http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion
Excerpted from: The History of Russia, Volume 5- The Revolution of 1921
Jonathon Redd, 1964
… On March 1st, a general meeting of the Kronstadt garrison convened in the highest reaches of the fortress. Stepan Petrichenko, an engineer aboard the Petropavlovsk, was elected president of this first organized meeting of uprising. A leader of an early rising of the navy against tsarist regime in 1917, Petrichenko entered the Bolshevik political party looking to serve what he believed was his nation’s best interests. Within a year though, he grew so disgusted by the corruption and hypocrisy of the so called “People’s party” he left. At Kronstadt, he had rapidly become the de-facto leader of the uprising, the common soldiers gravitating to his obvious vision.
There are times in history for patience, and there are times for action. On March 1st, the future of the new-born revolution was balanced between them. Two main factions were present at the meeting: the first composed of soldiers and sailors who participated in the 1917 revolutions and still believed, however foolishly, that the Bolshevik government now ensconced in Moscow could be reformed; the second mostly composed of ex-officers of the old Russian fleet and of peasants who had seen firsthand all Lenin’s government had offer them. The second faction urged for immediate action, an immediate march over the ice to Petrograd where starving workers and soldiers were waiting to join them. Speed was necessary, for every day the soldiers remained on their island in the Baltic the crimson armies of the Bolsheviks organized themselves, preparing crush the mutiny. Those who pushed for action were too few however, and it began to look as though the revolution would sit in Kronstadt and wait for its destruction.
The unwitting savior of the revolution was Mikhail Kalinin, who had hurriedly arrived earlier that afternoon at the head of a delegation of government officials. He was nominally there to negotiate with the soldiers, and in actuality there to stall them, while Trotsky prepared for the assault on the fortress. So when he stood to give a speech to the assembly at Kronstadt, his purpose was to sow continued disagreement between the revolutionaries. He emphasized the government’s willingness to discuss the council’s proposals and its dedication to fully equality for all Russians. But the habits of tyranny die hard, and soon Kalinin ventured into the less safe territory of thuggish intimidation. Alluding to the strength of the Soviet state, he declared that violent revolution against the State could only lead to violent retribution. Stay here, he urged, and don’t risk a confrontation with the government’s military might. He must have expected this to encourage the mutineers to keep to the safe path of moderation, but there he was wrong. For an hour later he was ejected from Kronstadt, lucky to be left alive. Unwittingly, he had given the proud revolutionaries a new resolve, for no true lover of liberty can tolerate coercion. ….
… And while the doomed Chairman of the CPC huddles in the haunts of the murdered tsars, we will return to Petrograd, where a new wind is blowing over the frozen Baltic. For on March 3rd, the workers and soldiers of that city were out in force, cheering Petrichenko and the 7000 sailors and soldiers who marched into the city with him. An hour previously, Trotsky had fled the city with a few loyal supporters, headed to Moscow and an unhappy Politburo. The Kronstadt sailor’s ranks quickly swelled with 15,000 deserters from the Red Army and the many Petrograd factory workers who took up arms to defend their city and the seed of what would become the modern Russian state….
_______
Excerpted from: The Demise of the Russian Bolsheviks: 1917-1923
Daniel Gray, 1962
… If we were called upon to give one characteristic that would characterize the Russian government for most of the country’s history, we might say extreme absolutism. The country’s origin under the iron fist of the Mongol invaders set the precedent for those who came after: the tsars, who brooked no dissent from peasant or boyar alike and whose power stemmed from a ubiquitous secret police; and the Bolsheviks, for whom the Cheka took over right where the Okhrana had left off. With this in mind, the final emergence of a liberal, democratic Russian state in the throes of seven years revolution and civil war is all the more remarkable, and worthy of our consideration, particularly given how crucial Russia was to the defense of liberalism later in the century …
… But Leon Trotsky, alone among the leaders of the Bolshevik government, escaped Lenin’s fate, for he had left Moscow by train on the eve of the Battle of Moscow. As the Kremlin fell on the night of the 23rd, Trotsky was crossing the German border in a sealed car, mirroring Lenin’s similar journey five years before, albeit in the opposite direction. Thus, the germ of Bolshevism spread beyond Russia just as it was being eradicated, for while a bullet to the brain was enough to end the threat Lenin posed to the world, Trotsky ended up at the heart of Germany. On April 27th, 1922, Trotsky met with Ernst Thälmann in at a railway station 3 miles from Berlin, where he was quickly spirited away to locations unknown. Documentary practice fails to place Trotsky for most of the next nine years; his own writings imply that he was hiding in Germany, but because of the extraordinary measures the KDP underwent to keep him hidden from the Germans authorities, no evidence remains to account for his whereabouts or actions during this period….
