This was during the first unsuccessful attack. There was one case where one unit moved to the side of those defending Kronstadt. What really happened was absolutely different. There has been a lot of speculation about the mass of soldiers refusing to take part in the attack for political reasons and also stories of mass desertions among the Red Army soldiers with many of them passing to the side of the Kronstadt rebels. The popular image that anti-Bolshevik critics try to portray is that there was widespread sympathy among the then Red Army soldiers towards the rebels. It is important to stress that neither of the two books have been written by Bolshevik sympathizers. The second book - "Kronstadt 1921" (Moscow, 2001) - is a collection of documents about the Kronstadt rebellion. This attempts to describe the role of Trotsky during the Russian civil war. The first book was published under the strange title, "The Unknown Trotsky: the red Bonaparte" (Krasnov V.G., Moscow, 2000). What I intend to do here is to highlight some of the new information published in these recent documents - a collection of material on Kronstadt. Anyone who wants to know the truth can read Trotsky for themselves. There is no need to repeat Trotsky's arguments here, as anyone can read his article by linking to it above. Trotsky answered these people in 1938 in his article " Hue And Cry Over Kronstadt" where he analysed the petit-bourgeois nature of this putsch. Later on, this criticism was adopted by other anti-Communist ideologues and propagandists. They described the Kronstadt events as a workers' and sailors' rebellion against the "Bolshevik dictatorship", and saw the crushing of the rebels as a "first step towards Stalinism". (In doing this Serge contradicted his own earlier views expressed at the time of the rebellion). The rebel leaders escaped to Finland.Īt the end of the 1930s a group of former Trotskyists, including Victor Serge, Max Eastman, Souvarine and some others, attacked Trotsky for his behaviour during the rebellion. After rejecting the government's ultimatum to capitulate, Kronstadt was stormed and captured in the second attack. The critical state that the Soviet Union was passing through in that moment meant that Lenin and Trotsky were forced to deal with the rebels very quickly. At the beginning of March 1921, in one of the most critical periods of the Soviet Republic's existence, in the naval base of Kronstadt near Petrograd, there was an attempt at a military coup against the Soviet government. It is not necessary to describe here all the aspects of this well-known event. Among them are two books about the most tragic act of the Russian Revolution-the so-called Kronstadt rebellion. The archives show that these leaders played a key role in the 1917 revolution and in establishing the Soviet state.ĭuring the last ten years many new interesting sources about critical moments of the Russian Revolution have been published. It is now clear to any historian why this was. The most difficult documents to get to in the past were those concerning the leaders of the Left Opposition. But they met with real problems in trying to find documents that could be used to discredit the leaders of the Russian Revolution - Lenin and Trotsky. What the bourgeois historians were hoping for was a mass of evidence that they could use to show that there was no difference between Stalinism and the healthy regime under Lenin and Trotsky in the first period after the revolution.
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![hue and cry over kronstadt hue and cry over kronstadt](https://litci.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/kronstadt-foto.jpg)
Thousands of them died at the hands of Stalin's henchmen. Trotsky's supporters in Soviet Russia in the 19s had first hand knowledge of these crimes because they were among the first to suffer the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration. Trotsky and his followers condemned these crimes long before any archives were opened. Of course, they did find a large amount of new evidence that confirms the shocking crimes of Stalinism. However the results for the bourgeois historians have been really disappointing. So one would expect a flow of terribly indicting facts. There was much speculation about the "terrible secrets of the communist regime" that would finally confirm the "evil character" of communism.Īfter the events that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, historians were finally allowed access to the Soviet archives. Far from confirming the criticisms of those hostile to the Bolsheviks, the latest sources show that Trotsky's position was correct and totally justified.įor many years the capitalist press, erudite professors and bourgeois analysts have been going on about the "secrets in the Soviet archives". New material that has emerged from the old Soviet archives over the past decade or so have allowed new books to be published on the events surrounding the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921.