http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1938/trotsky-protests.htm




First Published: by The Anarchist Federation, Glasgow, 1938;
Editor’s Introduction: This pamphlet grew out of an article for Vanguard, the Anarchist monthly published in New York City. It appeared in the July issue, 1938, but as the space of the magazine is limited, only part of the manuscript could be used. It is here given in a revised and enlarged form.


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I have before me two numbers, February and April, 1938, of the New International, Trotsky’s official magazine. They contain articles by John G. Wright, a hundred per cent. Trotskyist, and the Grand Mogul himself, purporting to be a refutation of the charges against him in re Kronstadt. Mr. Wright is merely echoing the voice of his master, and his material is in no way first hand, or from personal contact with the events of 1921. I prefer to pay my respects to Leon Trotsky. He has at least the doubtful merit of having been a party to the “liquidation” of Kronstadt.

There are, however, several very rash mis-statements in Wright’s article that need to be knocked on the head. I shall, therefore, proceed to do so at once and deal with his master afterwards.

John G. Wright claims that The Kronstadt Rebellion, by Alexander Berkman, “is merely a restatement of the alleged facts and interpretations of the Right Social Revolutionists with a few insignificant alterations” – (culled from “The Truth About Russia in Volya, Russia, Prague, 1921”).

The writer further accuses Alexander Berkman of “brazenness, plagiarism, and making, as is his custom, a few insignificant alterations, and hiding the real source of what appears as his own appraisal.” Alexander Berkman’s life and work have placed him among the greatest revolutionary thinkers and fighters, utterly dedicated to his ideal. Those who knew him will testify to his sterling quality in all his actions, as well as his integrity as a serious writer. They will certainly be amused to learn from Mr. Wright that Alexander Berkman was a “plagiarist” and “brazen," and that “his custom is making a few insignificant alterations. . ...”

The average Communist, whether of the Trotsky or Stalin brand, knows about as much of Anarchist literature and its authors as, let us say, the average Catholic knows about Voltaire or Thomas Paine. The very suggestion that one should know what one’s opponents stand for before calling them names would be put down as heresy by the Communist hierarchy. I do not think, therefore, that John G. Wright deliberately lies about Alexander Berkman. Rather do I think that he is densely ignorant.

It was Alexander Berkman’s life-long habit to keep diaries. Even during the fourteen years’ purgatory he had endured in the Western Penitentiary in the United States, Alexander Berkman had managed to keep up his diary which he succeeded in sending out sub rosa to me. On the S.S. “Buford” which took us on our long perilous cruise of 28 days, my comrade continued his diary and he kept up this old habit through the 23 months of our stay in Russia.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, conceded by conservative critics even to be comparable with Feodor Dostoyevsky’s Dead House, was fashioned from his diary. The Kronstadt Rebellion and his Bolshevik Myth are also the offspring of his day-by-day record in Russia. It is stupid, therefore, to charge that Berkman’s brochure about Kronstadt “is merely a restatement of the alleged facts... .” from the S.R. work that appeared in Prague.

On a par in accuracy with this charge against Alexander Berkman by Wright is his accusation that my old pal had denied the existence of General Kozlovsky in Kronstadt.

The Kronstadt Rebellion, page 15, states: “There was indeed a former General Kozlovsky in Kronstadt. It was Trotsky who had placed him there as an artillery specialist. He played no role whatever in the Kronstadt events.” This was borne out by none other than Zinoviev who was then still at the zenith of his glory. At the Extraordinary Session of the Petrograd Soviet, 4th March, 1921, called to decide the fate of Kronstadt, Zinoviev said: “Of course Kozlovsky is old and can do nothing, but the White Officers are back of him and are misleading the sailors.” Alexander Berkman, however, stressed the fact that the sailors would have none of Trotsky’s former pet General, nor would they accept the offer of provisions and other help of Victor Tchernov, leader of the Right S.R.’s in Paris (Socialist Revolutionists).

Trotskyists no doubt consider it bourgeois sentimentality to permit the maligned sailors the right to speak for themselves. I insist that this approach to one’s opponent is damnable Jesuitism and has done more to disintegrate the whole labour movement than anything else of the “sacred” tactics of Bolshevism.

That the reader may be in a position to decide between the criminal charge against Kronstadt and what the sailors had to say for themselves, I here reproduce the radio message to the workers of the world, 6th March, 1921: –

“Our cause is just: we stand for the power of soviets, not parties. We stand for freely elected representatives of the labouring masses. The substitute Soviets manipulated by the Communist Party have always been deaf to our needs and demands; the only reply we have ever received was shooting. ... Comrades! They not only deceive you; they deliberately pervert the truth and resort to most despicable defamation... In Kronstadt the whole power is exclusively in the hands of the revolutionary sailors, soldiers and workers – not with counter revolutionists led by some Kozlovsky, as the lying Moscow radio tries to make you believe... Do not delay, comrades! Join us, get in touch with us; demand admission to Kronstadt for your delegates. Only they will tell you the whole truth and will expose the fiendish calumny about Finnish bread and Entente offers.

“Long live the revolutionary proletariat and the peasantry!”

“Long live the power of freely elected Soviets!”

The sailors “led” by Kozlovsky, yet pleading with the workers of the world to send delegates that they might see whether there was any truth in the black calumny spread against them by the Soviet Press!

Leon Trotsky is surprised and indignant that anyone should dare to raise such a hue and cry over Kronstadt. After all, it happened so long ago, in fact seventeen years have passed, and it was a mere “episode in the history of the relation between the proletarian city and the petty bourgeois village.” Why should anyone want to make so much ado at this late day unless it is to “compromise the only genuine revolutionary current which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with its enemies, and which alone represents the future.” Leon Trotsky’s egotism known far and wide by his friends and his foes, has never been his weakest spot. Since his mortal enemy has endowed him with nothing short of a magic wand, his self-importance has reached alarming proportions.

Leon Trotsky is outraged that people should have revived the Kronstadt “episode” and ask questions about his part. It does not occur to him that those who have come to his defence against his detractor have a right to ask what methods he had employed when he was in power, and how he had dealt with those who did not subscribe to his dictum as gospel truth. Of course it was ridiculous to expect that he would beat his chest and say, “I, too, was but human and made mistakes. I, too, have sinned and have killed my brothers or ordered them to be killed.” Only sublime prophets and seers have risen to such heights of courage. Leon Trotsky is certainly not one of them. On the contrary, he continues to claim omnipotence in all his acts and judgments and to call anathema on the heads of anyone who foolishly suggests that the great god Leon Trotsky also has feet of clay.

He jeers at the documentary evidence left by the Kronstadt sailors and the evidence of those who had been within sight and hearing of the dreadful siege of Kronstadt. He calls them “false labels.” That does not, however, prevent him from assuring his readers that his explanation of the Kronstadt rebellion could be “substantiated and illustrated by many facts and documents.” Intelligent people may well ask why Leon Trotsky did not have the decency to present these “false labels” so that the people might be in a position to form a correct opinion of them.

Now, it is a fact that even capitalist courts grant the defendant the right to present evidence on his own behalf. Not so Leon Trotsky, the spokesman of the one and only truth, he who has "never repudiated his banner and has never compromised with its enemies."

One can understand such lack of common decency in John G. Wright. He is, as I have already stated, merely quoting holy Bolshevik scripture. But for a world figure like Leon Trotsky to silence the evidence of the sailors seems to me indicative of a very small character. The old saying of the leopard changing his spots but not his nature forcibly applies to Leon Trotsky. The Calvary he has endured during his years of exile, the tragic loss of those near and dear to him, and, more poignantly still, the betrayal by his former comrades in arms, have taught him nothing. Not a glimmer of human kindness or mellowness has affected Trotsky’s rancorous spirit.

What a pity that the silence of the dead sometimes speaks louder than the living voice. In point of truth the voices strangled in Kronstadt have grown in volume these seventeen years. Is it for this reason, I wonder, that Leon Trotsky resents its sound?

Leon Trotsky quotes Marx as saying, “that it is impossible to judge either parties or people by what they say about themselves.” How pathetic that he does not realise how much this applies to him! No man among the able Bolshevik writers has managed to keep himself so much in the foreground or boasted so incessantly of his share in the Russian Revolution and after as Leon Trotsky. By this criterion of his great teacher, one would have to declare all Leon Trotsky’s writing to be worthless, which would be nonsense of course.

In discrediting the motives which conditioned the Kronstadt uprising, Leon Trotsky records the following: “From different fronts I sent dozens of telegrams about the mobilisation of new ’reliable’ detachments from among the Petersburg workers and Baltic fleet sailors, but already in 1918, and in any case not later than 1919, the fronts began to complain that a new contingent of ‘Kronstadters’ were unsatisfactory, exacting, undisciplined, unreliable in battle and doing more harm than good.” Further on, on the same page, Trotsky charges that, “when conditions became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau more than once discussed the possibility of securing an ’internal loan’ from Kronstadt where a quantity of old provisions still remained, but the delegates of the Petrograd workers answered, ‘You will never get anything from them by kindness; they speculate in cloth, coal and bread. At present in Kronstadt every kind of riff-raff has raised its head.’” How very Bolshevik that is, not only to slay one’s opponents but also to besmirch their characters. From Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky to Stalin, this methods has ever been the same.

Now, I do not presume to argue what the Kronstadt sailors were in 1918 or 1919. I did not reach Russia until January, 1920. From that time on until Kronstadt was “liquidated” the sailors of the Baltic fleet were held up as the glorious example of valour and unflinching courage. Time on end I was told not only by Anarchists, Mensheviks and social revolutionists, but by many Communists, that the sailors were the very backbone of the Revolution. On the 1st of May, 1920, during the celebration and the other festivities organised for the first British Labour Mission, the Kronstadt sailors presented a large clear-cut contingent, and were then pointed out as among the great heroes who had saved the Revolution from Kerensky, and Petrograd from Yudenich. During the anniversary of October the sailors were again in the front ranks, and their re-enactment of the taking of the Winter Palace was wildly acclaimed by a packed mass.

