Ak..'Voam",


A












THE
Russinn
TRAGEDV
by
AleHannder Berkmon
Comprising:
THE R USSIAN TRA GED Y
THE RUSSIAN RE VOL UTION AND THE COMMUNIST PAR TY
THE KRONSTADT REBELLION
COMPILED AND INTRODUCED
BY
WILLIAM G. NOWLIN JR.
PO





Series Editor William G. Nowlin Jr.


THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY, Alexander Berkman.
First published as three separate pamphlets in 1922 by Der
Syndikalist, Berlin.
This edition first published 1976 by Cienfuegos Press Ltd.,
Over The Water, Sanday, Orkney.
Cover illustration by Flavio Costantini.
Cover design by Simon Stern
Typeset by Marigold.
Printed by D.A. Hodgson.
ISBN 0-904564-11-8
CIENFUEGOS PRESS LTD
Publishers, Distributors &  International Booksellers
Box A, Over The Water, Sanday, Orkney, KW17 2BL


II





(OnTEnTS
Introduction                      V
The Russian Tragedy               1
The Russian Revolution and
The Communist Party              33
The Kronstadt Rebellion          69
Publishing History              112


III





4S^


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~i~;i:


il~


Alexander Berkman (courtesy Taminent Library, New York University)





InTRODUCTIOn
THESE PAMPHLETS, ISSUED HERE in book form for the first time,
are Alexander Berkman's first writings after leaving Russia in December
of 1921. He had entered Russia just two years earlier, filled with
devotion to the ideals of the Russian revolution and anxious to contribute his share to the revolutionary process. It was a return home for
him, as he had lived his first 17 years in Russia and had grown up
among the revolutionaries of that era. Now he was welcomed back as
an important revolutionary exile from his adopted United States.
Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and 247 other "politicals"
had been deported from the United States on December 21, 1919.
Berkman and Goldman, the two most active anarchists in America
since the turn of the century, had only recently each completed two
year prison sentences for active opposition to the World War I draft (as
founders and organisers of the No-Conscription League) and, though
resentful of being so abruptly forced to terminate their organising in
America, looked forward to enthusiastic participation in the revolutionary experiment in their native land, Russia.
Among the reasons for their deportation was, in fact, their active
propagandising in support of the Russian Revolution within the United
States, Berkman writes, "Without exaggeration I may say that the
happiest day of my existence was passed in a prison cell - the day when
the first news of the October Revolution and the victory 1of the Bolsheviki reached me in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary."  As anarchists, both had reservations about the Marxist Bolsheviks, though
Berkman said:
"I placed the Revolution above theories, and it seemed to me
that the Bolsheviki did the same. Though Marxists, they had been
instrumental in bringing about a Revolution that was entirely
un-Marxian; that was indeed in defiance of Marxian dogma and
prophecy. Ardent advocates of parliamentarism, they repudiated
it in their acts. Throwing overboard the democratic planks of its
programme, it proclaimed the slogans of the Social Revolution in
order to gain control of the movement of the masses... Furthermore, the Communist Party exploited all the popular demands of
the hour: termination of the war, all power to the revolutionary
proletariat, the land for the peasants.  This attitude of the
Bolsheviki was of tremendous psychological effect in hastening
and stimulating the Revolution... In short, the Bolsheviki
1.  Berkman, The Anti-Climax, p.9.


V





appeared in practice a thoroughly revolutionary party whose sole
aim was the success of the Revolution; a party possessing the
moral courage an4 integrity to subordinate its theories to the
common welfare."
Alexander Berkman represents an unusual figure uniquely qualified
to report on revolutionary Russia in 1920 and 1921. His finished work
on the subject, based on his Russian diaries, is The Bolshevik Myth
(Boni & Liveright, 1925), a book sorely in need of reissue. The
Bolshevik Myth certainly compares in its own way with a select few
other books of the time, such as John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the
World. The present work, which we have titled The Russian Tragedy,
comprises his first writings on Russia and the revolution and its lessons
and contains the essence, though not the artistry, of the later work.
Unlike most Westerners, Berkman was in Russia for an extended period
of time and he spoke Russian - a matter of no small significance. His
reputation made him one that various individuals and groups sought
out. (During the Mooney case in San Francisco, Berkman's life had
been threatened by the California authorities; revolutionary workers
and sailors from Petrograd and Kronstadt demonstrated repeatedly at
the American Embassy and even threatened to hold the American
ambassador hostage until Berkman was out of danger). His fourteen
years in prison for the attempted assassination of Carnegie's Henry
Clay Frick in Pittsburgh during the Homestead strike of 1892 brought
him down from a more or less aristocratic perch and taught him how
to communicate honestly and equally with people of all backgrounds,
how to learn from those he had held in contempt as the dregs of
civilisation:  the "criminal element."  His Prison Memoirs Of An
Anarchist is an invaluable aid in understanding this development, as
well bas a good autobiography of his early life. Characterised by a
unique personal honesty and frankness, the Prison Memoirs offer a
good insight into how revolutionaries sometimes hold themselves
superior to the People they claim to serve. This was a lesson the
Bolsheviks never learned.
Before Berkman's questioning became too embarrassing to the
authorities of the new regime, he was invited to ride in Zinoviev's car,
to the platform at banquets and parades (often as official interpreter);
he was even asked to prepare the official English translation of Lenin's
Left Wing Communism, ironically enough, but refused unless permitted
to add his own preface. Appointed Chairman and General Manager by
the Museum of the Revolution for an extended journey throughout
Russia to collect material for the Museum, Berkman travelled widely in
the Ukraine, through Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa, and later made a trip
to Archangel, investigating in all places factories, peasant lands, prisons,
party headquarters, scenes of pogroms, and meeting with revolutionaries of every tendency. Berkman's 33 ycars in America gave
him the necessary critical distance to see things as an outsider (and
many peasants approached hiim as an American with stories they would
hesitate to tell a Russian, for fear the Russian might prove a Chekist or
2.  Berkman, ibid., pp. 10. 18.
VI





other Communist Party functionary). Yet his Russian background,
language, and facility for open discourse filled in those hidden areas
the outsider inevitably would overlook.
Yet Berkman was no impartial observer standing aloof from the
Revolution. Active as an interpreter, appointed to organise the reception
and care for future groups of American deportees (such a group turned
out to be returning Russian prisoners of war), and given charge of a
mammoth project to convert the villas of the old nobility into
"proletarian rest homes" for thousands of workers, in addition to the
Museum expedition, Berkman was active in the constructive effort. On
top of this, he was constantly interceding with the Cheka or top Party
leaders on behalf of arrested comrades and other unfortunates. His
enthusiasm for the cause led, in fact, to a split with Emma Goldman.
As her biographer Richard Drinnon reports in his Rebel in Paradise:
Berkman continued    to defend   their hosts against Emma's
criticism. He admitted that the bureaucracy had become suffocating and that there were inequalities and injustices, but he
argued that Russia would outgrow these evils once the blockade
was lifted. The important thing was that the revolution had gone
beyond mere political change to root out the larger part of the
capitalist system. In return for this great achievement, he was
willing to excuse much. In the fall of 1920 he was still asking
critical anarchist comrades if they had anything to propose in
place of the dictatorship: "Not the faults and shortcomings of
the Bolsheviki are at issue," he argues, "but the dictatorship
itself. Does not the success of the Revolution presuppose the
forcible abolition of the bourgeoisie and the imposing of the
proletarian will upon society?    In short, a dictatorship?"
His associated belief in "historical necessity" and his refusal to be
concerned with the "few specks of dust" who were victims of BolShevik
repression and executions are symptomatic of a relapse into an earlier
mode of his thought, the "end-justifying-the-means" philosophy which
led him to assassinate Frick. He had given up this belief in accordance
with a mature anarchism but under the pressure of counter-revolutionary threat in Russia he retreated to this simpler, if less human, posture.
The revolutionary often falls victim to the abstraction of a "correct"
stance, a mechanical view of social process, which divides all social
phenomena into "either/or," good or evil, a frequent trap for those
who believe in linear social development along a fore-ordained path (or
who believe inordinately in their own personal solutions to social
problems). Needless to say, Berkman held to this belief only in abstract
discussions; when faced with real life victims of the repression, his
heart opened up. It was an unnatural posture for Berkman, for it
didn't coincide with his anarchist convictions and was in tension with
his life-long crusade to abolish prisons and barbarous concepts such as
punishment and retribution. Berkman's life, indeed, can be seen as an
extended series of attempts to grapple with the questions of crime and
punishment, justice and morality.    His most developed, and most
3.   Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise, NY, Bantam edition: 1973, p.291.
VII





utopian, thought on the subject provides the core of his last book, What
Is Communist Anarchism?
His contacts with the Makhnovists and the Bolshevik brutality at
Kronstadt, plus the obvious impact of hundreds of daily experiences,
brought him "back to his senses."4   He and Emma decided to leave
Russia and tell the world what they had found. His first public statement, issued from Stockholm, was an appeal for aid to the political
prisoners in Russia, to the revolutionists imprisoned by the Communist
regime. The language was strong:... that a political party that calls itself revolutionary, a Government that dares to speak in the name of the proletariat, should
drown that proletariat's cry for justice and liberty in a sea of
blood, - that stands as the most monumental Judas crime in all
history. That it should, moreover, blacken and denounce the
popular, heroic attempt at social justice as counter-revolution is a
crime so monstrous that humanity will never forgive.5
Though Berkman was cruelly disillusioned and saw through the
myth, his post-Russian writings are not those of a jilted or spiteful man.
Nor did he write with the arrogance of one who would claim to have
reached a higher plane of wisdom than others had yet been able to
attain. As a self-proclaimed "free, Anarchist Communist," Alexander
Berkman had remained close to the Bolsheviks for quite some time and
spoke harshly to other anarchists who criticised Bolshevik methods.
Yet in time the weight of evidence became compelling:
At first I could not believe that what I saw was real. I would not
believe my eyes, my ears, my judgment. As those trick mirrors
that make you appear dreadfully monstrous, so Russia seemed to
me to reflect the Revolution as a monstrous perversion. It was an
appalling caricature of the new life, the world's hope... I fought
relentlessly, bitterly, against myself. For two years I fought. It
is hardest to convince him who does not want to be convinced.
And, I admit, I did not want to be convinced that the Revolution
in Russia had become a mirage, a dangerous deception.6
For eighteen months he would not piece together the indictment
which the events surrounding him demanded. He consistently maintained only the loosest of ties with the anarchist movement in Russia,
much to their dismay. Indeed, his defence of the Bolsheviks isolated
him from many Russian anarchists who were disappointed by his
failure to join them in their resistance to the Bolshevik consolidation of
power.   But at long last the elements of the indictment began to
converge, and Kronstadt was the final straw that snapped his links with
the Bolsheviks.
4.   For more information on Makhno, see: Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, Black and Red/Solidarity 1974 and Voline, The Unknown
Revolution, as well as my article "The Makhnovist Movement" Black
Rose No. 2 1975. For Kronstadt, see esp. Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921,
Princeton University Press, 1970, and Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising
London, Solidarity, 1967.
5.   Berkman, "Kronstadt: The Paris Commune of Russia", leaflet, Stockholm
March 1922. An original is at the Labadie Collection, Univ. of Michigan.
6.   Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy", pamphlet, Der Syndikalist, Berlin, May
1922, p.13.


VIII





As exiled celebrities, "Sasha" and Emma were in close contact with
the leading figures of the Soviet regime. Quartered in the First House
of the Soviet at the invitation of Zorin, Secretary of the Communist
Party in Petrograd, they lived within thle inner sanctum of the new
authority with all the privileges and access that their status entailed.
The other deportees suffered for their anonymity; all of them were
arrested and placed under house arrest for protesting the proclamation
of Bakaiev, head of the Petrograd Cheka greeting them upon their
arrival, that "anarchist foolishness would not be tolerated."7  The
Soviet "citizen" (already the State was making its claim) lacking the
proper papers led a quite different life. At a raid on a pathetic "market"
(desperate people trying to sell anything of value they might have in
order to be able to buy a few crumbs on which to live), Berkman meets
a young woman, Lena, and visits her h-ome. By the next time he meets
her she has lost her mother and two young brothers: starved to death.8
Though the large shopkeepers.stay open, the ragged people gathered in
the "market" are arrested for "speculation."
Though Berkman consciously held himself at a distance from the
Russian anarchists, who he felt were excessively critical in a nonco-operative spirit, lacking in solidarity, his anarchist background led
him to be suspicious of Marxists and sensitive to hierarchical and
authoritarian modes of organisation.  However much he wanted to
believe or however doggedly he defended the Bolsheviki to his critical
anarchist comrades, his experiences at the market place, the obviously
staged Party functions for foreign visitors, the evident growth of a
New Class - all these and more began to have their effect. Theories
of the degeneration or outright betrayal of the Revolution by the
Bolsheviks had already established themselves in Russia by this time
(and by 1920 the Bolsheviks retained almost no trade union support).9
Berkman felt that the revolution itself had occurred relatively
peacefully due to the unity of the various revolutionary forces and
the fact that they met almost no active opposition from the Russian
bourgeoisie, which was "unorganised, weak, and not of a militant
disposition."10  The October Revolution was not really so much a
bold stroke by the Bolsheviki under Lenin as it was a culmination of
months of progressive social revolution occurring throughout the
country. The ubiquitous growth of peasants and workers committees
and soviets sapped the power from   the hands of Kerensky and the
bourgeois provisional government, which surrendered without a fight
as its capacity to govern hlad completely dissolved.1 I
7.   Emma Goldman, Living Mv Lift, NY, Dover Books 1970, p. 785.
8.   Berkman, The Bolshcr'ik Myth, p.86, 304.
9.  One account is that of Jay Sorensen, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade
Unionism 1917-1928, NY, Atherton, 1969. From page 9: "Bolshevik
support quickly evaporated after 1914. By March 1917 they were little
more than a small isolated sect. Outside of a handful of unions... and
a handful of worker-Bolsheviks, Lenin was hard pressed to find worker
support for his party." As late as August 1917 John Reed also used the
characterisation "small sect." See also Leonard Schapiro, Origin of the
Communist Autocracy, p. 201.
10.  Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy," p.15.
11.  Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. The State and
Counter-Revolution, London: Solidarity, 1970 presents a detailed chronological account as well as an excellent analysis.
IX





Continued unity amongst the revolutionary parties and a co-opera,
tive spirit, working with the people as they continued to push forward,
could have ensured a tremendous period of social and economic
construction and experimentation. But here is where the ideology, the
arrogance, the thirst for power and the coup mentality of the
Bolsheviks intruded on the revolution. The charge of betrayal of the
revolution is a familiar one by now, advanced by no less than Trotsky
as against Stalin at a later time. Berkman argues that the betrayal was
fundamental to Bolshevism    anu that Trotsky, recent convert to
Bolshevism that he was, was as guilty of betrayal as the rest of his
newly adopted party:
It must always be remembered      and remembered well - that
revolution does not mean destruction only. It means destruction
plus construction, with the greatest emphasis on the plus. Most
unfortunately, Bolshevik principles and methods were soon fated
to prove a handicap, a drawback upon the creative activities of
the masses. The Bolsheviki are Marxists. Though in the October
days they had accepted and proclaimed anarchist watchwords
(direct action by the people, expropriation, free Soviets, and so
forth), it was not their social philosophy that dictated this attitude. They had felt the popular pulse - the rising wave of the
Revolution had carried them far beyond their theories. But they
remained Marxists. At heart they had no faith in the people and
their creative initiative. As social-democrats they distrusted the
peasantry, counting rather upon the support of the small revolutionary minority among the industrial element. They had
advocated the Constituent Assembly, and only when they were
convinced that they would not have a majority there, and therefore not be able to take State power into their own hands, they
suddenly decided upon the dissolution of the Assembly, though
the step was a refutation and denial of fundamental Marxist
principles.  As Marxists, the Bolsheviki insisted upon the
nationalisation of the land: ownership, distribution and control
were to be in the hands of the State. They were in principle
opposed to socialisation, and only the pressure of the Left faction
of the Social-Revolutionaries (the Spiridonova/Katkov wing)
whose influence among the peasants was traditional, forced the
Bolsheviki to "swallow the agrarian programme of the Social
Revolutionists whole," as Lenin later put it... The very
cornerstone of the Marxian credo, the dictatorship of the proletariat, served as an affront and an injury to the peasantry.12
Berkman points out that the peasants were constantly underrepresented at All-Russian conferences, National Conferences, and in
the Bolshevik-led Soviets.13 The distinction between nationalisation
12.  Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy", pp 16, 17. Regarding the Constituent
Assembly, elections held a few days after the fall of Kerensky yielded
only 175 of 707 seats to the Bolsheviks. The S-Rs won 410. (E.H. Carr
The Bolshevik Revolution, I, p. 120, who comments: "If this could be
read as a verdict on the government set up by the October revolution, it
was a crushing vote of non-confidence.")
13.  See also Carr, 1, pp. 153, 154. Mitrany's Marx Against the Peasant is also
worthy of consultation.


x





and socialisation, a fundamental one, is a lesson still to be learned by
most self-proclaimed "socialists" throughout the world, wlio tend to
ignore the distinction and identify the two as if they were the same.
Nationalisation tends to become a substitute for true socialisation: the
worker remains in a dependent and subordinate position. The power
and privileges of private capital may have been abrogated    but not
always, for "national socialism" and fascism   both permitted wide
leeway for private capital in tleir haphazard schemes of nationalisation.
Even under more comprehensive systems of nationalisation as in Soviet
Russia the old managers are often invited back and a new managerial
and ruling class develops.  The behaviour of capital, whether it be
privately owned or State owned, appears to remain relatively constant,
certainly witlioutt dramatically differing modes of bellaviour one Ilight
expect.   The idea that State capitalism   inevitably leads to State
socialism and then to stateless socialism does read well. The Marxist
would argue thiat tlie progress is inevitable, and Lenin advanced this
same argument wlhen lie proudly proclaimed that what he had done
was institute State capitalism in Russia. (see fn. 30 below). To the
anarchists, State capitalism  was not the Social Revolution: it was
debatable whether it could even be considered a step in tlat direction.
Sixty years after the Russian Revolution, one hundred years after
Bakunin's death, we might all question the inevitability, and thus the
alleged superiority of State capitalism over private capitalism. Nationalisation is not socialisation, and is not necessarily a step in the direction
of socialisation. Insofar as it may be harder for people to seize the
means of production, their workplaces and environments back from
the State than from far less powerful private capitalists, nationalisation
could well be argued to be in many ways a step away from socialisation.
Public employees in certain categories are not "allowed" to strike.
Private owners have to call upon the State and hope the State will
respond.   The State does not find its power one step removed.
As above, Berkman argues that the Revolution of 1917 was not
really led by the Bolsheviks at all, though they provided an inspiration
and rallying point through jettisoning their own policies and adopting
those which were popular. The Bolsheviks were constantly scrambling
to keep up with the pace set by the workers and peasants, and their
decrees were usually ex post facto ratifications of actions already
carried out by the direct action of the people themselves -who often
defied stated Bolshevik policy and sped the Revolution along.14   In
14.  Carr, II, p. 52, 64; Brinton, pp. 13, 14-16. Sorensen also has material.
Carr:  "The mounting tide of anarchy in the factories served their
revolutionary purposes. They could not have dammed it even if they had
desired to; but they could partly steer it so long as they were prepared to
ride with it. It was this situation which involved them in accepting and
acclaiming as their own practices which were anarchist and syndicalist
rather than Bolshevik.
What, however, nobody had foreseen was that the seizure of factories
by the workers was in the long term even less compatible than the seizure
of the land by the peasants with the establishment of a socialist order."
(p.64).
Brinton referring to Lenin's Draft Decree on Workers' Control (Nov. 3,
1917): "These excellent, and often quoted, provisions in fact only listed
and legalised what had already been achieved and implemented in many


XI





fact, one of the greatest fears of the Bolsheviks seems to have been that
the workers, having taken control of the factories, and the peasants the
land, might feel that they had already accomplished the revolution and
had no real need for Bolshevik leadership. As both Brinton and Carr
make abundantly clear, the first actions to subordinate the autonomous organisations of workers and peasants began in 1917 -- in other
words, immediately   well before the failure of the German Revolution,
well before the beginnings of the Civil War, the Allied blockade and
the other excuses usually offered for the "emergency" measures -- only
temporary, of course.
The Mensheviks were to the Bolsheviks as the Bolsheviks were to
the people. The Russian Social Democrats - Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
alike - did not believe that the small percentage of industrial workers
in overwhelmingly agrarian Russia could maintain and carry through a
full socialist revolution. The Mensheviks seemed content to achieve
merely a bourgeois revolution, not believing that the appropriate
conditions existed to go beyond that. The Bolsheviks distinguished
themselves by being more flexible and working harder to keep up with,
yet appear to be leading, the actions of the "masses."   As has often
been remarked, Lenin suddenly adopted an uncharacteristic libertarian
position in The State and Revolution, much to the shock and consternation of nearly everyone else in his party.15 Events proved Lenin
to have been tactically correct in assuming, temporarily, this libertarian
stance.
The seizure and retention of power alone is not a revolution,
though. The attempts to consolidate state power stopped the revolution
and this Berkman began to see. Travelling for the Museum of the
Revolution in the town of Sebezh he learned of the opposition of the
peasants to the Communists:
"We were treated like cattle before... and it was in the name of
the Little Father. Now they speak to us in the name of the Party
and the proletariat, but we are treated like cattle, the same as
before."
".... but the Bolsheviki gave you the land," I remonstrated.
He slowly scratched his head and a sly smile came into his eyes.
"No, golubtchik," he replied, "the land we took ourselves. Isn't
it so, little brothers?"16
places by the working class in the course of the struggles of the previous
months. They were followed by three further provisions of ominous
import. It is amazing that these are not better known. In practice they
were soon to nullify the positive features of the previous provisions."
(p.16). In essence, these later provisions state that (point 5) "the decisions
of the elected delegates of the workers and employees [could be] annulled
by trade unions and congresses [and were] answerable to the State for the
maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of
property." (point 6).
15.   Carr, 1, p.90 reports that only one person, Alexandra Kollontai, supported
Lenin when he first read the April Theses. The best account of all the
shifting intra-Party alliances and factions Lenin was constantly juggling
and splitting is Robert Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.
16.   Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 107.


