White flag over Kronstadt?

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. 

Kronstadt 1921: Bolshevism vs Counter-Revolution

Supplement to world revolution

This is the third issue of International Review, the theoretical journal of a small and exotic Left Communist group, the ICC (International Communist Current). The issue is dated October 1975 and subtitled “Supplement to World Revolution and Internationalism” (two other ICC publications). Most issues of the IR should be given some kind of award for chloroform in print. Only a sense of duty could carry a non-member of the ICC through the International Review!

This early issue, by contrast, is much better written than the later issues (although its print quality, ironically, is far worse) and could even be of some interest to left-watchers, or at least ultraleft-watchers. The most interesting piece is the article “The lessons of Kronstadt”. The ICC expresses support for the 1921 Kronstadt mutiny, but with a few unusual twists. The accompanying article “The degeneration of the Russian Revolution” is a more tedious polemic against an ex-Trotskyist outfit, the Revolutionary Workers Group (any relation to the “Kollontaist” Revolutionary Workers Faction?). This issue further contains the second part of an analysis of the fascist victory in Italy, arguing that fascism and liberal democracy are twins rather than antipodes, and a reprint of a Left Communist article from 1933 discussing the character of fascism.

Not for the general reader, but perhaps of some use if ultraleftism, anarchism or Kronstadt is something you take seriously.

The land which is not

"Vägen till landet som icke är" is a book unfortunately available only in Swedish. The author, Jan Häll, is a scholar of intellectual history. His book analyzes a somewhat obscure subject: the real or perceived influence of Rudolf Steiner on the Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran (who died in 1923).

I admit that I'm not much for poetry, but most people in Sweden are familiar with Södergran's poem "Landet som icke är" (The land which is not). The poem, which deals with life after death, was - fittingly or otherwise - published posthumously! Häll's book is titled after a line in this particular poem.

Apparently, Södergran was originally a Nietzschean and an atheist. I admit that the Nietzschean outpourings quoted by Häll sound near-pathological. Södergran was physically weak and frequently ill, yet harboured dreams of world conquest (both poetical and political) and admired the French "bellicist" poets, who glorified war. It seems that already this is controversial: the Wiki entry on Södergran claims that she could differentiate between the heroic characters of her poems and her own persona. Well, obviously, but only because she wanted to *be* like the personages in her poems! Södergran's political sympathies have also been a matter of contention. She seems to have supported Germany during World War I. In a semi-official entry in an encylopaedia of Finnish poets, Södergran stated her political affiliation as "Swedish People's Party", a conservative party which supported the Whites during the Finnish Civil War. Her attempts to aid the survivors of the Bolshevik attack on Kronstadt, who had fled to Finland, also suggests White sympathies (this time in the Russian Civil War), since she had been alerted of their plight by the local Russian priest. On the other hand, Södergran's private letters contain positive references to Swedish Social Democracy, Henri Barbusse and Clarté.

Later, Södergran turned to religion and spirituality, leading to a lot of psychological turmoil clearly visible in her preserved correspondence. But what kind of spirituality? Häll believes that Södergran was seriously interested in and to some extent influenced by the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. This has been strongly de-emphasized by most scholars studying her work. Häll refrains from speculating about the causes, at one point suggesting that perhaps Steiner is just to obscure and "esoteric" to be readily understandable to the average scholar of literature. Perhaps. However, another possibility could be a general tendency among secular scholars to look the other way when famous writers turn out to be occult. Wordsworth and Yeats have been subjected to the same treatment, so why not Södergran? The Wiki entry doesn't even mention Steiner!

