The link below
goes to an interesting article in ”Spartacist” no 59, titled ”Kronstadt 1921:
Bolshevism vs Counterrevolution”. As I noted in an earlier blog post,
”Spartacist” is the publication of a small leftist group in the United States,
the Spartacist League. I usually trash this publication, so clearly the time
has come to give the Red Dare Devil his due!
In 1921,
the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd (today St Petersburg)
mutinied against the Russian Bolshevik or Communist government. The rebellion was
soon suppressed by Red Army detachments. Some of the rebels, including the
leader Petrichenko, managed to escape to Finland. The Bolsheviks claimed that
the mutiny was either led by or inspired by White counter-revolutionaries.
Today, both Stalinist and Trotskyist groups take this position. Anarchists, by
contrast, claim the Kronstadt mutineers as some kind of honorary libertarian
socialists and deny any collaboration between them and the mostly monarchist
White Guards. They see the Kronstadt uprising as a legitimate popular rebellion
against Bolshevik ”betrayal” of the Russian revolution.
I have commented
on the Kronstadt uprising before, for instance in my review of Paul Avrich´s seminal
”Kronstadt 1921”. Avrich, who is an anarchist, created quite a stir among his
libertarian-socialist comrades when he unearthed evidence for at least some White involvement in the uprising. The
Spartacist League (which as good Communists oppose the uprising) has found much
more. The article in ”Spartacist” references and quotes a Russian collection of
documents on Kronstadt published in 1999 but never translated to English. The
volume is called ”Kronstadt Tragedy” for short.
The article
makes two interconnected claims. First, Petrichenko and a small clique around him
frequently went behind the backs of both the Kronstadt soviet and the
Provisional Revolutionary Committee (PRC), the nominal leadership of the free soviet
and the mutiny. In public, Petrichenko called for free elections to the soviets,
an ”anarchist” demand. In reality, his clique consisted of Mensheviks and Kadets
who really supported the Constituent Assembly, a demand the Spartacist League
regards as ”counter-revolutionary” (and so would the anarchists, for somewhat
different reasons). Since Kadet leader Miliukov openly advocated the
anarcho-populist ”free soviet” demand as a steppingstone to anti-Bolshevik regime
change of a more bourgeois-monarchist nature, Petrichenko´s strategy could be
seen as a direct emulation of Kadet strategy.
Second,
Spartacist argues that the Petrichenko faction of the PRC had direct contacts with
Russian White Guards in Finland, and that the British government secretly encouraged
the Finnish White government to aid the Kronstadt mutineers. Under the guise of
the Finnish Red Cross, a delegation of White Guards visited Kronstadt. One of them,
a White officer named Vilken, stayed behind to coordinate with Petrichenko.
Vilken also offered Petrichenko 800 armed fighters, but this was rejected,
probably because the general mood of the mutinous sailors was ”left-wing”,
making such a White intervention too blatant. Petrichenko had to tread carefully.
Meanwhile, two prominent supporters of White General Wrangel in Finland, Tseidler
and Grimm, were recognized as foreign representatives of the ”independent
republic of Kronstadt”. Thus, the collaboration between Petrichenko and the
Wrangelites didn´t begin after the suppression of the mutiny (as asserted by
the anarchists), but already during the actual mutiny itself.
One of Avrich´s
more sensational claims was that a secret White plan for a Kronstadt uprising had
been hatched before the ”spontaneous” uprising actually took place. Avrich,
however, didn´t believe that this proved the Whites were really behind it – the
execution of the mutiny does look spontaneous and amateurish, something to be
expected from anarcho-populist sailors but not from seasoned White officers. The
Spartacist League believe they have solved this mystery. A report from a White
leader in Finland reveals that some Kronstadt conspirators had compromised themselves
by attempting to intervene in a Petrograd ”uprising” which turned out to be
fake news. This forced the conspirators to stage the rebellion at Kronstadt
sooner than they had originally intended to (before the ice connecting
Kronstadt and Petrograd had melted). Of course, the subsequent military-tactical
blunders of the PRC could still be explained by anarcho-populist incompetence
(or the fear of the Petrichenko circle to be found out working with the
Whites).
The anarchists
will probably continue supporting Kronstadt 1921, perhaps by claiming that Petrichenko
– hitherto treated as a hero of the resistance – was a White mole in a
rebellion which was fundamentally libertarian and sound. Or they will simply
not read ”Spartacist”! Of course, for the ”authoritarian” left, ”Kronstadt
Tragedy” simply proves what they claimed to have known all the time: the
Kronstadters really were counter-revolutionary, objectively or subjectively.
Or, translated from Red lingo: ordinary people can ´t be trusted to defend the
socialist revolution, so a single vanguard party is needed instead.
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