XlI





So often he found that the peasants thought the Bolsheviks to have
been good, but found the Communists bad and feared them.17 The
tragedy of the Russian people could not have been better portrayed
than through this confusion so common in rural Russia. In Krasnoye
Selo the villagers:
stood timidly on the threshhold, observing us with unfriendly
eyes and exchanging whispered remarks. Gradually they regained
confidence, advanced toward the table, and began conversing.
They were totally ignorant of the events in the world at large;
what was happening in Russia, even, was entirely incomprehensible to them. They knew that the Tsar was no more and that
freedom had been given the peasant. But they felt that some
huge deceit had been played on the "dark people" by those in
high places. They were constantly harassed by the military, they
complained; soldiers of every kind kept swooping down upon the
village, taxing, confiscating, and pillaging.  One by one their
male folks had been drafted, often not even knowing into what
army, and then the boys began to be taken, as young as sixteen.
Generals and commissars kept coming and carrying the last
away, and now all the cattle are gone, and the fields cannot be
worked except by hand in little patches, and even the smallest
children must help. Frequently the older girls are dragged away
by officers and soldiers, returning later hurt and sick.  In a
neighbouring village the punitive expedition whipped old peasants
on the public square.   In a place thirty versts from Krasnoye
eighteen peasants hanged themselves after the commissars had
left.
"Is it as bad in other parts?" my hostess asked. "How is it in
Germany - my people come from there."
"Germany has also had a revolution," I informed her. "The
Kaiser is gone."
"Rev - o - lution?" she repeated in utter incomprehension. "Did
Germany have a war?"18
No less outrageous than the situation forced upon these innocent
people was the clampdown on those consciously revolutionary. Berkman claims that the "fundamental characteristic of Bolshevik psychology is distrust of the masses" and that, paradoxical as it may sound,
"the Communist dictatorship had no better ally, in the sense of
strengthening its life, than the reactionary forces which fought against
it.19   Distrust of the peasantry was endemic to Marxism.       The
Bolsheviks took this one step further to distrust of the industrial
proletariat as well. Since the unions were under Menshevik control for
17.  In March 1918 the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (Bolsheviks)
formally changed their name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
and Party members became known as Communists rather than Bolsheviks.
The distinction seemed more than just a change in name to the confused
population that had seen the Bolsheviks as bearers of the revolutionary
standard, but the Communists as the new State authority.
18.   Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, pp. 264, 265.
19.  Berkman, "The Anti-Climax", p. 20.


XIII





the most part and the peasants firmly backed the SR's, the Bolsheviks
had very little in the way of a popular base,20 and only retained their
influence through sloganising, exemplary posturing, and organisation.
A brilliant series of alliances and realignment out-manoeuvred all of
their competitors for power and the Bolsheviks then quickly launched
into direct attacks on any who would challenge their prerogatives of
rule on grounds of principle.   On April 11/12th of 1918 over 25
anarchist centres in Moscow alone were raided, with over 40 killed and
500 imprisoned.21    Rather quickly, the trade unions were taken
under Bolshevik control despite strong resistance in certain unions; the
soviets themselves were either absorbed or dismantled.22   Berkman
reports a meeting with the Secretary of the Soviet Labour Unions in
Kharkov; the Secretary says:
I am not a local man. I was sent from Moscow only a few weeks
ago.  You see, Comrade, it became necessary to liquidate the
whole management of the Soviet and of most of the unions. At
their heads were Mensheviki. They conducted the organisation
on the principle of the alleged protection of the workers' interests.
Protection against whom?" he raged. "You understand how
counter-revolutionary such a concept is!"23
Brinton's book provides a comprehensive study of the Bolshevik
subversion of workers control. The appelation "Soviet Union" remains
a cruel misnomer today.
Berkman called the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the "death-blow"
to the Revolution. March of 1918 saw Lenin calling for a "breathingspell" for the Revolution and the Treaty obtained one, but only by
giving over the greater part of Russia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania,
Ukrainia, White Russia, and Bessarabia to the Germans.24 When the
Left SR's assassinated the German Ambassador in protest, the Bolsheviki found themselves in "the anomalous position of a gendarme
for the Kaiser" as Dzherzinsky, head of the Cheka, called for the
delivery of the assassin. The Left SR's, in a brilliant move, responded
by arresting Dzherzinsky!   In the end, though, they were outlawed
and the Bolsheviki began in earnest their drive to crush all organised
non-Bolshevik revolutionary groups.   Trotsky ordered the Russian
army to forcibly put down peasant guerrilla bands who were fighting
to keep the Germans and White counter-revolutionaries out of the
Ukraine.25   Here, Berkman argues, began the period of dictatorship
over the proletariat.
20.   Sorensen, op. cit.. p. 9 among other sources.
21.   Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, pp. 184, 185. This book is the best
introduction and study of Russian anarchism.  These are the same
anarchists Berkman was later accusing of not showing adequate solidarity
with the Bolsheviki.  His abstract conception of revolutionary unity
blinded him to the reality of the situation.
22.   Sorensen and Daniels both provide excellent accounts of this process. In
The Bolshevik Myth we find a bit of background to the arrests of the
union (pp. 150, 151). Sorensen covers the Railway Workers' Union, the
State Employees' Union, and the Printers' Union.
23.   Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, pp. 179, 180.
24.   Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy" p. 18; Voline, op. cit., p. 80 or any good
history.
25.   Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy", p. 19. Arshinov and Voline both discuss
this in the particular situation of Makhno.


XIV





In March and April of 19 18 Carr reports that there was an extended
debate within the Communist Party over a proposal by Meshchersky, a
"6prominent iron and steel magnate," that private capital' and thle State
run industry together onl the basis of a 50/50 split in shares. The
Supreme Council of National Economy decided to negotiate on this
basis and, although the project was ultimately rejected, it was at this
time that Lenin published his remarkable Immediate Tasks of' the
Soviet Government.
After the initial flirtation with expropriations and workers control,
stances dictated by the developing popular revolution, Lenin again
begins to emerge clearly as thle supreme centraliser and statist, thle
advocate of state-planned and directed economic centralisation to
overcome the backwardness of Russia. Communist revolution on the
Leninist model can be seen as simply a telescoping of capitalist
development for the underdeveloped countries, leaping over thle stage
of private entrepreneurial dominance of thle economy. Marx taught
that capitalist development was essential to the organisation of resources
necessary to provide the material preconditions for a socialism free
from the burdens of scarcity. Lenin in The Immediate Tasks of the
Soviet Government elaborates, adding another aspect:
Large-scale machine industry -- which is precisely the material
source., the productive source, the foundation of socialism - calls
for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint
labours of hundreds', thousands, and tens of thousands of
people * -    unqutes tioning subordination to a single will is
absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the
pattern of large-scale machine industry... the same revolution
demands- precisely in the interests of its development and
consolidation, precisely in the interests of socialism  that thle
people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of
labour.-. iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning
obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while
at work.26     (all emphases Lenin's).
Lenin then goes onl to call for higher salaries and privileges for
specialists, the introduction of piece work to raise industrial productivity, the application of "m-uch of what is progressive and scientific
in the Taylor system,"27 the establishment of one-man management
instead of collective decision -m-aking, and concludes by saying that
one should "learn how to realise socialism from the organisers of
trusts... irrespective of their moral qualities."
Fromn Left Wing Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality:-... our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to
spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting
dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to
hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying
of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate
to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.28
26.   Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 67 1-673, Moscow, Progress Publishers,
1970.
27.   Lenin, Six Theses, Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 680. (May 1918).
28.   Lenin, Vol. 2, p. 694.
XV





The anarchist G.P. Maximoff adds a couple more quotations from
Lenin on the same theme:
The Socialist state gives the capitalist the means of production
now constituting its property: factories, raw materials, mines;
the capitalist works as a contractor, as a lessee, using the Socialist
means of production, receiving profits of his capital, giving back
to the Socialist state part of the product... The capitalists will
be growing alongside of you, they will be making big money on
you. Let them! But you in the meantime will learn to manage
the economy, and only then will you be able to build up a
Communist republic... govern with greater firmness than the
capitalists did.  Otherwise, you will not win.       You must
remember:    your administration must be more stringent and
firm than the old administration... going as far as shootings,
measures which even the old government did not visualise. The
philistines kept on writing and shouting: "There you have it, the
Bolsheviks have introduced shootings." We must say to that:
yes, we did it, and we did it knowingly.29
Carr says, "This conception of a highly concentrated and monopolistic economy operated by capitalists nominally under private
ownership, but under close state supervision, was what Lenin meant
by 'state capitalism' " and then quotes Lenin: "state capitalism would
be a step forward...that should be a victory." State capitalism was
the ally of socialism  against "the small proprietor, small capital.
petty bourgeoisie."30    Lenin in   1918 was asking for a halt to
independent action in the economic realm, for a "refusal to continue
the break-up of capitalist productive relationships and even a partial
restoration of them."'31
Lenin introduced shootings, the Cheka gained more and more
influence, and dozens of further quotations could easily be assembled
to document Lenin's constant prodding against sentimentalism      and
hesitancy in carrying out what he frankly called the "terror."32
Berkman comments: "The fanatical delusion that a little conspirative
group, as it were, could achieve a fundamental social transformation
proved the Frankenstein of the Bolsheviki... The methods of such a
29.   G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine At Work, pp. 146, 152 quoting Lenin,
Sobranie Sochineni v, Vol. XVIII, part one, pp. 374, 375, 379. Lenin may
have been excellent at economic co-ordination, though one can easily have
one's doubts, considering the estimated five million that died of famine
during this period, but hie certainly did not seem to rate Marx's concern
with alienated labour very highly. And, of course, these weren't the large
industrialists who were being shot.
30.   Carr, op. cit., II, pp. 97, 98.
31.  Ibid., II, p. 95. By "independent action", of course, he means direct
expropriation by workers and peasants not sanctioned by the Communist
authorities.
32.   Maximoff estimates, calling it conservative, "no less than 200,000"
shootings, adding: "Some place it as the much higher figure of 1,500,000."
The Guillotine At Work, p. 240. Despite his strident and frenetic style,
Maximoff (anarchist and frequenter of Bolshevik prisons) has assembled
an impressive amount of documentation. It is unfortunate that his style
of presentation tends to mar the material he presents. Sometimes it is
difficult to restrain one's emotions when dealing with what one feels to be
the most monstrous perversion and betrayal of people's hopes.
XVI





theory, its inevitable means, are twofold:      decrees and terror."33
Lenin was bluntly frank about the need for terror and enjoyed terming
freedom  a "bourgeois prejudice."34    In the Bolshevik Myth, Berkman
recounts meeting some of the sadists who inevitably burgeon under
such  a system.    One also finds the growth of such creatures as
Petrovsky, Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee,
for whom "Communism is a simple matter of a strong government and
determination to execute its will. It is not a question of experimentation or idealistic possibilities...   A powerful central authority,
consistently carrying out its policies, would solve all problems, he
believes.  Opposition must be eliminated; disturbing elements and
inciters of the peasantry against the Soviet regime such as Makhno,
crushed."35
The peasants took the land; the workers the factories. Lenin set
out to retake them both - in the name of the workers and the
peasants! Although Maximoff seems to go too far in calling Lenin the
"first theoretician of fascism" the relationship between state capitalism,
state socialism and fascism remains inadequately explored.
With the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago comes a
revival of interest in the charges that "Stalinism" was not at all idiosyncratic to Stalin but had its roots much earlier. Berkman, no Tsarist
or friend of religion, traces it to the Jesuitism and Jacobinism of the
Bolsheviks and would, with Bakunin, take it back to elements in
Marx's own work. Even such thorough critiques of Stalinism as Roy
Medvedev's Let History Judge, certainly the work of an exceptionally
honest and concerned man, preserves the sacrosanct status of Lenin
and portrays Stalin as an aberration. Though Medvedev has the courage
to call the present-day leaders of his land to account, he allows Lenin's
memory to rest in untroubled peace.36 Solzhenitsyn's project, how33.   Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy", p. 22.
34.   Berkman himself was, of course, accused of this for his concern with those
imprisoned by the new regime. A few other interesting points: in 1919
a "military opposition" accused Trotsky of "building up new national
conscript army with professional officers partly drawn from the old
Tsarist army." (Carr, I, p.202). The election of officers was abandoned
and the death penalty applied to conscientious objectors to the universal
military conscription. (Berkman, "The Russian Tragedy," p. 23). By
contrast, Makhno's peasant guerrillas organised only voluntarily. With
Trotsky as Commissar of War "thousands" of former imperial officers
were brought back to service. (Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, p. 66). At the
Ninth Party Congress (March 1920) Lenin and Trotsky call for the
"militarisation of labour" and for one-man management to take the place
of collective management. Berkman also reports on the alliance of the
Bolsheviks with professional criminal gangs in Odessa. (Bolshevik Myth,
pp. 251, 252).
35.   Berkman, Bolshevik Myth, p. 176.
36.   Solzhenitsyn's work already begins to have a bit of an effect on Medvedev,
though. See his response in Ramparts, Jan. 1974. Very important also is
David Horowitz's reaction to leftists who criticise or attempt to ignore
Solzhenitsyn. Goldman and Berkman met a similar kind of hostility,
though in their case they were accusing the Communists of not being
revolutionary enough and playing, in essence, a counter-revolutionary role.
Solzhenitsyn, as we know, comes from a different angle.


XVII





ever, seems concerned with demythologising Lenin and Leninism only
to promote the tired myths of God and State as guarantors of social
order.
Lenin's tremendous achievements as developer of modern Russia
cannot be undercut, yet one can question the severity of his methods,
the price paid by the peoples of the Soviet Union and, in fact, the price
paid by all subsequent revolutionary movements.    The appeal of
Marxism/Leninism, though, today remains strong, especially to developing countries seeking quicker development and to intellectuals frustrated with the slowness of the masses to respond to their intellectual
conceptions of how to effect social change. Yet it was Marx who said:
"the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the
working classes themselves."37
In concluding his study The Bolshevik and Workers Control: The
State and Counterrevolution, Maurice Brinton stresses:
'Workers' power' cannot be identified or equated with the power
of the Party - as it repeatedly was by the Bolsheviks. In the
words of Rosa Luxemburg, workers' power must be implemented
"by the class, not a minority, managing things in the name of the
class. It must emanate from the active involvement of the masses,
remain under their dirept influence, be submitted to control by
the entire population result from the increasing political awareness of the people."38
Brinton concludes by contending that, rather than being a fundamentally new ideology, Bolshevism is but "the last garb donned by a
bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the roots," that the
essence of bourgeois ideology is the division of society into leaders and
led and the extension of authoritarian social relationships into all
aspects of life. To use another terminology, Leninism is essentially
a supremely macho concept or world view, an arrogating presumption
which reinforces and builds on ingrained behaviour modes of hierarchy
and dominance rather than helping search for new modes of true
liberation from hierarchy and from domination. Once Marxist/Leninism
is recognised as the last, most sophisticated, and quite seductive
attempt of the bourgeois intellectual to rework social arrangements to
fit a preconceived, abstract notion, rather than to permit and
encourage the people themselves to handle this process, it will then
become possible to re-open authentic revolutionary experimentation
and explorations toward freedom.
William G. Nowlin Jnr.
April, 1976
37.  Karl Marx, "General Rules of the International Working Men's Association"
Selected Works, Vol. II, Progress Publishers, 1969, p. 19. By no means an
isolated comment, it is fundamental to Marx's conception of alienation
and class consciousness.
38.  Brinton, op. cit., p. xiv.


XVIII





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Alexander Berkman, Moscow, 1920. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam).





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Aropotkin 's funeral: Berkman and Goldman are recognisable in the centre of the photograph. The bearded man beside Emma Goldman
is Aron Baron. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam).







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Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Lidya Jensen, Alexander Schapiro and Lindstrom in Stockholm, January 10, 1922, five days after
Berkman, Goldman and Schapiro arrived: "First time in a kingdom since 1877" remarked Berkman. (I.I. of S.H., Amsterdam).





4


Krnstadt sailors demonstrate for the power of the soviets, 1917. (The Unknown
Revolution,   B & R. Detroit).





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THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY


(A Review and An Outlook)
By
ALEXANDER BERKMAN





.... -...~..` -- -


Jg:


In front of the Tauride Palace, March 14, 1917. " 'Long live the revolution' rang from the milling crowd, whose attitude steadily became more
determined and menacing."