Häll's research in Södergran's private papers show a woman who for several years was deeply preoccupied with studying Steiner's works, including the esoteric lecture cycles (at the time only available to members of the Anthroposophical Society itself). She was almost infatuated with the man and his message, treated a portrait of him almost as an idol, and attempted to "convert" her close friend Hagar Olsson to Steiner's message. Olsson actually visited Goetheanum, the international headquarter of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland, but never got the chance to speak directly to Steiner. It seems that Södergran got access to Steiner's secret writings through a Finnish Anthroposophist who lent her the material already before the poet became a formal member of the Society. She also attempted to practice the spiritual disciplines described by Steiner in his books. Unfortunately, it's impossible to know how far Södergren was "initiated" into the mysteries of Anthroposophy, but she does claim to have "seen the Sun" and "met her double", the double being the Guardian on the Threshold. She composed a somewhat flamboyant letter in which she asked Steiner directly to make her one of his students (and hence part of the inner circle), but the letter was probably never sent.

The letters also reveal that Södergran was a troubled soul who never completely accepted Steiner's esoteric Christianity. She was also influenced by evangelical Christianity through a Christian missionary who frequently visited her house at Raivola. What she lacked in Steiner was the idea of grace and a "religion of the heart". To Södergran, Anthroposophy was too cerebral. She also had a pessimistic, escapist tendency absent from the optimistic evolutionism of Steiner's speculations. Since both Steiner and evangelicalism emphasizes Christ, Södergran's statements can sometimes be spun either way. What did she mean when she said that "Christ is coming soon"? Steiner believed that the Christ Being would soon appear "in the etheric"...

The letters also mention several "Dionysian" (i.e. Nietzschean) relapses. It's interesting that Södergran at one point attempted to combine Anthroposophy with her fantasies about world conquest. After World War I, Steiner enjoyed momentary success with a political proposal for a "threefold society". Södergran was excited, and expressed hopes that both literati and politicians (including Social Democrats) could be won for the idea. Some politicians and industrialists *did* express some interest in "the threefold society", including Axel Lille, the leader of the Swedish People's Party in Finland. There were also bizarre rumours that Swedish Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting had made a two-week visit to Goetheanum and discussed Steiner's political visions directly with Steiner himself! Curiously, Häll takes the rumour seriously, but his only source is a book written by Hagar Olsson, who presumably heard it during her own visit to Goetheanum. (On the web, I only found this rumour on a Swedish Anthroposophical blog, which also claims that Olof Palme knew all about Branting's visit and was very familiar with Steiner's work! Clearly, this is some kind of Anthroposophical urban legend.)

Judging by the posthumously published poem "Landet som icke är", Södergran eventually resolved her psychological struggles in a non-Anthroposophical direction. The poem is pessimistic in its take on the material world. Salvation lies in the beyond. It portrays "the land which is not" (i.e. Heaven) as a final resting place from the woes of earthly existence, and there is no mention of cosmic evolution or reincarnation. The final lines are obviously about Christ, who is approached in a child-like manner. I would argue that the poem is traditionally Christian, rather than Anthroposophical. Interestingly, Häll argues the opposite. He points out that the last line contains what could be a mysterious code: "I am the one you love and the one you will always love". The phrase "I am" (I AM) played an important role in Steiner's comments to the Gospel of John, which Södergran had carefully studied. However, it seems that our scholarly author has forgotten that, of course, I AM also plays an important role in traditional Christianity, including in the aforementioned gospel...

As already mentioned, "Vägen till landet som icke är" is only available in Swedish. With that little caveat, I give the book four stars.

The tragedy of Kronstadt

In March 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, a naval base outside Petrograd (St. Petersburg), rose in rebellion against the Russian Bolshevik regime. The revolt was suppressed after only two weeks. Trotsky much later called the Kronstadt uprising "a mere episode". He was, of course, wrong. The rebellion took place at the very doorstep of Petrograd, following a large strike movement among the workers in that important Russian city. If successful, Petrograd and Bolshevik power would have become sitting ducks. Many Russian émigré groups attempted to aid the rebels (in the event, unsuccessfully). Also, the Kronstadt mutineers turned out to have an elaborate political program and even managed to publish a newspaper. The program sounded left-wing but anti-Bolshevik, accused the Bolsheviks of betraying the ideals of the revolution, and called for the legalization of all socialist parties (but not right-wing groups).