….On January 18th, 1923, newly elected delegates from Soviets around the USSR arrived in Petrograd for the Constitutional Congress. Of these, a full third identified themselves as Bolsheviks and refused to take further part in the proceedings, other than to raucously disrupt the Convention. It is would be an impossible task to fully categorize the rest, for they consisted of anarchists and regional nationalists, old Mensheviks and illiterate peasant leaders and members of every possible faction down to a few lonely royalists. It is one of the miracles of history: that out of the synthesis of such oppositional voices come documents that stand at the heart of every stable nation-state. How solidly the foundation stones of government are laid by those who disagree on the minutest points of masonry.
The most symbolically poignant action of the Congress was the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was resolved on its seventh floor vote by a margin of three delegates. Petrichenko’s full support of the motion, which he believed to be necessary if Russia was to fully break with the old regime, was barely sufficient to force the vote past a coalition of Bolsheviks and Russian nationalists who stood opposed to the symbolic nature of the resolution, and regional nationalists who objected its lack of actual support for separatist movements. On February 1st, the Russian Republic was born….
________
Excerpted from: Socialism on the Rack
Scarlett Iliff, 1974
…The interests of the Party functionaries and the interests of the Proletariat were rapidly divorced, a process begun during the Civil War and rapidly completed over the summer of 1921. By the time of the Battle of Moscow, the classes of party intelligentsia and bureaucrats were engaged in open warfare against the class which had so recently brought them to power. This follows the classic pattern of revolution: one class uses another to over through their mutual oppressor; then once it has gained predominance, takes on the role of exploiter. The Kronstadt revolutionaries recognized this: to quote the first of their fifteen points, “The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants.” Upon the seizure of Petrograd in March, they proceeded to try and execute those figures of the oppressing class who fell into their hands. On the 10th of April, Gregory Zinoviev, the Bolshevik administrator of Petrograd, was tried before court of soldiers and works, accused of “crimes against the proletariat and peasant classes of Russia.” His claims of membership in the proletariat class were dismissed, and he was executed four days later. ….
… The Constitutional Congress of 1923 dates the end of the brief period of proletarian rule in Russia. At the opening of the convention, Stepan Petrichenko, who had hitherto avoided receiving any official title and had remained merely the de-facto leader of the movement, was persuaded by the Congress to accept the title of president. The Congress was marked by the ascendency of a coalition of shopkeepers, well-to-do peasant farmers, and factory manager, which styled themselves the Vsego. This coalition was responsible for Article 12 of the new Constitution, which affirmed the individual’s right to own property, and Article 17, which ended government ownership of most industry. In short, the Congress represented the co-optation of the Revolution of 1921 by a newly resurgent class of petit bourgeoisie.
The progress of the new Russian state in the 1920’s continued the trend. While the state officially declared itself a People’s Social Republic, this proved to be as much a farce as the tsarist claim to divine right. The acute class consciousness of the early Kronstadt Uprising dissolved into the national jingoism that has been long used to distract the proletariat from their best interests. Stepan Petrichenko’s rhetoric became increasingly less revolutionary over the course of his fifteen year term in office, to the point that he could warn the nation with a straight face, in his last speech to the national congress, against the “subversive influence of German provocateurs among the uneducated working class of this country.” The last remnants of rule by the people vanished with the Second Great War, which pitted against the nation against a Communist foe. ….