FOREWORD


We live at a time when two civilisations are struggling
for their existence. Present society is at death grips with
the'New Ideal. The Russian Revolution was but the first
serious combat of the two forces, whose struggle must con=
tinue till the final triumph of the one or of the other.
The Russian Revolution has failed - failed of its ultimate
purpose. But that failure is a temporary one. In the point of
revolutionising the thought and feeling of the masses of
Russia and of the world, in undermining the fundamental
concepts of existing society, and lighting the torch of faith
and hope for the Better Day, the Russian Revolution has
been of incalculable educational and inspirational value to
mankind.
Though the Russian Revolution failed to achieve its true
goal, it will forever remain a most magnificent historic event.
And yet - tremendous as it is - it is but an incident in the
gigantic war of the two worlds.
That war will go on, is going on. In that war capitalism
is already facing its doom. Yet more: with capitalism, centralised political government, the STATE, is also doomed, -
and that is the most significant lesson of the Russian Revolution, as I see it.
This pamphlet was recently published in the Dutch
language, whereupon a Holland critic wrote to me: "You
have failed to give the full lesson of the Russian Revolution".
I agree with him. It will require a great many volumes
to give "the full lesson" of so tremendous an event as the
Russian Revolution. My purpose is more modest. It will
require the effort of many minds to clarify to the world the


3





full significance of the Russian Revolution, the potentiali.
ties of the ideals and ideas involved in it. I merely want to
contribute my little share.
I have decided to incorporate the result of my two years'
study and observation in Russia in a series of pamphlets
under the general caption of the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
SERIES.
The Series will comprise a critical review of the most
important phases of the Revolution, together with a con--
structive analysis of some of the vital lessons to be drawn.
If the present Series will help to make things a little
clearer in regard to Russia, if it will aid the workers to
see the path of liberation a little straighter, then I shall
consider my effort fully repaid.
May, 1922
ALEXANDER BERKMAN





THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY
I
It is most surprising how little is known, outside of
Russia, about the actual situation and the conditions prevail,
ing in that country. Even intelligent persons, especially
among the workers, have the most confused ideas about the
character of the Russian Revolution, its development, and
its present political, economic and social status. Understand,
ing of Russia and of what has been happening there since
1917 is most inadequate, to say the least. Though the great
majority of people side either with or against the Revolution,
speak for or against the Bolsheviki, yet almost nowhere is
there concrete knowledge and clarity in regard to the vital
subjects involved. Generally speaking, the views expressed
- friendly or otherwise - are based on very incomplete
and unreliable, frequently entirely false, information about
the Russian Revolution, its history and the present phase of
the Bolshevik regime. But not only are the opinions enter,
tained founded, as a rule, on insufficient or wrong data; too
often they are deeply colored - properly speaking, distorted
-by partisan feeling, personal prejudice, and class interests.
On the whole, it is sheer ignorance, in one form or another,
which characterises the attitude of the great majority of
people toward Russia and Russian events.
And yet, understanding of the Russian situation is most
vital to the future progress and well-being of the world. On
the correct estimation of the Russian Revolution, the r6le
played in it by the Bolsheviki and by other political parties
and movements, and the causes that have brought about the
present situation, - in short, on a thorough conception of the


5





whole problem depends what lessons we shall draw from the
great historic events of 1917. Those lessons will, for good or
evil, affect the opinions and the activities of great masses
of mankind. In other words, coming social changes - and
the labor and revolutionary efforts preceding and accom
panying them - will be profoundly, essentially influenced by
the popular understanding of what has really happened in
Russia.
It is generally admitted that the Russian Revolution is
the most important historic event since the Great French
Revolution. I am even inclined to think that, in point of its
potential consequences, the Revolution of 1917 is the most
significant fact in the whole known history of mankind. It
is the only Revolution which aimed, de facto, at social worldrevolution; it is the only one which actually abolished thecapi,
talist system on a country-wide scale, and fundamentally
altered all social relationships existing till then. An event of
such human and historic magnitude must not be judged from
the narrow viewpoint of partisanship. No subjective feeling
or preconception should be consciously permitted to color
one's attitude. Above all, every phase of the Revolution
must be carefully studied, without bias or prejudice, and all
the facts dispassionately considered, to enable us to form a
just and adequate opinion. I believe - I am firmly con.
vinced - that only the whole truth about Russia, irrespective
of any considerations whatever, can be of ultimate benefit.
Unfortunately, such has not been the case so far, as a
general rule. It was natural, of course, for the Russian Revolution to arouse bitterest antagonism, on the one hand, and
most passionate defense, on the other. But partisanship, of
whatever camp, is not an objective judge. To speak plainly,
the most atrocious lies, as well as ridiculous fairy tales, have
been spread about Russia, and are continuing to be spread,
even at this late day. Naturally, it is not to be wondered at
that the enemies of the Russian Revolution, the enemies of
revolution, as such, the reactionaries and their tools, should
have flooded the world with most venomous misrepresenta,
tion of events transpiring in Russia. About them and their


6





"information" I need not waste any further words: in the
eyes of honest, intelligent people they are discredited long
ago.
But, sad to state, it is the would-be friends of Russia and
of the Russian Revolution who have done the greatest harm
to the Revolution, to the Russian people, and to the best in,
terests of the working masses of the world, by their exercise
of zeal untempered by truth. Some unconsciously, out of
ignorance, but most of them consciously and intentionally
have been lying, persistently and cheerfully, in defiance of
all facts, in the mistaken notion that they are "helping the
Revolution". Reasons of "political expediency", of "Bolshes
vik diplomacy", of the alleged "necessity of the hour", and
frequently motives of less unselfish considerations, have
actuated them. The sole legitimate consideration of decent
men, of real friends of the Russian Revolution and of man's
emancipation, - as well as of reliable history - considera%
lion for truth, they have entirely ignored.
There have been honorable exceptions, unfortunately
too few: their voice has almost been lost in the wilderness of
misrepresentation, falsehood, and overstatement. But most
of those who visited Russia simply lied about the conditions
in that country, - I repeat it deliberately. Some lied because
they did not know any better: they had had neither the time
nor the opportunity to study the situation, to learn the facts.
They made "flying trips", spending ten days or a few weeks
in Petrograd and Moscow, unfamiliar with the language,
never for a moment coming in direct touch with the real life
of the people, hearing and seeing only what was told or
shown them by the interested officials accompanying them
at every step. In many cases these "students of the Revolution" were veritable innocents abroad, naive to the point
of the ludicrous. So unfamiliar were they with the environs
ment, that in most cases they had not even the faintest suspis
cion that their affable "interpreter", so eager to "show and
explain everything", was in reality a member of the "trusted
men", specially assigned to "guide" important visitors. Many
such visitors have since spoken and written voluminously


7





about the Russian Revolution, with little knowledge and less
understanding.
Others there were who had the time and the opportunity,
and some of them really tried to study the situation seriously,
not merely for the purpose of journalistic "copy". During
my two years' stay in Russia I had occasion to come in per:
sonal contact with almost every foreign visitor, with the Labor missions, and with practically every delegate from
Europe, Asia, America and Australia, who gathered in Mos.
cow to attend the International Communist Congress and
the Revolutionary Trade Union Congress held there last
year. (1921.) Most of them could see and understand what
was happening in the country. But it was a rare exception,
indeed, that had vision and courage enough to realize that
only the whole truth could serve the best interests of the
situation.
As a general rule, however, the various visitors to Russia
were extremely careless of the truth, systematically so, the
moment they began "enlightening" the world. Their assertions frequently bordered on criminal idiocy. Think, for in.
stance, of George Lansbury (publisher of the London "Daily
Herald") stating that the ideas of brotherhood, equality, and
love preached by Jesus the Nazarene were being realised in
Russia - and that at the very time when Lenin was deploring
the "necessity of military communism forced upon us by
Allied intervention and blockade". Consider the "equality"
that divided the population of Russia into 36 categories,
according to the ration and wages received. Another Englishman, a noted writer, emphatically claimed that everything
would be well in Russia, were it not for outside interference
- while whole districts in the East, the South, and in Siberia,
some of them larger in area than France, were in armed rebellion against the Bolsheviki and their agrarian policy.
Other literati were extolling the "free Soviet system" of
Russia, while 18,000 of her sons lay dead at Kronstadt in the
struggle to achieve free Soviets.
But why enlarge upon this literary prostitution? The
reader will easily recall to mind the legion of Ananiases who


8





have been strenuously denying the very existence of the
things that Lenin tried to explain as inevitable. I know that
many delegates and others believed that the real Russian
situation, if known abroad, might strengthen the hand of the
reactionists and interventionists. Suth a belief, however, did
not necessitate the painting of Russia as a veritable labor
Eldorado. But the time when it might have been considered
inadvisable to speak fully of the Russian situation is long
past. That period has been terminated, relegated into the
archives of history, by the introduction of the "new economic
policy". Now the time has come when we must learn the
full lesson of the Revolution and the causes of its debacle.
That we may avoid the mistakes it made (Lenin frankly says
they were many), that we be enabled to adopt its best features, we must know the whole truth about Russia.
It is therefore that I consider the present activities of
certain labor men as positively criminal and a betrayal
of the true interests of the workers of the world. I refer to
the men and women, some of them delegates to the Congresses held in Moscow in 1921, that still continue to propagate the "friendly" lies about Russia, delude the masses with
roseate pictures of labor conditions in that country, and even
seek to induce workers of other lands to migrate in large
numbers to Russia. They are stregthening the appalling confusion already existing in the popular mind, deceive the proletariat by false statements of the present and vain promises
for the near future. They are perpetuating the dangerous de,
lusion that the Revolution is alive and continuously active
in Russia. It is most despicable tactics. Of course, it is easy
for an American labor leader, playing to the radical element,
to write glowing reports about the condition of the Russian
workingmen, while he is being entertained at State expense at
the Luxe, the most lucrative hotel in Russia. Indeed, he may
insist that "no money is needed", for does he not receive
everything his heart desires, free of charge? Or why should
the President of an American needle-workers' union not state
that the Russian workers enjoy full liberty of speech? He is
careful not to mention that only Communists and "trusties"


9





were permitted within speaking distance while the distin;
guished visitor was "investigating" conditions in the factories.
May history be merciful to them.
II
That the reader may form a just estimate of what I shall
say further, I think it necessary to sketch briefly my mental
attitude at the time of my arrival in Russia.
It was two years ago. A democratic government, "the
freest on earth", had deported me - together with 248 other
politicals - from the country I had lived in over thirty years.
I had protested emphatically against the moral wrong perpetrated by an alleged democracy in resorting to methods it
had so vehemently condemned on the part of the Tsarist
autocracy. I branded deportation of politicals as an outrage
on the most fundamental rights of man, and I fought it as a
matter of principle.
But my heart was glad. Already at the outbreak of the
February Revolution I had yearned to go to Russia. But the
Mooney case had detained me: I was loath to desert the
fight. Then I myself was taken prisoner by the United
States, and penalised for my opposition to world slaughter.
During two years the forced hospitality of the Federal
penitentiary at Atlanta, Ga., prevented my departure.
Deportation followed.
My heart was glad, did I say? Weak word to express
the passion of joy that filled me at the certainty of visiting
Russia. Russia! I was going to the country that had swept
Tsardom off the map, I was to behold the land of the Social
Revolution! Could there be greater joy to one who in his
very childhood had been a rebel against tyranny, whose
youth's unformed dreams had visioned human brotherhood
and happiness, whose entire life was devoted to the Social
Revolution?!
The journey was an inspiration. Though we were prison.
ers, treated with military severity, and the "Buford" a


10





leaky old tub repeatedly endangering our lives during the
month's Odyssey, yet the thought that we were on the way
to the land of revolutionary promise kept the whole company
of deportees in high spirits, adtremble with expectation of the
great Day soon to come. Long, long was the voyage, shame--
ful the conditions we were forced to endure: crowded below
deck, living in constant wetness and foul air, fed on the poor::
est rations. Our patience was nigh exhausted, yet our
courage unflagging, and at last we reached our destination.
It was the 19th of January, 1920, when we touched the
soil of Soviet Russia. A feeling of solemnity, of awe,
almost overwhelmed me. Thus must have felt my pious
old forefathers on first entering the Holy of Holies. A
strong desire was upon me to kneel down and kiss the
ground -   the ground consecrated by the life:blood of
generations of suffering and martyrdom, consecrated anew
by  the thriumphant revolutionists of my   own   day.
Never before, not even when released from the horrible
nightmare of 14 years' prison, had I been stirred so
profoundly, - longing to embrace humanity, to lay my
heart at its feet, to give my life a thousand times, were it but
possible, to the service of the Social Revolution. It was the
most sublime day of my life.
We were received with open arms. The revolutionary
hymn, played by the military Red Band, greeted us enthusiýasticallv as we crossed the Russian frontier. The hurrahs of
the redzcapped defenders of the Revolution echoed through
the woods, rolling into the distance like threats of thunder.
With bowed head I stood in the presence of the visible sym.
bols of the Revolution Triumphant. With bowed head and
bowed heart. My spirit was proud, yet meek with the
consciousness of actual Social Revolution. What depths,
what grandeur lay therein, what incalculable possibilities
stretched in its vistas!
I heard the still voice of my soul: "May your past life
have contributed, if ever so little, to the realisation of the
great human ideal, to this, its successful beginning". And I


11





became conscious of the great happiness it offered me: to do,
to work, to help with every fiber of my being the complete
revolutionary expression of this wonderful people. They
had fought and won. They proclaimed the Social Revolution.
It meant that oppression has ceased, that submission and
slavery, man's twin curses, were abolished. The hope of
generations, of ages, has at last been realised: justice has
been established upon the earth - at least upon that part
of it that was Soviet Russia, and nevermore shall the pre,
cious heritage be lost.
But years of war and revolution have exhausted the
country. There is suffering and hunger, and much need of
stout hearts and willing hands to do and help. My heart
sang for joy. Aye, I will give myself fully, completely, to
the service of the people; I shall be rejuvenated and grow
young again in ever greater effort, in the hardest toil, for the
furtherance of the common weal. My very life will I con.
secrate to the realisation of the world's great hope, the
Social Revolution.
At the first Russian army outpost a massmeeting was
held to welcome us. The large hall crowded with soldiers and
sailors, the nun.dressed women on the speaker's platform,
their speeches, the whole atmosphere palpitating with Revolution in action, - all made a deep impression on me. Urged
to say something, I thanked the Russian comrades for their
warm welcome of the American deportees, congratulated
them on their heroic struggle, and expressed my great joy at
being in their midst. And then my whole thought and feel.
ing fused in one sentence. "Dear Comrades", I said, "we
came not to teach but to learn; to learn and to help".
Thus I entered Russia. Thus felt my fellow"deportees.
I remained two years. What I learned, I learned
gradually, day by day, in various parts of the country.
I had exceptional opportunities for observation and study.
I stood close to the leaders of the Communist Party,


12





associated much with the most active men and women,
participated in their work, and travelled  extensively
through  the country  under conditions most favorable
to personal contact with the life of the workers and peasants.
At first I could not believe that what I saw was real. I would
not believe my eyes, my ears, my judgment. As those trick
mirrors that make you appear dreadfully monstrous, so Russia seemed to reflect the Revolution as a frightful perversion.
It was an appalling caricature of the new life, the world's
hope. I shall not now go into detailed description of my
first impressions, my investigations, and the long process
that resulted in my final conviction. I fought relentlessly,
bitterly, against myself. For two years I fought. It is hardest to convince him who does not want to be convinced.
And, I admit, I did not want to be convinced that the Re%
volution in Russia had become a mirage, a dangerous deception. Long and hard I struggled against this conviction. Yet
proofs were accumulating, and each day brought more damn%
ing testimony. Against my will, against my hopes, against
the holy fire of admiration and enthusiasm for Russia which
burned within me, I was convinced - convinced that the
Russian Revolution had been done to death.
How and by whom?
III
It has been asserted by some writers that Bolshevik
accession to power in Russia was due to a coup de main, and
doubt has been expressed regarding the social nature of the
October change.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter
of historic fact, the great event known as the October Re%
volution was in the profoundest sense a social revolution.
It was characterised by all the essentials of such a fundamental change. It was accomplished, not by any political party,
but by the people themselves, in a manner that radically
transformed all the heretofore existing economic, political


13





and social relations. But it did not take place in October.
That month witnessed only the formal "legal sanction" of
the revolutionary events that had preceded it. For weeks
and months prior to it, the actual Revolution had been going
on all over Russia: the city proletariat was taking possession
of the shops and factories, while the peasants expropriated
the big estates and turned the land to their own use. At the
same time workers' commitees, peasant committes and
Soviets sprang up all over the country, and there began the
gradual transfer of power from the provisional government
to the Soviets. That took place, first in Petrograd, then in
Moscow, and quickly spread to the Volga region, the Ural
district, and to Siberia. The popular will found expression
in the slogan, "All power to the Soviets", and it went sweep,
ing through the length and breadth of the land. The people
had risen, the actual Revolution was on. The keynote of the
situation was struck by the Congress of the Soviets of the
North, proclaiming: "The provisional government of Keren=
sky must go; the Soviets are the sole power!"
That was on October 10th. Practically all the real power
was already with the Soviets. In July the Petrograd uprising
against Kerensky was crushed, but in August the influence
of the revolutionary workers and of the garrison was strong
enough to enable them to prevent the attack planned by
Korniloff. The Petrograd Soviet gained strength from day to
day. On October 16th it organised its own Revolutionary
Military Committee, an act of definance of and open chal,
lenge to the government. The Soviet, through its Revolutio,
nary Military Committee, prepared to defend Petrograd
against the coalition government of Kerensky and the pos,
sible attack of General Kaledin and his counter-revolutionary
cossacks. On October 22nd the whole proletarian popula,
tion of Petrograd, solidarically supported by the garrison, demonstrated throughout the city against the government and
in favor of "All power to the Soviets".
The AllRussian Congress of Soviets was to open on
October 25th. The provisional government, knowing its very
existence in imminent peril, resorted to drastic action. On


14





October 23rd the Petrograd Soviet ordered the Kerensky Ca%
binet to withdraw within 48 hours. Driven to desperation,
Kerensky undertook - on October 24th - to suppress the
revolutionary press, arrest the most prominent revolutionists
of Petrograd, and remove the active Commissars of the So.
viet. The government relied on the "faithful" troops and on
the young yunkers of the military student schools. But it
was too late: the attempt to sustain the government failed.
During the night of October 24-25 (November 6-7) the
Kcrensky government was dissolved - peacefully, without
bloodshed - and the exclusive supremacy of the Soviets was
established. The Communist Party stepped into power. It
was the political culmination of the Russian Revolution.
IV
Various factors contributed to the success of the Revo=
lution. To begin with, it met with almost no active opposi=
tion: the Russian bourgeoisie was unorganised, weak, and not
of a militant disposition. But the main reasons lay in the
all-absorbing enthusiasm with which the revolutionary slo.
gans had fired the whole people. "Down with the war!",
"Immediate peace!", "The land to the peasant, the factory
to the workers!", "All power to the Soviets!" - these were
expressive of the passionate soul cry and deepest needs of
the great masses.  No power could withstand their mira=
culous effect.
Another very potent factor was the unity of the various
revolutionary elements in their opposition to the Kerensky
government. Bolsheviki, Anarchists, the left faction of the
Social; Revolutionist party, the numerous politicals freed
from prison and Siberian exile, and the hundreds of returned
revolutionary emigrants, had all worked during the Februaryv
October months toward a common goal.
But if "it was easy to begin" the Revolution, as Lenin
had said in one of his speeches, to develop it, to carry it to
its logical conclusion was another and more difficult matter.


15





Two conditions were essential to such a consummation: con:
tinued unity of all the revolutionary forces, and the applica;
tion of the country's goodwill, initiative and best energies
to the important work of the new social construction. It
must always be remembered - and remembered well - that
revolution does not mean destruction only. It means destruction plus construction, with the greatest emphasis on the
plus. Most unfortunately, Bolshevik principles and methods
were soon fated to prove a handicap, a drawback upon the
creative activities of the masses.
The Bolsheviki   are Marxists.   Though  in   the
October days they had accepted    and proclaimed   an,
archist watchwords   (direct  action  by  the  people,
expropriation, free Soviets, and   so  forth), it  was
not their social philosophy that dictated this attitude.
They had felt the popular pulse - the rising waves of the
Revolution had carried them far beyond their theories. But
they remained Marxists. At heart they had no faith in the
people and their creative initiative. As socialdemocrats they
distrusted the peasantry, counting rather upon the support
of the small revolutionary minority among the industrial
element. They had advocated the Constituent Assembly,
and only when they were convinced that they would not have
a majority there, and therefore not be able to take State
power into their own hands, they suddenly decided upon the
dissolution of the Assembly, though the step was a refutation
and a denial of fundamental Marxist principles. (Incidentally,
it was an Anarchist, Anatoly Zheleznyakov, in charge of the
palace guard, who took the initiative in the matter). As
Marxists, the Bolsheviki insisted  on  the nationalisa.
tion 'of the land:   ownership, distribution  and control to   be  in  the  hands   of  the   State.  They
were in principle opposed to socialisation, and only
the pressure of the Left faction of the SocialRevolutionists
(the Spiridonova-Kamkov wing) whose influence among the
peasantry was traditional, forced the Bolsheviki to "swallow
the agrarian programme of the SocialistRevolutionists
whole", as Lenin afterwards put it.


