Appeal to the proletariat of the world:
On the 2nd March, here, in Kronstadt we rebelled against the abominable Communist yoke and unfurled the Red flag of the 3rd revolution. Red soldiers, sailors and workers, the Revolutionary Kronstadt appeals to you!.. We will remain faithful to the cause which we have made ours: the liberation of the people from the yoke imposed upon them by the fanaticism of a party and we will die shouting LONG LIVE THE SOVIETS, FREELY ELECTED! Let the world proletariat know it! Comrades, we need your moral help: protest against the violent acts of the communist autocrats! (Izvestia March 13)
As Rudolph Rocker notes: "This last appeal of the Kronstadt rebels issued in the face of death, remained a cry in the desert. Nobody heard them... [Yet] while the communards of Paris found a place in the hearts of the great world proletariat, those whose blood had run on the pavements of Kronstadt were declared traitors and counter-revolutionaries by their own class." (The Failure of State Communism p41)
Kronstadt fell in the early morning hours of March 18, 1921. No mercy was shown to the mutineers, while the Bolsheviks celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune. Later that night, some 500 rebels were shot without trial on Zinoviev's orders: the regular executioner refused to do it, so a brigade of teenage Komsomols was ordered to shoot the sailors instead... During the following months 2,000 more rebels were executed, nearly all of them without trial, while hundreds of others were sent on Lenin's orders to Solovki, the first big Soviet concentration camp on an island in the White Sea, where they died a slower death... About 8,000 rebels escaped across the ice to Finland, where they were interned and put to public works. Some of them were later lured back to Russia by the promise of an amnesty � only to be shot or sent to concentration camps on their return.
At the end of February 1921, the workers of Petrograd, who had been making an enormous productive effort despite the short rations they were allowed, went on strike against their intolerable conditions. The Party and Zinoviev, who was responsible for the defence of Petrograd, could think of only one answer: to send a detachment of the Koursanty (cadet officers) against the strikers, and to proclaim a state of siege in Petrograd. In The Kronstadt Commune, Ida Mett tells what happened next. On 26 February the Kronstadt sailors, naturally interested in all that was going on in Petrograd, sent delegates to find out about the strikes. The delegation visited a number of factories. It returned to Kronstadt on the 28th. That same day, the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk, having discussed the situation, voted the following resolution which was presented to Kronstadts citizens assembly at which 16,000 were present, and was unanimously adopted:
Having heard the reports of the representatives sent by the General Assembly of the Fleet to find out about the situation in Petrograd, the sailors demand:
1. New elections to the Soviets by secret ballot, with freedom to carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants.
2. Freedom of speech and of the press for all workers and peasants, for anarchists and left-socialist parties.
3. Freedom of assembly for trade unions and peasant organisations 4. A non-party conference of the workers, Red Army soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and Petrograd province.
5. Liberation of all political prisoners of socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labour and peasant movements.
6. Election of a commission to review the case of those being held in prison and concentration camps.
7. Abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state for such purposes. Instead cultural and educational commissions should be established, locally elected and financed by the state.
8. Removal of all roadblocks between town and country
9. Equal rations for all working people, with the exception of those employed in trades detrimental to health.
10. An end to all Party detachments in all branches of the army, as well as the Party guards kept on duty in factories and mills. Should such guards or detachments be found necessary, they are to be appointed in the army from the ranks and in the factories and mills at the discretion of the workers.
11. Full freedom of action for peasants in regard to the land, and the right to keep cattle, on condition that the peasants manage with their own means and do not hire labour.
12. A request to all branches of the army, including officer trainees, to endorse this programme.
13. The press to give the programme wide publicity.
14. Appointment of mobile workers� control groups
15. Authorisation of handicraft production provided no wage labour is involved.
The Kronstadt demands were not outlandish - mrerely a request for basic freedoms, rights, and for democratic government by representative Soviets. These goals can clearly be seen in the list of demands of the Petropavlovsk Resolution. What would have happened if their demands had been adopted we will never know - their plan (unlike that of the Party) were clearly federative, decentralised and radically democratic.[1] "The Kronstadt workers... had shown the possibility of another form of power. With their commune and with their freely elected councils, the workers, not the Bolsheviks, provided the prototype of a proletarian revolution and workers� power". [Brendel]
"..the Kronstadt sailors were both disillusioned and FED UP WITH COMMUNIST PARTY POLICY AND THEY SPOKE WITH HATRED ABOUT POLITICAL PARTIES IN GENERAL... all were out to seize power and would later BETRAY THE PEOPLE who had vested their confidence in them."[Mett]
Today, in Australia and worldwide there are an increasing number who have similar sentiments regarding representative 'democracy' and the Party system. There is a general feeling that it has become a thin disguise for political-corporate collusion on a global scale. Currently, the Neo-Jacobins, neo-liberals & neo-conservatives are further doing in the name of LIBERTY what the Bolshevik leaders did in the name of EGALITE - destroy it completely and replace it with a sick caricature. Torn from their radical roots and reduced to cliches from the mouths of puppet-actors, Liberty & Democracy become objects of ridicule; feared, mistrusted and finally abandoned.