__________
Excerpted from: The Other Capital
Emily Golden, 1975
… A factory worker in 1921 Petrograd would have been astonished to be informed that he was living in the worker’s paradise. The reality of the Bolshevik utopia was mass impoverishment on a scale never before seen in Russia. Statistics can communicate some of the hardships suffered by the residents of Petrograd: average working classes wages in 1920 were at some 9% of their 1913 level; workers subsisted on an average of 750 calories a day; two thirds of the city had fled to the countryside, where conditions were admittedly hardly better. The real cost of the Bolshevik autocracy, though, can only be seen by looking at the human lives suffering through it, the personal cost of the collectivist nightmare. …
... A working class family in Petrograd in 1918-19 would have been able to survive by dealing in the informal barter markets that sprang up all around the Soviet Union during the Civil War period in technical violation of the Bolshevik ban on individual commerce. Supplementing an exceedingly meager official ration with extra bread obtained at these markets, a family might avoid starvation, even heat their apartment in the depths of winter. Mariya Alexandrov, writing her sister in the fall of 1919, says that her husband traded her needlework at the markets for “four loaves of bread, a quarter pint of lamp oil, and a hat for Borya” her son. Other families bound books, made candles, or even, in the case of Nikolai Stastov’s family, cast bullets from scavenged metal. This informal market economy kept the city alive, and allowed factory workers to support a family with wages insufficient support a single individual.
In the summer of 1920, the Bolshevik government abruptly cracked down on all aspects individual enterprise. Vasily Konchalovksy was the proprietor of a small store in Petrograd, where he sold bread and firewood in exchange for manufactured items like boots, needles, and lamps. These he would periodically take out into the country and trade for flour with the farmers. On July 15th, he was arrested by the Cheka, given a perfunctory trial as a counter-revolutionary the next day, and soon found himself on a train bound for Siberia. There he presumably starved to death in the winter of 1922-23 along with the rest of the inhabitants of the Gulag Archipelago. Other participants in the barter markets received similar treatment. Soon Petrograd was purged of all remnants of market economy, and was wholly dependent on an incompact state bureaucracy for survival. The winter of 1920-21 was unimaginably bleak. All those with any family in the countryside left the city; Gavrila Chardynin describes leaving an apartment building “completely vacated,” one of many such abandoned buildings in the neighborhood….
… When the delegates returned to the fortress on February 28th with news of the brutally suppressed strikes in Petrograd, the sailors of Kronstadt drew up their famous 15-point demand. While mostly dealing with political matters, such as the immediate election of new Soviets by secret ballot, the resolution did touch on the economic flaws of Bolshevism. It notably included points 11: “The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labor,” and 15: “We demand that handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labor.” That the Kronstadt mutineers had economic liberation at the forefront of their mind as they marched across the ice is doubtful, but it certainly accounts for the warm welcome they received from the people of Petrograd. The markets opened up as soon the Bolsheviks had left the city. Fyodor Katina reports that on March 10th, just a week after Great March, his family ate their fill for the first time “in years” of bread he had brought back in from the countryside. 1921 Petrograd could only be considered prosperous in comparison to preceding years. Still, the recovery from paradise had begun. …
_________
Excerpted from: Fifteen Points to Constitution
Gordon White, 1979
… Where did the Fifteen Points come from? The document shows three distinct influences in their framing. The first is the voice of the universal revolutionary, speaking against oppression. The second is the voice of the Marxist intent on rescuing Russia from the wayward path of the Bolsheviks. The third, and eventually most influential of the three, was a voice of economic liberalization. How did a group of sailors on a fortress in the Baltic Ocean draw up such a heterogeneous document?