16





From the first days of their accession to political power
the Marxist tendencies of the Bolsheviki began to manifest
themselves, to the detriment of the Revolution. Socialhdemos
cratic distrust of the peasantry influenced their methods and
measures. At the All.Russian Conferences the peasants did
not receive equal representation with the industrial workers.
Not only the village speculator and exploiter, but the agrarian
population as a whole was branded by the Bolsheviki as
"petty bosses" and "bourgeois", "unable to keep step with
the proletariat on the road to socialism". The Bolshevik
government discriminated against the peasant representas
tives in the Soviets and at the National Conferences, sought
to handicap their independent efforts, and systematically
narrowed the scope and activities of the Land Commissariat,
then by far the most vital factor in the reconstruction of
Russia. (The Commissariat was then presided over by a
Left SocialbRevolutionist). Inevitably this attitude led to
much dissatisfaction on the part of the great peasant masses.
The Russian muzhik is simple and naive, but with the
instinct of the primitive man he quickly senses a wrong: no
fine dialectics can budge his once settled conviction. The
very cornerstone of the Marxian credo, the dictatorship of
the proletariat, served as an affront and an injury to the
peasantry. They demanded an equal share in the organisa,
tion and administration of the affairs of the country. Had
they not been enslaved, oppressed and ignored long enough?
The dictatorship of the proletariat the peasant resented as
discrimination against himself. "If dictatorship must be",
he argued, "why not of all who labor, of the town worker and
of the peasant, together?"
Then came the Brest-Litovsk peace. In its far-reaching
results it proved the death blow to the Revolution. Two
months previously, in December, 1917, Trotzky had refused,
with a fine gesture of noble indignation, the peace offered by
Germany on conditions much more favorable to Russia.
"We wage no war, we sign no peace!" he had said, and revo,
lutionary Russia applauded him. "No compromise with
German imperialism, no concessions", echoed through the


17





length and breadth of the country, and the people stood
ready to defend their Revolution to the very death. But now
Lenin demanded the ratification of a peace that meant the
most mean-spirited betrayal of the greater part of Russia.
Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraina, White Russia, Bessarabia
- all were to be turned over to the oppression and exploitation of the German invader and of their own bourgeoisie.
It was a monstrous thing - the sacrifice at once of the prin.
ciples of the Revolution and of its interests as well.
Lenin insisted on ratification, on the ground that the
Revolution needed a "breathing spell", that Russia was
exhausted, and that peace would enable the "revolutionary
oasis" to gather strength for new effort. Radck denounced
acceptance of Brest-Litovsk  conditions as betrayal of
the October Revolution.  Trotzky disagreed with Lenin.
The revolutionary forces split. The Left Social-Revolutionists, most of the Anarchists and many of the nonpartisan revolutionary elements were bitterly opposed to
making peace with imperialism, especially on the terms dictated then by Germany. They declared that such a peace
would be fatal to the Revolution; that the principle of "peace
without annexations" must not be sacrificed; that the German conditions involved the basest treachery to the workers
and peasants of the provinces demanded by the Prussians;
that the peace would subject the whole of Russia to economic and political dependence upon German Imperialism,
that the invaders would possess themselves of the Ukrainan
bread and the Don coal, and drive Russia to industrial ruin.
But Lenin's influence was potent. He prevailed. The
Brest-Litovsk treaty was ratified by the 4th Soviet Congress.
It was Trotzky who first asserted, in refusing the Ger.
man peace terms offered in December, 1917, that the workers
and peasants, inspired and armed by the Revolution, could
by guerilla warfare overcome any army of invasion. The
Left Social-Revolutionists now called for peasant uprisings
to oppose the Germans, confident that no army could conquer
the revolutionary ardor of a people fighting for the fruits of
their great Revolution. Workers and peasants, responding


18





to this call, formed military detachments and rushed to the
aid of Ukraina and White Russia, then valiantly struggling
against the German invaders. Trotzky ordered the Russian
army to pursue and suppress these partisan units.
The killing of Mirbach followed. It was the protest of
the Left Social[Revolutionist Party against, and the defiance
of, Prussian imperialism  within Russia. The Bolshevik
government initiated repressive measures: it now felt itself,
as it were, under obligations to Germany. Dzerzhinsky, head
of the AllRussian Extraordinary Commission, demanded
the delivery of the terrorist. It was a situation unique in
revolutionary annals: a revolutionary party in power demanding of another revolutionary party, with which it had till
then co=operated, the arrest and punishment of a revolution,
ist for executing the representative of an imperialist govern,
ment! The BrestLitovsk peace had put the Bolsheviki in the
anomalous position of a gendarme for the Kaiser. The Left
Social.Revolutionists replied to Dzerzhinsky's demand by
arresting the latter. This act, and the armed skirmishes which
followed it (though insignificant in themselves) were tho,
roughly exploited by the Bolsheviki politically. They des
dared that it was an attempt of the Left SocialRevolutionist
Party to seize the reins of government. They announced that
party outlawed, and their extermination began.
These Bolshevik methods and tactics were not accidents
al. Soon it became evident that it is the settled policy of
the Communist State to crush every form of expression no*
in accord with the government. After the ratification of tht
BrestLitovsk  peace the Left SocialRevolutionist Party
withdrew its representative in the Soviet of People's Corn
missars. The Bolsheviki thus remained in exclusive contro
of the government. Under one pretext and another thern
followed most arbitrary and cruel suppression of all th,
other political parties and moovements. The Mensheviki anm
the Right Social=Revolutionists had been "liquidated" long
before, together with the R iussian bourgeoisie. Now was the
turn of the revolution;ary elements - the Left Social.Revolu;
tionists, the Anarchists, the non-partisan revolutionists.


19





But the "liquidation" of these involved much more than
the suppression of small political groups. These revolutionary
elements had strong followings, the Left Social.Rcvolu
tionists among the peasantry, the Anarchists mainly among
the city proletariat. The new Bolshevik tactics encompassed
systematic eradication of every sign of dissatisfaction,
stifling all criticism and crushing independent opinion or
effort. With this phase the Bolsheviki enter upon the dicta.
torship over the proletariat, as it is popularly characterised
in Russia. The government's attitude to the peasantry is
now that of open hostility. More increasingly is violence
resorted to. Labor unions are dissolved, frequently by force,
when their loyalty to the Communist Party is suspected. The
co-operatives are attacked. This great organisation, the
fraternal bond between city and country, whose economic
functions were so vital to the interests of Russia and of the
Revolution, is hindered in its important work of production,
exchange and distribution of the necessaries of life, is dis
organised, and finally completely abolished.
Arrests, night searches, zassada (house blockade), execu.
tions, are the order of the day. The Extraordinary Com.
missions (Tcheka), originally organised to fight counterrevolution and speculation, is becoming the terror of every
worker and peasant. Its secret agents are everywhere, always
unearthing "plots", signifying the razstrel (shooting) of
hundreds without hearing, trial or appeal. From the intended
defense of the Revolution the Tcheka becomes the most
dreaded organisation, whose injustice and cruelty spread
terror over the whole country. Allhpowerful, owing no one
responsibility, the Tcheka is a law unto itself, possesses its
own army, assumes police, judicial, administrative and execu
tive powers, and makes its own laws that supersede those
of the official State. The prisons and concentration camps
are filled with alleged counter-revolutionists and speculators,
95 per cent of whom are starved workers, simple peasants,
and even children of 10 to 14 years of age. (See reports of
prison investigations, Petrograd "Krasnaya Gazetta" and
"Pravda"; Moscow "Pravda", May, June, July, 1920). Cornm


20





munism becomes synonymous in the popular mind with
Tchekism, the latter the epitome of all that is vile and brutal.
The seed of counter-revolutionary feeling is sown broadcast.
The other policies of the "revolutionary government"
keep step with these developments. Mechanical centralisa=
tion, run mad, is paralising the industrial and economic activw
ities of the country. Initiative is frowned upon, free effort
systematically discouraged. The great masses are deprived
of the opportunity to shape the policies of the Revolution,
or take part in the administration of the affairs of the
country. The government is monopolising every avenue of
life: the Revolution is divorced from the people. A bureau.
cratic machine is created that is appalling in its parasitism,
inefficiency and corruption. In Moscow alone this new class
of sovburs (Soviet bureaucrats) exceeds, in 1920, the total of
office holders throughout the whole of Russia under the
Tsar in 1914. (See official report of investigation by Com.
mittee of Moscow Soviet, 1921). The Bolshevik economic
policies, effectively aided by this bureaucracy, completely
disorganise the already  crippled  industrial life of the
country. Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Communist leaders
thunder philippics against the new Soviet bourgeoisie, - and
issue ever new  decrees that strengthen and augment its
numbers and influence.
The system of yedinolitchiye is introduced: management by one person. Lenin himself is its originator and chief
advocate. Henceforth the shop- and factory committees are
to be abolished, stripped of all power. Every mill, mine, and
factory, the railroads and all the other industries are to be
managed by a single head, a "specialist", -  and the old
Tsarist bourgeoisie is invited to step in. The former bankers,
bourse operators, mill owners and factory bosses become the
managers, in full control of the industries, with absolute
power over the workers. They are vested with authority to
hire, employ and discharge the "hands", to give or deprive
them of the payok (food ration), even to punish them and
turn them over to the Tcheka. The workers, who had fought
and bled for the Revolution and were willing to suffer, freeze


21





and starve in its defense, resent this unheard of imposition.
They regard it as the worst betrayal. They refuse to be
dominated by the very owners and foremen whom they had
driven, in the days of the Revolution, out of the factories and
who had been so lordly and brutal to them. They have no
interest in such a reconstruction. The "new   system",
heralded by Lenin as the savior of the industries, results in
the compiete paralysis of the economic life of Russia, drives
the workers en masse from the factories, and fills them with
bitterness and hatred of everything "socialistic". The prin=
ciples and tactics of Marxian mechanisation of the Revolution are sealing its doom.
The fanatical delusion that a little conspirative group, as
it were, could achieve a fundamental social transformation
proved the Frankenstein of the Bolsheviki. It led them to
incredible depths of infamy and barbarism. The methods of
such a theory, its inevitable means, are twofold: decrees and
terror. Neither of these did the Bolsheviki spare. As
Bukharin. the foremost ideologue of the militant Commu=;ists, taught, terrorism is the method by which capitalistic
human nature is to be transformed into fit Bolshevik
citizenship. Freedom is "a bourgeois prejudice" (Lenin's
favorite expression), liberty of speech and of the press
unnecessary, harmful. The central government is the depository of all knowledge and wisdom. It will do everything.
The sole duty of the citizen is obedience. The will of the
State is supreme.
Stripped of fine phrases, intended mostly for Western
consumption, this was and is the practical attitude of the
Bolshevik government. This government, the real and only
actual government of Russia, consists of five persons, members of the inner circle of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia. These "Big Five" are omnipotent.
This group, in its true essence conspiratory, has been controlling the fortunes of Russia and of the Revolution since
the Brest-Litovsk peace. What has happened in Russia since,
has been in strict accord with the Bolshevik interpretation
of Marxism. That Marxism, reflected through the Com,


22





munist inner circle's megalomania of omniscience and omnis
potence, has achieved the present debacle of Russia.
In consonance with their theory, the social fundamentals
of the October Revolution have been deliberately destroyed.
The ultimate object being a powerfully centralised State,
with the Communist Party in absolute control, the popular
initiative and the revolutionary creative forces of the masses
had to be eliminated. The elective system was abolished,
first in the army and navy, then in the industries. The
Soviets of peasants and workers were castrated and trans,
formed into obedient Communist committees, with the
dreaded sword of the Tcheka ever hanging over them. The
labor unions governmentalised, their proper activities
suppresed, they were turned into mere transmitters of the
orders of the State. Universal military service, coupled with
the death penalty for conscientious objectors; enforced labor,
with a vast officialdom for the apprehension and punishment
of "deserters"; agrarian and industrial conscription of the
peasantry; military Communism in the cities and the system
of requisitioning in the country, characterised by Radek as
simply grain plundering (International Press Correspondence,
English edition, vol. 1, No. 17); the suppression of workers'
protests by the use of the military; the crushing of peasant
dissatisfaction with an iron hand, even to the extent of whip,
ping the peasants and razing their villages with artillery -
(in the Ural. Volga and Kuban districts, in Siberia and the
Ukraina) -   this characterised the attitude of the Communist State toward the people, this comprised the "con,
structive social and economic policies" of the Bolsheviki.
Still the Russian peasants and workers, prizing the Revolution for which they had suffered so much, kept bravely
fighting on numerous military fronts. They were defending
the Revolution, as they thought. They starved, froze, and
died by the thousands, in the fond hope that the terrible
things the Communists did would soon cease. The Bolshevik
horrors were, somehow - the simple Russian thought - the
inevitable result of the powerful enemies "from abroad"
attacking their beloved country. But when the wars will at


23





last be over - the people naively echoed the official press -
the Bolsheviki will surely return to the revolutionary path
they entered in October, 1917, the path the wars had forced
them temporarily to forsake.
The masses hoped and - endured. And then, at last,
the wars were ended. Russia drew an almost audible sigh of
relief, relief palpitating with deep hope. It was the crucial
moment: the great test had come. The soul of a nation was
a-quiver. To be or not to be? And then full realisation
came. The people stood aghast. Repressions continued,
even grew worse. The piratical razvyorstka, the punitive
expeditions against the peasants, did not abate their
murderous work.    The Tcheka was unearthing more
"conspiracies", executions were  taking  place  as before.  Terrorism  was rampant.    The new    Bolshevik
bourgeoisie lorded  it  over  the  workers   and  the
peasants, official corruption was vast and open, huge
food supplies were rotting through Bolshevik inefficiency
and centralised State monopoly,   and the people were
starving.
The Petrograd workers, always in the forefront of revolutionary effort, were the first to voice their dissatisfaction
and protest. The Kronstadt sailors, upon investigation of
the demands of the Petrograd proletariat, declared themselves solidaric with the workers. In their turn they announced their stand for free Soviets, Soviets free from Com--
munist coercion, Soviets that should in reality represent the
revolutionary masses and voice their needs. In the middle
provinces of Russia, in the Ukraina, on the Caucasus, in
Siberia, everywhere the people made known their wants,
voiced their grievances, informed the government of their
demands. The Bolshevik State replied with its usual argument: the Kronstadt sailors were decimated, the "bandits"
of Ukraina massacred, the "rebels" of the East laid low with
machine guns.
This done, Lenin announced at the X. Congress of the
Communist Party of Russia (March, 1921) that his former
policies were all wrong. The razvyorstka, the requisition of


24





food, was pure robbery. Military violence against the
peasantry a "serious mistake". The workers must receive
some consideration. The Soviet bureaucracy is corrupt and
criminal, a huge parasite. "The methods we have been using
have failed." The people, especially the rural population,
are not yet up to the level of Communist principles. Private
ownership must be re-introduced, free trade established.
Henceforth the best Communist is he who can drive the best
bargain. (Lenin's expression).
V
Back to Capitalism!
The present situation in Russia is most anomalous.
Economically it is a combination of State and private capitalism. Politically it remains the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or, more correctly, the dictatorship of the inner circle of
the Communist Party.
The peasantry has forced the Bolsheviki to make concessions to it. Forcible requisitioning is abolished. Its place
has taken the tax in kind, a certain percentage of the peasant
produce (going to the government. Free trade has been
legalised, and the farmer may now exchange or sell his
surplus to the government, to the recestablished co-operatives
or on the open market. The new economic policy opens wide
the door of exploitation. It sanctions the right of enrichment
and of wealth accumulation. The farmer may now profit by
his successful crops, rent more land, and exploit the labor
of those peasants who have little land and no horses to work
it with. The shortage of cattle and bad harvests in some
parts of the country have created a new class of "farm hands"
who hire themselves out to the well-to=do peasant. The poor
people migrate from those regions which are suffering from
famine and swell the ranks of this class. The village capital=
ist is in the making.
The city worker in Russia today, under the new economic policy, is in exactly the same position as in any other


25





capitalistic country. Free food distribution is abolished,
except in a few industries operated by the government. The
worker is paid wages, and must pay for his necessaries - as
in any country. Most of the industries, in so far as they are
active, have been let or leased to private persons. The small
capitalist now has a free hand. He has a large field for his
activities. The farmer's surplus, the product of the industries,
of the peasant trades, and of all the enterprises of private
ownership, are subject to the ordinary processes of business,
can be bought and sold. Competition within the retail trade
leads to incorporation and to the accumulation of fortunes
in the hands of individuals.
Developing city capitalism and village capitalism can not
long co~exist with "dictatorship of the proletariat". The
unnatural alliance between the latter and foreign capitalism
will in the near future prove another vital factor in the fate
of Russia.
The Bolshevik government still strives to uphold the
dangerous delusion that the "revolution is progressing", that
Russia is "ruled by proletarian soviets", that the Communist
Party and its State are identical with the people. It is still
speaking in the name of the "proletariat". It is seeking to
dupe the people with a new chimera. After awhile - the
Bolsheviki now pretend - when Russia shall have become
industrially resurrected, through the achievements of our
fast growing capitalism, the "proletarian dictatorship" will
also have grown strong, and we will return to nationalisation.
The State will then systematically curtail and supplant the
private industries and thus break the power of the meanwhile
developed bourgeoisie.
"After a period of partial denationalisation a stronger
nationalisation begins", says Preobrazhensky, Finance Comrn
missar, in his recent article, "The Perspectives of the New
Economic Policy". Then will "Socialism be victorious on
the entire front" (ibid). Radek is less diplomatic. "We cert.
ainly do not mean", he assures us in his political analysis
of the Russian situation, entitled "Is the Russian Revolution


26





a Bourgeois Revolution?" (I. P. C., Dec. 16, 1921) "that at
the end of a year we shall again confiscate the newly accu%
mulated goods. Our economic policy is based upon a longer
period of time.... We are consciously preparing ourselves
for co-operating with the bourgeoisie; this is undoubtedly
dangerous to the existence of the Soviet government, because
the latter loses the monopoly on industrial production as
against the peasantry. Does not this signify the decisive
victory of capitalism? May we not then speak of our revo.
lution as having lost its revolutionary character?..."
To these very timely and significant questions Radek
cheerfully replies with a categoric No! It is true, of course,
as Marx taught, he admits, that economic relations determine
the political ones, and that economic concessions to the
bourgeoisie must lead also to political concessions. He
remembers that when the powerful landowning class of
Russia began making economic concessions to the bour,
geoisie, those concessions were soon followed by political
ones and finally by the capitulation of the landowning class.
But he insists that the Bolsheviki will retain their power
even under the conditions of the restoration of capitalism.
"The bourgeoisie is a historically deteriorating, dying class... That is why the working class (?) of Russia can refuse
to make political concessions to the bourgeoisie; since it is
justified in hoping that its power will grow on a national and
international scale more quickly than will the power of the
Russian bourgeoisie".
Meanwhile, though authoritatively assured that his
"power is to grow on a national and international scale", the
Russian worker is in a bad plight. The new economic policy
has made the proletarian "dictator" a common, every-day
wage slave, like his brother in countries unblessed with
Socialist dictatorship. The curtailment of the government's
national monopoly has resulted in the throwing of hundreds
of thousands of men and women out of work. Many Soviet
institutions have been closed; the remaining ones have dis,
charged from 50 to 75 per cent of their employees. The large
influx to the cities of peasants and villagers ruined by the


27





razvyorstka, and those fleeing from the famine districts, has
produced an unemployment problem of threatening scope.
The revival of the industrial life through private capital is a
very slow process, due to the general lack of confidence in
the Bolshevik State and its promises.
But when the industries will again begin to function
more or less systematically, Russia will face a very difficult
and complex labor situation. Labor organisations, trade
unions, do not exist in Russia, so far as the legitimate activi
ties of such bodies are concerned. The Bolsheviki abolished
them long ago. With developing production and capitalism,
governmental as well as private, Russia will see the rise of
a new proletariat whose interests must naturally come into
conflict with those of the employing class. A bitter struggle
is imminent. A struggle of a twofold nature: against the
private capitalist, and against the State as an employer of
labor. It is even probable that the situation may develop
still another phase: antagonism of the workers employed in
the State=owned industries toward the better.paid workers
of private concerns. What will be the attitude of the Bolshe.
vik government? The object of the new economic policy is
to encourage, in every way possible, the development of
private enterprise and to accelerate the growth of industri;
alism. Shops, mines, factories and mills have already been
leased to capitalists. Labor demands have a tendency to
curtail profits; they interfere with the "orderly processes" of
business. And as for strikes, they handicap production,
paralise industry. Shall not the interests of Capital and
Labor be declared solidaric in Bolshevik Russia?
The industrial and agrarian exploitation of Russia, under
the new economic policy, must inevitabely lead to the growth
of a powerful labor movement. The workers' organisations
will unite and solidify the city proletariat with the agrarian
poor, in the common demand for better living conditions.
From the present temper of the Russian worker, now
enriched by his four years' experience of the Bolshevik
regime, it may be assumed with considerable degree of
probability that the coming labor movement of Russia will