Today, the Russian people, purged of any memory of self-government and free initiative, once again turn to the 'iron hand' of the Tsar to 'punish and guide'.[2] As Richard Pipes, professor of History at Harvard University observed: "..I thought out of the collapse of communism the libertarian elements would win out -- but instead what's winning out is the old authoritarian trend in Russia... Putin is acquiring the power of the Tsars -- if you read Russian opinion polls the majority of Russians reject democracy and freedom -- they want security above all. They want to be a great power but they're not -- but mainly they feel extremely insecure.. and they want security in every way so they don't mind if the State acquires a great deal of power.. to them democracy is identified with anarchy and crime and they don't want it."[3]
This is not a mistake of history, it is the direct legacy of a bloody abortion from which Russia (and the world) is still recovering. It was the death of a people, many of whom still even today worship mass-murderers of the past as heroes.[4] That the abortion was carried out by 'scientists' and 'experts' in the name of Progress makes it all the sicker.. a grim reminder of the foolishness of centralised power - and of the totalitarian potential of ideologies.
In contrast to this, the Kronstadt rebels appear as a bright flame on the otherwise bleak pages of Russian history - a reminder of what is possible, if only for a short time. They were not experts in political theory who tried to force some utopian order on others from above - they just tried to remain free and so acted accordingly - even if it meant disobeying the "dictatorship of the proletariat". As one of the 'mutineers' said (quoting Kropotkin) "It is only those who do nothing who make no mistakes." They committed the unforgivable sin of siding with the peasantry[5] against elitist politicians and the Party. Their downfall marked the end of the social revolution in Russia. With the defeat of Kronstadt freedom was killed and the very word 'socialism' was turned into a curse.[6]
Like the Bolshevik elite, the neo-Jacobin global elite of today preach a doctrine of revolution[7] but in fact hate all autonomous forms of struggle which doesn't fit in with their 'New Economic Policy'.[8] All such struggles must (like the Kronstadt uprising) be branded as "counter-revolutionary", "traitorous" and, if possible, eliminated. Like in the pages of Pravda, history is re-written in the name of the victors and the truth replaced with a pack of lies. But, although they would like to eradicate the 'virus' of freedom completely they never can - it may at times be weakened or lie dormant, but, like the small seed, it will re-emerge sometimes unexpectedly and in unusual places. The Kronstadt rebels were the growth of such a seed - through remembering and through our own struggle we help to keep the autonomous tradition alive.
===
[1] "The classic forms of Kronstadt organization were the mass meeting and the committee, or Soviet, of deputies subject to immediate recall. There was free participation for all socialist classes and parties."[Pravda o Kronshtadte]
[2] 'Be firm... one wants to feel your hand - how long, years, people have told me the same - "Russia loves the whip" - it's their nature - tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide.' [Tsarina Alexandra to her husband - 1916.]
[3] "..a people, who under whatsoever pretext it may be, suffers tyranny, necessarily loses at length the salutory habit of revolt and even the very instinct of revolt. It loses the feeling for liberty, and once a people has lost all that, it necessarily becomes not only by its outer conditions, but in itself, in the very essence of its being, a people of slaves." [Bakunin]
[4] "..the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including, it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes." [Karl Popper ~ The Open Society & its Enemies]
[5] In their own homes, their native villages, the sailors saw that the Bolsheviks take by force the peasants' last grain and cattle, and pitilessly destroy all who do not unquestioningly obey. They destroy with the aid of executions, arrests, secret police... By their own experience and that of their relatives, the Kronstadt sailors were convinced that the Bolsheviks, who in word call themselves the "peasant power," in deed show themselves to be the most malicious enemies of the peasants; they are enemies of the peasants, and of the workers. [Pravda o Kronshtadte]
[6] "If the present situation continues, the very word socialism will turn into a curse. This is what happened to the conception of 'equality' in France for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins." - Peter Kropotkin writing to Lenin in 1920
[7] "By our efforts we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." [GW Bush]
see - 'W and Dostoevsky' by Justin Raimond. Antiwar.com.
[8] Lenin - New Economic Policy 1921
refs: (use google-search)
- Pravda o Kronshtadte (The Truth about Kronstadt)(recommended)
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mhuey/TOC/KRN.frame.html
- The Bolsheviks and Workers Control ~ Maurice Brinton (recommended)[pdf]
- Trotsky Protests Too Much ~ Emma Goldman 1938 [pdf]
- The Russian Revolution Destroyed [unknown][pdf]
- Marx's Program of State Dictatorship ~ Mikhail Bakunin [pdf]
- Socialism: Utopian & Scientific ~ Engels [pdf]
- Kronstadt: Proletarian Spin-Off Of The Russian Revolution by Cajo Brendel [pdf]
- The Kronstadt Commune by Ida Mett [net]
- Anarchism and Sovietism - The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Rudolf Rocker [pdf]
- Nationalism & Culture ~ Rudolph Rocker [net]
- The Failure of State Communism by Rudolph Rocker - translated by J Grancharoff 2004 -available from P.O Box 6012 Quaama, NSW, 2550 $10 Australia [money order]
Read the 14 papers published by the rebels at:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/izvestiia_krons1921.html
eyewitness accounts and articles at
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia.html
other relevant articles online:
POPULAR
- The (Neo-Jacobin) Ideology of American Empire by Claes G. Ryn
- Trotskys Ghost Wandering The White House
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/trotskys_ghost_wandering_the_white_house.htm
- W and Dostoevsky. by Justin Raimond. Antiwar.com.
THEORETICAL
- The End Of Socialist Statism
http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol2/fotopoulos_end.htm