Is it possible that the leading members of the party, save Leon Trotsky, were unaware of the corruption and the demoralisation of Kronstadt, claimed by him? I do not think so. Moreover, I doubt whether Trotsky himself held this view of the Kronstadt sailors until March, 1921. His story must, therefore, be an afterthought, or is it a rationalisation to justify the senseless “liquidation” of Kronstadt?

Granted that the personnel had undergone a change, it is yet a fact that the Kronstadters in 1921 were nevertheless far from the picture Leon Trotsky and his echo have painted. In point of actual fact, the sailors met their doom only because of their deep kinship and solidarity with the Petrograd workers whose power of endurance of cold and hunger had reached the breaking point in a series of strikes in February, 1921. Why have Leon Trotsky and his followers failed to mention this? Leon Trotsky knows perfectly well, if Wright does not, that the first scene of the Kronstadt drama was staged in Petrograd on 24th February, and played not by the sailors but by the strikers. For it was on this date that the strikers had given vent to their accumulated wrath over the callous indifference of the men who had prated about the dictatorship of the proletariat which had long ago deteriorated into the merciless dictatorship of the Communist Party.

Alexander Berkman’s entry in his diary of this historic day reads: –

“The Trubotchny mill workers have gone on strike. In the distribution of winter clothing, they complain, the Communists received undue advantage over the non-partisans. The Government refuses to consider the grievances till the men return to work.

“Crowds of strikers gathered in the street near the mills, and soldiers were sent to disperse them. They were Kursanti, Communist youths of the military academy. There was no violence.

“Now the strikers have been joined by the men from the Admiralty shops and Calernaya docks. There is much resentment against the arrogant attitude of the Government. A street demonstration was attempted, but mounted troops suppressed it.”

It was after the report of their Committee of the real state of affairs among the workers in Petrograd that the Kronstadt sailors did in 1921 what they had done in 1917. They immediately made common cause with the workers. The part of the sailors in 1917 was hailed as the red pride and glory of the Revolution. Their identical part in 1921 was denounced to the whole world as counter-revolutionary treason. Naturally, in 1917 Kronstadt helped the Bolsheviks into the saddle. In 1921 they demanded a reckoning for the false hopes raised in the masses, and the great promise broken almost immediately the Bolsheviks had felt entrenched in their power. A heinous crime indeed. The important phase of this crime, however, is that Kronstadt did not “mutiny” out of a clear sky. The cause for it was deeply rooted in the suffering of the Russian workers; the city proletariat, as well as the peasantry.

To be sure, the former commissar assures us that “the peasants reconciled themselves to the requisition as a temporary evil,” and that “the peasants approved of the Bolsheviki, but became increasingly hostile to the ‘Communists’.” But these contentions are mere fiction, as can be demonstrated by numerous proofs – not the least of them the liquidation of the peasant soviet, headed by Maria Spiridonova, and iron and fire used to force the peasants to yield up all their produce, including their grain for their spring sowing.

In point of historic truth, the peasants hated the régime almost from the start, certainly from the moment when Lenin’s slogan, “Rob the robbers,” was turned into “Rob the peasants for the glory of the Communist Dictatorship.” That is why they were in constant ferment against the Bolshevik Dictatorship. A case in point was the uprising of the Karelian Peasants drowned in blood by the Tsarist General Slastchev-Krimsky. If the peasants were so enamoured with the Soviet regime, as Leon Trotsky would have us believe, why was it necessary to rush this terrible man to Karelia.

He had fought against the Revolution from its very beginning and had led some of the Wrangel forces in the Crimea. He was guilty of fiendish barbarities to war prisoners and infamous as a maker of pogroms. Now Slastchev-Krimsky recanted and he returned to “his Fatherland.” This arch-counter revolutionist and Jew-baiter, together with several Tsarist generals and White Guardists, was received by the Bolsheviki with military honours. No doubt it was just retribution that the anti-Semite had to salute the Jew, Trotsky, his military superior. But to the Revolution and the Russian people the triumphal return of the imperialist was an outrage.

As a reward for his newly-fledged love of the Socialist Fatherland, Slastchev-Krimsky was commissioned to quell the Karelian peasants who demanded self-determination and better conditions.[1]

Leon Trotsky tells us that the Kronstadt sailors in 1919 would not have given up provisions by “kindness” – not that kindness had been tried at any time. In fact, this word does not exist in Bolshevik lingo. Yet here are these demoralised sailors, the riff-raff speculators, etc., siding with the city proletariat in 1921, and their first demand is for equalisation of rations. What villains these Kronstadters were, really!

Much is being made by both writers against Kronstadt of the fact that the sailors who, as we insist, did not premeditate the rebellion, but met on the 1st of March to discuss ways and means of aiding their Petrograd comrades, quickly formed themselves into a Provisional Revolutionary Committee. The answer to this is actually given by John G. Wright himself. He writes: “It is by no means excluded that the local authorities in Kronstadt bungled in their handling of the situation... . It is no secret that Kalinin and Commissar Kusmin, were none too highly esteemed by Lenin and his colleagues... . In so far as the local authorities were blind to the full extent of the danger or failed to take proper and effective measures to cope with the crisis, to that extent their blunders played a part in the unfolding events... .”

The statement that Lenin did not esteem Kalinin or Kusmin highly is unfortunately an old trick of Bolshevism to lay all blame on some bungler so that the heads may remain lily pure.

Indeed, the local authorities in Kronstadt did “bungle.” Kuzmin attacked the sailors viciously and threatened them with dire results. The sailors evidently knew what to expect from such threats. They could not but guess that if Kuzmin and Vassiliev were permitted to be at large their first step would be to remove arms and provisions from Kronstadt. This was the reason why the sailors formed their Provisional Revolutionary Committee. An additional factor, too, was the news that a committee of 30 sailors sent to Petrograd to confer with the workers had been denied the right to return to Kronstadt, that they had been arrested and placed in the Cheka.

Both writers make a mountain of a molehill of the rumours announced at the meeting of 1st March to the effect that a truckload of soldiers heavily armed were on their way to Kronstadt. Wright has evidently never lived under an air-tight dictatorship. I have. When every channel of human contact is closed, when every thought is thrown back on itself and expression stifled, then rumours rise like mushrooms from the ground and grow into terrifying dimensions. Besides, truckloads of soldiers and Chekists armed to their very teeth tearing along the streets in the day, throwing out their nets at night and dragging their human haul to the Cheka, was a frequent sight in Petrograd and Moscow during the time when I was there. In the tension of the meeting after Kuzmin’s threatening speech, it was perfectly natural for rumours to be given credence.

The news in the Paris Press about the Kronstadt uprising two weeks before it happened had been stressed in the campaign against the sailors as proof positive that they had been tools of the Imperialist gang and that rebellion had actually been hatched in Paris. It was too obvious that this yarn was used only to discredit the Kronstadters in the eyes of the workers.

In reality this advance news was like other news from Paris, Riga or Helsingfors, and which rarely, if ever, coincided with anything that had been claimed by the counter-revolutionary agents abroad. On the other hand, many events happened in Soviet Russia which would have gladdened the heart of the Entente and which they never got to know – events far more detrimental to the Russian Revolution caused by the dictatorship of the Communist Party itself. For instance, the Cheka which undermined many achievements of October and which already in 1921 had become a malignant growth on the body of the Revolution, and many other similar events which would take me too far afield to treat here.

No, the advance news in the Paris Press had no bearing whatever on the Kronstadt rebellion. In point of fact, no one in Petrograd in 1921 believed its connection, not even quite a number of Communists. As I have already stated, John G. Wright is merely an apt pupil of Leon Trotsky and therefore quite innocent of what most people within and outside of the party thought about this so-called “link.”

Future historians will no doubt appraise the Kronstadt “mutiny" in its real value. If and when they do, they will no doubt come to the conclusion that the uprising could not have come more opportunely if it had been deliberately planned.

The most dominant factor which decided the fate of Kronstadt was the N.E.P. (the New Economic Policy). Lenin, aware of the very considerable party opposition this new-fangled “revolutionary” scheme would meet, needed some impending menace to ensure the smooth and ready acceptance of the N.E.P. Kronstadt came along most conveniently. The whole crushing propaganda machine was immediately put into motion to prove that the sailors were in league with all the Imperialist powers, and all the counter-revolutionary elements to destroy the Communist State. That worked like magic. The N.E.P. was rushed through without a hitch.

Time alone will prove the frightful cost this manoeuvre has entailed. The three hundred delegates, the young Communist flower, rushed from the Party Congress to crush Kronstadt, were a mere handful of the thousands wantonly sacrificed. They went fervently believing the campaign of vilification. Those who remained alive had a rude awakening.

I have recorded a meeting with a wounded Communist in a hospital in My Disillusionment. It has lost nothing of its poignancy in the years since:

“Many of those wounded in the attack on Kronstadt had been brought to the same hospital, mostly Kursanti. I had an opportunity to speak to one of them. His physical suffering, he said, was nothing as compared with his mental agony. Too late he had realised that he had been duped by the cry of ‘counter-revolution.’ No Tsarist generals, no White Guardists in Kronstadt had led the sailors – he found only his own comrades, sailors, soldiers and workers, who had heroically fought for the Revolution."

No one at all in his senses will see any similarity between the N.E.P. and the demand of the Kronstadt sailors for the right of free exchange of products. The N.E.P. came to reintroduce the grave evils the Russian Revolution had attempted to eradicate. The free exchange of products between the workers and the peasants, between the city and the country, embodied the very raison d’etre of the Revolution. Naturally “the Anarchists were against the N.E.P.” But free exchange, as Zinoviev had told me in 1920, “is out of our plan of centralisation.” Poor Zinoviev could not possibly imagine what a horrible ogre the centralisation of power would become.