28





develop along syndicalist lines. This sentiment is strong
among the Russian workers. The principles and methods of
revolutionary syndicalism are not unfamiliar to them. The
effective work of the factory and shop committees, the first
to initiate the industrial expropriation of the bourgeoisie in
1917, is an inspiring memory still fresh in the minds of the
proletariat. Even in the Communist Party itself, among its
labor elements, the syndicalist idea is popular. The famous
Labor Opposition, led by Shliapnikov and Mme. Kolontay
within the Party, is essentially syndicalistic.
What attitude will the Bolshevik government take to the
labor movement about to develop in Russia, be it wholly or
even only partly syndicalistic? Till now the State has been
the mortal enemy of labor syndicalism wuithin Russia, though
encouraging it in other countries. At the X. Congress of the
Russian Communist Party (March, 1921) Lenin declared
merciless warfare against the faintest symptom of syndicalist
tendencies, and even the discussion of syndicalist theories
was forbidden the Communists, on pain of exclusion from
the Party. (See official Report, X. Congress). A number of
the Labor Opposition were arrested and imprisoned. It is
not to be lightly assumed that the Communist dictatorship
could satisfactorily solve the difficult problems arising out
of a real labor movement under Bolshevik autocracy. They
involve principles of Marxian centralisation, the functioning
of trade or industrial unions independent of the omnipotent
government, and active opposition to private capitalism.
But not only the big and small capitalist will the workers of
Russia soon have to fight. They will presently come to grips
with State capitalism itself.
To correctly understand the spirit and character of the
present Bolshevik phase, it is necessary to realise that the
so.called "new economic policy" is neither new nor economic,
properly considered. It is old political Marxism, the exclusive
fountain.head of Bolshevik wisdom. As social.democrats
they have remained faithful to their bible. Only a country
where capitalism is most highly developed can have a social


29





revolution - that is the acme of Marxian faith. The Bolsheviki are about to apply it to Russia. True, in the October
days of the Revolution they repeatedly deviated from the
straight and narrow path of Marx. Not because they doubted
the prophet. By no means. Rather that Lenin and his group,
political opportunists, had been forced by irresistible popular
aspiration to steer a truly revolutionary course. But all the
time they hung on to the skirts of Marx, and sought every
opportunity to direct the Revolution into Marxian channels.
As Radek naively reminds us, "already in April, 1918, in
a speech by comrade Lenin, the Soviet government attempted
to define our next tasks and to point out the way which we
now designate as the new economic policy". (I. P. C., Vol. 1,
No. 17).
Significant admission! In truth, present Bolshevik polil
cies are the continuation of the good orthodox Bolshevik
Marxism  of 1918. Bolshevik leaders now admit that the
Revolution, in its post;October developments, was only polil
tical, not social. The mechanical centralisation of the Comrn
munist State - it must be emphasized - proved fatal to
the economic and social life of the country. Violent party
dictatorship destroyed the unity of the workers and the
peasants, and created a perverted, bureaucratic attitude to
revolutionary reconstruction. The complete denial of free
speech and criticism, not only to the masses but even to the
rank and file of the Communist Party itself, resulted in its
undoing, through its own mistakes.
And now? Bolshevik Marxism is continuing in poor
Russia. But it is monstrously criminal to prolong this bloody
Comedy of Errors. Communist construction is not possible
alongside of a sickly capitalism, artificially developed. That
capitalism can never be destroyed - as Lenin & Co. pretend
to believe - by the regular processes of the Bolshevik State
grown economically strong. The "new" policies are therefore a delusion and a snare, fundamentally reactionary.
These policies themselves create the necessity for another
revolution.


30





Must tortured humanity ever tread the same vicious
circle?
Or will the workers at last learn the great lesson of the
Russian Revolution that every government, whatever its
fine name and nice promises, is by its inherent nature, as a
government, destructive of the very purposes of the social
revolution? It is the mission of government to govern, to
subject, to strenghten and perpetuate itself. It is high time
the workers learn that only their own organised, creative
efforts, free from political and State interference, can make
their age~long struggle for emancipation a lasting success.


31





,ji.  &


*0 -
%,


A&N *t t


A


AK




I




I


V


\


N i


"A huge army of 'kursati' blindly devoted to the government, " surrounded Kronstadt. (The Unknown Revolution, B & R, Detroit).





TIHE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
AND
THE COMMUNIST PARTY





PREFACE


Clarity of ideas is not characteristic of the average mind.
Many people still continue to think and to talk of the Russian
Revolution and of the Bolsheviki as if the two were iden%
tical. In other words, as if nothing had happened in Russia
during the last three years.
The great need of the present is to make clear the differ.
ence between that grand social event and the ruling politi%
cal party - a difference as fundamental as it has been fatal
to the Revolution.
The following pages present a clear and historically true
picture of the ideals that inspired the Revolution, and of the
r61e played by the Bolsheviki. This pamphlet conclusively
proves what the Russian Revolution IS and what the Bolshevik State, alias the Communist Party, IS NOT.
I consider this brochure a very able, and for popular
reading sufficiently exhaustive, analysis of the Russian Re,
volution and of the causes of its undoing. It may be regarded
as an authoritative expression of the Anarchist movement of
Russia, for it was written by Anarchists of differents schools,
some of them participants and all of them well versed in the
events of the Revolution. It is the joint work of four well
known Moscow Anarchists. Their names cannot be men.
tioned at present, in view of the fact that some of them are
still in Russia. Nor are their names important in this
connection: rather is it the subject and its treatment. I
hereby accept full responsibility for the contents of the
following pages, as I am also responsible for the rendering of
the Russian manuscript into English.
I take this occasion to correct the erroneous statement
contained in Rudolf Rocker's Preface to the German edition
of this pamphlet, regarding its authorship. This brochure
was written in Moscow, in June, 1921, and secretly forwarded
to Rocker. Because of a misunderstanding Comrade Rocker
ascribed the authorship of the manuscript to o n e person,
hinted at but unnamed in Rocker's Preface. The fact of the
authorship is as stated above.
July, 1922.                ALEXANDER BERKMAN


34





THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND
THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The October Revolution was not the legitimate offspring
of traditional Marxism. Russia but little resembled a country
in which, according to Marx, "the concentration of the means
of production and the socialisation of the tools of labor
reached the point where they can no longer be contained
within their capitalistic shell. The shell bursts..
In Russia, "the shell" burst unexpectedly. It burst at a
stage of low technical and industrial development, when
centralisation of the means of production had made little
progress. Russia was a country with a badly organised
system of transportation, with a weak bourgeoisie and weak
proletariat, but with a numerically strong and socially
important peasant population. In short, it was a country in
which, apparently, there could be no talk of irreconcilable
antagonism between the grown industrial labor forces and a
fully ripened capitalist system.
But the combination of circumstances in 1917 involved,
particularly for Russia, an exceptional state of affairs which
resulted in the catastrophic breakdown of her., whole
industrial system. "It was easy for Russia", Lenin justly
wrote at the time, "to begin the socialist revolution in the
peculiarly unique situation of 1917."
The specially favorable conditions for the beginning of
the socialist revolution were:
1) the possibility of blending the slogans of the Social
Revolution with the popular demand for the termination of


35





the imperialistic world war, which had produced great
exhaustion and dissatisfaction among the masses;
2) the possibility of remaining, at least for a certain
period after quitting the war, outside the sphere of influence
of the capitalistic European groups that continued the
world war;
3) the opportunity to begin, even during the short time
of this respite, the work of internal organisation and to
prepare the foundation for revolutionary reconstruction;
4) the exceptionally favorable position of Russia, in case
of possible new aggression on the part of West European
imperialism, due to her vast territory and insufficient means
of communication;
5) the advantages of such a condition in the event of
civil war; and
6) the possibility of almost immediately satisfying the
fundamental demands of the revolutionary     peasantry,
notwithstanding the fact that the essentially democratic
viewpoint of the agricultural population  was entirely
different from  the socialist program  of the "party of the
proletariat" which seized the reins of government.
Moreover, revolutionary Russia already had the benefit
of a great experience - the experience of 1905, when the
T'sarist autocracy succeeded in crushing the revolution for
the very reason that the latter strove to be exclusively
political and therefore could neither arouse the peasants nor
inspire even a considerable part of the proletariat.
The world war, by exposing the complete bankruptcy
of constitutional government, served to prepare and quicken
the greatest movement of the people - a movement which,
by virtue of its very essence, could develop onl 1 into a social
revolution.
Anticipating  the  measures  of  the  revolutionary
government, often even in defiance of the latter, the
revolutionary masses by their own initiative began, long
before the October days, to put in practice their social


36





ideals. They took possession of the land, the factories,
mines, mills, and the tools of production. They got rid of
the more hated and dangerous representatives of government
and authority. In their grand revolutionary outburst they
destroyed every form of political and economic oppression.
In the deeps of Russia the Social Revolution was raging,
when the October change took place in the capitals of
Petrograd and Moscow.
The Communist Party, which was aiming      at the
dictatorship, from the very beginning correctly judged the
situation. Throwing overboard the democratic planks of its
platform, it energetically proclaimed the slogans of the Social
Revolution, in order to gain control of the movement of the
masses.. In the course of the development of the Revolution,
the Bolsheviki gave concrete form to certain fundamental
principles and methods of Anarchist Communism, as for
instance: the negation of parliamentarism, expropriation
of the bourgeoisie, tactics of direct action, seizure of the
means of production, establishment of the system  of
Workers' and Peasants' Councils (Soviets), and so forth.
Furthermore, the Communist Party exploited all the
popular demands of the hour: termination of the war, all
power to the revolutionary proletariat, the land for the
peasants, etc. This, as we shall see later, base demagoguery
proved of tremendous psychologic effect in hastening and
intensifying the revolutionary process.
But if it was easy, as Lenin said, to begin the Revolution,
its further development and strengthening were to take place
amid difficult surroundings.
The external position of Russia, as characterised by
Lenin about the middle of 1918, continued to be "unusually
complicated  and  dangerous", and  "tempting  for the
neighboring imperialist States by its temporary weakness".
The Socialist Soviet Republic was in an "extraordinarily
unstable, very critical international position".
And, indeed, the whole subsequent external history of
Russia is full of difficulties in consequence of the necessity


37





of fighting ceaselessly, often on several fronts at once, against
the agents of world imperialism, and     even  against
common adventurers. Only after the final defeat of the
Wrangel forces was at last put an end to direct armed
interference in the affairs of Russia.
No less difficult and complex, even chaotic, was the
iniernal situation of the country.
Complete breakdown of the whole industrial fabric;
failure of the national economy; disorganisation of the
transportation system, hunger, unemployment; relative lack
of organisation among the workers; unusually complex and
contradictory conditions of peasant life; the psychology of
the "petty proprietor", inimical to the new Soviet regime;
sabotage of Soviet work by the technical intelligentsia; the
great lack in the Party of trained workers familiar with local
conditions, and the practical inefficiency of the Party heads;
finally, according to the frank admission of the acknowledged
leader of the Bolsheviki, "the greatest hatred, by the masses,
and distrust of everything governmental" - that was the
situation in which the first and most difficult steps of the
Revolution had to be made.
It must also be mentioned that there were still other
specific problems with which the revolutionary government
had to deal. Namely, the deep=seated contradictions and
even antagonisms between the interests and aspirations of
the various social groups of the country. The most important
of these were:
(a) the most advanced, and in industrial centers the most
influential, group of factory proletarians. Notwithstanding
their relative cultural and technical backwardness, these
elements favored the application of true communist methods;
(b) the numerically powerful peasant population, whose
economic attitude was decisive, particularly at a time of
industrial prostration and blockade. This class looked with
distrust and even hatred upon all attempts of the Communist
government to play the guardian and control their economic
activities;


3





(c) the very large and psychologically influential group
(in the sense of formihg public opinion, even if of a panicky
character) of the common citizenry: the residue of the upper
bourgeoisie, technical specialists, small dealers, petty
bosses, commercial agents of every kind - a numerous
group, in which were also to be found functionaries of the
old regime who adapted themselves and were serving the
Soviet government, now  and then sabotaging; elements
tempted by the opportunities of the new order of things and
seeking to make a career; and, finally, persons torn out of
their habitual modes of life and literally starving. This class
was approximately estimated at 70/% of the employees of
Soviet institutions.
Naturally, each of these groups looked upon the
Revolution  with their own   eyes, judged  its further
possibilities from their own point of view, arnd in their own
peculiar manner reacted on the measures of the revolutionary
government.
All these antagonisms, rending the country    and
frequently clashing in bloody strife, inevitably tended to
nourish counter-revolution - not mere conspiracy or rebellion, but the terrific convulsion of a country experiencing
two world cataclysms at once: war and social revolution.
Thus the political party that assumed the rble of dictator
was faced by problems of unprecedented difficulty. The
Communist Party did not shrink from their solution, and in
that is its immortal historic merit.
Notwithstanding the many deep antagonisms, in spite
of the apparent absence of the conditions necessary for a
social revolution, it was too late to discuss about driving
back the uninvited guest, and await a new, more favorable
opportunity. Only blind, dogmatic or positively reactionary
elements could imagine that the Revolution could have been
"made differently". The Revolution was not and could not
be a mechanical product of the abstract human will. It was
ant organic process burst with elemental force from the


39





very needs of the people, from the complex combination of
circumstances that determined their existence.
To return to the old political and economical regime,
that of industrial feudalism, was out of the question. It
was impossible, and first of all because it were the denial
of the greatest conquest of the Revolution: the right of
every worker to a decent human life. It was also impossible
because of the fundamental principles of the new national
economy: the old regime was inherently inimical to the
development of free social relationship - it had no room
for labor initiative.
It was apparent that the only right and wholesome
solution - which could save the Revolution from its external
enemies, free it from the inner strife which rent the country,
broaden and deepen the Revolution itself - lay in the direct,
creative initiative of the toiling masses. Only they who had
for centuries borne the heaviest burdens could through
conscious systematic effort find the road to a new,
regenerated society. And that was to be the fitting cul.
mination of their unexampled revolutionary zeal.
Lenin himself, replying in one of his works to the
question, "How is the discipline of the revolutionary party
of the proletariat to be maintained, how to be strengthened?"
clearly and definitely replied: "By knowing how to meet,
to combine, to some extent even to merge, if you will, with
the broad masses of the toilers, mainly with the proletariat,
but also with the non~proletarian laboring masses". (Italics
are Lenin's.)
However, this thought was and still remains, on the
whole, in irreconcilable conflict with the spirit of Marxism
in its official Bolshevik interpretation, and particularly with
Lenin's authoritative view of it.
For years trained in their peculiar "underground" social
philosophy, in which fervent faith in the Social Revolution
was in some odd manner blended with their no less fanatical
faith in State centralisation, the Bolsheviki devised an entirely


40





new science of tactics. It is to the effect that the preparation
and consummation of the Social Revolution necessitates the
organisation of a special conspirative staff, consisting
exclusively of the theoreticians of the movement, vested with
dictatorial powers for the purpose of clarifying and perv
fecting beforehand, by their own conspirative means, the
class-consciousness of the proletariat.
Thus the fundamental characteristic of Bolshevik
psychology was distrust of the masses, of the proletariat.
Left to themselves, the masses - according to Bolshevik
conviction - could rise only to the consciousness of the
petty reformer.
The road that leads to the direct creativeness of the
masses was thus forsaken.
According to Bolshevik conception, the masses are
"dark", mentally crippled by ages of slavery. They are
multi.colored: besides the revolutionary advanceguard they
comprise great numbers of the indifferent and many self%
seekers. The masses, according to the old but still correct
maxim of Rousseau, must be made free by force. To educate
them to liberty one must not hesitate to use compulsion
and violence.
"Proletarian compulsion in all its forms", writes Bukharin,
one of the foremost Communist theoreticians, "beginning
with summary execution and ending with compulsory labor
is, however paradoxical it may sound, a method of reworking
the human material of the capitalistic epoch into Communist
humanity".
This  cynical doctrinairism, this  fanatical quasis
philosophy flavored with Communist pedagogic sauce and
aided by the pressure of "canonized officials" (expression
of the prominent Communist and labor leader Shliapnikov)
represent the actual methods of the Party dictatorship, which
retains the trade mark of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
merely for gala affairs at home and for advertisement abroad.
Already in the first days of the Revolution, early in 1918,
when Lenin first announced to the world his socioseconomic


41





program in its minutest details, the roles of the people and
of the Party in the revolutionary reconstruction were strictly
separated and definitely assigned. On the one hand, an
absolutely submissive socialist herd, a dumb people; on the
other, the omniscient, all-controlling Political Party. What
is inscrutable to all, is an open book to It. In the land there
may be only one indisputable source of. truth - the State.
But the Communist State is, in essence and practice, the
dictatorship of the Party only, or - more correctly - the
dictatorship of its Central Committee. Each and every
citizen must be, first and foremost, the servant of the State,
its obedient functionary, unquestioningly executing the will
of his master - if not as a matter of conscience, then out of
fear. All free initiative, of the individual as well as of the
collectivity, is eliminated from the vision of the State. The
people's Soviets are transformed into sections of the Ruling
Party; the Soviet institutions become soulless offices, mere
transmitters of the will of the center to the periphery. All
expressions of State activity must be stamped with the
approving seal of Communism as interpreted by the faction
in power. Everything else is considered superfluous, useless
and dangerous.
This system of barrack absolutism, supported by bullet
and bayonet, has subjugated every phase of life, stopping
neither before the desfruction of the best cultural values, nor
before the most stupendous squandering of human life and
energy.
*
By its declaration L'diat c'est moi, the Bolshevik
dictatorship has assumed entire responsibility for the
Revolution in all its historic and ethical implications.
Having paralised the constructive efforts of the people,
the Communist Party could henceforth count only on its own
initiative.  By  what means, then, did the Bolshevik


42





dictatorship expect to use to best advantage the resources
of the Social Revolution? What road did it choose, not
merely to subject the masses mechanically to its authority,
but also to educate them, to inspire them with advanced
socialist ideas, and to stimulate them - exhausted as they
were by long war, economic ruin and police rule - with new
faith in socialist reconstruction? What has it substituted in
place of the revolutionary enthusiasm which burned so
intensely before?
Two things, which comprised the beginning and the end
of the constructive activities of the Bolshevik dictatorship:
1) the theory of the Communist State, and 2) terrorism.
In his speeches about the Communist program, in
discussions at conferences and congresses, and in his
celebrated pamphlet on "Infantile Sickness of 'Leftism' in
Communism", Lenin gradually shaped that peculiar doctrine
of the Communist State which was fated to play the
dominant role in the attitude of the Party and to determine
all the subsequent steps of the Bolsheviki in the sphere of
practical politics. It is the doctrine of a zigzag political road:
of "respites" and "tributes", agreements and compromises,
profitable retreats, advantageous withdra\yals and surrenders
- a truly classical theory of compromise.
Scorning the "chuckling and giggling of the lackeys of
the bourgeoisie", Lenin calls upon the laboring masses to
"steer down the wind", to retreat, to wait and watch, to go
slowly, and so on. Not the fiery spirit of Communism, but
sober commercialism which can successfully bargain for a
few  crumbs of socialism  from  the still unconquered
bourgeoisie - that is the "need of the hour". To encourage
and develop the virtues of the trader, the spirit of parsimony
and profitable dealing: that is the first commandment to
the "regenerated" people.
In the pamphlet referred to, Lenin scouts all stereotyped
morality and compares the tactics of his Party with those
of a military commander, ignoring the gulf which divides


43





them and their aims. All means are good that lead to
victory. There are compromises and compromises. "The
whole history of Bolshevism before and after the October
Revolution", Lenin sermonises the "naive German left
Communists" who are stifling in their own revolutionary
fervor, "is replete with instances of agreements and
compromises with other parties, the bourgeoisie included".
To prove his assertion, Lenin enumerates in great detail
various cases of bargaining  with bourgeoisie parties,
beginning with 1905 and up to the adoption by the
Bolsheviki, at the time of the October Revolution, "of the
agrarian platform of the socialists-revolutionists, in foto,
without change".
Compromise and bargaining, for which the Bolsheviki
so unmercifully and justly denounced and stigniatised all the
other factions of State Socialism, now become the Bethlehem
Star pointing the way to revolutionary reconstruction.
Naturally,. n methods could not fail to lead, with fatal
inevitability, into the swamp of conformation, hypocrisy and
unprincipledness.
The Brest Litovsk peace; the agrarian policy with its
spasmodic changes from the poorest class of peasantry to
the peasant exploiter; the perplexed, panicky attitude to the
labor unions; the fitful policy in regard to technical experts,
with its theoretical and practical swaying from collegiate
management of industries to "one.man power"; nervous
appeals to West European capitalism, over the heads of the
home and foreign proletariat; finally, the latest inconsistent
and zigzaggy, but incontrovertible and assured restoration of
the abolished bourgeoisie - such is the new system of
Bolshevism. A   system  of unprecedented shamelessness
practiced on a monster scale, a policy of outrageous double.
dealing in which the left hand of the Communist Party is
beginning consciously to ignore, and even to deny, on
principle, what its right hand is doing; when, for instance,
it is proclaimed, on the one hand, that the most important
problem of the moment is the struggle against the small


44





bourgeoisie (and, incidentally, in stereotyped Bolshevik
phraseology, against anarchist elements), while on the other
hand are issued new decrees creating the techno.economic
and psychological conditions necessary for the restoration and
strengthening of that same bourgeoisie - that is the
Bolshevik policy which will forever stand as a monument
of the thoroughly false, thoroughly contradictory, concerned
only in self-preservation, opportunistic policy  of the
Communist Party dictatorship.
However loud that dictatorship may shout about the
great success of its new political methods, it remains the
most tragic fact that the worst and most incurable wounds
of the Revolution were received at the hands of the
Communist dictatorship itself.
An inevitable consequence of Communist Party rule
was also the other "method" of Bolshevik management:
terrorism.
Long ago Engels said that the proletariat does not need
the State to protect liberty, but needs it for the purpose of
crushing its opponents; and that when it will be possible to
speak of liberty, there will be no government. The Bolsheviki
adopted this maxim not only as their socio-political axiom
during the "transition  period", but gave it universal
application.
Terrorism always was and still remains the ultima ratio
of government alarmed for its existence. Terrorism is
tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a
mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.
Psychologically it is explained as a matter of self-defense,
as the necessity of throwing off responsibility the better to
strike the enemy.
But the principles of terrorism unavoidably rebound to
the fatal injury of liberty and revolution. Absolute power
corrupts and  defeats its partisans no less than   its
opponents. A people that knows not liberty becomes
accustomed to dictatorship: fighting despotism and counterrevolution, terrorism itself becomes their efficient school.