This wasn't your everyday little peasant disturbance, of which there were many during the Russian Civil War and its aftermath.

Ever since 1921, Communists (with only a few exceptions) have condemned the Kronstadt rebellion as counter-revolutionary. For instance, the Socialist Workers Party has published a collection of articles by Lenin and Trotsky on the subject, available from Pathfinder Press. On the other hand, anarchists have turned Kronstadt into part of their political mythology, alongside the Makhnovists and the Spanish Revolution. The classical anarchist works on the subject are "The Kronstadt Commune" by Ida Mett and "The Unknown Revolution" by Voline.

Paul Avrich, a historian with anarchist political sympathies, has attempted to steer a middle course, and actually write an objective historical account of the uprising. The book deals with both the actual course of events during the uprising, Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik reactions to it, and the historical context in which the rebellion took place, i.e. War Communism and the future New Economic Policy (NEP). He uses Bolshevik and anarchist sources to paint a portrait of the principal leaders of the rebellion, which turns out to be easier said than done. None of them were particularly well-known people.

Avrich believes that the Kronstadt uprising was a spontaneous event, and that none of the opposition parties to the Bolshevik regime were involved. The political program of the rebellion didn't resemble those of the SRs or the Mensheviks. Avrich calls it anarcho-populist. It reflected ideas current among the Russian peasantry, which tended to oppose both the White Guards and the Bolsheviks, and indeed had a deeply-rooted suspicion of state power in general, in favour of a nebulous conception of libertarian self-government. The author also points out that the principal leaders of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee were of Ukrainian nationality. The principal leader, Petrichenko, was a Ukrainian peasant nicknamed "Petliura" for his nationalist ideas. However, the rebellion as such wasn't nationalist in inspiration, and most of the participants were Russians. Discontent with War Communism was what triggered the mutiny.

The Bolsheviks claimed, already at the outset, that the mutiny was organized by the White Guards. They even named the ringleader, a certain General Kozlovsky. As already mentioned, Avrich doesn't believe that White groups were directly involved in the rebellion. However, they were certainly active. A secret memorandum from the National Center, a Russian émigré organization associated with the Kadets, actually laid out plans for a mutiny on Kronstadt several months before it happened! The author of the memorandum, probably a Russian Red Cross official named Tseidler, claimed that a small group of émigré agents were already stationed at Kronstadt, waiting for an opportune moment to act. Tseidler was in touch with Grimm, another Red Cross official who had humanitarian contacts with Petrichenko during the actual uprising. However, it's unclear whether Petrichenko knew about the Russian Red Cross being a front for the National Center. Kozlovsky - there was such a person - is a more likely candidate for the secret mole at Kronstadt. He was a former Czarist officer who turned coat during the revolution, only to join the Kronstadt mutiny later on. Ironically, Petrichenko and the Revolutionary Committee refused to listen to Kozlovsky's expert military advice about how to deal with the Bolshevik threat. The secret memorandum of the National Center prophetically warned that if the uprising would break out too early, before the ice melted, it would probably be defeated. That is precisely what happened, suggesting that the counter-revolutionary agents at the naval base didn't have much leverage. This also points to Kozlovsky and his closest aides. The unruly Russian soldiers tended to distrust officers and generals.

What is clear is that Petrichenko and some of his associates *did* join the National Center in Finland after fleeing the Bolshevik attack on Kronstadt. They also volunteered their services to General Wrangel, who sent them a favourable letter. Apparently, Grimm was Wrangel's representative in Finland. Curiously, Petrichenko's program still sounded very left-wing but apparently contained a secret clause that a temporary military dictatorship would be necessary after the victory of the anti-Bolshevik forces, presumably headed by Wrangel himself! Avrich also quotes reports from the Russian secret police, according to which Petrichenko recruited several people to Wrangel's organization. These even managed to enter Russia and reach Petrograd, where a clandestine Wrangelite group was active. However, the Cheka managed to expose and liquidate them. Interestingly, Ida Mett's pamphlet on Kronstadt contains a short article by Petrichenko published in a Left SR magazine in 1926, denying that the Russian Red Cross was a White Guard front. Obviously, Petrichenko was lying, since by this time he surely knew the truth!