It is the idée fixe of centralisation of the dictatorship which early began to divide the city and the village, the workers and the peasants, not, as Leon Trotsky will have it, because “the one is proletarian ... . and the other petty bourgeois,” but because the dictatorship had paralysed the initiative of both the city proletariat and the peasantry.

Leon Trotsky makes it appear that the Petrograd workers quickly sensed “the petty bourgeois nature of the Kronstadt uprising and therefore refused to have anything to do with it.” He omits the most important reason for the seeming indifference of the workers of Petrograd. It is of importance, therefore, to point out that the campaign of slander, lies and calumny against the sailors began on the 2nd March, 1921. The Soviet Press fairly oozed poison against the sailors. The most despicable charges were hurled against them, and this was kept up until Kronstadt was liquidated on 17th March. In addition, Petrograd was put under martial law. Several factories were shut down and the workers thus robbed, began to hold counsel with each other. In the diary of Alexander Berkman, I find the following: –

“Many arrests are taking place. Groups of strikers guarded by Chekists on the way to prison are a common sight. There is great nervous tension in the city. Elaborate precautions have been taken to protect the Government institution. Machine guns are placed on the Astoria, the living quarters of Zinoviev and other prominent Bolsheviki. Official proclamations commanding immediate return of the strikers to the factories ... and warning the populace against congregating in the streets.

“The Committee of Defence has initiated a ‘clean-up of the city.’ Many workers suspected of sympathising with Kronstadt have been placed under arrest. All Petrograd sailors and part of the garrison thought to be ‘untrustworthy’ have been ordered to distant points, while the families of Kronstadt sailors living in Petrograd are held as hostages. The Committee of Defence notified Kronstadt that ‘the prisoners are kept as pledges’ for the safety of the Commissar of the Baltic Fleet, N. N. Kuzmin, the Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, T. Vassiliev, and other Communists. If the least harm is suffered by our comrades the hostages will pay with their lives.”

Under these iron-clad rules it was physically impossible for the workers of Petrograd to ally themselves with Kronstadt, especially as not one word of the manifestoes issued by the sailors in their paper was permitted to penetrate to the workers in Petrograd. In other words, Leon Trotsky deliberately falsifies the facts. The workers would certainly have sided with the sailors because they knew that they were not mutineers or counter-revolutionists, but that they had taken a stand with the workers as their comrades had done as long ago as 1905, and March and October, 1917. It is therefore a grossly criminal and conscious libel on the memory of the Kronstadt sailors.

In the New International on page 106, second column, Trotsky assures his readers that no one “we may say in passing, bothered in those days about the Anarchists.” That unfortunately does not tally with the incessant persecution of Anarchists which began in 1918, when Leon Trotsky liquidated the Anarchist headquarters in Moscow with machine guns. At that time the process of elimination of the Anarchists began. Even now so many years later, the concentration camps of the Soviet Government are full of the Anarchists who remained alive. Actually before the Kronstadt uprising, in fact in October 1920, when Leon Trotsky again had changed his mind about Machno, because he needed his help and his army to liquidate Wrangel, and when he consented to the Anarchist Conference in Kharkhov, several hundred Anarchists were drawn into a net and despatched to the Boutirka prison where they were kept without any charge until April, 1921, when they, together with other Left politicals, were forcibly removed in the dead of night and secretly sent to various prisons and concentration camps in Russia and Siberia. But that is a page of Soviet history of its own. What is to the point in this instance is that the Anarchists must have been thought of very much, else there would have been no reason to arrest them and ship them in the old Tsarist way to distant parts of Russia and Siberia.

Leon Trotsky ridicules the demands of the sailors for Free Soviets. It was indeed naive of them to think that free Soviets can live side by side with a dictatorship. Actually the free Soviets had ceased to exist at an early stage in the Communist game, as the Trade Unions and the co-operatives. They had all been hitched to the chariot wheel of the Bolshevik State machine. I well remember Lenin telling me with great satisfaction, “Your Grand Old Man, Enrico Malatesta, is for our soviets.” I hastened to say, “You mean free soviets, Comrade Lenin. I, too, am for them.” Lenin turned our talk to something else. But I soon discovered why Free Soviets had ceased to exist in Russia.

John G. Wright will have it that there was no trouble in Petrograd until 22nd February. That is on par with his other rehash of the “historic” Party material. The unrest and dissatisfaction of the workers were already very marked when we arrived. In every industry I visited I found extreme dissatisfaction and resentment because the dictatorship of the proletariat had been turned into a devastating dictatorship of the Communist Party with its different rations and discriminations. If the discontent of the workers had not broken loose before 1921 it was only because they still clung tenaciously to the hope that when the fronts would be liquidated the promise of the Revolution would be fulfilled. It was Kronstadt which pricked the last bubble.

The sailors had dared to stand by the discontented workers. They had dared to demand that the promise of the Revolution – all Power in the Soviets – should be fulfilled. The political dictatorship had slain the dictatorship of the proletariat. That and that alone was their unforgivable offense against the holy spirit of Bolshevism.

In his article Wright has a footnote to page 49, second column, wherein he states that Victor Serge in a recent comment on Kronstadt “concedes that the Bolsheviki, once confronted with the mutiny had no other recourse except to crush it.” Victor Serge is now out of the hospitable shores of the workers’ “fatherland.” I therefore do not consider it a breach of faith when I say that if Victor Serge made this statement charged to him by John G. Wright, he is merely not telling the truth. Victor Serge was one of the French Communist Section who was as much distressed and horrified over the impending butchery decided upon by Leon Trotsky to “shoot the sailors as pheasants” as Alexander Berkman, myself and many other revolutionists. He used to spend every free hour in our room running up and down, tearing his hair, clenching his fists in indignation and repeating that “something must be done, something must be done, to stop the frightful massacre.” When he was asked why he, as a party member, did not raise his voice in protest in the party session, his reply was that that would not help the sailors and would mark him for the Cheka and even silent disappearance. The only excuse for Victor Serge at the time was a young wife and a small baby. But for him to state now, after seventeen years, that “the Bolsheviki once confronted with the mutiny had no other recourse except to crush it,” is, to say the least, inexcusable. Victor Serge knows as well as I do that there was no mutiny in Kronstadt, that the sailors actually did not use their arms in any shape or form until the bombardment of Kronstadt began. He also knows that neither the arrested Communist Commissars nor any other Communists were touched by the sailors. I therefore call upon Victor Serge to come out with the truth. That he was able to continue in Russia under the comradely régime of Lenin, Trotsky and all the other unfortunates who have been recently murdered, conscious of all the horrors that are going on, is his affair, but I cannot keep silent in the face of the charge against him as saying that the Bolsheviki were justified in crushing the sailors.

Leon Trotsky is sarcastic about the accusation that he had shot 1,500 sailors. No, he did not do the bloody job himself. He entrusted Tuchachevsky, his lieutenant, to shoot the sailors “like pheasants” as he had threatened. Tuchachevsky carried out the order to the last degree. The numbers ran into legions, and those who remained after the ceaseless attack of Bolshevist artillery, were placed under the care of Dibenko, famous for his humanity and his justice.

Tuchachevsky and Dibenko, the heroes and saviours of the dictatorship! History seems to have its own way of meting out justice.

Leon Trotsky tries a trump card, when he asks, “Where and when were their great principles confirmed, in practice at least partially, at least in tendency?” This card, like all others he has already played in his life, will not win him the game. In point of fact Anarchist principles in practice and tendency have been confirmed in Spain. I agree, only partially. How could that be otherwise with all the forces conspiring against the Spanish Revolution? The constructive work undertaken by the National Confederation of Labour (the C.N.T.), and the Anarchist Federation of Iberia (the F.A.I.), is something never thought of by the Bolshevik régime in all the years of its power, and yet the collectivisation of the industries and the land stand out as the greatest achievement of any revolutionary period. Moreover, even if Franco should win, and the Spanish Anarchists be exterminated, the work they have started will continue to live. Anarchist principles and tendencies are so deeply rooted in Spanish soil that they cannot be eradicated.

1. “My Disillusionment in Russia,” p. 239.


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Leon Trotsky, John G. Wright and the Spanish Anarchists.
During the four years civil war in Russia the Anarchists almost to a man stood by the Bolsheviki, though they grew more daily conscious of the impending collapse of the Revolution. They felt in duty bound to keep silent and to avoid everything that would bring aid and comfort to the enemies of the Revolution.

Certainly the Russian Revolution fought against many fronts and many enemies, but at no time were the odds so frightful as those confronting the Spanish people, the Anarchists and the Revolution. The menace of Franco, aided by German and Italian man power and military equipment, Stalin’s blessing transferred to Spain, the conspiracy of the Imperialist powers, the betrayal by the so-called democracies and, not the least, the apathy of the international proletariat, far outweigh the dangers that surrounded the Russian Revolution. What does Trotsky do in the face of such a terrible tragedy? He joins the howling mob and thrusts his own poisoned dagger into the vitals of the Spanish Anarchists in their most crucial hour. No doubt the Spanish Anarchists have committed a grave error. They failed to invite Leon Trotsky to take charge of the Spanish Revolution and to show them how well he had succeeded in Russia that it may be repeated all over again on Spanish soil. That seems to be his chagrin.

You dogmatic muppet. I don't think you'll convince anarchists, or libertarians generally, to support an authoritarian dogma on the grounds that an 85 year-old battle was actually between one set of authoritarians and another, not authoritarians versus libertarians.

"There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party" - Argentina anyone?