The Kronstadt mutineers were certainly participating in a long and proud tradition of revolutionary manifestos, a tradition they were fully conscious of, at least after the fact: twenty years later, Stepan Petrichenko would write that “That night aboard the Petropavlovsk we were filled by the spirit of gone Revolutionaries, by the soul of the Paris Commune.” Certainly the Fifteen Points shows the prints of such documents as The American Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and through them to John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, although it is not clear that any of the Point’s drafters had ever read those famous manifestoes. Characteristic of such documents are the first three points’ affirmation of personal rights as inseparable from political rights. A comparison of the Fifteen Points to the many similar manifestoes released all across Russia by worker’s and soldier’s Soviets during the 1917-1923 period is instructive. The Murmansk Worker’s Soviet (which was notably under occupation by the Western Allies at the time) released a manifesto in 1917 that….
… But despite the Anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of the Mutineer’s leader’s, it is notable that the red-and black flag of that movement never flew above Kronstadt. When five years before, Petrichenko had led his fellow sailors on a similar fortress island, Nargen, to declare themselves an independent republic, they had been much more overtly anarchistic. That the Kronstadters did not do so is illuminating. While points such as 7, 10, and 11 are fundamentally anarcho-syndicalist demands, the document as a whole, particularly the demands for personal economic freedom, are not typical of that political tradition. Indeed, points 11 and 15 are not easily attributable to any of the three dominant political traditions framing the document. Beyond the political demands of the Social Contract manifesto writers, beyond the plans for institutional reform of the purifying Marxist, beyond even the anti-party sentiments of the anarchists, is the voice of economic liberalism, which can only have been discovered through the sailor’s empirical experience with the closure of the Petrograd free markets. ….
____________
Excerpted from: Petrichenko’s Paradise: Kronstadt through the lens of the 1960’s
Jeremy Brown, 1998
… Why the adoration of Petrichenko’s Russia? For adoration it was. Historians like Jonathan Redd and Daniel Gray made heroes of the men who ended Bolshevism in Russia and put the country on the path to liberal democracy. Therefore a generation of students read of Jonathan Redd’s “proud revolutionaries” and “lovers of liberty,” characters taken straight from the American mythology of its own birth in the 18th century, or of Daniel Gray’s Russia which was “crucial to the defense of liberalism” during the Second Great War. Yet this is the same Russia that immediately reopened the Soviet Gulags in the spring of 1923, the same Russia that was ruled for fifteen years without election by Stepan Petrichenko. Despite the evidence that the early Russian Republic was as repressive as it predecessor, the historical community of the sixties was dominated by dedicated apologists of the Soviet successor state. Why?
The single most important narrative of the twentieth century is the heroic defense of liberal democracy against the aggression of Communist Germany, Italy, and later France. The story runs that, in their hour of need, a reformed Russia arrived to save the West from its worst nightmare, and that together with the US and Great Britain founded the world order that remains to this day. This is a generally problematic narrative, to say the least. The academic community of the period was briefly disrupted by, and then set about studiously ignoring, the Admiralty Papers, declassified in 1966, which indicated that the immediate cause of the war had been an Allied attack on German warships. Likewise, historians carefully avoided discussing the burned out husks of Berlin, Paris, Milan, Marseilles, and a hundred other European cities, evidence of Allied complicity in war crimes on an unprecedented scale. The most disturbing characteristic of the proponents of this narrative is their willingness to justify violence for a greater good. More recent editions of Daniel Gray’s Demise edit out his mention of the execution of Trotsky, but a reader of the original text can’t help but be disgusted by his casual satisfaction at the “bullet to the brain” Lenin receives. …
__________
Note: Inspiration for the concept of a Kronstadt rebellion that spreads to the mainland comes from Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, who claims that there were ex-officers who urged this course of action and speculates that had the mutineers done so the Bolshevik government might have been overthrown.
____
I submitted this as my final paper for my History class this semester. The assignment was to write an account of a real or fictional event from the perspectives of six different historians: a follower of Sir Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Leopold von Ranke, a classic Marxist, a social historian, a new cultural historian, and a postmodern historian....
