Kronstadt 1921

THEIR REVOLT was crushed in short order. But then, no regime can tolerate for long an uprising of its own praetorian guard, and when a group of sailors at Kronstadt confronted the Bolsheviks with cries of unfilled promises and scorn for falsified slogans, the government had no choice but to act fast.

No fortress was more vital to the defense of the Soviet nation than the enclave of battleships and guns at Kronstadt. Perched on an island in the Gulf of Fniland 20 miles off Petrograd, it guarded the naval approaches to Russia's largest and former capital city, and its capture could place an enemy within easy grasp of the country's industrial and intellectual center.

Falsely, perhaps, Soviet authorities had felt they could depend on the Kronstadt sailors to uphold the gains of the Bolshevik victory. Inveterate enemies of Tsarist autocracy, the sailors had risen decisively against both Nicholas and the mildly reformist Provisional Government. They had propelled the Communists to victory at the Winter Palace, and the valiant support which they rendered the fledgling regime during the stormy days after the October insurrection had prompted Minister of War Leon Trotsky to hail them as "the pride and glory of the revolution."

But a devastating civil war was soon to erode the new government's political base and deprive it of popular support. Less than two months after the seizure of power, the remains of the Tsarist army, soon to be joined by 14 foreign powers, attacked the Bolshevik regime and plunged Russia into a state of physical and economic desolation. Those who had lived with hope and excitement through the days of Lenin's victory could not help feeling betrayal and disgust at the severe, quasi-dictatorial methods which the government now employed to deal with an increasingly desperate situation. The miniscule rations in the cities, the forced requisitioning of peasant grain, the growth of a centralized, omnipotent bureaucratic machine-all seemed to belie the straightforward, liberationist goals to which the revolution had aspired.

The sailors had defended the Bolsheviks during the civil war, and they had withstood heavy and constant bombardment of their island fortress in doing so. But in late 1920, as the conflict drew to a close, they were becoming highly sensitive to the wave of strikes and peasant revolts which began sweeping the country with the tightening of the government's reins. "A restless and independent breed who loathed all privilege and authority," Paul Avrich writes in Kronstadt 1921, "They seemed forever on the verge of exploding into open violence against their officers or against the central government, which they regarded as an alien and a coercive force."

AVRICH'S account of the Kronstadt explosion is, by any standard, a remarkably fair and balanced work. The important point, he understands, is that, in this particular bit of history, there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, no exploiters or toilers or even hypocrites. The sailors were, in effect, demanding the implementation of the government's own political and economic promises; at the outset, at least. they sought no breach with the party, but rather unity on the basis of the programs for which they and the party had struggled for so long. The sailors' echo of Lenin's slogan, "All power to the Soviets" represented a threat to the Bolshevik government under siege, but in the insurgents view the party itself, under less adverse conditions, would have stood for no less.

The difficulty confronting the government in late 1920 after its victory over the Tsarist forces was its confusion over how to make the transition from a war to a peacetime economy. The Russian nation had not had a breathing spell since its entrance into the World War in 1914, and the Bolsheviks had never known power under any but the most extremely dire conditions. Some party members argued for a complete relaxation of nationwide economic sanctions; others, such as Trotsky, advocated an even tighter regulation of farming and industry. Lenin, not wanting to move too precipitously, decided for the moment to continue with the present policy of arbitrary rations and forced requisitioning; yet he did this, as it turned out, at the expense of his own favor and credibility.

Most of this internal party squabbling, of course, was at best meaningless and at worst infuriating to most of the nation. The peasantry, by and large, had never been wholeheartedly in favor of the Bolsheviks-many of whom had rejected the peasants entirely as a factor in revolutionary change-and tended to prefer such groups as the Mensseviks and Social Revolutionaries, who opposed the requisitioning and endorsed equal land ownership and a free agricultural market. Many industrial workers, their unions emasculated and their soviets crucially weakened during the civil war period, had also come to doubt the wisdom and fairness of the party's centralist thinking.

THE BOLSHEVIKS reluctance to abandon immediately their methods of wartime governance in turn, led to a mass of strikes and rural unrest that nearly brought the regime to its knees. As winter set in, supply levels in the major cities approached subsistence levels and the populace began blaming the party for all the misfortune. Labor protest crippled Petrograd in February 1921, and peasant revolt flared as never before. The government deftly maneuvered itself out of these crises but nevertheless felt the blow, and at a party congress in March, Lenin finally introduced the agricultural liberalization that was to become the cornerstone of his New Economic Policy (NEP).

Lenin's policy change, however, came too late to avert the Kronstadt uprising. The sailors, mostly of peasant origin, had visited their homes after the end of the civil war and saw for the first time how difficult life was for their families in the countryside. They, too, blamed the party for most of the nation's ills; after all, had the government not carried out the forcible seizure of peasant grain, and in many instances denied the farmers even a subsistence of their own produce?

Thus, the sailors learned that they were not the only Russians who felt the acute pangs of economic collapse and the excessive denials of "war communism." They began to perceive that, if they should make the government in Moscow a target of militant protest, they would not be alone in their sympathies. In this regard, the events in Petrograd during the last two weeks in February were absolutely inflammatory. If they were to pick up the gun, the sailors thought, many on the mainland and in the Imperial City itself would join them.

The sailors envisioned a momentary coup. "Spontaniety and decentralization were their watchwords. They yearend for a free social order anchored in the local soviets, a direct popular democracy patterned after the Cossack Krug and the medieval veche. They were forever prone to sudden paroxysms of violence against the holders of authority, the officers, the bureaucrats, the men of property and privilege. In March 1921 all of these urges were to find their final and most formidable expression."

