![]() Prominent American anarchist Alexander Berkmans 1922 pamphlet, The Kronstadt Rebellion, was based largely on a spurious 1921 account entitled The Truth About Kronstadt published by the Social Revolutionaries (SR), bitter opponents of the October Revolution. Right from the start, the anarchists made common cause with open counterrevolutionaries over Kronstadt. The documents in Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda, dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (The 1921 Kronstadt Tragedy, Documents in Two Volumes) (Moscow: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 1999) confirm beyond doubt the counterrevolutionary nature of the Kronstadt rising. This led to the 1999 publication of a huge collection of Russian historical materials by ROSSPEN, the main publishing house associated with the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. Yeltsin unwittingly helped drive a nail in the coffin of the Kronstadt myth when, in blessing the mutineers, he also opened the archives for study of the mutiny. To wield Kronstadt as an ideological club against Leninism, the anarchists have to insist, against all known facts, that the mutineers of 1921 were the same sailors who had played a vanguard role in 1917 and that they were not linked to the White reactionaries. The principal aim of the hue and cry over Kronstadt has always been to discredit the Marxists struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and in particular to smear Trotskyism, the contemporary embodiment of authentic Leninism.Īccording to anarchist myth, Kronstadt was the third toilers revolution-a continuation of the February and October revolutions of 1917-its suppression proof positive of the anti-working-class character of the Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, and of Marxism in general. The Kronstadt mutiny is the center of a great myth, assiduously propagated by anarchists but seized upon by a whole array of anti-revolutionary forces ranging from social democrats to tsarist restorationists. The fact that Yeltsin, who had led the 1991-92 overturn of the Bolshevik Revolution, rehabilitated the Kronstadt mutineers simply confirmed once again whose class interests were served by the 1921 uprising. Nearly 73 years later, on 10 January 1994, self-selected White Guard heir Boris Yeltsin, president of a now-capitalist Russia, placed his double-headed-eagle seal of approval on the Kronstadt revolt (see Kronstadt and Counterrevolution: Then and Now, Workers Vanguard No. Though militarily repulsed by the Soviet Red Army after nearly three years of civil war, the White Guards and their imperialist patrons remained intent on reversing the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917 and crushing the young Soviet workers state. The Bolsheviks charged that the revolt was a counterrevolutionary mutiny: whatever the sailors intentions, it could only aid the forces of capitalist restoration-ranging from avowed democrats to outright monarchists-united behind the White standard of clerical/tsarist reaction. The rebels claimed to be fighting to restore a purified Soviet power freed from the monopoly of the Communists. The mutineers held Kronstadt for two weeks, until the Soviet regime finally retook it by a direct assault across the ice, at a cost of many lives on both sides. In March 1921, the garrison of the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt, gateway to revolutionary Petrograd, revolted against the Bolshevik government. Russian Archives Refute Anarchist Lies, Again With a subscription to an English-language ICL periodical
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