Excerpted from: The History of Russia, Volume 5- The Revolution of 1921
Jonathon Redd, 1964
… On March 1st, a general meeting of the Kronstadt garrison convened in the highest reaches of the fortress. Stepan Petrichenko, an engineer aboard the Petropavlovsk, was elected president of this first organized meeting of uprising. A leader of an early rising of the navy against tsarist regime in 1917, Petrichenko entered the Bolshevik political party looking to serve what he believed was his nation’s best interests. Within a year though, he grew so disgusted by the corruption and hypocrisy of the so called “People’s party” he left. At Kronstadt, he had rapidly become the de-facto leader of the uprising, the common soldiers gravitating to his obvious vision.
There are times in history for patience, and there are times for action. On March 1st, the future of the new-born revolution was balanced between them. Two main factions were present at the meeting: the first composed of soldiers and sailors who participated in the 1917 revolutions and still believed, however foolishly, that the Bolshevik government now ensconced in Moscow could be reformed; the second mostly composed of ex-officers of the old Russian fleet and of peasants who had seen firsthand all Lenin’s government had offer them. The second faction urged for immediate action, an immediate march over the ice to Petrograd where starving workers and soldiers were waiting to join them. Speed was necessary, for every day the soldiers remained on their island in the Baltic the crimson armies of the Bolsheviks organized themselves, preparing crush the mutiny. Those who pushed for action were too few however, and it began to look as though the revolution would sit in Kronstadt and wait for its destruction.
The unwitting savior of the revolution was Mikhail Kalinin, who had hurriedly arrived earlier that afternoon at the head of a delegation of government officials. He was nominally there to negotiate with the soldiers, and in actuality there to stall them, while Trotsky prepared for the assault on the fortress. So when he stood to give a speech to the assembly at Kronstadt, his purpose was to sow continued disagreement between the revolutionaries. He emphasized the government’s willingness to discuss the council’s proposals and its dedication to fully equality for all Russians. But the habits of tyranny die hard, and soon Kalinin ventured into the less safe territory of thuggish intimidation. Alluding to the strength of the Soviet state, he declared that violent revolution against the State could only lead to violent retribution. Stay here, he urged, and don’t risk a confrontation with the government’s military might. He must have expected this to encourage the mutineers to keep to the safe path of moderation, but there he was wrong. For an hour later he was ejected from Kronstadt, lucky to be left alive. Unwittingly, he had given the proud revolutionaries a new resolve, for no true lover of liberty can tolerate coercion. ….
… And while the doomed Chairman of the CPC huddles in the haunts of the murdered tsars, we will return to Petrograd, where a new wind is blowing over the frozen Baltic. For on March 3rd, the workers and soldiers of that city were out in force, cheering Petrichenko and the 7000 sailors and soldiers who marched into the city with him. An hour previously, Trotsky had fled the city with a few loyal supporters, headed to Moscow and an unhappy Politburo. The Kronstadt sailor’s ranks quickly swelled with 15,000 deserters from the Red Army and the many Petrograd factory workers who took up arms to defend their city and the seed of what would become the modern Russian state….
_______
Excerpted from: The Demise of the Russian Bolsheviks: 1917-1923
Daniel Gray, 1962
… If we were called upon to give one characteristic that would characterize the Russian government for most of the country’s history, we might say extreme absolutism. The country’s origin under the iron fist of the Mongol invaders set the precedent for those who came after: the tsars, who brooked no dissent from peasant or boyar alike and whose power stemmed from a ubiquitous secret police; and the Bolsheviks, for whom the Cheka took over right where the Okhrana had left off. With this in mind, the final emergence of a liberal, democratic Russian state in the throes of seven years revolution and civil war is all the more remarkable, and worthy of our consideration, particularly given how crucial Russia was to the defense of liberalism later in the century …
… But Leon Trotsky, alone among the leaders of the Bolshevik government, escaped Lenin’s fate, for he had left Moscow by train on the eve of the Battle of Moscow. As the Kremlin fell on the night of the 23rd, Trotsky was crossing the German border in a sealed car, mirroring Lenin’s similar journey five years before, albeit in the opposite direction. Thus, the germ of Bolshevism spread beyond Russia just as it was being eradicated, for while a bullet to the brain was enough to end the threat Lenin posed to the world, Trotsky ended up at the heart of Germany. On April 27th, 1922, Trotsky met with Ernst Thälmann in at a railway station 3 miles from Berlin, where he was quickly spirited away to locations unknown. Documentary practice fails to place Trotsky for most of the next nine years; his own writings imply that he was hiding in Germany, but because of the extraordinary measures the KDP underwent to keep him hidden from the Germans authorities, no evidence remains to account for his whereabouts or actions during this period….