Ironically, Avrich's book has been used by Communists to "prove" their case that the Kronstadt rebellion was indeed counter-revolutionary. By contrast, some anarchists have accused Avrich of sloppy scholarship! Anarchists tend to think of the Kronstadt uprising as immaculate, and apparently don't want their rosy illusions smashed.

What Avrich's book really shows are the problems confronting non-Bolshevik leftists during the Russian Civil War, squeezed between "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and the Czarist and landlordist White Guards. Rejecting both proved to be easier said than done. The Kronstadt uprising was defeated by the revolution and its leadership derailed by counter-revolution.

That was the tragedy of Kronstadt.

Anarchism for teenagers

At least in Sweden, Daniel Guérin's book "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice" is *the* book everyone interested in anarchism reads. I know from personal experience than all teenagers who consider themselves anarchists read it, or at least used to read it when I was in high school. I also read it and found it interesting and well-written. I think it was the first political book I ever read!

Guérin was a French left-wing intellectual, and wrote several books that are relatively well-known in leftist circles, including "Fascism and Big Business" and "Negroes on the march". He belonged to the PSOP, a rather small socialist party in France, roughly similar to the Spanish POUM and the British ILP. Later, he became an anarchist of the "platformist" current, which emphasizes class struggle rather than alternative lifestyles, and calls for a centralized revolutionary organization, something many other anarchists consider anathema. (The founders of platformism were Peter Arshinov, Nestor Makhno and Ida Mett. See my review of Arshinov's book on the Makhnovists for a background.)

"Anarchism: From Theory to Practice" was first published in 1965. However, the anarchist political myths are still the same, and the book can therefore still be read by students of intellectual history (or budding anarchists, perhaps). Guérin describes the main anarchist thinkers of the 19th century: Proudhon, Bakunin, Stirner and Krapotkin. He attempts a kind of synthesis of their rather disparate ideas. Other anarchists mentioned include Malatesta and the perhaps lesser known Diego Abad de Santillan. The section on the history of anarchism concentrates on those anarchists that were active in the labour movement and called for class struggle, rather than on hippies, religious communes or terrorists. All the usual anarchist stories are included: the French CGT, the Spanish CNT and the Spanish revolution, Makhno, Kronstadt... There is also a chapter criticizing "workers self-management" in Algeria and Yugoslavia. Today, this part of the book looks curious, but back in 1965, many left-wingers probably saw these nations as some kind of libertarian alternatives to Soviet Communism. In Sweden, the more moderate wing of anarcho-syndicalism was certainly positive towards Tito's Yugoslavia.

While Guérin isn't entirely uncritical of the anarchist tradition, "Anarchism" is nevertheless a work of propaganda, and should be read with that in mind. I find it interesting for the reason I mentioned earlier: many people got their first positive exposure to anarchism from this book.

PS. Perhaps I must point out, that I'm not an anarchist...

The dangerous slogans of the Workers´ Opposition

"The Workers' Opposition" is a pamphlet originally published in Soviet Russia in 1921. The author was Alexandra Kollontai, a leader of a dissident faction within the Bolshevik Party also known as The Workers' Opposition.

The Workers' Opposition demanded that the administration of Russian industry should be handed over to the labour unions. This part of their program explains why anarcho-syndicalists and similar groups are interested in this particular dissident group. Indeed, the idea that "the entire economy" should be run by "the workers' themselves" sounds like an anarcho-syndicalist idea. The Opposition also demanded that all party officials should be elected by the membership rather than appointed from above, that all non-proletarian members of the party should be expelled (!), and that high-ranking political offices should be filled exclusively by workers. Naturally, the Oppositionists wanted to have absolute freedom of discussion within the party.