Divide and rule
divide et impera
split and wreck
etc. etc. etc.

so someone wants anarchists and trotskyists to argue with each other

who might that somebody be?
what are their interests?
what do they want (not to happen)?


with apologies to master Bob;
they come spreading isms and schisms
like they want to divide and rule, yeah


(May I translate for those of you who dont get it:

DONT FEED THE TROLLS!

First problem. Given that Red Army soldiers who refused to fight were surely less likely to be punished if they gave technical/military rather than political reasons, surely the former would be used to cover for the latter.

Second problem. When the Kronstadt rebellion happened, the civil war was OVER. In fact the rebels waited for the war to be over before they rebelled. Evidence is in Brinton’s pamphlet “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control”:
Available here as PDF
 http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/varpams/bolshies&workercontrol.pdf
and here as HTML
 http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html

According to Brinton’s chronology,

Jan 1920 – Whites collapse in Siberia; Britain, France and Italy lift the blockade
Nov 14th 1920 – General Wrangel evacuates Siberia – this is the end of the civil war.
March 17th, 1921 – Kronstadt uprising begins

In other words, there are FIVE MONTHS between the end of the civil war and the Kronstadt uprising!

Actually Kronstadt is not the worst of what the Bolsheviks did, because they had been union-busting from at least 1919.

Third problem. Why did the Bolsheviks suppress a rebellion all but a handful of the demands of which were the same as those of the Bolsheviks in 1917? In fact, this account elides the rebels’ demands completely.

Here is the full list of demands:
 http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob19.html
Release socialist political prisoners, re-elect the Soviets by secret ballot, freedom of press for socialists/workers/peasants, freedom of association for trade unions etc., elect a committee to review cases of imprisonment, convene a non-party congress of workers and peasants for Petrograd, abolish state funding for Bolshevik propaganda… Where is the great horror at all this coming from? By the way, the only allegedly non-socialist demands, no. 9 (peasant economic freedom) and no. 10 (individual artisan production), were to be conceded a few years later in the NEP… Notice that “soviets without communists” is NOT one of the demands, as Trotsky later insists it is. Worse still, he says that “The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie.” They somehow managed to have a programme when it was impossible for them to have one!

Fourth problem. This new evidence does not in the slightest prove the absurd claims made by Lenin and Trotsky, such as that a White fleet was off the coast just waiting to be allowed into the port. Nor has the new evidence proved the claim that peasant annoyance at a bad harvest was the cause of the rebellion.

Here is the entire text of Trotsky’s “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”:
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/kronstadt/trotsky_hue_cry.html

Notice the class purism of the analysis. Firstly, that if the movement is “peasants” or “petty bourgeois”, it is by definition reactionary. Secondly, that the claims of the insurgents are not to be taken “at face value”, in terms of what they actually say, but read sideways through such external class categories. And of course, the interest of the workers is identified with the Bolshevik dictatorship! And if the peasants resist this, it only shows their reaction! What a neat trick! Suddenly the political agendas need not be taken into account because everything is already known in advance, from predetermined and dogmatic definitions of class. “From the class point of view… the basic criterion for politics and history…” But the class categories are determined in advance. And the workers were no more in control in 1921 than the peasants. The bureaucracy was in control. Why is the “class analysis” not applied to the bureaucracy? Why is the party supposed to be able to “represent” the working class even though it is itself bureaucratic and not proletarian in terms of its own relationship to the means of production?

Trotsky does not try to demonstrate that the Kronstadt rebels were in fact counterrevolutionary. He first of all asserts in advance that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be defended at any cost, and deduces from this that the rebellion has to be smashed. Because the dictatorship is proletarian, therefore the rebellion is counterrevolutionary. Neat wordplay, but proves nothing! For where is it proven that the dictatorship is proletarian? Is this not precisely what is challenged by the critics of the Kronstadt massacre?

There’s a long quote from Lenin here, where he claims not that a few former Whites had defected, but that the entire White forces were amassed in Kronstadt and that furthermore, extra forces were prepared offshore to be landed imminently:
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/mett/time8.html

Also on the net: Ida Mett’s book on Kronstadt
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/mett.html

Eyewitness accounts of the Russian revolution
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia.html

Make no mistake. We cannot stand by while turrists like the Kronstate bandits prepare to murder innocent Russians. We knew for certain that the turrists had stockpiles of chemical, biological and nukular weapons. We knew that someday, the rogue bandits of Kronstate would link up with the turrists of al-Kayda to wreak mass destruction and turror. In these times of danger, inaction is not an option. The homeland security of the Russian state is in jeopardy if we let down our guard. The turrists who struck our country on September the 11th could strike again at any time. To do nothing, to appease the turrists, would be to give up the lives of our own innocent people.

Make no mistake. There were weapons of mass destruction in Kronstate. We had to act and we acted swiftly and firmly to eliminate the threat posed by these turrists. And we will do the same again, whenever turrists threaten our nation.

I really don't give a shit what happened one hundred years ago. Live in the present day rather than digging up old arguments about the Russian "Revolution". Its 2004 if you hadn't noticed and the world's a different place.

Look to the future, not the past. There's fuck all to learn from history, you can pick and choose the bits of the past to suit your own dogma, it doesn't mean shit to most people.

The quality of the Trotskyite article can be found in this
sentence:

"There were a lot of other movements that were lead by people
raising the slogan of 'Soviets without Bolsheviks', etc."

The kronstadt rebels did not raise this slogan, ever.

If you are interested in the truth about the revolt, visit
"An Anarchist FAQ":

H.7 What was the Kronstadt rebellion?
 http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html

This webpage quotes from all the respected sources on Kronstadt,
including the soviet archives. And guess what? The anarchists
are/were right and Trotsky wrong.

Not going to comment directly about Kronstadt here. Some interesting new material plus some good ol stuff has been posted here. Been round these circles time and again.

However, the post by 'Not a Trot' deserves some comment:

They quote "There cannot be a revolution without a revolutionary party" and then add: -"Argentina anyone? "

While I'm not sure anymore whether we need a 'revolutionary party', neither am I sure about spontaneous revolution based on both older history and more recent events.

Has there been a revolution in Argentina? I don't think so.

There has been an uprising in Argentina with revolutionary potential against the disaster and ruin global capitalism has bought them.

But they have not yet broken the power that the state and capital has. They have not broken and disorganised the power of the ruling class - an essential first feature of revolution, even in its most limited political sense. (We are not even talking here about the fuller meaning of a successfull revolution, the emergence of a new social and economic epoch without classes and states, which has yet to happen).

So the Leninist/Trotskyist argument about the necessity of a 'revolutionary party' is not refuted by mentioning recent events in Argentina.

Of course, there has been a fabulous and creative uprising and an inspiring revolutionary struggle by the workers, the poor and the disposessed in Argentina

In this struggle, many elements of a new society could be glimpsed.

But the old Leninist or Trotskysist argument is not that one needs a revolutionary party to start the class war. They think we need one to win the class war, to bring it to a successfull comnclusion - at least in terms of the shattering of the power of the capitalist state.

Unfortunately, the eveidence from Argentina does not yet prove that an uprising can spontaneously escalate into a full blown revolution.

This does not mean that we should fall into the old dogmas of either Bolshevism or Anarchism. We should lean from an honest anmd realistic apraisal of the events in todays global class struggle and its potential.

But at the same time, we should not forget our history and the lessons and traditions of past generations of revolutionaries, be they 'Marxist' or 'Anarchist'. We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater! We should just not be prisioners of these past traditions either.

Argentina isn't a full-blown revolution (yet) but its fairly free from dogma, the de-emphasis of class has been interesting to observe for those schooled in european revolutionary theory - from the unity of the piquetueros and the mothers of the disappeared to the 'bougeoise block' of middle-class people demosishing banks with hammers in anger at the banks theft from society and in solidarity with working class getting screwed by the whole process. An interesting route to classless society - 'we're not classes, we're people'.

There are plenty of successful historical revolutions without party leadership, though these have been pre-capitalist ones. There have been very few successful revolutions against capitalism due to it's ability to abosorb 'sparks of discontent to prevent them catching fire' (can't remember who said that but its nice). Even the anarchists in the spanish revolution worked through a syndicalist union (the CNT I think, but might be wrong) which was not disimilar to a political party, though in theory democratic. Infamously 'anarchists' also joined the capitalist government.

However, far from confirming the need for a party apparatus, both the Russian and Spanish revolutions confirm the problem with this approach. In Marxist theory, the purpose of the revolutionary party is to crush the capitalist backlash that almost inevitably follows social revolution. Subsequently, the state is meant to disband, so that Marx's ultimate vision of statless communism (anarchism?) can arise.

The problem lies in creating an all powerful state in waiting in a 'revolutionary party' history has shown you merely replace an unaccountable class of capitalists with an unaccountable class of bureaucrats. Bureaucracies don't disband themselves, in fact they tend to grow exponentially. Thus a new state apparatus is formed which is unnacountable to the people - the bolsheviks largely ignored the soviets dispite Lenin's almost syndicalist slogan in 1917 of 'all power to the soviets'. Creating that much centralised power, and expecting it not to corrupt even the most well meaning of people is absurd. Trotsky handled Kronstadt like any other politician - by sacrificing other people's children to a greater dogmatic ideal that was best understood by him, and not worthy of other people's input (save Lenin, senior bolsheviks perhaps).

Could someone please hide this since it has been up about a million times before.

if a similar event happened today I would support the crushing of the rebels. they were fighing on the side of the imperialists. anarchists should rise above the level of supporting the reactionary coup plotters. here we see the generals waiting to pounce on proletarian russia to carve it up for the capitalists, and then hoodlum elements from the rural petty bourgois area launch their own futile putsh without the support of the russian working class. no wonder the rebellion went no where.

as for makhno, why do anti-authoritarians support this thug? he raped, executed and pillaged and was never loyal to any side in the civil war. in effect he was an opportunist bandit. lets not romanticise the horror of his social role.