45





Once on the road of terrorism, the State necessarily
becomes estranged from the people. It must reduce to the
possible minimum   the circle of persons vested with
extraordinary powers, in the name of the safety of the State.
And then is born what may be called the panic of authority.
The dictator, the despot is always cowardly. He suspects
treason everywhere. And the more terrified he becomes, the
wilder rages his frightened  imagination, incapable of
distinguishing real danger from fancied. He sows broadcast
discontent, antagonism, hatred. Having chosen this course,
the State is doomed to follow it to the very end.
The Russian people remained silent, and in their name
- in the guise of mortal combat with counter~revolutionthe government initiated the most merciless warfare against
all political opponents of the Communist Party. Every
vestige of liberty was torn out by the roots. Freedom of
thought, of the press, of public assembly, self-determination
of the worker and of his unions, the freedom of labor - all
were declared old rubbish, doctrinaire nonsense, "bourgeois
prejudices", or intrigues of reviving counter.revolution.
Science, art, education fell under suspicion. Science is to
investigate and teach only the truths of the Communist State:
the schools and universities are speedily transformed into
Party schools.
Election campaigns, as for instance the recent reelections to the Moscow Soviet (1921), involve the arrest and
imprisonment of opposition candidates who are not favored
by the authorities. With entire impunity the government
exposes non.Communist candidates to public insult and
derision on the pages of the official newspapers pasted on
bulletin boards. By numberless stratagems the electors are
c.joled and menaced, in turn, and the result of the so-called
elections is the complete perversion of the people's will.
State terrorism is exercised through government organs
known   as Extraordinary  Commissions.   Vested   with
unlimited powers, independent of any control and practically
irresponsible, possessing their own "simplified" forms of


46





investigation and procedure, with a numerous staff of
ignorant, corrupt and brutal agents, these Commissions have
within a short time become not only the terror of actual or
fancied counter=revolution, but also - and much more so -
the most virulent ulcer on the revolutionary body of the
country.
The all;pervading secret police methods, the inseparable
from them system of provocation, the division of the
population into well=meaning and ill=disposed, have gradually
transformed the struggle for the new world into an unbridled
debauch of espionage, pillage and violence.
No reactionary r6gime ever dominated the life and
liberty of its citizens with such arbitrariness and despotism
as the alleged "dictatorship of the proletariat". As in the
old days of Tsarism, the "okhranka" (secret police section)
rules the land. The Soviet prisons are filled with socialists
and revolutionists of every shade of political opinion.
Physical violence toward political prisoners and hunger
strikes in prison are again the order of the day. Summary
executions, not only of individuals but en masse, are common
occurrences. The Socialist State has not scrupled to resort
to  a measure which   even the most brutal bourgeois
governments did not dare to use: the system of hostages.
Relationship or even casual friendship is sufficient ground
for merciless persecution and, quite frequently, for capital
punishment.
Gross and barbaric contempt for the most elementary
human rights has become an axiom of the Communist
Government.
With logical inevitability the Extraordinary Commissions
have  gradually  grown  into  a monstrous autocratic
mechanism, independent and unaccountable, with power
over life and death. Appeal is impossible, nonsexistent.
Even the supreme organs of State authority are powerless
before the Extraordinary Commissions, as proven by bitter
experience.
*              *


47





The Bolshevik Party is not in the habit of scorning any
perversion of truth to stigmatise every anti-Bolshevik
criticism or protest as "conspiracy" of one of the "right"
socialist parties: of the social-democratic Mensheviki and
Socialist-Revolutionists. Thus the Communists seek to
justify brutal repressions against the "right elements". In
regard to the Anarchists, however, Bolshevist terrorism
cannot be "justified" by such means.
It is apropos here to sketch, though very briefly, the
mutual relations between Anarchism and Bolshevism during
the Revolution.
When, in the first days of the Revolution (1917), the
laboring masses began the destruction of the system of
private ownership and of government, the Anarchists
worked shoulder to shoulder with them. The October
Revolution instinctively followed the path marked out by
the great popular outburst, naturally reflecting Anarchist
tendencies.  The Revolution  destroyed  the old State
mechanism and proclaimed in political life the principle of
the federation of soviets. It employed the method of direct
expropriation to abolish private capitalistic ownership: the
peasants and workers expropriated the landlords, chased the
financiers from the banks, seized the factories, mines, mills
and shops. In the field of economic reconstruction the
Revolution established the principle of the federation of
shop and factory committees for the management of
production. House committees looked after the proper
assignment of living quarters.
In this early phase of the October Revolution, the
Anarchists aided the people with all the power at their
command, and worked hand in hand with the Bolsheviki
in supporting and strengthening the new principles. Among
the legion of enthusiastic fighters of the Revolution, who
to the end remained true to the ideals and methods of
Anarchism, v e may particularly mention here Justin Zhook,
the founder of the famous Schluesselburg powder mill, who
lost his life while performing revolutionary military duty;


48





also Zhelesnyakov, who with rare strength and courage
dispersed the Constituent Assembly, and who afterwards fell
fighting against counter-revolutionary invasion.
But as soon as the Bolsheviki succeeded in gaining
control of the movement of the masses, the work of social
reconstruction suffered a sharp change in its character and
forms.
From  now  on the Bolsheviki, under cover of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, use every effort to build up a
centralised bureaucratic State. All who interpreted the
Social Revolution as, primarily, the self=determination of
the masses, the introduction of free, nonsgovernmental
Communism, - they are henceforth doomed to persecution.
This persecution was directed, first of all, against the critics
from "the left", the Anarchists. In April, 1918, the ruling
Communist Party    decided  to  abolish  all Anarchist
organisations. Without warning, on the night of April 12th,
the Anarchist club of Moscow was surrounded by artillery
and machine guns, and those present on the premises ordered
to surrender. Fire was opened on those resisting. The
Anarchist quarters were raided, and the following day the
entire Anarchist press was suppressed.
Since then the persecution of Anarchists and of their
organisations has assumed a systematic character. On the
one hand our comrades were perishing on the military fronts,
fighting counter-revolution; on  the other, they  were
struck down by the Bolshevik State by means of the
Extraordinary Commissions (Tcheka).
The further the ruling Party departed from the path
marked   out  by  the October Revolution, the more
determinedly it oppressed the other revolutionary elements
and particularly the Anarchists. In November, 1918, the
AllRussian Conference of the Anarcho-Syndicalists, held in
Moscow, was arrested in corpore. The other Anarchist
organisations were broken up and terrorised. Because of the
total impossibility of legal activity, some Anarchists decided


49





to "go underground". Several of them, in co6peration with
some left SocialistsRevolutionists, resorted to terrorism.
On September 25, 1919, they exploded a bomb in the building
(Leontevsky Pereulok) in which the Moscow Committee
of the Party was in session. The Anarchist organisations
of Moscow, not considering terrorism  a solution of the
difficulties, publicly expressed disapproval of the tactics of
the underground group. The government, however, replied
with repressions against all Anarchists. Many members of
the underground group were executed, a number of Moscow
Anarchists were arrested, and in the provinces every
expression of the Anarchist movement was suppressed.
The finding, during a search, of such Anarchist literature as
the works of Kropotkin or Bakunin, led to arrest.
Only in the Ukraina, where the power of the Bolsheviki
was comparatively weak, owing to the wide.spread rebels
peasant movement known as the Makhnovstschina (from its
leader, the Anarchist Makhno), the Anarchist movement
continued to some extent active. The advance of Wrangel
into the heart of the Ukraina and the inability of the Red
Army to halt his progress, caused Makhno temporarily to
suspend his struggle with the Bolsheviki for free Soviets and
the self;determination of the laboring masses. He offered
his help to the Bolsheviki to fight the common enemy
Wrangel. The offer was accepted, and a contract officially
concluded between the Soviet Government and the army of
Makhno.
Wrangel was defeated and his army dispersed, with
Makhno playing no inconsiderable part in this great military
triumph. But with the liquidation of Wrangel, Makhno
became unnecessary and dangerous to the Bolsheviki. It
was decided to get rid of him, to put an end to
"Makhnovstschina", and, incidentally, dispose of the
Anarchists at large. The Bolshevik government betrayed
Makhno: the Red forces treacherously surrounded Makhno's
army demanding surrender. At the same time all the
delegates who had arrived in Kharkov to participate in the


50





Anarchist Congress, for which official permission had been
given, were arrested, as well as the Anarchists resident in
Kharkov and the comrades still en route to the Congress.
Yet, in spite of all the provocative and terroristic
tactics of the Bolsheviki against them, the Anarchists of
Russia refrained, during the whole period of civil war,
from protesting to the workers of Europe and America -
aye, even to those of Russia itself - fearing that such action
might be prejudicial to the interests of the Russian Revow
lution and that it may aid the common enemy, world
imperialism.
But with the termination of civil war the position of
the Anarchists grew even worse. The new policy of the
Bolsheviki of open compromise with the bourgeois world
became clearer, more definite, and ever sharper their break
with the revolutionary aspirations of the working masses.
The struggle against Anarchism, till then often masked by
the excuse of fighting "banditism in the guise of Anarchism",
now became open and frank warfare against Anarchist
ideals and ideas, as such.
The Kronstadt events offered the Bolsheviki the desired
pretext for completely   "liquidating"  the  Anarchists.
Wholesale  arrests were instituted  throughout Russia.
Irrespective of factional adherence, practically all known
Russian Anarchists were taken into the police net.  To
this day all of them remain in prison, without any charges
having been preferred against them. In the night of April
25th-26th, 1921, all the political prisoners in the Bootirka
prison (Moscow), to the number of over 400, consisting of
representatives of the right and left wings of socialist
parties and members of Anarchist organisations, were
forcibly taken from the prison and transferred. On that
occasion many of the prisoners suffered brutal violence:
women were dragged down the steps by their hair, and a
number of the politicals sustained serious injuries.  The
prisoners were divided into several groups and sent to


51





various prisons in the provinces. Of their further fate we
have so far been unable to receive definite information.*)
Thus did the Bolsheviki reply to the revolutionary
enthusiasm and deep faith which inspired the masses in the
beginning of their great struggle for liberty and justice - a
reply that expressed itself in the policy of compromise
abroad and terrorism at home.
This policy proved fatal: it corrupted and disintegrated
the Revolution, poisoned it, slayed its soul, destroyed its
moral, spiritual significance. By its despotism; by strubborn,
petty paternalism; by the perfidy which replaced its former
revolutionary idealism; by its stifling formalism and criminal
indifference to the interests and aspirations of the masses;
by its cowardly suspicion and distrust of the people at large,
the "dictatorship of the proletariat" hopelessly cut itself off
from the laboring masses.
Thrust back from direct participation in the constructs
ive work of the Revolution, harassed at every step, the
victim of constant supervision and control by the Party,
the proletariat is becoming accustomed to consider the Revoo
lution and its further fortunes as the private, personal
affair of the Bolsheviki.   In vain   does the Communist
Party seek by ever new decrees to preserve its hold upon
the country's life. The people have seen through the real
meaning of the Party dictatorship. They know its narrow,
selfish dogmatism, its cowardly opportunism; they are aware
of its internal decay, its intrigues behind the scenes.
In the land where, after three years of tremendous
effort, of terrible and heroic sacrifice, there should have
come to bloom the wonder.flower of Communism, - alas,
even its withered buds are killed in distrust, apathy, and
enmity.
*) This pamphlet was written in June, 1921, as mentioned in my
Preface. Since then some of the Anarchists imprisoned in Moscow have
been deported from Russia, though natives of that country; others have
been exiled to distant parts, while a large number are still in the prisons.
A. B.


52





Thus came about the era of revolutionary stagnation, of
sterility, which cannot be.,ured by any political party
methods, and which demonstrates the complete social
atrophy.
The swamp of compromise into which Bolshevik
dictatorship had  sunk  proved  fatal to  the Revo%
lution: it became poisoned by its noxious miasma.  In
vain do the Bolsheviki point to the imperialistic world
war as the cause of Russia's economic breakdown; in vain
do they ascribe it to the blockade and the attacks of armed
counter~revolution. Not in them is the real source of the
collapse and debacle.
No blockade, no wars with foreign reaction could dismay
or conquer the revolutionary people whose unexampled
heroism, self.sacrifice and perseverance defeated all its
external enemies. On the contrary, it is probable that civil
war really helped the Bolsheviki. It served to keep alive
popular enthusiasm and nurtured the hope that, with the
end of war, the ruling Communist Party will make effective
the new revolutionary principles and secure the people in
the enjoyment of the fruits of the Revolution. The masses
looked forward to the vearned.for opportunity for social
and economic liberty. Paradoxical as it may sound, the
Communist dictatorship had no better ally, in the sense of
stengthening and prolonging its life, than the reactionary
forces which fought against it.
It was only the termination of the wars which per%
mitted a full view of the economic and psychologic
demoralisation to which the blindly despotic policy of the
dictatorship brought the revolutionary country. Then it
became evident that the most formidable danger to the
Revolution was not outside, but within the country: a
danger resulting from the very nature of the social and
economic arrangements which characterise the present
"transitory stage".
We fully realise the gross error of the theoreticians of
bourgeois political economy who wilfully ignore the study


53





of industrial evolution from the historico-social viewpoint,
and stupidly confound the system of State capitalism with
that of the socialist dictatorship. The Bolsheviki are quite
right when they insist that the two types of socio.economic
development are "diametrically opposed in their essential
character." However, it were wrong and useless to pretend
that such a form of industrial life as expressed in the present
system of proletarian dictatorship is anything essentially
different from State capitalism.
As a matter of fact, the proletarian dictatorship, as
it actually exists, is in no sense different from State
capitalism.
The distinctive characteristics of the latter - inherent
social antagonisms-are abolished only formally in the Soviet
Republic. In reality those antagonisms exist and are very
deep-seated. The exploitation of labor, the enslavement of
the worker and peasant, the cancellation of the citizen as
"a human being, as a personality, and his transformation into
"a microscopic part of the universal economic mechanism
owned   by  the government; the creation of privileged
groups favored by the State; the system of compulsory labor
service and its punitive organs - such are the characteristic
features of State capitalism.
All these features are also to be found in the present
Russian system. It were unpardonable naivity, or still more
unpardonable hypocrisy, to pretend - as do Bolshevik
theoreticians, especially Bukharin - that universal compulsory
labor service in the system of the proletarian dictatorship
is, in  contradistinction to  State capitalism, "the self:
organisation of the masses for purposes of labor", or that
the existing "mobilisation of industry is the strengthening
of socialism", and that "State coercion in the system of
proletarian dictatorship is a means of building the Comr
munist society".
A year ago Trotzky, at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Russia, thundered against the "bourgeois
notion" that compulsory labor is not productive. He sought


54





to convince his audience that the main problem is to "draw
the worker into the process of labor, not by external
methods of coercion, but by means internal, psychological".
But when he approached the concrete application of this
principle, he advocated a "very complex system, involving
methods of an ethical nature, as well as premiums and
punishment, in order to increase the productivity of labor
in consonance with those principles of compulsion according
to which we are constructing our whole economic life".
The experiment was made, and it gave surprising
results. Whether the old "bourgeois notion" proved
correct, or the newest socialism was powerless "internally,
psychologically compulsory" to "draw the worker into the
process of production", by means of premiums, punishment,
etc., at any rate, the worker refused to be snared by the
tempting formula of "psychologic coercion". Evidently the
ideology as well as the practice of Bolshevism convinced
the toilers that the socio-economic ideals of the Bolsheviki
arc incidentally also a step forward in the more intensive
exploitation of labor. For Bolshevism, far from saving the
country from ruin and in no way improving the conditions
of existence for the masses, is attempting to turn the serf
of yesterday into a complete slave. How little the Com%
munist State is concerned about the workers' well-being is
seen from the statement of a prominent Communist delegate
to the Tenth Congress of the Party: "Up till now Soviet
policy has been characterised by the complete absence of
any plan to improve the living conditions of labor". And
further: "All that was done in that regard happened
accidentally, or was done by fits and starts, by local
authorities under pressure of the masses themselves".
Is this, then, the system of proletarian dictatorship or
State capitalism?
Chained to their work, deprived of the right to leave
the job on pain of prison or summary execution for "labor
desertion"; bossed and spied upon by Party overseers;
divided into qualified sheep (artisans) and unqualified goats


55





(laborers) receiving unequal food rations; hungry and
insufficiently clad, deprived of the right to protest or strike
- such are the modern proletarians of the Communist
dictatorship. Is this "self organisation" of the toiling
masses not a step backward, a return to feudal serfdom or
negro slavery?  Is the hand of the Communist State
executioner less ruthless than the whip of the plantation
boss?  Only scholasticism or blind fanaticism can see in
this, the most grievous form of slavery, the emancipation
of labor or even the least approach to it.
It is the height of tragedy that State Socialism,
enmeshed in logical antitheses, could give to the world
nothing better than the intensification of the evils of the
very system whose antagonisms produced socialism.
The Party dictatorship applies the same policy, in every
detail, also to the peasantry. Here, too, the State is the
universal master. The same policy of compulsory labor
service, of oppression, spying, and systematic expropriation
of the fruits of the peasant's toil: the former method of
requisition which frequently stripped the peasants even of
the necessaries of life; or the newly initiated, but no less
predatory, food tax; the senseless, enormous waste of
foodstuffs due to the combrous system of centralisation and
the Bolshevik food policy; the dooming of whole peasant
districts to slow starvation, disease and death; punitive
expeditions, massacring peasant families by the wholesale
and razing entire villages to the ground for the slightest
resistance to the plundering policy of the Communist
dictatorship - such are the methods of Bolshevik rule.
Thus, neither economic nor political exploitation of the
industrial and agrarian proletariat has ceased. Only its
forms have changed: formerly exploitation was purely
capitalistic; now, labeled "workers' and peasants' governs
ment" and christened "communist economy", it is State
capitalistic.
But this modern system of State capitalism is pernicious
not only because it degrades the living human into a soulless


56





machine. It contains another, no less destructive, element.
By its very nature this system is extremely aggressive. Far
from abolishing militarism, in the narrow sense of the term,
it applies the principle of militarisation - with all its
attributes of mechanical discipline, irresponsible authority
and repression - to every phase of human effort.
Socialist militarism is not only admitted, but defended
and justified by the theoreticians of the Party. Thus
Bukharin in his work on the "Economics of the Transition
Period" writes: "The workers' government, when waging
war, seeks to broaden     and strengthen the economic
foundations on which it is built - that is, socialist forms
of production. Incidentally, it is clear from this that, in
principle, even an aggressive revolutionary socialist war
is permissible". And, indeed, we are already familiar
with some imperialistic pretensions of the "workers"
dictatorship.
Thus the "bourgeois prejudices" kicked out through the
window re-cnter through the door.
It is evident that the militarism   of the "labor"
dictatorship, like any other militarism, necessitates the
formation of a gigantic army of non~producers. Moreover,
such an army and all its various organs must be supplied
with technical resources and means of existence, which puts
additional burdens on the producers, that is, the workers
and the peasants.
Another and the most momentous internal danger is
the dictatorship itself. The dictatorship which, despotic
and ruthless, has alienated itself from the laboring masses,
has strangled initiative and liberty, suppressed the creative
spirit of the very elements which bore the brunt of the
Revolution, and is slowly but effectively instilling its poison
in the hearts and minds of Russia.
Thus   does   the  dictatorship itself sow  counters
revolution.  Not conspiraces   from  without, not the
campaigns of the Denikins and Wrangels are the Damocles


57





sword of Russia. The real and greatest danger is that
country..wide disillusionment, resentment and hatred of
Bolshevik despotism, that counter revolutionary attitude of
the people at large, which is the legitimate offspring of the
Communist Party dictatorship itself.
Even in the ranks of the proletariat is ripening, with
cumulative force, the protest against the reactionary "big
stick" policy of Bolshevism.
The organised labor movement of Russia developed
immedialely after the February Revolution. The formation
of shop and factory committees was the first step toward
actual control by labor of the activities of the capitalist
owners. Such control, however, could not be general without
co6rdinating the work of all other similar committees, and
thus came to life Soviets, or General Councils, of shop ana
factory committees, and their All=Russian Congress.
In this manner the shop and factory committees
(zahvkomy) were the pioneers in labor control of industry,
with the prospect of themselves, in the near future, managing
the industries entire. The labor unions, on the other hand,
were engaged in improving the living conditions and cultural
environment of their membership.
But after the October Revolution the situation changed.
The centralisation methods of the Bolshevik dictatorship
penetrated also into the unions. The autonomy of the shop
committees was now declared superfluous. The labor unions
were reorganised on industrial principles, with the shop
committee emasculated into a mere "embryo" of the union,
and entirely subjected to the authority of the central organs.
Thus all independence of action, all initiative was torn
from the hands of the workers themselves and transferred
to the union bureaucracy. The result of this policy was
the compelete indifference of the workers to their unions
and to the fate of the industries.


