John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The Kronstadt Soviet established in the February 1917 Revolution was virtually independent from 1917 to 1921. The unique nature of Kronstadt, where the sailors both lived and worked, made it more of a mass commune than a political forum. Inside the base were mini-communities where sailors, workers and bourgeois intellectuals laboured together on urban garden plots. Unlike the chaotic property sequestrations of Petrograd, Kronstadt distributed property according to family size. The sailors–recipients of the “special rations” that went to party cadres and militias–shared their portions with the rest of the city. Not for nothing has the Kronstadt commune been called “one of the most vivid utopian socialist experiments to surface in the revolution”. 1

After the suppression of the 1921 revolt, the Bolsheviks claimed the sailors who had rebelled were not the same individuals as “the pride and glory of the revolution” hailed by Trotsky in 1917. Yet Kronstadt as a city, a workplace and a forge of revolutionary sentiment was basically the same in February 1921 as in October 1917. Three quarters of the sailors serving in the Baltic Fleet in 1921 had been serving in March 1918. It is true there had been a “churn” of sailors during those years as some went to fight on various fronts of the Civil War, but the nature of the Fleet (i.e. it consisted of warships that departed and returned to a fixed base) meant there was a definite degree of continuity. Nor were new recruits depoliticised. Israel Getzler’s history of Kronstadt from 1917-21 found that “by the end of 1919 thousands of veteran sailors, who had served on many fronts of the civil war, and in the administrative network of the expanding Soviet state, had returned to the Baltic Fleet and to Kronstadt, most by way of remobilisation”. 2

If anything, the experience of the Civil War gave the sailors a sharper sense of the surrounding political environment than they had possessed in 1917, when their actions were driven more by visceral anti-government emotion rather than conscious political ideology. The record of the Kronstadt sailors and the Baltic Fleet bears out Paul Avrich’s conclusion that “throughout the Civil War of 1918-1920 the sailors of Kronstadt, and the Baltic Fleet as a whole, remained the torchbearers of revolutionary militancy”. 3

The source of the fracture between the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt sailors was that the latter did not fit the Bolshevik notion of “advanced” workers, i.e. schooled in Marxism, disciplined, productivist and loyal to the vanguard party. To the extent they had a specific ideology it was a localist, libertarian socialism. Their proximity to the labour movement of Petrograd kept them politically attuned and their military skills gave them enormous leverage when it counted. In his introduction to Ida Mett’s classic work on the uprising, Murray Bookchin characterised the social milieu of the Kronstadt base, noting that “Its living traditions and its close contact with ‘Red Petrograd’ served to anneal men of nearly all strata into revolutionaries”. 4Right up to 1921 no one questioned this. In October 1920, five months before the rebellion, the sailors of “Red Kronstadt” led the third anniversary celebrations of October 1917 in Petrograd.

Yet Petrograd was now lost to the Bolsheviks. Jonathan Aves records that by early February 1921 “strikes were becoming an everyday occurrence”, so much so that the Bolsheviks responded with a military clampdown and mass arrests. 5General Strikes also broke out in Moscow, Saratov and Ekaterinoslavl. These were not simply work stoppages. They were mass social unrest that encompassed “factory occupations, ‘Italian Strikes’, demonstrations, mass meetings, the beating up of Communists and so on”. 6Striking railway workers sent emissaries along the tracks to spread the action. The strikers’ demands expanded to holding free Soviet elections in which other socialist parties could stand. Red Army units sent to crush the railwaymen refused orders to fire on them and were replaced by reliable RCP detachments.

On 23rd February Moscow was placed under martial law, with RCP units putting factories under 24-hour guard. 7After a General Strike in Saratov was suppressed it too was placed under martial law. Petrograd had been under unofficial martial law for some time. In Avrich’s estimation, in February 1921 “an open breach occurred between the Bolshevik regime and its principal mainstay of support, the working class”. 8

The sailors had their own specific grievances. On 15th February, 1921 the Second Conference of Communist Sailors of the Baltic Fleet, composed of 300 delegates, passed a resolution which condemned the work of the Political Section of the Baltic Fleet (Poubalt) and decreed, “Poubalt has not only separated itself from the masses but from the active functionaries”. In the latter half of 1920 over 20% of RCP members in the Fleet resigned from the party. The resolution stated, “The cause is to be found in the very principle of Poubalt’s organisation. These principles must be changed in the direction of greater democracy”. 9The RCP ignored the sailors. As a result they turned against those who had been their idols and leaders in 1917–Trotsky and their former leader Raskolnikov, now a senior party figure with a lifestyle to match. In February 1921 a further 5,000 sailors left the RCP in protest.

Alexander Berkman, who had arrived in Russia with Emma Goldman in late 1919, was in Petrograd at the time, desperately trying to maintain his faith in the revolution. He recorded in his diary that on 23rd February a strike broke out at the large Trubotchny Mill. Even though Zinoviev sent RCP students to break the strike, it spread to the Baltisky and Laferma tobacco factories, the Skorohod shoe factory, the Baltic and Patronny metal plants, and on 28th February to the enormous Putilov Works itself. The strikers’ economic demands included more efficient food supply, the withdrawal of roadblocks around the city and freedom to travel outside the city to a radius of 30 miles. Their political demands included freedom of speech and the press, and the freeing of working-class and socialist political prisoners. The response was immediate. On 24th February an RCP-convened “Committee of Defence” declared a “state of siege” in Petrograd, imposing an 11pm curfew and a total ban on any political meetings indoors or outdoors. Strike leaders were arrested.

On 26th February the Kronstadt sailors sent emissaries to Petrograd to investigate. They found factories surrounded by troops. One of the sailors’ leading activists, Chief Quartermaster of the battleship Petropavlovsk Stepan Petrichenko, an experienced seaman who had joined the navy in 1912 and played a key role in 1917, wrote, “One might have thought that these were not factories but the forced labour prisons of Tsarist times”. 10On 28th Februaru they returned to the naval base with a report of the suppression of the strikes. After hearing the report, the sailors of the Petropavlovsk called a mass meeting and passed a resolution which would function as the core programme of the Kronstadt rebellion.

The resolution demanded new Soviet elections by secret ballot and accompanied by free election propaganda; freedom of speech and of the press for all workers and peasants, as well as for “anarchists and left socialist parties”; freedom of assembly for trade union and peasant organisations; the organisation by 10th March of a conference of nonparty workers from Kronstadt, Petrograd and the Petrograd District; immediate liberation of all political prisoners from the socialist parties and those belonging to workers’ and peasants’ organisations; election of a commission to investigate the cases of all detained in prison and concentration camps on political charges; equalisation of rations for all workers; granting of “freedom of action” to peasants on their own land; and abolition of all political sections within the armed forces. 11