Thats funny, numerous posts above have proven you wrong and yet al you can do is hold your ears and repeat the dogma. tHIS FOR YOURSELF?Nah, not if you are a marxist-leninist!

"if a similar event happened today I would support the crushing
of the rebels. they were fighing on the side of the imperialists."

If you knew anything about the Kronstadt revolt you would
know that they rose in rebellion in solidarity with the striking
workers of Petrograd. Workers the Bolsheviks were busy repressing
to remain in power.

but, then again, you admit that your "revolutionary" government would
crush a similar group of rebels demanding democracy and freedom for
working class people. This shows you exactly who has power under
Leninism -- it's not the workers!

"anarchists should rise above the level of supporting the reactionary
coup plotters."

Anyone with any knowledge of Kronstadt would know that it was not a
plot but rather a spontaneous revolt by working class people against
a dictatorship which was busy repressing striking workers. The
spontaneous nature of the revolt and its utter lack of links with
the whites can be found in the soviet archives (some revelent quotes
are provided in section H.7 of "An Anarchist FAQ").

"here we see the generals waiting to pounce on proletarian russia to
carve it up for the capitalists, and then hoodlum elements from the
rural petty bourgois area launch their own futile putsh without the
support of the russian working class. no wonder the rebellion went
no where."

Anyone with any knowledge of Kronstadt would know that the vast majority
of the rebels had been there from 1917. 93% of the sailors of the two
battleships which started the revolt had joined the navy in 1917 or
before. As for "without the support of the russian working class" the
revolt was in solidarity with the russian working class. The Bolsheviks
in Petrograd imposed martial law and lied about the uprising and, therefore,
the Kronstadt revolt was isolated. State repression explains why the
rebellion "went no where."

But that would be obvious to anyone who knew anything about the Kronstadt
revolt. As can be seen, Leninists know nothing about it. This, however,
does not stop them wittering on about it.

So, if you are interested in the facts of the rebellion, visit:

 http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html

Moving onto another subject that Leninists know nothing about but do not
stop wittering on about...

"as for makhno, why do anti-authoritarians support this thug? he raped,
executed and pillaged and was never loyal to any side in the civil war. in
effect he was an opportunist bandit. lets not romanticise the horror of
his social role."

Which shows the ignorance of our Leninist. Makhno "executed" people. As
did Lenin, in substantially greater numbers. And should we forget that
there was a civil war doing on? Perhaps so. As for "pillaged", well,
the Bolsheviks did that. Their grain policy was based on pillaging the
peasants (and the workers, as they did not control the product of their
labour). The Makhnovists had substantial support in the countryside so
suggesting that their "pillaging" was substantially less than the
Bolsheviks.

As for "never loyal to any side in the civil war," what can I say? The
Bolsheviks broke three agreements with the Makhnovists. So much for
loyality! And the Makhnovists were *never* loyal to the Whites. They
fought them continually. Indeed, Denikin considered the Makhnovists his
greatest foe. The lie that Makhno worked with the Whites was created
by the Bolsheviks. Today their followers repeat it. As for being "an
opportunistic bandit" the facts are different. The Makhnovists had a
strong social base and had a clear vision of a new society which they
applied in practice. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Makhnovists encouraged
free soviets, speech and organisation. For details visit:

 http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH11.html

So it would be far better to say "lets not romanticise the horror of
the Bolsheviks social role." As the fate of Kronstadt and the Makhno
movement shows, they would stop at nothing to maintain their
dictatorship *over* the proletariat. It is sad that their lies are
still repeated today.

It is funny that anarchists criticise Marxists for being 'religiously devoted' to one man. It seems that all anarchists have their very own bible, the infoshop website. If in doubt during an argument, refer to the Anarchist FAQ.

Well when someone posts Trotsky's interpretation of the Kronstadt incident, then it is shouted down. All the original poster was doing was trying to show the anarchists on here a opposing view to that of Goldman et al.

Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt
By Leon Trotsky

January 15, 1938

A "People's Front" of Denouncers

The campaign around Kronstadt is being carried on with undiminished vigor in certain circles. One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago, but only yesterday. Participating in the campaign with equal zeal and under one and the same slogan are Anarchists, Russian Mensheviks, left Social Democrats of the London Bureau, individual blunderers, Miliukov's paper, and, on occasion, the big capitalist press. A "People's Front" of its own kind!

Only yesterday I happened across the following lines in a Mexican weekly which is both reactionary Catholic and "democratic": "Trotsky ordered the shooting of 1,500 [?] Kronstadt sailors, these purest of the pure. His policy when in power differed in no way from the present policy of Stalin." As is known, the left Anarchists draw the same conclusion. When for the first time in the press I briefly answered the questions of Wendelin Thomas, member of the New York Commission of Inquiry, the Russian Mensheviks' paper immediately came to the defense of the Kronstadt sailors and…of Wendelin Thomas. Miliukov's paper came forward in the same spirit. The Anarchists attacked me with still greater vigor. All these authorities claim that my answer was completely worthless. This unanimity is all the more remarkable since the Anarchists defend, in the symbol of Kronstadt, genuine anti-state communism; the Mensheviks, at the time of the Kronstadt uprising, stood openly for the restoration of capitalism; and Miliukov stands for capitalism even now.

How can the Kronstadt uprising cause such heartburn to Anarchists, Mensheviks, and "liberal" counter-revolutionists, all at the same time? The answer is simple: all these groupings are interested in compromising the only genuinely revolutionary current, which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with its enemies, and alone represents the future. It is because of this that among the belated denouncers of my Kronstadt "crime" there are so many former revolutionists or semi-revolutionists, people who have lost their program and their principles and who find it necessary to divert attention from the degradation of the Second International or the perfidy of the Spanish Anarchists. As yet, the Stalinists cannot openly join this campaign around Kronstadt but even they, of course, rub their hands with pleasure; for the blows are directed against "Trotskyism", against revolutionary Marxism, against the Fourth International!

Why in particular has this variegated fraternity seized precisely upon Kronstadt? During the years of the revolution we clashed not a few times with the Cossacks, the peasants, even with certain layers of workers (certain groups of workers from the Urals organized a volunteer regiment in the army of Kolchak!). The antagonism between the workers as consumers and the peasants as producers and sellers of bread lay, in the main, at the root of these conflicts. Under the pressure of need and deprivation, the workers themselves were episodically divided into hostile camps, depending upon stronger or weaker ties with the village. The Red Army also found itself under the influence of the countryside. During the years of the civil war it was necessary more than once to disarm discontented regiments. The introduction of the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) attenuated the friction but far from eliminated it. On the contrary, it paved the way for the rebirth of kulaks [wealthy peasants] and led, at the beginning of this decade, to the renewal of civil war in the village. The Kronstadt uprising was only an episode in the history of the relations between the proletarian city and the petty-bourgeois age. It is possible to understand this episode only in connection with the general course of the development of the class struggle during the revolution.

Kronstadt differed from a long series of other petty-bourgeois movements and uprisings only by its greater external effect. The problem here involved a maritime fortress under Petrograd itself. During the uprising proclamations were issued and radio broadcasts were made. The Social Revolutionaries and the Anarchists, hurrying from Petrograd, adorned the uprising with "noble" phrases and gestures. All this left traces in print. With the aid of these "documentary" materials (i.e., false labels), it is not hard to construct a legend about Kronstadt, all the more exalted since in 1917 the name Kronstadt was surrounded by a revolutionary halo. Not idly does the Mexican magazine quoted above ironically call the Kronstadt sailors the "purest of the pure".

The play upon the revolutionary authority of Kronstadt is one of the distinguishing features of this truly charlatan campaign. Anarchists, Mensheviks, liberals, reactionaries try to present the matter as if at the beginning of 1921 the Bolsheviks turned their weapons on those very Kronstadt sailors who guaranteed the victory of the October insurrection. Here is the point of departure for all the subsequent falsehoods. Whoever wishes to unravel these lies should first of all read the article by Comrade J. G. Wright in the New International (February 1938). My problem is another one: I wish to describe the character of the Kronstadt uprising from a more general point of view.

Social and Political Groupings in Kronstadt

A revolution is "made" directly by a minority. The success of a revolution is possible, however, only where this minority finds more or less support, or at least friendly neutrality, on the part of the majority. The shift in different stages of the revolution, like the transition from revolution to counter-revolution, is directly determined by changing political relations between the minority and the majority, between the vanguard and the class.

Among the Kronstadt sailors there were three political layers: the proletarian revolutionists, some with a serious past and training; the intermediate majority, mainly peasant in origin; and finally, the reactionaries, sons of kulaks, shopkeepers, and priests. In czarist times, order on battleships and in the fortress could be maintained only so long as the officers, acting through the reactionary sections of the petty officers and sailors, subjected the broad intermediate layer to their influence or terror, thus isolating the revolutionists, mainly the machinists, the gunners, and the electricians, i.e., predominantly the city workers.

The course of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin in 1905 was based entirely on the relations among these three layers, i.e., on the struggle between proletarian and petty-bourgeois reactionary extremes for influence upon the more numerous middle peasant layer. Whoever has not understood this problem, which runs through the whole revolutionary movement in the fleet, had best be silent about the problems of the Russian revolution in general. For it was entirely, and to a great degree still is, a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for influence upon the peasantry. During the Soviet period the bourgeoisie has appeared principally in the guise of kulaks (i.e., the top stratum of the petty bourgeoisie), the "socialist" intelligentsia, and now in the form of the "Communist" bureaucracy. Such is the basic mechanism of the revolution in all its stages. In the fleet it assumed a more centralized, and therefore more dramatic expression.

