 1921 the administration of the
Baltic Fleet and the Communist Party organisation had collapsed,
so allowing "unauthorised meetings of ships' crews . . . [to]
tak[e] place behind the backs of their commissars, there being
too few loyal rank and file party members left to nip them in
the bud." [I. Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921, p. 212]
Thus, the anarchist argument is no utopian plan. Rather,
it is one which has been applied successfully in the same
circumstances which Trotskyists argue forced the Bolsheviks
to act as they did. As can be seen, a viable alternative
approach existed and was applied (see
the appendix on "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to
Bolshevism?" for more
on the Makhnovists).
The terrible objective circumstances facing the revolution
obviously played a key role in the degeneration of the
revolution. However, this is not the whole story. The
ideas of the Bolsheviks played a key role as well. The
circumstances the Bolsheviks faced may have shaped certain
aspects of their actions, but it cannot be denied that the
impulse for these actions were rooted in Bolshevik theory.
In regards to this type of analysis, the Trotskyist Pierre
Frank argues that anarchists think that bureaucratic
conceptions "beget bureaucracy" and that "it is ideas,
or deviations from them, that determine the character of
revolutions. The most simplistic kind of philosophical
idealism has laid low historical materialism." This means,
apparently, that anarchists ignore objective factors in the
rise of the bureaucracy such as "the country's backwardness,
low cultural level, and the isolation of the revolution."
[Lenin and Trotsky, Kronstadt, pp. 22-3]
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. What
anarchists argue (like Lenin before the October revolution)
is that every revolution will suffer from isolation,
uneven political development, economic problems and so
on (i.e. "exceptional circumstances," see
section 12).
The question is whether your revolution can survive them
and whether your political ideas can meet these challenges
without aiding bureaucratic deformations. As can be seen
from the Russian Revolution, Leninism fails that test.
Moreover, Frank is being incredulous. If we take his
argument seriously then we have to conclude that Bolshevik
ideology played no role in how the revolution developed.
In other words, he subscribes to the contradictory position
that Bolshevik politics were essential to the success of
the revolution and yet played no role in its outcome.
The facts of the matter is that people are faced with choices,
choices that arise from the objective conditions they face.
What decisions they make will be influenced by the ideas they
hold -- they will not occur automatically, as if people were
on auto-pilot -- and their ideas are shaped by the social
relationships they experience. Thus, someone placed into a
position of power over others will act in certain ways, have
a certain world view, which would be alien to someone subject
to egalitarian social relations.
So, obviously "ideas" matter, particularly during a revolution.
Someone in favour of centralisation, centralised power and who
equates party rule with class rule (like Lenin and Trotsky),
will act in ways (and create structures) totally different from
someone who believes in decentralisation and federalism. In other
words, political ideas do matter in society. Nor do anarchists
leave our analysis at this obvious fact, we also argue
that the types of organisation people create and work in
shapes the way they think and act. This is because specific
kinds of organisation have specific authority relations and
so generate specific social relationships. These obviously affect
those subject to them -- a centralised, hierarchical system will
create authoritarian social relationships which shape those
within it in totally different ways than a decentralised,
egalitarian system. That Frank denies this obvious fact
suggests he knows nothing of materialist philosophy and
subscribes to the distinctly lobotomised (and bourgeois)
"historical materialism" of Lenin (see Anton Pannekoek's
Lenin as Philosopher for details).
The attitude of Leninists to the Kronstadt event shows quite
clearly that, for all their lip-service to history from below,
they are just as fixated with leaders as is bourgeois history.
As Cornellius Castoriadis argues:
"Now, we should point out that it is not workers who write
history. It is always the others. And these others, whoever
they may be, have a historical existence only insofar as the
masses are passive, or active simply to support them, and
this is precisely what 'the others' will tell us at every
opportunity. Most of the time these others will not even
possess eyes to see and ears to hear the gestures and
utterances that express people's autonomous activity. In
the best of instances, they will sing the praises of this
activity so long as it miraculously coincides with their
own line, but they will radically condemn it, and impute
to it the basest motives, as soon as it strays therefrom.
Thus Trotsky describes in grandiose terms the anonymous
workers of Petrograd moving ahead of the Bolshevik party
or mobilising themselves during the Civil War, but later
on he was to characterise the Kronstadt rebels as 'stool
pigeons' and 'hirelings of the French High Command.' They
lack the categories of thought -- the brain cells, we might
dare say -- necessary to understand, or even to record,
this activity as it really occurs: to them, an activity
that is not instituted, that has neither boss nor program,
has no status; it is not even clearly perceivable, except
perhaps in the mode of 'disorder' and 'troubles.' The
autonomous activity of the masses belongs by definition
to what is repressed in history." [Op. Cit., p. 91]
The Trotskyist accounts of the Kronstadt revolt, with
their continual attempts to portray it as a White
conspiracy, proves this analysis is correct. Indeed, the
possibility that the revolt was a spontaneous mass revolt
with political aims was dismissed by one of them as "absurd"
and instead was labelled the work of "backward peasants"
being mislead by SRs and spies. Like the capitalist who
considers a strike the work of "outside agitators" and
"communists" misleading their workers, the Trotskyists
present an analysis of Kronstadt reeking of elitism and
ideological incomprehension. Independence on behalf of
the working class is dismissed as "backward" and to be
corrected by the "proletarian dictatorship." Clearly
Bolshevik ideology played a key role in the rise of
Stalinism.