The Workers' Opposition was defeated at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. They were roundly condemned by Trotsky, who cracked the famous words: "The Workers' Opposition has raised dangerous slogans...in the final analysis, the party is always right" (!). Still today, anarchists love to quote Trotsky on that one... Since the Bolsheviks imposed a ban on factions in 1921, the Workers' Opposition was formally dissolved, but seems to have existed as a more informal grouping for a few more years. Ironically, the Workers' Opposition later merged with the Left Opposition (led by Trotsky) and then perished in the Gulag.

But not Kollontai. She made her peace, first with Lenin and later with Stalin, and even managed to survive the Great Purges, perhaps because she was too well known internationally for Stalin to have her executed. However, Kollontai's main claim to fame internationally wasn't her syndicalist deviation, but rather her "feminism" and call for free love. She also became the first female ambassador in the world, serving in Norway, Mexico and Sweden. Of course, she had to peddle the propaganda lies of Stalin, claiming that all was well in her homeland.

If only.

As a teenager, I was very impressed by "The Workers' Opposition". It may have been one of the first political documents I ever read. Today, I consider Kollontai's proposed program problematic, to the point of being amateurish. For instance, it hardly ever mentions the peasantry. Kollontai seems to disdain the peasants (the absolute majority of the Russian population at the time) to the point of claiming that the peasants are better off than the workers. But what should be done about the peasants? This was one of the most important issues in 1921, and the Bolsheviks solved it by launching the New Economic Policy (NEP), in effect a kind of "market socialism" which, they hoped, would benefit the peasants economically and hence make them stop their constant resistance against Bolshevik power. The increased productivity of the peasantry would led to larger revenues for the Soviet state, and hence indirectly finance the (state-controlled) industrialization of Russia. On this, Kollontai's pamphlet has nothing to say. Nor does it say anything about the international situation. And no, this cannot be brushed aside by saying "well, it's a document about domestic issues". Communism was a world movement, more or less directed from Moscow. Besides, the working class is international according to Marxist theory. Kollontai still claimed to be a Marxist. Wouldn't the syndicalistic program of the Workers' Opposition have international consequences for the Communist and working class movements?

When the Kronstadt sailors rose in rebellion, also during the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, the Workers' Opposition supported the Bolshevik regime (and Trotsky), which promptly suppressed the rebels. This has confused the anarchist admirers of the Opposition ever since, since they support the Kronstadt mutineers. However, the program of the Kronstadt uprising was not particularly similar to that of the Workers' Opposition. Rather, it was a populist program typical of the aspirations of Russian peasants. I don't think the Workers' Opposition's rejection of the Kronstadt rising was a co-incidence. While the Bolshevik leadership smashed the Kronstadters simply because they challenged one-party rule, Kollontai and her associates probably disdained them as rough peasants with ideas inimical to those of true proletarians. Ironically, the "libertarian" oppositionists thus ended up on the same side as the "authoritarian" Bolshevik regime they were criticizing! Note also the equally ironic fact that Lenin, while crushing peasant rebellions, nevertheless decided to make concessions to the economic demands of the peasantry, while keeping political power firmly in the hands of the party. The Workers' Opposition, in effect, took the opposite position: weaken the ruling party, while opposing economic concessions to the peasantry. Lenin (as usual) was a purveyor of Realpolitik, while Kollontai simply buried her head in the sand, refusing to see the real problems...

Who were the Workers' Opposition? What interests did they represent? My guess is that the Opposition represented a section of the Bolshevik labour union apparatus. One of their leaders, Shlyapnikov, was a labour union boss and for a time even People's Commissar for Labour. This social base in the union apparatus would explain a lot of things. The opposition was sensitive to rank-and-file working class unrest, but insensitive to the interests of the peasantry, while never planning a clean break with the Bolshevik regime. In a strange way, the position of the Workers' Opposition is thus analogous to that of labour union apparats in capitalist nations! Their opposition to Lenin and Trotsky expressed a sectionalist, workerist or labourite discontent, which Kollontai attempted to generalize into a political program.