The political composition of the Kronstadt Soviet reflected the composition of the garrison and the crews. The leadership of the soviets as early as the summer of 1917 belonged to the Bolshevik Party, which rested on the better sections of the sailors and included in its ranks many revolutionists from the underground movement who had been liberated from the hard-labor prisons. But I seem to recall that even in the days of the October insurrection the Bolsheviks constituted less than one-half of the Kronstadt Soviet. The majority consisted of SRS and Anarchists. There were no Mensheviks at all in Kronstadt. The Menshevik Party hated Kronstadt. The official SRs, incidentally, had no better attitude toward it. The Kronstadt SRs quickly went over into opposition to Kerensky and formed one of the shock brigades of the so-called "left" SR& They based themselves on the peasant part of the fleet and of the shore garrison. As for the Anarchists, they were the most motley group. Among them were real revolutionists, like Zhuk and Zhelezniakov, but these were the elements most closely linked to the Bolsheviks. Most of the Kronstadt "Anarchists" represented the city petty bourgeoisie and stood upon a lower revolutionary level than the SRs. The president of the soviet was a nonparty man, "sympathetic to the Anarchists," and in essence a peaceful petty clerk who had been formerly subservient to the czarist authorities and was now subservient ... to the revolution. The complete absence of Mensheviks, the "left" character of the SRs, and the Anarchist hue of the petty bourgeois were due to the sharpness of the revolutionary struggle in the fleet and the dominating influence of the proletarian sections of the sailors.

Changes During the Years of Civil War

This social and political characterization of Kronstadt; which, if desired, could be substantiated and illustrated by many facts and documents, is already sufficient to illuminate the upheavals which occurred in Kronstadt during the years of the civil war and as a result of which its physiognomy changed beyond recognition. Precisely about this important aspect of the question, the belated accusers say not one word, partly out of ignorance, partly out of malevolence.

Yes, Kronstadt wrote a heroic page in the history of the revolution. But the civil war began a systematic depopulation of Kronstadt and of the whole Baltic fleet. As early as the days of the October uprising, detachments of Kronstadt sailors were being sent to help Moscow. Other detachments were then sent to the Don, to the Ukraine, to requisition bread and organize the local power. It seemed at first as if Kronstadt were inexhaustible. From different fronts I sent dozens of telegrams about the mobilization of new "reliable" detachments from among the Petersburg workers and the Baltic sailors. But beginning as early as 1918, and in any case not later than 1919, the fronts began to complain that the new contingents of "Kronstadters" were unsatisfactory, exacting, undisciplined, unreliable in battle, and doing more harm than good. After the liquidation of Yudenich (in the winter of 1919), the Baltic fleet and the Kronstadt garrison were denuded of all revolutionary forces. All the elements among em that were of any use at all were thrown against Denikin in the south.152 If in 1917-18 the Kronstadt sailor stood considerably higher than the average level of the Red Army and formed the framework of its first detachments as well as the framework of e Soviet regime in many districts, those sailors who remained "peaceful" Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921, not fitting in n any of the fronts of the civil war, stood by this time on a level considerably lower, in general, than the average level of the Red Y, and included a great percentage of completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts.

Demoralization based on hunger and speculation had in general greatly increased by the end of the civil war. The so-called "sack-carriers" (petty speculators) had become a social light, threatening to stifle the revolution. Precisely in Kronstadt here the garrison did nothing and had everything it needed, the demoralization assumed particularly great dimensions. When conditions became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau more than once discussed the possibility of securing an "internal loan" from Kronstadt, where a quantity of old provisions still remained. But delegates of the Petrograd workers answered: "You will get nothing from them by kindness. They speculate in cloth, coal, and bread. At present in Kronstadt every kind of riffraff has raised its head." That was the real situation. It was not like the sugar-sweet idealizations after the event.

It must further be added that former sailors from Latvia and Estonia who feared they would be sent to the front and were preparing to cross into their new bourgeois fatherlands, Latvia and Estonia, had joined the Baltic fleet as "volunteers." These elements were in essence hostile to the Soviet authority and displayed this hostility fully in the days of the Kronstadt uprising.... Besides these there were many thousands of Latvian workers, mainly former farm laborers, who showed unexampled heroism on all fronts of the civil war. We must not, therefore, tar the Latvian workers and the "Kronstadters" with the same brush. We must recognize social and political differences.

The Social Roots of the Uprising

The problem of a serious student consists in defining, on the basis of the objective circumstances, the social and political character of the Kronstadt; mutiny and its place in the development of the revolution. Without this, "criticism" is reduced to sentimental lamentation of the pacifist kind in the spirit of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and their latest imitators.153 These gentlefolk do not have the slightest understanding of the criteria and methods of scientific research. They quote the proclamations of the insurgents like pious preachers quoting Holy Scriptures. They complain, moreover, that I do not take into consideration the "documents," i.e., the gospel of Makhno and the other apostles.154 To take documents "into consideration" does not mean to take them at their face value. Marx has said that it is impossible to judge either parties or peoples by what they say about themselves. The characteristics of a party are determined considerably more by its social composition, its past, its relation to different classes and strata, than by its oral and written declarations, especially during a critical moment of civil war. If, for example, we began to take as pure gold the innumerable proclamations of Negrin, Companys, Garcia Oliver, and Company, we would have to recognize these gentlemen as fervent friends of socialism. But in reality they are its perfidious enemies.

In 1917-18 the revolutionary workers led the peasant masses, not only of the fleet but of the entire country. The peasants seized and divided the land most often under the leadership of the soldiers and sailors arriving in their home districts. Requisitions of bread had only begun and were mainly from the landlords and kulaks at that. The peasants reconciled themselves to requisitions as a temporary evil. But the civil war dragged on for three years. The city gave practically nothing to the village and took almost everything from it, chiefly for the needs of war. The peasants approved of the "Bolsheviks" but became increasingly hostile to the "Communists." If in the preceding period the workers had led the peasants forward, the peasants now dragged the workers back. Only because of this change in mood could the Whites partially attract the peasants, and even the half-peasants-half-workers, of the Urals to their side. This mood, i.e., hostility to the city, nourished the movement of Makno, who seized and looted trains marked for the factories, the plants, and the Red Army, tore up railroad tracks, shot Communists, etc. Of course, Makhno called this the Anarchist struggle with the "state." In reality, this was a struggle of the infuriated petty property owner against the proletarian dictatorship. A similar movement arose in a number of other districts, especially in Tambovsky, under the banner of "Social Revolutionaries." Finally, in different parts of the country so-called "Green" peasant detachments were active. They did not want to recognize either the Reds or the Whites and shunned the city parties. The "Greens" sometimes met the Whites and received severe blows from them, but they did not, of course, get any mercy from the Reds. Just as the petty bourgeoisie is ground economically between the millstones of big capital and the proletariat, so the peasant partisan detachments were pulverized between the Red Army and the White.

Only an entirely superficial person can see in Makhno's bands or in the Kronstadt revolt a struggle between the abstract principles of Anarchism and "state socialism." Actually, these movements were convulsions of the peasant petty bourgeoisie which desired, of course, to liberate itself from capital but which at the same time did not consent to subordinate itself to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie does not know concretely what it wants, and by virtue of its position cannot know. That is why it so readily covered the confusion of its demands and hopes, now with the Anarchist banner, now with the populist, now simply with the "Green." Counterposing itself to the proletariat, it tried, flying all these banners, to turn the wheel of the revolution backwards.

The Counterrevolutionary Character of the Kronstadt Mutiny

There were, of course, no impassable bulkheads dividing the different social and political layers of Kronstadt. There were still at Kronstadt a certain number of qualified workers and technicians to take care of the machinery. But even they were identified by a method of negative selection as politically unreliable and of little use for the civil war. Some "leaders" of the uprising came from among these elements. However, this completely natural and inevitable circumstance, to which some accusers triumphantly point, does not change by one iota the anti-proletarian character of the revolt. Unless we are to deceive ourselves with pretentious slogans, false labels, etc., we shall see that the Kronstadt; uprising was nothing but an armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against the hardships of social revolution and the severity of the proletarian. dictatorship.

That was exactly the significance of the Kronstadt slogan, "Soviets without Communists," which was immediately seized upon, not only by the SRs but by the bourgeois liberals as well. As a rather farsighted representative of capital, Professor Miliukov understood that 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 serve only as a bridge from the proletarian dictatorship to capitalist restoration. They could play no other role, regardless, of the "ideas" of their participants. The Kronstadt uprising thus had a counterrevolutionary character.

From the class point of view, which-without offense to the honorable eclectics-remains the basic criterion not only for politics but for history, it is extremely important to contrast the behavior of Kronstadt to that of Petrograd in those critical days. The whole leading stratum of the workers had also been drawn out of Petrograd. Hunger and cold reigned in the deserted capital, perhaps even more fiercely than in Moscow. A heroic and tragic period! All were hungry and irritable. All were dissatisfied. In the factories there was dull discontent. Underground organizers sent by the SRs and the White- officers tried to link the military uprising with the movement of the discontented workers.

The Kronstadt paper wrote about barricades in Petrograd, about thousands being killed. The press of the whole world proclaimed the same thing. Actually the precise opp9site occurred. The Kronstadt; 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.

The NEP and the Kronstadt Uprising

Victor Serge, who, it would seem, is trying to manufacture a sort of synthesis of anarchism, POUMism, and Marxism, has intervened very unfortunately in the polemic about Kronstadt. In his opinion, the introduction of the NEP one year earlier could have averted the Kronstadt uprising. Let us admit that. But advice like this is very easy to give after the event. It is true, as Victor Serge remembers, that I had proposed the transition to the NEP as early as 1920. But I was not at all sure in advance of its success. It was no secret to me that the remedy could prove to be more dangerous than the malady itself. When I met, opposition from the leaders of the party, I did not appeal to the ranks, in order to avoid mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie against the workers. The experience of the ensuing twelve months was required to convince the party of the need for the new course. But the remarkable thing is that it was precisely the Anarchists all over the world who looked upon- the NEP as ... a betrayal of communism. But now the advocates of the Anarchists denounce us for not having introduced the NEP a year earlier.