….On January 18th, 1923, newly elected delegates from Soviets around the USSR arrived in Petrograd for the Constitutional Congress. Of these, a full third identified themselves as Bolsheviks and refused to take further part in the proceedings, other than to raucously disrupt the Convention. It is would be an impossible task to fully categorize the rest, for they consisted of anarchists and regional nationalists, old Mensheviks and illiterate peasant leaders and members of every possible faction down to a few lonely royalists. It is one of the miracles of history: that out of the synthesis of such oppositional voices come documents that stand at the heart of every stable nation-state. How solidly the foundation stones of government are laid by those who disagree on the minutest points of masonry.
The most symbolically poignant action of the Congress was the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was resolved on its seventh floor vote by a margin of three delegates. Petrichenko’s full support of the motion, which he believed to be necessary if Russia was to fully break with the old regime, was barely sufficient to force the vote past a coalition of Bolsheviks and Russian nationalists who stood opposed to the symbolic nature of the resolution, and regional nationalists who objected its lack of actual support for separatist movements. On February 1st, the Russian Republic was born….
________
Excerpted from: Socialism on the Rack
Scarlett Iliff, 1974
…The interests of the Party functionaries and the interests of the Proletariat were rapidly divorced, a process begun during the Civil War and rapidly completed over the summer of 1921. By the time of the Battle of Moscow, the classes of party intelligentsia and bureaucrats were engaged in open warfare against the class which had so recently brought them to power. This follows the classic pattern of revolution: one class uses another to over through their mutual oppressor; then once it has gained predominance, takes on the role of exploiter. The Kronstadt revolutionaries recognized this: to quote the first of their fifteen points, “The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants.” Upon the seizure of Petrograd in March, they proceeded to try and execute those figures of the oppressing class who fell into their hands. On the 10th of April, Gregory Zinoviev, the Bolshevik administrator of Petrograd, was tried before court of soldiers and works, accused of “crimes against the proletariat and peasant classes of Russia.” His claims of membership in the proletariat class were dismissed, and he was executed four days later. ….
… The Constitutional Congress of 1923 dates the end of the brief period of proletarian rule in Russia. At the opening of the convention, Stepan Petrichenko, who had hitherto avoided receiving any official title and had remained merely the de-facto leader of the movement, was persuaded by the Congress to accept the title of president. The Congress was marked by the ascendency of a coalition of shopkeepers, well-to-do peasant farmers, and factory manager, which styled themselves the Vsego. This coalition was responsible for Article 12 of the new Constitution, which affirmed the individual’s right to own property, and Article 17, which ended government ownership of most industry. In short, the Congress represented the co-optation of the Revolution of 1921 by a newly resurgent class of petit bourgeoisie.
The progress of the new Russian state in the 1920’s continued the trend. While the state officially declared itself a People’s Social Republic, this proved to be as much a farce as the tsarist claim to divine right. The acute class consciousness of the early Kronstadt Uprising dissolved into the national jingoism that has been long used to distract the proletariat from their best interests. Stepan Petrichenko’s rhetoric became increasingly less revolutionary over the course of his fifteen year term in office, to the point that he could warn the nation with a straight face, in his last speech to the national congress, against the “subversive influence of German provocateurs among the uneducated working class of this country.” The last remnants of rule by the people vanished with the Second Great War, which pitted against the nation against a Communist foe. ….