Lastly, the supporters of Bolshevism argue that in suppressing
the revolt "the Bolsheviks only did their duty. They defended
the conquests of the revolution against the assaults of
the counterrevolution." [Wright, Op. Cit., p. 123] In
other words, we can expect more Kronstadts if these
"revolutionaries" gain power. The "temporary vacillations"
of future revolutions will, like Kronstadt, be rectified
by bullets when the Party "assert[s] its dictatorship
even if its dictatorship clashes even with the passing
moods of the workers' democracy." [Trotsky, quoted by
M. Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 78] No clearer condemnation of
Bolshevism as a socialist current is required.
And, we must ask, what, exactly, were these "conquests"
of the revolution that must be defended? The suppression of
strikes, independent political and labour organisations,
elimination of freedom of speech, assembly and press and,
of course, the elimination of soviet and union democracy
in favour of part dictatorship? Which, of course, for all
Leninists, is the real revolutionary conquest. Any one
who attacks that is, of course, a counter-revolutionary
(even if they are workers). Thus:
"Attitudes to the Kronstadt events, expressed . . . years
after the event often provide deep insight into the
political thinking of contemporary revolutionaries. They
may in fact provide a deeper insight into their conscious
or unconscious aims than many a learned discussion about
economics, or philosophy or about other episodes of
revolutionary history.
"It is a question of one's basic attitude as to what socialism
is all about. what are epitomised in the Kronstadt events
are some of the most difficult problems of revolutionary
strategy and revolutionary ethics: the problems of ends
and means, of the relations between Party and masses, in
fact whether a Party is necessary at all. Can the working
class by itself only develop a trade union consciousness?
. . .
"Or can the working class develop a deeper consciousness
and understanding of its interests than can any
organisations allegedly acting on its behalf? When
Stalinists or Trotskyists speak of Kronstadt as 'an
essential action against the class enemy' when some
more 'sophisticated' revolutionaries refer to it as
a 'tragic necessity,' one is entitled to pause for
thought. One is entitled to ask how seriously they
accept Marx's dictum that 'the emancipation of the
working class is the task of the working class itself.'
Do they take this seriously or do they pay mere lip
service to the words? Do they identify socialism
with the autonomy (organisational and ideological)
of the working class? Or do they see themselves,
with their wisdom as to the 'historic interests'
of others, and with their judgements as to what
should be 'permitted,' as the leadership around
which the future elite will crystallise and develop?
One is entitled not only to ask . . . but also
to suggest the answer!" ["Preface", Ida Mett's
The Kronstadt Uprising, pp. 26-7]
The issue is simple -- either socialism means the
self-emancipation of the working class or it does
not. Leninist justifications for the suppression of
the Kronstadt revolt simply means that for the
followers of Bolshevism, when necessary, the party
will paternalistically repress the working class for
their own good. The clear implication of this
Leninist support of the suppression of Kronstadt is
that, for Leninism, it is dangerous to allow working
class people to manage society and transform it as they
see fit as they will make wrong decisions (like vote for
the wrong party). If the party leaders decide a decision
by the masses is incorrect, then the masses are
overridden (and repressed). So much for "all power
to the soviets" or "workers' power."
Ultimately, Wright's comments (and those like it) show
that Bolshevism's commitment to workers' power and
democracy is non-existent. What is there left of
workers' self-emancipation, power or democracy when
the "workers state" represses the workers for trying
to practice these essential features of any real form
of socialism? It is the experience of Bolshevism in
power that best refutes the Marxist claim that the
workers' state "will be democratic and participatory."
The suppression of Kronstadt was just one of a series of
actions by the Bolsheviks which began, before the start
of the Civil War, with them abolishing soviets which
elected non-Bolshevik majorities, abolishing elected
officers and soldiers soviets in the Red Army and Navy
and replacing workers' self-management of production by
state-appointed managers with "dictatorial" powers (see
sections H.4 and
2 for details).
As Bakunin predicted, the "workers' state" did not,
could not, be "participatory" as it was still a state.
Kronstadt is part of the empirical evidence which proves
Bakunin's predictions on the authoritarian nature of Marxism.
These words by Bakunin were confirmed by the Kronstadt
rebellion and the justifications made at the time and
afterwards by the supporters of Bolshevism:
"What does it mean, 'the proletariat raised to a governing class?'
Will the entire proletariat head the government? The Germans
number about 40 million. Will all 40 million be members of the
government? The entire nation will rule, but no one would be
ruled. Then there will be no government, there will be no
state; but if there is a state, there will also be those who
are ruled, there will be slaves.
"In the Marxists' theory this dilemma is resolved in a simple
fashion. By popular government they mean government of the
people by a small number of representatives elected by the
people. So-called popular representatives and rulers of
the state elected by the entire nation on the basis of
universal suffrage -- the last word of the Marxists, as
well as the democratic school -- is a lie behind which
the despotism of a ruling minority is concealed, a lie
all the more dangerous in that it represents itself as the
expression of a sham popular will.
"So . . . it always comes down to the same dismal result:
government of the vast majority of the people by a privileged
minority. But this minority, the Marxists say, will consist of
workers. Yes, perhaps, of former workers, who, as soon as
they become rulers or representatives of the people will
cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole
workers' world from the heights of the state. They will no
longer represent the people but themselves and their own
pretensions to govern the people. . .
"They say that this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a
necessary transitional device for achieving the total
liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the
goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. Thus,
for the masses to be liberated they must first be
enslaved. . . . They claim that only a dictatorship
(theirs, of course) can create popular freedom. We
reply that no dictatorship can have any other objective
than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender
and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.
Liberty can only be created by liberty, by an
insurrection of all the people and the voluntary
organisation of the workers from below upward."
[Statism and Anarchy, pp. 178-9]