In 1921 Lenin more than once openly acknowledged that the party's obstinate defense of the methods of Military Communism in had become a great mistake.156But does this change matters? Whatever the immediate or remote causes of the Kronstadt; rebellion, it was in its very essence a mortal danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Simply because it had been guilty of a political error, should the proletarian revolution really have committed suicide to punish itself?

Or perhaps it would have been sufficient to inform the Kronstadt sailors of the NEP decrees to pacify them? Illusion! The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie. They themselves did not clearly understand that what their fathers and brothers needed first of all was free trade. They were discontented and confused but they saw no way out. The more conscious, i.e., the rightist elements, acting behind the scenes, wanted the restoration of the bourgeois regime. But they did not say so out loud. The "left" wing wanted the liquidation of discipline, "free soviets," and better rations. The regime of the NEP could only gradually pacify the peasant, and, after him, the discontented sections of the army and the fleet. But for this time and experience were needed.

Most puerile of all is the argument that there was no uprising, that the sailors had made no threats, that they "only" seized the fortress and the battleships. It would seem that the Bolsheviks marched with bared chests across the ice against the fortress only because of their evil characters, their inclination to provoke conflicts artificially, their hatred of the Kronstadt sailors, or their hatred of the Anarchist doctrine (about which absolutely no one, we may say in passing, bothered in those days). Is this not childish prattle? Bound neither to time nor place, the dilettante critics try (seventeen years later!) to suggest that everything would have ended in general satisfaction if only the revolution had left the insurgent sailors alone. Unfortunately, the world counterrevolution would in no case-have left them alone. The logic of the struggle would have given predominance in the fortress to the extremists, that is, to the most counterrevolutionary elements. The need for supplies would have made the fortress directly dependent upon the foreign bourgeoisie and their agents, the White émigrés. All the necessary preparations toward this end were already being made. Under similar circumstances only people like the Spanish Anarchists or POUMists would have waited passively, hoping for a happy outcome. The Bolsheviks, fortunately, belonged to a different school. They considered it their duty to extinguish the fire as soon as it started, thereby reducing to a minimum the number of victims.

The "Kronstadters" without a Fortress

In essence, the venerable critics are opponents of the dictatorship of the proletariat and by that token are opponents of the revolution. In this lies the whole secret. It is true that some of them recognize the revolution and the dictatorship-in words. But this does not help matters. They wish for a revolution which will not lead to dictatorship or for a dictatorship which will get along without the use of force. Of course, this would be a very "pleasant" dictatorship. It requires, however, a few trifles: an equal and, moreover, an extremely high, development of the toiling masses. But in such conditions the dictatorship would in general be unnecessary. Some Anarchists, who are really liberal pedagogues, hope that in a hundred or a thousand years the toilers will have attained so high a level of development that coercion will prove unnecessary. Naturally, if capitalism could lead to such a development, there would be no reason for overthrowing capitalism. There would be no need either for violent revolution or for the dictatorship which is an inevitable consequence of revolutionary victory. However, the decaying capitalism of our day leaves little room for humanitarian-pacifist illusions.

The working class, not to speak of the semi-proletarian masses, is not homogeneous, either socially or politically. The class struggle produces a vanguard that absorbs the best elements of the class. A revolution is possible when the vanguard is able to lead the majority of the proletariat. But this does, not at all mean that the internal contradictions among the toilers disappear. At the moment of the highest peak of the revolution they are of course attenuated, but only to appear later at a new stage in all their sharpness. Such is the course of the revolution as a whole. Such was the course of Kronstadt. When parlor pinks try to mark out a different route for the October Revolution, after the event, we can only respectfully ask them to show us exactly where and when their great principles were confirmed in practice, at least partially, at least in tendency? Where are the signs that lead us to expect the triumph of these principles in the future? We shall of course never get an answer.

A revolution has its own laws. Long ago we formulated those "lessons of October" which have not only a Russian but an international significance. No one else has even tried to suggest any other "lessons." The Spanish revolution is negative confirmation of the "lessons of October." And the severe critics are silent or equivocal. The Spanish government of the "People's Front" stifles the socialist revolution and shoots revolutionists. The Anarchists participate in this government, or, when they are driven out, continue to support the executioners. And their foreign allies and lawyers occupy themselves meanwhile with a defense ... of the Kronstadt mutiny against the harsh Bolsheviks. A shameful travesty!

The present disputes around Kronstadt revolve around the same class axis as the Kronstadt uprising itself, in which the reactionary sections of the sailors tried to overthrow the proletarian dictatorship. Conscious of their impotence on the arena of present-day revolutionary politics, the petty-bourgeois blunderers and eclectics try to use the old Kronstadt episode for the struggle against the Fourth International, that is, against the party of the proletarian revolution. These latter-day "Kronstadters" will also be crushed-true, without the use of arms since, fortunately, they do not have a fortress.

Yes, printing Trotsky's assertions from the late 1930s really makes
sense given that his account (unlike Goldman's) has been proven
utterly false by later research.... As indicated, most of the sailors
had been there since 1917. Visit  http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secH7.html
got the details (and references).

Anyway, Red writes:

"It is funny that anarchists criticise Marxists for being 'religiously
devoted' to one man. It seems that all anarchists have their very own bible,
the infoshop website. If in doubt during an argument, refer to the Anarchist
FAQ."

Obviously no one has explained to "Red" why FAQs exist. They exist so that
when someone raises a frequently asked question about something, you don't
have to keep writing something new you just point them to the FAQ. It's
called being efficient. And if anarchists refer to the FAQ that simply
means they agree with its Answers.

It also seems that "Red" also has never heard of references. Obviously if
someone in interested in , say, Marx's economics, "red" refuses to tell them
to read Capital or one of the shorter introductions to that work by other
writers. Instead, presumably, he sits down and writes (on each occassion)
an explanation of what it is about...

So why object to pointing to a reference which discusses the frequency asked
questions about Kronstadt, a reference which bases itself on the standard books
and articles on the revolt?

So, please "Red" think before you write if you don't have something sensible to say.

"Well when someone posts Trotsky's interpretation of the Kronstadt incident, then
it is shouted down."

actually, the reason why the FAQ section was references was to expose the nonsense
which is Trotsky's "interpretation" of the revolt. It you think presenting
evidence equals being "shouted down", I feel sorry for you.

"All the original poster was doing was trying to show the anarchists on here a
opposing view to that of Goldman et al."

And all the anarchists were doing was showing that Goldman et al analyses have
been confirmed by latter research, unlike Trotsky's assertions.

It is, of course, significant that none of the Leninists have actually bothered
to critique of the FAQ section. I doubt they have read it, as facts and evidence
seem to be an irrelevance when Leninists attack Kronstadt.

The following piece was originally written to refute lies about the history of 20th century revolutionary movements peddled by the comically obnoxious Trotskyoids of the Spartacus League, in their newspaper Workers Vanguard (sic). Fearing that they may be losing ground to an admittedly incoherent contemporary anarchism, and hungry for fresh cannon fodder, the Sparts ran an occasionally informative series of articles by Joseph Seymour, titled "Marxism vs. Anarchism", tracing the historic differences between anarchism and the Sparts’ version of "Marxism".

In part 7 of this series, (W. V., page 7, 8/30/1996), the part dealing with the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921, Seymour claimed:

"The most significant counterrevolutionary force under the banner of anarchism was the Ukrainian peasant-based army of Nestor Makhno, which carried out pogroms against Jewish communities and collaborated with White armies against the Bolsheviks."

Seymour made these accusations without providing any documentation, and with good reason, for outside of Stalinist hagiographies, Stalin-era fiction like Shuslov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and Seymour’s air-brush-happy imagination no evidence exists to support his claims. Surviving partisans of the Makhnovist movement, like Makhno’s comrade the ex-Bolshevik Peter Arshinov in his History of the Makhnovist Movement, the anarchist historian Voline in his work The Unknown Revolution, and independent historians who are not friends of revolution or anarchism, like Stanford scholar Michael Palij, in his book The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, all affirm that:

1. The Makhnovist Movement was a mass revolutionary movement of the poor in the Southern Ukraine, and fielded an army of several tens of thousands of partisans in the Russian Civil War. This revolutionary movement lasted from the spring of 1918 until a final large-scale massacre of its partisans, and large numbers of non-combatant sympathizers, by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

2. Revolutionaries of Jewish origins played an important part in the Makhnovist movement, among them Voline. He was a key figure in the anarcho-communist "Nabat" confederation in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War.

3. Jewish communities in the Ukraine furnished numerous combatants to Makhno’s Insurrectionary Army. Jewish communities participated in regional revolutionary mass assemblies of workers, peasants and partisans called by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Makhnovist Army.

4. The Makhnovists named one of their free-communist agricultural communes after Rosa Luxemburg, who was from a Jewish background.

5. Nestor Makhno and his comrades issued numerous proclamations against anti-Semitism. On several occasions Makhno himself killed instigators of violence against the Jewish population, including a prominent bandit named Grigor’ev. (See Arshinov’s History of the Makhnovist Movement, pp. 135-137.)

6. Leah Feldman, who died in London in the late 1980’s, was the last known survivor of the Makhno movement in the west. As a young girl, Feldman helped sew uniforms for the Makhnovist Army. Feldman was from a Jewish background. She vehemently attested to the Makhnovists’ violent hostility to anti-Semitism.