__________
Excerpted from: The Other Capital
Emily Golden, 1975
… A factory worker in 1921 Petrograd would have been astonished to be informed that he was living in the worker’s paradise. The reality of the Bolshevik utopia was mass impoverishment on a scale never before seen in Russia. Statistics can communicate some of the hardships suffered by the residents of Petrograd: average working classes wages in 1920 were at some 9% of their 1913 level; workers subsisted on an average of 750 calories a day; two thirds of the city had fled to the countryside, where conditions were admittedly hardly better. The real cost of the Bolshevik autocracy, though, can only be seen by looking at the human lives suffering through it, the personal cost of the collectivist nightmare. …
... A working class family in Petrograd in 1918-19 would have been able to survive by dealing in the informal barter markets that sprang up all around the Soviet Union during the Civil War period in technical violation of the Bolshevik ban on individual commerce. Supplementing an exceedingly meager official ration with extra bread obtained at these markets, a family might avoid starvation, even heat their apartment in the depths of winter. Mariya Alexandrov, writing her sister in the fall of 1919, says that her husband traded her needlework at the markets for “four loaves of bread, a quarter pint of lamp oil, and a hat for Borya” her son. Other families bound books, made candles, or even, in the case of Nikolai Stastov’s family, cast bullets from scavenged metal. This informal market economy kept the city alive, and allowed factory workers to support a family with wages insufficient support a single individual.
In the summer of 1920, the Bolshevik government abruptly cracked down on all aspects individual enterprise. Vasily Konchalovksy was the proprietor of a small store in Petrograd, where he sold bread and firewood in exchange for manufactured items like boots, needles, and lamps. These he would periodically take out into the country and trade for flour with the farmers. On July 15th, he was arrested by the Cheka, given a perfunctory trial as a counter-revolutionary the next day, and soon found himself on a train bound for Siberia. There he presumably starved to death in the winter of 1922-23 along with the rest of the inhabitants of the Gulag Archipelago. Other participants in the barter markets received similar treatment. Soon Petrograd was purged of all remnants of market economy, and was wholly dependent on an incompact state bureaucracy for survival. The winter of 1920-21 was unimaginably bleak. All those with any family in the countryside left the city; Gavrila Chardynin describes leaving an apartment building “completely vacated,” one of many such abandoned buildings in the neighborhood….
… When the delegates returned to the fortress on February 28th with news of the brutally suppressed strikes in Petrograd, the sailors of Kronstadt drew up their famous 15-point demand. While mostly dealing with political matters, such as the immediate election of new Soviets by secret ballot, the resolution did touch on the economic flaws of Bolshevism. It notably included points 11: “The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labor,” and 15: “We demand that handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labor.” That the Kronstadt mutineers had economic liberation at the forefront of their mind as they marched across the ice is doubtful, but it certainly accounts for the warm welcome they received from the people of Petrograd. The markets opened up as soon the Bolsheviks had left the city. Fyodor Katina reports that on March 10th, just a week after Great March, his family ate their fill for the first time “in years” of bread he had brought back in from the countryside. 1921 Petrograd could only be considered prosperous in comparison to preceding years. Still, the recovery from paradise had begun. …
_________
Excerpted from: Fifteen Points to Constitution
Gordon White, 1979
… Where did the Fifteen Points come from? The document shows three distinct influences in their framing. The first is the voice of the universal revolutionary, speaking against oppression. The second is the voice of the Marxist intent on rescuing Russia from the wayward path of the Bolsheviks. The third, and eventually most influential of the three, was a voice of economic liberalization. How did a group of sailors on a fortress in the Baltic Ocean draw up such a heterogeneous document?