Even as an anarcho-syndicalist program, Kollontai's pamphlet is a failure. Labour union control of industry in the Soviet Russia of 1921 wasn't the same as "workers' control" of industry, since the labour unions were controlled by the Bolsheviks. The pamphlet nowhere calls for multi-party elections or free soviets. It's not even clear whether Kollontai wants to abolish the centralized planned economy, since she proposes that the labour unions appoint a supreme economic council. Some demands are downright weird, such as the crazy workerist call for the expulsion of all non-proletarians from the party (Kollontai herself had an aristocratic background).

One can only wonder what these ouvrieriste-labourite petty apparatchiks would have done, had they somehow managed to take power? The question is, of course, hypothetical. The Workers' Opposition was too confused to really challenge the hardened Bolshevik leadership. Had they somehow taken power, they would have been quickly overthrown (and romanticized by generations of idealist leftists).

Another anarchist urban legend can be laid to rest. It's a fact that the Workers' Opposition really had no solutions. When the chips were down, the dangerous slogans of the Workers' Opposition really meant very little...

Trotskyists come clean

A review of "Kronstadt", a book published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. 

In 1921, the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd (St. Petersburg) rebelled against the Bolshevik regime. The Soviet regime succeeded in suppressing the uprising, but it has nevertheless acquired a strong symbolic significance for virtually all non-Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt sailors adopted a political program, elected a free soviet and published a short-lived newspaper. Their leader, Petrichenko, managed to escape abroad and gave interviews to Russian émigré publications. The Kronstadt sailors had supported the October Revolution in 1917, and had a reputation for being super-revolutionary, "the purest of the pure". The Kronstadt uprising was therefore an acute embarrassment to the Bolsheviks. The fact that it took place during the Tenth Party Congress of the Bolshevik Party, where Lenin launched the New Economic Policy in an attempt to appease the restive Russian peasantry, only added to its symbolic significance.

The Kronstadt rebellion is particularly embarrassing to Trotskyists, who claim to stand for a different kind of socialism or Communism than Stalin. Indeed, Trotsky called for a "political revolution" against Stalin, even calling for free elections to the soviets and the legalization of the Mensheviks and the SRs. At least that's what Trotsky said in 1938, when he was exiled in Mexico. But when Trotsky was in power, together with Lenin and indeed Stalin himself, he participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. Anarchists in particular have used this against Trotsky and the Trotskyists, and so have some left-socialists.

"Kronstadt", a book published by Pathfinder Press, is a Trotskyist attempt to "set the record straight". Pathfinder is the publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. I can't say the SWP succeeds in its attempt to "prove" that Lenin and Trotsky were different from the Stalinists. Nevertheless, their book does contain a lot of interesting source material, and can be recommended simply for that reason.

The first section of "Kronstadt" contain nine articles or excerpts from articles written by V.I. Lenin. The second section contain Trotsky's writings on Kronstadt, both articles he wrote while in power and later pieces written in exile, in which he still defends (quite openly) the Bolshevik decision to suppress the rebellion. A third section of the book contain an article by American Trotskyist John G. Wright, apparently written after consultations with Trotsky himself, and a polemical exchange between the SWP and two independent Marxists, Victor Serge and Dwight Macdonald. I'm not sure who the latter was, but Serge was a well-known Marxist intellectual, originally from Belgium, who supported Trotsky against Stalin during his prolonged stay in the Soviet Union. He was eventually able to leave Russia, but broke with Trotsky in favour of the POUM and the "London Bureau".

"Kronstadt" also contain a more modern article, written by Pierre Frank, a leader of the Fourth International at the time the book was published.

Well, at least it's good to know that the Trotskyists come clean and admit that they really did want the Kronstadt mutineers to be shot like partridges! Honesty is the first rule of politics, right?

Those interested in a more in-depth treatment of the events at Kronstadt should obtain a copy of Paul Avrich's "Kronstadt 1921". However, "Kronstadt" by Pathfinder Press is a good supplemental volume for those interested in the Bolshevik version of events.