THE ACTIONS of the mutineers reflected this belief in local control. After electing a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and imprisoning the prominent loyal Bolsheviks that remained in the area, they adopted their own rations, set their own rules, and began to enact an already agreed-upon political program: the creation of a strong, independent, self-governing soviet that guaranteed extensive intellectual and personal liberties. But the sailors never really attempted by themselves to spread their particular revolt, forcibly or otherwise. They leafletted sporadically in the Petrograd area and in the end felt somewhat betrayed by the city's inaction, but they never strove to move their experiment beyond the island fortress. They believed instead that the revolt would generate itself in most other areas, such were the depths of their confidence in spontaneous insurrection.

This somewhat mystifying reluctance to extend the revolt negates the official Bolshevik reaction to the initial uprising-that it was a reactionary plot. It is possible, in fact, that the Soviets believed the Whites were behind it all, particularly in the early days of the two-week revolt when reliable information was hard to come by, when local newspapers were reporting fallacious rebel bombardments of the mainland and, in one case, a sailors' seizure of Petrograd. But it is precisely this spontaneous characteristic of the revolt, its self-imposed locality, its conformity, in fact, with the Bolshevik catchword 'soviet,' that raises the crucial question: Did the regime act honestly and fairly when it moved against the sailors at Kronstadt?

Were it not for this question, Kronstadt would remain a historical fantasy, of some topical interest to be sure, but not really worth dragging off the shelf. Yet as it is, the dilemma is worthy of attention because it poses the difficulty that must accompany the inclusion of "democracy" and "centralism" into a single thread of political practice. The Kronstadters argument, of course, was that the revolution had really begun with the promise of autonomous soviets; the Bolshevik hard-liners had supposed that the soviets must compromise their independence in favor of a more central and powerful body. Lenin, throughout his political career, had woven a course between these two extremes, holding that the people's choice would probably be the right choice, and if that were not the case, that public opinion could be courted and indulged and ultimately educated to the correct position.

But, in the difficult circumstances of Russia at war, it was inevitable that Lenin would forego this gradualism and do what he wanted with a maximum of dispatch. The harshness and momentary brutality of centralism did prove necessary to defeat the Whites. In a country that had always been far from rich, it seemed fairly impossible to allow local autonomy in the distribution of material resources and still succeed in drawing the whole nation together. By and large, the Soviet citizenry acknowledged the need, if not the desirability, of centralism at the time of the civil war.

IN A SENSE, this reasoning may be inadequate when applied to the Kronstadt revolt itself: the war was over, the people were clamoring for an end of centralism, and the demands of the mutineers were certainly justified. But from another point of view, the conditions of war still existed: resources were scarce and needed to be carefully handled, and that meant there had to be a national as well as a local reckoning. And, more immediately, the enemies of the Soviet republic, inveterate as they were, still sought an opportunity to topple the government.

The Russian expatriates, as Avrich points out, were scheming to turn the Kronstadt uprising to their own advantage. The rebels and the emigres had nothing in common, and Lenin and Trotsky know it; the sailors called for the realization of the "toilers republic," while the Whites stood for a bourgeois or even a Tsarist restoration, and all the dreaded forms of exploitation which that involved. The threat of the sailors was serious enough, but for the most part it was reformist in nature; the reactionaries would settle on nothing less than the final overthrow of Bolshevik rule.

If the strategic fortress, now held by rebels of their own stripe, were truly to fall into enemy hands, who knew what might occur? The Whites could play upon popular discontent, of which there was now an excess; or they might simply muster a large militia and drive the Soviets under for the last time. In any event, the prospect was a dangerous one.

It is in these terms that Avrich views the uprising. The rebels may have had cause, but the government needed also to protect itself against undue threats to its existence. In the Russia of 1921, a protest such as this, owing to the dreadful state of affairs, seemed inevitable; the government's reaction, equally predictable. It is what Avrich, speaking in literary terms, calls "the tragedy of Kronstadt."

And so it happened. Bombardments, raids, and finally, a massive expedition of 50,000 troops crossing the thick layer of ice atop the Finnish Gulf to take back the fortress from the insurrectionists. The rebels blow gigantic holes in the ice, and hundreds of loyalist troops drown in chilling graves. The expedition's survivors bludgeon their way into the city, defended by 15,000 men, and there is fierce hand-to-hand combat raging in the city's homes and streets. Then a silence, and it is over, some of the sailors fleeing across the ice to Finland and the rest on their way to Soviet trials and labor camps.

WHO, then, was responsible for Kronstadt? Avrich never attempts to solve the riddle, but it seems that the beginning of an answer is at hand. Those forces which attempted to set back Soviet Russia, to retard her economic and political progress, to make her life and her people's lives as wretched and unendurable as possible, are the real villains of the episode. To set the blame, one must look first to the Tsarists and the Allied powers who fired the opening shots of the civil war itself, who attacked what had begun as a new human experiment, a genuinely popular social revolution, and attacked it without the slightest measure of compassion or concern.

The legacy of suppression that began with the Soviet bombardment of Kronstadt led directly to the Stalinist terror and to the faceless, cynical technocracy that the Soviet Union is today. That alone, in retrospect, would make the attack on the fortress absurd. But the burning irony of Kronstadt is that, before the siege began, at a time when it might have been stopped or called off, the real perpetrators were nowhere to be found.