58





Then the Communist Party began to fill the labor
unions with its own party members. They occupied the
union offices. That was easily done because all the other
political parties were outlawed and there existed no public
press except the official Bolshevik publications. No wonder
that within a short time the Communists proved an
overwhelming majority in all the provincial and central
executive committees, and had in their hands the exclusive
management of the labor unions.    They usurped the
dominant role in every labor body, including even such
organisations where the membership (as in the Union of
Soviet Employees) is manifestly and most bitterly opposed
to the Bolsheviki. Whenever an occasional union proved
refractory, as the printers, for instance, and refused to yield
to "internal psychologic persuasion", the Communists
solved the difficulty by the simple expedient of suspending
the entire administration of the union.
Having gained control of the political machinery of the
labor organisations, the Communist Party formed in every
shop and factory small groups of its own members, so-called
Communist "cells", whidh became the practical masters of
the situation. The Communist "cell" is vested with such
powers that no action of the shop or factory committee
(even if the latter consist of Communists) is valid unless
sanctioned by the "cell". The highest organ of the labor
movement, the All-Russian Central Soviet of Labor Unions,
is itself under the direct control of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party.
Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders take the position that
the labor union must be, first and foremost, a "school of
Communism". In practice the r61e of the labor union in
Russia is reduced to that of an automatic agency for the
execution of the orders of the ruling Party.
However, this state of affairs is becoming unbearable
even to that labor element which is still faithful to the
commandments of State Communism. In the ranks of the
Communist Party itself there has developed an opposition


59





movement against the military governmentalisation of the
labor unions. This new movement, known as the Labor
Opposition, though still loyal to its Communist parent, yet
realises the full horror of the hopeless position, the "blind
alley" into which the criminally stupid policies of the
Bolsheviki have driven the Russian proletariat and the
Revolution.
The Labor Opposition is characterised by the good
orthodox Communist Kolontay as "the advance guard of
the proletariat, class conscious and welded by the ties of
class interests", an element which "has not estranged itself
from the rank and file of the working masses and has not
become lost among Soviet office holders."  This Labor
Opposition protests "against the bureaucratisation, against
the differentiation between the 'upper' and the 'lower'
people", against the excesses of the Party hegemony, and
against the shifting and twisting policy of the ruling central
power. "The great creative and constructive power of the
proletariat", says the Labor Opposition, "cannot be replaced,
in the task of building the Communist society, by the
mere emblem of the dictatorship of the working class", -
of that dictatorship  which  a prominent Communist
characterised at the last Congress of the Communist Party
as "the dictatorship of the Party bureaucracy".
Indeed, the Labor Opposition is justified in asking:
"Are we, the proletariat, really the backbone of the working
class dictatorship, or are we to be considered merely as a
willUless herd, good enough only to carry on our backs some
party politicians who are pretending to reconstruct the
economic life of the country without our control, without our
constructive class spirit?"
And this Labor Opposition, according to Kolontay,
"keeps on growing in spite of the determined resistance on
the part of the most influential leaders of the Party, and
gains more and more adherents among the laboring masses
throughout Russia".


60





But the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of
Russia (April, 1921) put its decisive veto on the Labor
Opposition. Henceforth it is officially doomed, discussion
of its ideas and principles forbidden because of "their
Anarcho:;syndicalist tendency", as Lenin expressed himself.
The Communist Party declared war on the Labor
Opposition. The Party Congress decided that "propagation
of the principles of the Labor Opposition is incompatible
with membership in the Communist Party". The demand
to turn the management of the industries over to the
proletariat was outlawed.
The October Revolution was initiated with the great
battle cry of the First International, "The emancipation of
the workers must be accomp'iished by the workers
themselves". Yet wve saw that, when the period of
constructive destruction had passed, when the foundations
of Tsarism had been razed, and the bourgeois system
abolished, the Communist Party thougsht itself sufficiently
strong to take into its own hands the entire management of
the country. It began the education of the workers in a
spirit of strictest authoritarianism, and step by step the
Soviet system became transformed into a bureaucratic,
punitive police machine. Terrorism became its logical,
inevitable handmaid.
General indifference and hatred, and complete social
paralysis, wvere the result of the government course. An
atmosphere of slavish submission, at once revolting and
disgusting, pervades the whole country. It stifles alike the
oppressed and the oppressors.
What boots it that the sober minded, compromise ready
Lenin begins his every speech with the confession of the
many and serious mistakes which have been made by the
Party in power.? No piling up of mistakes by the "'ingenious
opportunist", as Lunacharsky dubs Lenin, can dismay the
champions of Bolshevism intoxicated with their Party's


61





political dominion. The mistakes of their leaders become,
in the interpretation  of Communist theoreticians and
publicists, "eminent necessity", and the convulsive attempts
to correct them (the whole agrarian policy) are hailed as
acts of the greatest wisdom, humanity und loyalty to
Bolshevik principles.
In vain the impatient cry of Kolontay: "The fear of
criticism, inherent in our system of bureaucracy, at times
reaches the point of caricature". The Party Elders brand
her a heretic for her pains, her pamphlet "The Labor
Opposition"  is prohibited, and Illitch himself (Lenin)
"settles" her with a few sarcastic personal slurs. The
syndicalist "peril" is supposedly removed.
Meanwhile the Opposition   is growing, deepening,
spreading throughout working Russia.
Indeed, what shall the impartial observer think of the
peculiar picture presented by Bolshevik Russia? Numerous
labor strikes, with scores of workers arrested and often
summarily  executed;  peasant  uprisings  and  revolts,
continuous revolutionary insurrections in various parts of
the country. Is it not a terribly tragic situation, a heinous
absurdity? Is not the rebellion of workers and peasants,
however lacking in class consciousness in some cases, actual
war against the workers' and peasants' government - the
very government which is flesh of the flesh and blood of
the blood of themselves, which had been called to guard
their interests, and whose existence should be possible only
in so far as it corresponds to the needs and demands of the
laboring masses?
The popular protests do not cease. The opposition
movement grows, and in self1defense the Party must, from
time to time, mollify the people, even at the sacrifice of its
principles. But where it is impossible by a few sops to still
the craving for bread and liberty, the hungry mouths are
shut with bullet or bayonet, and the official press brands
the protestants with the infamous name of "counters
revolutionists", traitors against the "workers' and peasants'
government".


62





Then Russia, Bolshevik Russia, is quiet again - with
the quietness of death.
The history of recent days is filled with grewsome
illustrations of such "quiet".
One of those illustrations is Kronstadt - Kronstadt,
against which has been perpetrated the most awful crime of
the Party dictatorship, a crime against the proletariat, against
socialism, against the Revolution. A crime multiplied a
hundredfold by the deliberate and perfidious lies spread by
the Bolsheviki throughout the world.
Future history will deal adequately with this crying
shame. Here we shall give but a brief sketch of the Kronstadt events.
In the month of February, 1921, the workers of four
Petrograd factories went on strike.   It had been an
exceptionally hard winter for them: they and their families
suffered from cold, hunger and exhaustion. They demanded
an increase of their food rations, some fuel and clothing.
Here and there was also voiced the demand for the
Constituent Assembly   and   free trade.  The strikers
attempted  a street demonstration, and the authorities
ordered out the military against them, chiefly the "kursants",
the young Communists of the military training schools.
When the Kronstadt sailors learned what was happening
in Petrograd, they expressed their solidarity with the
strikers in their economic and revolutionary demands, but
refused to support any call for the Constituent Assembly
and free trade. On March 1, the sailors organised a mass:
meeting in Kronstadt which was attended also by the
Chairman of the AllhRussian Central Executive Committee,
Kalinin, (the presiding officer of the Republic of Russia), by
the Commander of the Fortress of Kronstadt, Kuzmin, and
by the Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, Vassilyev. The
meeting, held with the knowledge and permission of the
Executive Committee of the Kronstadt Soviet, passed
resolutions approved by the sailors, the garrison and the
citizen meeting of 16,000 persons. Kalinin, Kuzmin and
Vassilyev spoke against the resolutions. The main points


63





of the latter were: free speech and free press for the
revolutionary parties; amnesty for imprisoned   revolu%
tionists; re:election of the Soviets by secret ballot and
freedom   from   government   interference  during  the
electioneering campaign.
The Bolshevik authorities replied to the resolutions by
beginning to remove from the city the food and ammunition
supplies. The sailors prevented the attempt, closed the
entrances to the city, and arrested some of the more
obstreperous commissars. Kalinin was permitted to return
to Petrograd.
No sooner did the Petrograd authorities learn of the
Kronstadt resolutions, than they initiated a campaign of
lies and libel. In spite of the fact that Zinoviev kept in
constant telephonic  communication  with the presiding
officer of the Kronstadt Soviet, and was assured by the
latter that all was quiet in Kronstadt and that the sailors
were busy only with preparations for the re.elections, the
Petrograd radio station was kept hard at work sending
messages to the world announcing a counterirevolutionary
conspiracy and a white.-guard uprising in Kronstadt. At
the same time Zinoviev, Kalinin and their aids succeeded
in persuading the Petrograd Soviet to pass a resolution
which  was an   ultimatum  to  Kronstadt to surrender
immediately, on pain of complete annihilation in case of
refusal.
A group of wellsknown and trusted revolutionists, then
in Petrograd, realising the provocative character of such a
policy, appealed to Zinoviev and to the Council of Defense,
of which he was the President. They pointed out the un%
revolutionary, reactionary nature of his policy and its great
danger to the Revolution. The demands of Kronstadt were
clearly set forth: they  were  against the Constituent
Assembly, against free trade, apd in favor of the Soviet
form of government. But the people of Kronstadt, as they
frankly stated in their bulletin, could no longer tolerate the
despotism of the Party, and demanded the right to air their
grievances and the reestablishment of free Soviets. "All


64





power to the Soviets" was again their watch:word, as it had
been that of the people and of the Bolsheviki in 1917. To
resort to armed force against Kronstadt were the height of
folly; indeed, a terrible crime. The only right and revolution
nary solution lay in complying with the request of Kronstadt
(wired by the sailors to Zinoviev, but not transmitted by
him to the Soviet) for the selection of an impartial Commission to reach an amicable settlement.
But this appeal of the Petrograd group of revolus
tionaries  was  ignored.  Many   Communists    clearly
understood how maliciously reactionary was the government
attitude toward Kronstadt, but slavishly  debased and
morally crippled by the jesuitism of the Party, they dared
not speak and mutely participated in the crime.
On March 7th Trotzky began the bombardment of
Kronstadt, and on the 17th the fortress and city were
taken, after numerous fierce assaults involving terrific
human sacrifice and treachery.   Thus Kronstadt was
"liquidated", and the "counter-revolutionary plot" quenched
in blood. The "conquest" of the city was characterised by
ruthless savagery to the defeated, although not a single one of
the Communists arrested by the Kronstadt sailors had been
injured or killed by them. And even before the storming
of the fortress the Bolsheviki summarily executed numerous
soldiers of the Red Army, whose revolutionary spirit and
solidarity caused them to refuse to participate in the
bloody bath.
The "conspiracy" and the "victory" were necessary for
the Communist Party to save it from threatening inner
decomposition. Trotzky, who during the discussion of the
r61e of the Labor Unions (at the joint session of the
Communist Party, the Central Executive Council of the
Unions, and the delegates to the 6th Congress of the Soviets,
December 30, 1920) was treated by Lenin as a bad boy who
"don't know his Marx", once more proved himself the savior
of the "country in danger". Harmony was re.established
A few days after the "glorious conquest" of Kronstadt,
Lenin said at the 10th Congress of the Communist Party of


65





Russia: "The sailors did not want the countersrevolutionists,
but - they did not want us, either". And, - irony of the
executioner! - at that very Congress Lenin advocated, free
trade, "as a respite".
On March 17th the Communist government celebrated
its bloody victory over the Kronstadt proletariat, and on
the 18th it commemorated the martyrs of the.Paris Com%
mune. As if it was not evident to all who had eyes and
would see, that the crime committed against Kronstadt was
far more terrible and enormous than the slaughter of the
Commune in 1871, for it was done in the name of the Social
Revolution, in the name of the Socialist Republic. Henceforth
to the vile classic figures of Thiers and Gallifet are added
those of Trotzky, Zinoviev, Dihbenko, Tukhachefsky.
*             *
Thus is human sacrifice brought to the Moloch of
Bolshevism, to the gigantic lie that is still growing and
spreading throughout the world and enmeshing it in its
network of ruin, falsehood and treachery. Nor is it only
the liberty and lives of individual citizens which are
sacrificed to this god of clay, nor even merely the wellbeing of the country: it is socialist ideals and the fate of the
Revolution which are being destroyed.
Long ago Bakunin wrote: "The whole power of the
Russian Tsar is built upon a lie - a lie at home and a lie
abroad: a colossal and artful system of lies never witnessed
before, perhaps, in the whole history of man".
But now such a system exists. It is the system of State
Communism. The revolutionary proletariat of the world
must open their eyes to the real situation in Russia. They
should learn to see to what a terrible abyss the ruling
Bolshevik Party, by its blind and bloody dictatorship, has
brought Russia and the Russian Revolution. Let the world
proletariat give ear to the voices of true revolutionists,
the voices of those whose object is not political party
power, but the success of the Social Revolution, and


66





to whom the Revolution is synonymous with human dignity,
liberty and social regeneration.
May the proletariat of Europe and America, when the
world revolution comes, choose a different road than the
one followed by the Bolsheviki. The road of Bolshevism
leads to the formation of a social r6gime with new class
antagonisms and class distinctions; it leads to State capitalo
ism, which only the blind fanatic can consider as a transition
stage toward a free society in which all class differences are
abolished.
State Communism, the contemporary Soviet government,
is not and can never become the threshold of a free,
voluntary, non-authoritarian Communist society, because the
very essence and nature of governmental, compulsory Com%
munism excludes such an evolution. Its consistent economic
and political centralisation, its governmentalisation and
bureaucratisation of every sphere of human activity and
effort, its inevitable militarisation and degradation of the
human spirit mechanically destroy every germ of new life
and extinguish the stimuli of creative, constructive work.
It is the Communist Party dictatorship itself which most
effectively hinders the further development and deepening
of the Revolution.
The historic struggle of the laboring masses for liberty
necessarily and unavoidably proceeds outside the sphere
of governmental influence. The struggle against oppression
- political, economic and social - against the exploitation
of man by man, or of the individual by the government, is
always simultaneously also a struggle against government
as such. The political State, whatever its form, and cons
structive revolutionary effort are irreconcilable. They are
mutually exclusive. Every revolution in the course of its
development faces this alternative: to build freely, index
pendent and despite of the government, or to choose
government with all the limitation and stagnation it involves.
The path of the Social Revolution, of the constructive selft
reliance of the organised, conscious masses, is in the direction


67





of non-government, that is, of Anarchy. Not the State, not
government, but systematic and coordinated social recon.
struction by the toilers is necessary for the upbuilding of the
new, free society. Not the State and its police methods,
but the solidaric cooperation of all working elements - the
proletariat, the peasantry, the revolutionary intelligentsia -
mutually helping each other in their voluntary associations,
will emancipate us from the State superstition and bridge
the passage between the abolished old civilisation and Free
Communism. Not by order of some central authority, but
organically, from life itself, must grow up the closely;knit
federation of the united industrial, agrarian, etc. associations;
by the workers themselves must it be organised and
managed, and then -    and only then -   will the great
aspiration of labor for social regeneration have a sound,
firm  foundation.  Only such   an organisation of the
commonwealth will make room for the really free, creative,
new humanity, and will be the actual threshold of non%
governmental, Anarchist Communism.
Thus, and only thus, can be completely swept away all
the remna its of our old, dying civilisation, and the human
mind and heart relieved of the varied poisons of ignorance
and prejudice.
The revolutionary world proletariat must be permitted
to hear this Anarchist voice, which cries to them - as of
yore - from the depths, from the prison dungeons.
The world proletariat should understand the great
tragedy of the toilers of Russia: the heart-breaking tragedy
of the workers and peasants who bore the brunt of the Res
volution and who find themselves now helpless in the iron
clutch of an allparalising State. The world proletariat must,
ere too late, losen that stranglehold.
If not, then Soviet Russia, once the hearth of the Social
Revolution of the world, will again become the world's haven
of blackest reaction.
Moscow, June, 1921.