The Kronstadt mutineers were certainly participating in a long and proud tradition of revolutionary manifestos, a tradition they were fully conscious of, at least after the fact: twenty years later, Stepan Petrichenko would write that “That night aboard the Petropavlovsk we were filled by the spirit of gone Revolutionaries, by the soul of the Paris Commune.” Certainly the Fifteen Points shows the prints of such documents as The American Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and through them to John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, although it is not clear that any of the Point’s drafters had ever read those famous manifestoes. Characteristic of such documents are the first three points’ affirmation of personal rights as inseparable from political rights. A comparison of the Fifteen Points to the many similar manifestoes released all across Russia by worker’s and soldier’s Soviets during the 1917-1923 period is instructive. The Murmansk Worker’s Soviet (which was notably under occupation by the Western Allies at the time) released a manifesto in 1917 that….
… But despite the Anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of the Mutineer’s leader’s, it is notable that the red-and black flag of that movement never flew above Kronstadt. When five years before, Petrichenko had led his fellow sailors on a similar fortress island, Nargen, to declare themselves an independent republic, they had been much more overtly anarchistic. That the Kronstadters did not do so is illuminating. While points such as 7, 10, and 11 are fundamentally anarcho-syndicalist demands, the document as a whole, particularly the demands for personal economic freedom, are not typical of that political tradition. Indeed, points 11 and 15 are not easily attributable to any of the three dominant political traditions framing the document. Beyond the political demands of the Social Contract manifesto writers, beyond the plans for institutional reform of the purifying Marxist, beyond even the anti-party sentiments of the anarchists, is the voice of economic liberalism, which can only have been discovered through the sailor’s empirical experience with the closure of the Petrograd free markets. ….
____________
Excerpted from: Petrichenko’s Paradise: Kronstadt through the lens of the 1960’s
Jeremy Brown, 1998
… Why the adoration of Petrichenko’s Russia? For adoration it was. Historians like Jonathan Redd and Daniel Gray made heroes of the men who ended Bolshevism in Russia and put the country on the path to liberal democracy. Therefore a generation of students read of Jonathan Redd’s “proud revolutionaries” and “lovers of liberty,” characters taken straight from the American mythology of its own birth in the 18th century, or of Daniel Gray’s Russia which was “crucial to the defense of liberalism” during the Second Great War. Yet this is the same Russia that immediately reopened the Soviet Gulags in the spring of 1923, the same Russia that was ruled for fifteen years without election by Stepan Petrichenko. Despite the evidence that the early Russian Republic was as repressive as it predecessor, the historical community of the sixties was dominated by dedicated apologists of the Soviet successor state. Why?
The single most important narrative of the twentieth century is the heroic defense of liberal democracy against the aggression of Communist Germany, Italy, and later France. The story runs that, in their hour of need, a reformed Russia arrived to save the West from its worst nightmare, and that together with the US and Great Britain founded the world order that remains to this day. This is a generally problematic narrative, to say the least. The academic community of the period was briefly disrupted by, and then set about studiously ignoring, the Admiralty Papers, declassified in 1966, which indicated that the immediate cause of the war had been an Allied attack on German warships. Likewise, historians carefully avoided discussing the burned out husks of Berlin, Paris, Milan, Marseilles, and a hundred other European cities, evidence of Allied complicity in war crimes on an unprecedented scale. The most disturbing characteristic of the proponents of this narrative is their willingness to justify violence for a greater good. More recent editions of Daniel Gray’s Demise edit out his mention of the execution of Trotsky, but a reader of the original text can’t help but be disgusted by his casual satisfaction at the “bullet to the brain” Lenin receives. …
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Note: Inspiration for the concept of a Kronstadt rebellion that spreads to the mainland comes from Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, who claims that there were ex-officers who urged this course of action and speculates that had the mutineers done so the Bolshevik government might have been overthrown.
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I submitted this as my final paper for my History class this semester. The assignment was to write an account of a real or fictional event from the perspectives of six different historians: a follower of Sir Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Leopold von Ranke, a classic Marxist, a social historian, a new cultural historian, and a postmodern historian....