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

On 4th March the Petrograd Soviet, consisting entirely of RCP delegates, “mostly youngsters, fanatical and intolerant” (as Berkman, watching from the gallery, recorded), condemned the Kronstadt rebels. Representatives from Petrograd factories attempted to support the sailors but were shouted down. Kalinin claimed that Kronstadt was the centre of a plot orchestrated by Kozlovsky. After a short “debate” the Soviet declared the sailors were counter-revolutionary and demanded their immediate surrender. Trotsky, who had been called back to Petrograd to direct operations, sent the sailors one short communication.

Grimly titled “Ultimatum: March 5th, 1921, 1400 Hours”, Trotsky’s message said, “The Workers and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the insurgent battleships must be restored to the jurisdiction of the Soviet Republic without delay”. After demanding the rebels immediately lay down their arms and release the commissars held at the base, it concluded:

Only those who surrender unconditionally can count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic. I am issuing orders to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms. Total responsibility for whatever calamities may befall the civilian population in this operation is on the heads of the White Guard insurrectionists. This is the last warning. 17

The warning was ignored.

On 7th March the assault began. The ice in the Gulf of Finland had not yet thawed and so the 50,000 soldiers of Tukchachevsky’s 7th Army could advance by foot and armoured car all the way to Kotlin Island. Although the epic battle lasted nearly two weeks, the outcome was never in doubt. Fire from the fortress blew great holes in the ice, which sent thousands of soldiers to icy deaths, but when a snowstorm came up they had cover to advance to the island’s defences. On 16th March they broke through. Fierce fighting ensued inside the fortress and throughout the city, but in the end force of numbers won out.

Once the outpost had fallen retribution was swift. Prisoners were transported to Petrograd. On Zinoviev’s personal orders, 500 of the sailors were immediately shot. When some of the regular Cheka units refused to carry out the order, teenage Komsomol cadres were used for the mass execution. 18Over the next few weeks about 2,000 more were summarily executed without trial. The remainder were transported to Solovetsky concentration camp in the White Sea. About 7,000 sailors escaped across the ice to Finland, including Petrichencko, who wrote an invaluable memoir that confirmed the rebellion had been a reassertion of Soviet democracy, not a challenge to it.

For many on the libertarian left the violent suppression of Kronstadt was the final straw, a devastating and bitter irony that the Bolsheviks did not seem to comprehend. On 18th March, two days after Kronstadt fell in blood and smoke, the Tenth Party Congress closed with solemn remembrance of the Paris Commune and the 30,000 Parisian workers murdered by the French army after its fall. After watching captured Kronstadt sailors paraded through the streets on their way to either execution or Solovetsky camp, Berkman made one last entry in his diary. “The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871”, he wrote bitterly, “Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels”. Although he continued his translation work for the Comintern, he left Russia a few months later.

The last outpost of the workers’ democracy born in February 1917 was extinguished in March 1921. After the suppression of the revolt, Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition pamphlet was officially banned. The entire text was published in the British socialist newspaper Workers’ Dreadnought , edited by Sylvia Pankhurst, a constant thorn in the side of Lenin and Sovnarcom. Pankhurst and Kollontai–Marxist feminists whose socialism was inextricable from sexual, social and cultural liberation–had much in common. Pankhurst had been expelled from the suffragette Womens’ Social and Political Union in 1913 for sharing platforms with trade union and Irish independence leaders. She went on to support Anton Pannekoek’s “Council Communist” movement in the 1920s and thereafter put her energies into anti-colonialism. Kollontai entered twenty-five years of diplomatic service for the Soviet Union, although for unfathomable reasons of his own Stalin never had her killed.

Kronstadt destroyed the Bolshevik Revolution, politically and morally. Even the Bolsheviks knew it. Their public responses verged on the hysterical. Trotsky, usually precise and eloquent, descended into violent crudity. In an article published in Pravda on 23rd March, 1921, he quoted a report from a French right-wing newspaper that linked the Kronstadt events and the possible fall of the Soviet regime to the prospects of renewed capitalist profits in Russia. He claimed this discredited the entire programme of the Kronstadt sailors and revealed the real motivations of all who had supported it. It was a desperate and dishonest argument, wrapped up in fear and hatred:

The counter-revolutionary riff-raff, the SR blowhards and simpletons, the Menshevik garbage, and the rip-roaring anarchist daredevils–all of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, out of guile or stupidity, perform one and the same historical function: they support every attempt to establish the unlimited sway of the bandits of world imperialism over the workers. The economic, political and national independence of Russia is possible only under the dictatorship of the Soviets. The backbone of this dictatorship is the Communist Party. There is no other party that can play this part, nor can there be. You wish to break this backbone, do you, dear sirs of the Menshevik and SR parties? Go ahead and try. We are ready to add to your experience. 19

Trotsky was right in one regard. The forces that fought on the ice before Kronstadt had diametrically opposed political values. Whatever they told themselves, the Bolsheviks stood for hierarchical state capitalism imposed by dictat, with minimal to no influence on this process by trade unions or the wider working class. The Kronstadt sailors wanted to revive the vision of the February Revolution and the localised democratic structures that had emerged from it. This did not always accord with the political and economic programme of social democrats like the Mensheviks, but the period 1917-21 had taught hard lessons. By the middle of 1918 it was clear to many, probably most, workers that the Mensheviks’ commitment to civil liberties and non-coercive government would have given them the greatest space and freedom to organise and to build structures of self-government. But by then it was too late.

Even the most hardline Bolsheviks acknowledged how badly wrong things had gone. On 8th January, 1921 Dzerzhinsky had written to Lenin to report on the current security threat. “The prisons are packed”, he told him, with a hint of weary sarcasm, “mostly with workers and peasants instead of the bourgeoisie”. 20In one memo he summed up the entire procession of events from the dispersal of the democratic Soviets in 1918 and 1919, to the breaking of anti-government strikes, to the crushing of the sailors of Kronstadt. Contrary to left mythology, still powerful today, the Stalinist counter-revolution did not begin in 1921. It began on 25th October, 1917, although there were other elements within Bolshevism that it had to contend with before it was triumphant. With the destruction of Kronstadt and the banning of oppositional elements in the Bolshevik Party it was complete.

At the close of the Tenth Party Congress Lenin accepted the inevitable and called a halt to War Communism. In February Bukharin had visited Tambov and reported back to the Politburo that the Soviet regime was doomed unless it conceded peasant demands for greater economic freedom. It was essential to restore an exchange of products between town and country, to kickstart agricultural production as soon as possible and to defuse peasant discontent. Lenin determined that the best way to do this was to institute a “tax–in-kind” on the peasants. This was an agreed percentage of requisition of the harvest on all peasant producers (originally half the amount of the 1920 requisition, eventually reduced to 10% of the total harvest), while allowing them to retain the surplus and sell it as they chose. At the same time the state monopoly on commerce was reduced, with small–scale private manufacturing and commercial enterprises allowed to operate.