In The Unknown Revolution (p. 698), Voline quotes a Jewish historian, M. Tcherikover, interviewed in Paris, who was not an anarchist or a revolutionary:

"It is undeniable that, of all these armies, including the (so-called) Red Army, the Makhnovists behaved best with regard to the civil population in general and the Jewish population in particular...Do not let us speak of pogroms alleged to have been organized by Makhno himself. This is a slander or an error. Nothing of the sort occurred." [my italics].

With regard to Seymour’s claim that the Makhnovists "...collaborated with White armies against the Bolsheviks":

1. The Makhno Movement began as a class struggle of the exploited and dispossessed against the rich in the Southern Ukraine in the spring of 1918. Makhno and his comrades helped initiate the seizure and redistribution of the wealth of rich exploiters by poor folks. Exploiters who resisted were killed.

2. Makhno fought against Austrian and German Imperialist forces and their allies among the local gentry, as opposed to the Bolshevik regime, who collaborated with these enemies of the world revolution by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Makhno’s forces played a key role in the defeat of the Austro-German invasion of the Ukraine and in the defeat of the Ukrainian nationalist regime of Petliura in 1918.

3. Makhno’s forces destroyed a significant portion of the White army General Denikin’s forces in September and October 1919, thus crippling Denikin’s attempt at that time to take Moscow. (The Whites were the right-wing counterrevolutionary forces in the Russian Civil War)

4. Makhno’s forces played the decisive part in the defeat of the White general Wrangel in late 1920. At that time an agreement was made between the Bolshevik state, signed by Frunze and Bela Kun, and the revolutionaries of the Makhno movement, where Makhno’s forces were considered to be effectively a part of the so-called Red Army. This agreement is reproduced in Arshinov and Voline’s works. Earlier, in May of 1919, the leading Bolshevik Lev Kamenev had journeyed to Makhno’s headquarters and negotiated in person with Makhno.

The Bolsheviks are the only counterrevolutionaries the Makhnovists can be accurately accused of collaborating with.

Space considerations prohibit me from describing in great detail the counterrevolutionary treachery displayed by the Bolsheviks with regard to the Makhnovists. But anyone who reads the sources mentioned above and who also reads of how the Stalinists behaved during the Spanish Civil War will see many similarities.

Seymour peddled a similar combination of ignorance and falsehoods about the German left communists of the early 1920’s and one of their organizations, the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Far from being, as Seymour puts it, an "unstable amalgam of anarchist and Communist politics", left communism was a sophisticated Marxist current with deep roots among combative wage workers and poor people in Germany and Holland. The Dutch Marxist theoreticians Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and their comrades began developing a far-going critique of European social democracy in the decades before World War One.

The left communists saw that any usefulness that had been played by electoral politics and trade unions had passed. In a revolutionary period proletarians would have to fight for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the abolition of wage labor and commodity relations outside of and against all pro-capitalist workers’ organizations. A new historical period meant that new tactics had become necessary, and new forms of self-organization had emerged that superseded the old dichotomy of parliamentary activity and unions. These were unitary expressions of proletarian power: soviets, workers, soldiers and sailor’s councils, mass assemblies combining political and economic aspects of the fight against capital.

Vulgar Marxists like Trotskyists, and the Stalinists they often cheer for, will say that unions "organize workers", but the question posed by authentically anti-capitalist revolutionaries like the German communist left was a qualitative one: what do they organize the working class for?

Trade unions and leftist parties act in the interests of the capitalist system. They are organizations of proletarian defeat; they were then, they are now. As opposed to what Trotskyists claim, pro-wage-labor leftist parties and unions are not "betrayers" or "misleaders" of the working class -- they are the left wing of capital, a fundamental element of the capitalist political apparatus.

Working class self-organization means taking action outside of and against the control of unions, parties and electoral politics. The best revolutionaries who came out of Trotskyism after World War Two recognized this. For example, see the writings of Grandizo Munis. Munis was a leading member of the Trotskyists’ Bolshevik-Leninist Group, which fought alongside of the anarchist revolutionaries of the "Friends of Durruti" group in the May 1937 uprising in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. After World War Two, Munis described labor unions as "auxiliary organs of capital" and noted that:

"...unions...function as messengers from capital to labor and as agents who help to adapt labor to the requirements of capital...Unions, having a bureaucratic and legal life of their own, merely use the working class as a docile mass to manipulate in order to increase their own power as a legal institution in our society. Unions and working people have completely different daily lives and motivations. Any ‘tactical’ work within (the union apparatus), even if guided by the purest intentions, will impede the self-activity of the exploited class, destroying their fighting spirit and barring the way to revolutionary activity.

"Lenin and Trotsky’s position on revolutionary work within unions is entirely outside the realm of today’s realities...There is about as much possibility of ‘changing’ unions in a revolutionary direction as there is of ‘changing’ capitalist society in general; unions use wage workers for their own particular end but wage workers will never be able to make unions serve a revolutionary goal; they must destroy them." (from Unions Against Revolution, by G. Munis, available in some anarchist bookstores or for $1 from Black and Red, P. O. Box 02374, Detroit, Michigan 48202).

Lenin’s and Trotsky’s vision of the content of socialism and the tactics that could be used in achieving it did not break fundamentally with the pre-World War I social democratic ideology of the Second International. Their equation of the content of socialism with, to quote Lenin in 1918, "a state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the entire people" helped to destroy the revolutionary movement of their day.

During World War One the Bolsheviks were a key part of the international revolutionary movement. In 1917 they regrouped many of the most combative elements of the proletarian movement in the urban centers of Russia. But shortly after the October Revolution the overwhelming circumstances of the Russian Civil War, and the pronounced deficiencies of their politics, led the Bolsheviks to pass over to the side of the counterrevolution. This tendency was resisted unsuccessfully by dissident currents within the party that had some authentically communist content, the "left communists" and the "democratic centralists." But these minority tendencies had no lasting impact on the party. As early as 1921, the founding manifesto of the short-lived (left communist) Communist Workers International declared:

"Nothing can stop the flow of events, or obscure the truth. We are saying this without useless reticence, without sentimentalism: proletarian Russia of red October is becoming a bourgeois state."

By the time of the Kronstadt massacre in March 1921 the Russian Revolution was dead. To the German left communists the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a fundamental and necessary element of revolutionary politics, meant the absolute social power of the revolutionary mass movement itself against the capitalist system, and against those who would defend it or restore it. The Makhnovist movement was an excellent example of this principle put into practice; a mass movement of the poor acting in a despotic manner against exploiters and counterrevolutionaries. For the Bolsheviks the bottom line became one of holding onto state power at any cost. The Bolshevik victory came at the expense of the possibility of revolution in Germany and Italy. It came at the expense of revolutionary forces that weren’t under their control, like the Makhnovists, and at the expense of the working class in the urban areas of Russia, who were driven out of active participation in political life by the police terror of the Bolshevik party-state.

The Kronstadt uprising was the last cry of the dying revolutionary movement in Russia. By 1921 the Lenin regime wasn’t a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was just a dictatorship; a clique claiming to act in the name of the working class while using terror against the working class. When the German left fought for "the dictatorship of the proletariat" they didn’t mean a police state that would impose wage labor on the laboring classes and force the development of industrialization and state capitalism at their expense, which is what the Bolsheviks ended up doing.

The Spart’s Joseph Seymour was undoubtedly right when he quoted the American Trotskyist James Cannon bragging that Lenin’s polemic "Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder" banished the left communists’ perspective from an effective presence in the workers’ movement in the US and elsewhere. From the early 1920’s on, the Leninist attachment to pre-World War I social democratic tactics like electoral politics and political activity within pro-capitalist labor unions dominated the perspectives of the so-called Communists. But if these tactics were correct ones, why did they lead to such a dismal set of results?

The revolutionary movement of the inter-war period was defeated. The defeat of the revolutionary movement was accompanied by the rise of fascism and Stalinism, and 50 million people died in the imperialist Second World War. Leninism didn’t result in even a single successful proletarian revolution. Leninism didn’t give rise to a society anywhere in the world worthy of the human beings that live in it.

Today capitalism rules in every country. But not in the befogged consciousness of Trotskyists, who, in their terminal fealty to Stalinism and need to compensate for their own total historical failure obscenely describe regimes that exploit, imprison and murder wage laborers in Cuba, North Korea, and China as "workers’ states".

Trotskyism isn’t a theoretical tool for understanding and changing reality, but a dogma, an impoverished and sterile amalgam of social democracy and Stalinism; an ersatz "socialism" devoid of social content. Trotskyism is a religion trip worshipping Lenin and Trotsky, around whom all history is made to revolve in a Ptolemaic system. It’s fitting that when confronted by a revolutionary movement like the Makhnovists, Trotskyists parrot the line of the Stalinists, the more successful fellow worshipers of the Lenin mummy-cult. Trotskyism is Stalinism’s loyal opposition. Since no Trotskyist movement has ever taken power anywhere, Trotskyists have compensated by being cheerleaders for Stalinism and pro-capitalist "national liberation" movements, forces the Trots have more in common with than class war anarcho-communists like Makhno and the left communists of the KAPD.

The defeat of the Russian Revolution, and the Leninist ideology that flowed from that defeat, led the revolutionary possibilities of the 20th century into a total historical dead-end. The main historical legacy of Leninism is a globally defeated and disoriented proletariat. The working class doesn’t hold power anywhere today. But now we can see the world in a different, demystified light. New opportunities will present themselves in the coming decades. We have to utterly destroy the capitalist world order, demolish it totally, without equivocations or compromises. We can’t let the future be held hostage by the failures of the past.

With Kronstadt and Makhno against Lenin and Trotsky,
for worldwide anti-statist communist revolution,

Max Anger

(A leaflet-length version of the arguments presented in this article may soon be available from this web-site. Entertain and irritate your Trotskyist friends and neighbors!)