68





THE
KROSTAD T R EBEL,.LION
BY
ALEXAND)ER BERKAIAN


WITH MAI) OF KRONS'FADT,AND
A FAC:SIMILE PAGE OF THE' KRON-STAD-T IZ VESTIA





0


1V0 141 -A L-,


I a v 19 11"'1 0ý ý




1~~~~ 4~'


--  __ __      N1J.O~_;r    ___ ____Nit_
-~~N yg.
-o  -   _____


i~Lii~7


F7~iT  -       -   -___









I. LABOR     DiSTURBANCE]14S IN       PETROGRAD
It was carly in 1921. Lonl ears oI wIar, revolution, and
civil strut ie had bled Russia to exhalistion and brought her
"copcl to the brink of despair. But at last civil war was at
"a encd: the numerous fronts w-cre liquidatcd, and \Vrangel
the last hope of o ntente intervention and Russian counter=
revolution --- \Nas defeated and his military activities within
r.ussia terminated.  The people now  confidently looked
forward to t ihe mit iation of the severe Bolshevik regime.
It was expected that \ith the end of civil war the Corn;
iiunists would lighten the  burdens, abolish  war- time
restrictions, introduce some fundamental liberties, Cnnd begin
1he organisatiotu of a m 1i-ore normai life. Though far from
hcbeing popular. tlec Bolshevik C1overlinienlt had the support
of the workers; in its oft 1ann4ounced plan of takintg up the
economic r coristruction of the country as soon as military
e-rations  shoul   cease.  The neopiC  were cager to
c(i}perate, to put their initiative and creative efforts to the
tph Iuilding of the ruined land.
J1ost unfor0tunately-, these expectations were doomed to
cisappointment. The Cm(ommunist State showed no intention
rf loosening the yoke. The same poliies continued, with
labor miitarisation  still further enslaving tlihe people.
em bitterin them with added oppression and tyranny, and in
conse iuence paradising every possibility of industrial revival.
'[he last hope of the proletariat was perishing: the con1
victiton grew that the Communist Party was more interested
in retaining political power than in saving the Revolution.
1hIe most revolutionary clements of Russia, the workers
of Petrograd, were the first to speak out. They charged
that, aside from  other causes. Bolshevik centralisation,


71





bureaucracy, and autocratic attitude toward the peasants
and workers were directly responsible for much of the
misery and suffering of the people. Many factories and mills
of Petrograd had been closed, and the workers were literally
starving. They called meetings to consider the situation.
The meetings were suppressed by the Government. The
Petrograd proletariat, who had borne the brunt of the
revolutionary struggles and whose great sacrifices and
heroism alone had saved the city from Yudenitch, resented
the action of the Government. Feeling against the methods
employed  by the Bolsheviki continued to grow. More
meetings were called, with the same result. The Communists
would make no concessions to the proletariat, \while at the
same.time they were offering to compromise with the capi,
talists of Europe and America. The workers were indignant
-  they became aroused. To compel the Government to
consider their demands, strikes were called in the Patronnv
munition works, the Trubotchny and Baltiyski mills, and in
the Laferm factory. Instead of talking matters over with
the dissatisfied workers, the "Workers' and Peasants' Covernment" created a war-time Komitet Oborony (Committee of
Defense) with Zinoviev, the most hated man in Petrograd,
as Chairman. The avowed purpose of that Committee was to
suppress the strike movement.
It was on February 24 that the strikes were declared.
The same day the Bolsheviki sent the     kursanti, the
Communist students of the military academy (training
officers for the Army and Navy), to disperse the workers
who had gathered on Vassilevsky Ostrov, the labor district
of Petrograd.  The next day, February 25, the indignant
strikers of Vassilevsky Ostrov visited the Admiralty shops
and the Galernaya docks, and induced the workers there to
join their protest against the autocratic attitude of the
Government. The attempted street demonstration of the
strikers was dispersed by armed soldiery.
On February 26 the Petrograd Soviet held a session at
which the prominent Communist Lashevitch, member of the


72





Committee of Defense and of the Revolutionary Military
Soviet of the Republic, denounced the strike movement in
sharpest terms. Me charged the workers of the Trubotchny
factory with inciting dissatisfaction, accused them of being
"self-seeking labor skinners (shkurniki) and counter-revo,
Intionists", and proposed that the Trubotchny factory be
closed. The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet
(Zinovicv, Chairman)    accepted   the  suggestion.  The
'Trubotchny strikers were locked out and thus automatically
deprived of their rations.
"These methods of the Bolshevik Government served
still further to embitter and antagonise the workers.
Strikers' proclamations now began to appear on the,rets of Petrograd.    Some of them assumed a distinctly
political character, the most significant of them, posted on
the walls of the city February 27, reading:
A complete change is necessary in the policies of the Govern1 -lent. First of all, the workers and peasants need freedom. Thev
don't want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviki: they want to
control their own destinies.
Comrades, preserve revolutionary order! Determinedlv and
in an organised manner demand:
Liberation of  all  arrcsted  socialists  and nonpartisan
workingmen;
Abolition of martial law; freedom  of speech, press and
assembly for all who labor;
Free election of shop and factory committees (zahvkcmi). of
labor union and soviet representatives.
C(all meetings, pass resoAlutions, send your delegates to the
authorities and work for the realisation of your demands.
The Government replied to the demands of the strikers
by making numerous arrests and suppressing several labor
organisations. The action resulted in popular temper growing
more anti-Bolshevik; reactionary slogans began to be heard.
Thus on February 28 there appeared a proclamation of the
"Socialist Workers of the Nevsky District", which concluded
with a call for the Constituent Assembly:


73





We know who is afraid of the Constituent Assembly. It is
they who will no longer be able to rob the people. Instead they
will have to answer before the representatives of the people for
their deceit, their robberies, and all their crimes.
Down with the hated Communists!
Down with the Soviet Government!
Long live the Constituent Assembly!
eicanwhile the Bolsheviki concentrated in Petrograd
large miiitary forces from the provinces and also ordered
to  the city its most trusted    Communist regiments
from the front. Petrograd was put under "extraordinary
martial law". The strikers were overawed, and the labor
unrest crushed with an iron hand.
II. THE KRONSTADT MOVEMENT
The Kronstadt sailors were much disturbed by what
was happening in Petrograd.   They did not look with
friendly eyes upon the Government's drastic treatment of
the strikers. They knew what the revolutionary proletariat
of the capital had had to bear since the first days of the
Revolution, how   heroically they  had  fought against
Yudenitch, and how patiently they were suffering privation
and misery.   But Kronstadt was far from favoring the
Constituent Assembly or the demand for free trade which
made itself heard in Petrograd. The sailors were thoroughly
revolutionary in spirit and action. They were the staunch,
est supporters of the Soviet system, but they were opposed
to the dictatorship of any political party.
The sympathetic movement with the Petrograd strikers
first began among the sailors of the warships Petropavlovsk
and Sevastopol -- the ships that in 1917 had been the main
support of the Bolsheviki. The movement spread to the
whole fleet of Kronstadt, then to the Red Army regiments
stationed there. On February 28 the men of Petropavlovsk
passed a resolution which was also concurred in by the


74





sailors of Sevastopol. The resolution demanded, among
other things, free reilections to the Kronstadt Soviet, as the
tenure of office of the latter was about to expire. At the
same time a committee of sailors was sent to Petrograd to
learn the situation there.
On March 1 a public meeting was held on the Yakorny
Square in Kronstadt, which was officially called by the
crews of the First and Second Squadrons of the Baltic Fleet.
16,000 sailors, Red Army men, and workers attended the
gathering. It was presided over by the Chairman of the
Executive Committee of the Kronstadt Soviet, the Communist Vassiliev. The President of the Russian Socialist
Federated Republic, Kalinin, and the Commissar of the Baltic
Fleet, Kuzmin, were present and addressed the audience.
It may be mentioned, as indicative of the friendly attitude
of the sailors to the Bolshevik Government, that Kalinin
was met on his arrival in Kronstadt with military honors,
music, and banners.
At this meeting the Sailors' Committee that had been
sent to Petrograd on February 28 made its report.    It
corroborated the worst fears of Kronstadt. The audience
was outspoken in its indignation at the methods used by
the Communists to crush the modest demands of the Petroc
Lrad workers. The resolution which had been passed by
Petropavlovsk on February 28 was then submitted to the
meeting. President Kalinin and Commissar Kuzmin bitterly
attacked the resolution and denounced the Petrograd strikers
as well as the Kronstadt sailors. But their arguments failed
to impress the audience, and the Petropavlovsk resolution
was passed unanimously. The historic document read:
RESOLUTION OF THE GENERAL MEETING
OF THE CREWS OF THE FIRST AND SECOND SQUADRONS
OF THE BALTIC FLEET
HELD MARCH I, 1921
Having heard the Report of the Representatives sent by the
cGeneral Meeting of Ship Crews to Petrograd to investigate the
situation there, Resolved:


75





(1) In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the
will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elctions
by secret ballot, the pre:election campaign to have full freedom of
agitation among the workers and peasants;
(2) To establish freedom of speech and press for workers and
peasants, for Anarchists and left Socialist parties;
(3) To secure freedom of assembly for labor unions and peazant
or-ganisations;
(4) To call a nonpartisan Conference of the workers, Red Army
soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt, and of Petrograd
Province, no later than March 10. 1921;
(5) To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist parties, as
well as all workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors imprisoned in
connection with the labor and peasant movements;
(6) To elect a Commission to review the cases of those held
in prisons and concentration camps;
(7) To abolish all politotdeli (political bureaus) because no
party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its
ideas or receive the financial support of the Go;vernment for such
purposes. Instead there should be established educational and
cultural commissions, locally  elected  and  financed  by  the
Government;
(8) To abolish immediately all zagryaditeliye otryadi;*
(9) To equalise the rations of all who work, with the exception
of those employed in trades detrimental to health;
(10) To abolish the Communist fighting detachments in all
branches of the Army, as well as the Communist guards kept on
duty in mills and factories.   Should such guards or military
detachments be found necessary, they are to be appointed in the
Army from   the ranks, and in the factories according to the
judgment of the workers;
(11) To give the peasants full freedom of action in regard to
their land, and also the right to keep cattle, on condition that the
peasants manage with their own means; that is, without employing
hired labor;
(12) To request all branches of the Army, as well as our
comrades the military kursanti, to concur in our resolutions;
*) Armed units organised by the Bolsheviki for the purpose of suppressing traffic and confiscating foodstuffs and other products. The
irresponsibility and arbitrariness of their methods were proverbial throughout the country. The Government abolished them in the Petrograd Province on the eve of its attack against Kronstadt - a bribe to the Petrograd
proletariat.                                            A. B.


76





(13) To demand that the press give the fullest publicity to our
resolutions;
(14) To appoint a Travelling Commission of Control;
(15) To permit free kustarnoye (individual small scale) produc,
tion by one's own efforts.
Resolution passed unanimously by Brigade Meeting, two per,
sons refraining from voting.
PETRICHENKO
Chairman Brigade Mccting
PEREPELKIN
Secretary
Resolution passed by an overwhelming majority of the
Kronstadt garrison.
VASSILIEV
Chairman
Together with comrade Kalinin Vassiliev votes against the
Resolution.
This Resolution, strenuously opposed - as already mentioned -  by Kalinin and Kuzmin, was passed over their
protest. After the meeting Kalinin was permitted to return
to Petrograd unmolested.
At the same Brigade Meeting it was also decided to send
ci Committee to Petrograd to explain to the workers and
the garrison  there the demands of Kronstadt and to
request that nonpartisan delegates be sent by the Petrograd
proletariat to Kronstadt to learn the actual state of affairs
and   the  demands   of the   sailors.  This  Committee,
which consisted of thirty members, was arrested by the
Bolsheviki in Petrograd. It was the first blow struck by the
Communist Government against Kronstadt. The fate of
the Committee remained a mystery.
As the term of office of the members of the Kronstadt
Soviet was about to expire, the Brigade Meeting also decided
to call a Conference of delegates on March 2, to discuss the
manner in which the new elections were to be held. The
Conference was to consist of representatives of the ships,
the garrison, the various Soviet institutions, the labor unions
and factories, each organisation to be represented by two
delegates.


77





The Conference of March 2 took place in the House of
Education (the former Kronstadt School of Engineering)
and was attended by over 300 delegates, among whom were
also (ommun.ists. The meeting was opened by the sailor
Petrichenko, and a Presidium (Executive Committee) of five
members was elected viva voce. The main question before
the delegates was the approaching new elections to the Kronstadt Soviet to be based on more equitable principles than
heretofore. The meeting was also to take action on the
Resolutions of March 1, and to consider ways and means
of helping the country out of the desperate condition created
by famine and fuel shortage.
The spirit of the Conference was thoroughly Sovictist:
Kronstadt demanded Soviets free from interference by any
political party; it wanted nonpartisan Soviets that should
truly reflect the needs and express the will of the workers
and peasants. The attitude of the delegates was antagonistic
to the arbitrary rule of bureaucratic commissars, but friendly
to the Communist Party as such.   They were staunch
adherents of the Soviet system  and they were earnestly
seeking to find, by means friendly and peaceful, a solution of
the pressing problems.
Kuzmin, Commissar of the Baltic Fleet, was the first to
address the Conference.  A  man of more energy than
judgment, he entirely failed to grasp the great significance
of the moment. He was not equal to the situation: he did
not know how to reach the hearts and minds of those simple
men, the sailors and workers who had sacrificed so much
for the Revolution and who were now exhausted to the point
of desperation. The delegates had gathered to take counsel
with the representatives of the Government. Instead, Kuz,
min's speech proved a firebrand thrown into gunpowder.
He incensed   the  Conference by   his arrogance  and
insolence.  He denied the labor disorders in Petrograd,
declaring that the city was quiet and the workers satisfied.
He praised the work of the Commissars, questioned the re.
volutionary motives of Kronstadt, and warned against danger


78





from Poland.  He stooped to unworthy insinuations and
thundered threats. "If you want open warfare", Kuzmin
concluded, "you shall have it, for the Communists will not
give up the reins of government. We will fight to the bitter
end."
This tactless and provoking speech of the Commissar of
the Baltic Fleet served to insult and outrage the delegates.
The address of the Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, the
Communist Vassiliev, who was the next speaker, made no
impression on the audience: the man was colorless and
indefinite. As the meeting progressed, the general attitude
became more clearly anti.Bolshevik. Still the delegates were
hoping to reach some friendly understanding with the rep=
resentatives of the Government. But presently it became
apparent, states the official report,* that "we could not trust
comrades Kuzmin and Vassiliev any more, and that it was
necessary to detain them temporarily, especially because
the Communists were in possession of arms, and we had
no access to the telephones. The soldiers stood in fear of the
Commissars, as proved by the letter read at the meeting, and
the Communists did not permit gatherings of the garrison to
take place."
Kuzmin and Vassiliev were therefore removed from the
meeting and placed under arrest. It is characteristic of the
spirit of the Conference that the motion to detain the other
Communists present was voted down by an overwhelming
majority. The delegates held that the Communists must be
considered on equal footing with the representatives of other
organisations and accorded the same rights and treatment.
Kronstadt still was determined to find some bond of
agreement with the Communist Party and the Bolshevik
Government.
The Resolutions of March 1 were read and enthusiastically
passed. At that moment the Conference was thrown into
great excitement by the declaration of a delegate that the
) I zv e s t ia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kron,
stadt, No. 9, March  11, 1921.


79





Bolsheviki were about to attack the meeting and that fifteen
carloads of soldiers and Communists, armed with rifles and
machine guns, had been dispatched for that purpose. 'This
information", the izvestia report continues, "produced pas:
sionate resentment among the delegates. Investigation soon
proved the report groundless, but rumors persistcd that a
rcgiment of kursan i, headed by the notorious Tchekist
Dutkiss, was already marching in the direction of the fort
Krasnaia Gorka". In view of these new developments, and
remembering the threats of Kuzmin and Kalinin, the Conference at once took up the question of organising the dcfense
of Kronstadt against Bolshevik attack. Time pressing, it was
decided to turn the Presidium of the Conference into a
IProvisional Revolutionary Committee, which wvas charged
with the duty of prcserving the order and safety of the city.
That Committee w:as also to make the necessary preParations
for holding the new elections to the Kronstadt Soviet.
III. BOLSHEVIK CAMPAIGN AGAINST
KRONSTADT
Petrograd was in a state of high nervous tension.  New -\N
strikes had broken out and there were persistent rumors of
labor disorders in Moscow, of peasant uprisings in. the East
and in Siberia. For lack of a reliable public press the people
gave credence to the most exaggserated and even to obviously
false reports. All eyes were on Kronstadt in expectation of
miomentous developments.
The Bolsheviki lost no time in organising their attack
against Kronstadt. Already on March 2 the Government
issued a prikaz (order) signed by Lenin and Trotsky, w\hich
denounced the Kronstadt movement as a my'atezh, a Mutiny
against the Communist authorities. In that document the
sailors were charged with being "the tools of formter Tsarist
generals who together with Socialist=Rcvolutionist traitors
st-aged a counter~rcvolutionary conspiracy against the prole--


80





tarian Republic". The Kronstadt movement for free Soviets
wvas characterised by Lenin and Trotsky as "the work
of Entente   interventionists  and French  spies". "On
February 28", the prikaz read, "there were passed by the
men of the Petropavlovsk resolutions breathing the spirit
of the Black Hundreds. Then there appeared on the scene
the group of the former general, Kozlovsky. He and
three of his officers, whose names we have not yet
ascertained, have openly assumed the role of rebellion.
Thus the meaning of recent events has become evident.
Behind the Socialist-Revolutionists again stands a Tsarist
general. Jn view of all this the Council of Labor and Defense
orders: (1) To declare the former general Kozlovsky and
his aides outlawed; (2) to put the City of Petrograd and the
Petrograd Province under martial law; (3) to place supreme
nower over the whole Petrograd District into the hands of
the Petrograd Committee of Defense."
There was indeed a former general, Kozlovsky, in Kronstadt. It was Trotsky who had placed him there as an
artillery specialist. He played no r6le whatever in the Kronstadt events, but the Bolsheviki cleverly exploited his name
to denounce the sailors as enemies of the Soviet Republic
and their movement as counter-revolutionary. The official
Bolshevik press now began its campaign of calumny and
defamation of Kronstadt as a hotbed of "White conspiracy
headed by General Kozlovsky", and Communist agitators
were sent among the workers in the mills and factories of
Petrograd and Moscow to call v;on the proletariat "to rall"
to the support and defense of the Workers' and Peasants
G(overnment against the counter-revolutionary uprising iKronstadt".
Far from  having anything to do with generals ant
counter-revolutionists, the Kronstadt sailors refused to,
accept aid even from the Socialist-Revolutionist Party. It-.
leader, Victor Tchernov, then in Reval, attempted to
influence the sailors in favor of his Party and its demands,
hut received no encouragement from     the Provisional


81





Revolutionary Committee. Tchernov sent to Kronstadt the
following radio:"
The Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, Victor Tchernov,
sends his fraternal greetings to the heroic comrades>sailors, the
Red Army men and workers, who for the third time since 1905 arc
throwing off the yoke of tyranny. He offers to aid with men
and to provision Kronstadt through the Russian co6peratives
abroad. Inform what and how much is needed. Am prepared to
come in person and give my energies and authority to the service
of the people's revolution. I have faith in the final victory of the
laboring masses. ** Hail to the first to raise the banner of the
people's liberation! Down with despotism from the left and right!
At the same time the Socialist=Revolutionist Party sent
the following message to Kronstadt:
The SocialistRevolutionist delegation abroad  ** now that
the cup of the people's wrath is overflowing, offers to help with all
means in its power in the struggle for liberty and popular govern,
ment. Inform in what ways help is desired. Long live the people's
revolution! Long live free Soviets and the Constituent Assembly!
The Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee declined the
SocialistRevolutionist offers. It sent the following reply
to Victor Tchernov:
The Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt ex,
presses to all our brothers abroad its deep gratitude for their
sympathy. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is thankful
for the offer of Comrade Tchernov, but it refrains for the present:
that is, till further developments become clarified. Meantime
everything will be taken into consideration.
PETRICHENKO
Chairman Provisional Revolutionary Committee
Moscow, however, continued its campaign of misreprce
sentation. On March 3 the Bolshevik radio station sent out
the   following  message   to   the  world   (certain  parts
undecipherable owing to interference from another station):
"*** That the armed uprising of the former general Kozlovsky
has been organised by the spies of the Entente, like many similar
previous plots, is evident from the bourgeois French newspaper
*) Published in R v olutsion n a aRossi ya (SocialistRvcn,
lutionist journal) No. 8, May, 1921. See also Moscow I z v c s t i a ((Comnmui
nist) No. 154, July 13, 1922.


82





Matin, which two weeks prior to the Kozlovsky rebellion published
the following telegram from IIelsingfors: "As a result of the recent
Kronstadt uprising the Bolshevik military authorities have taken
steps to isolate Kronstadt and to prevent the sailors and soldiers of
Kronstadt from entering Petrograd." *** It is clear that the Kronm
stadt uprising was made in Paris and organised by the French
secret service. *** The Socialist;Revolutionists, also controlled and
directed from Paris, have been preparing rebellions against the
Soviet Government, and no sooner were their preparations made
than there appeared the real master, the Tsarist general.
The character of the numerous other messages sent by
M:1oscow can be judged by the following radio:
Petrograd is orderly and quiet, and even the few factories
where accusations against the Soviet Government were recently
voiced now understand that it is the work of provocators. They
realise where the agents of the Entente and of counterrevolution
are leading them to.
*** Just at this moment, when in America a new republican
r6girme is assuming the reins ot government and showing inclination
to take up business relations with Soviet Russia, the spreading of
lying rumors and the organisation of disturbances in Kronstadt
have the sole purpose of influencing the new American President
and changing his policy toward Russia. At the same time the
London Conference is holding its sessions, and the spreading of
similar rumors must influence also the Turkish delegation and
make it more submissive to the demands of the Entente. The
rebellion of the Petropavlovsk crew is undoubtedly part of a great
conspiracy to create trouble within Soviet Russia and to injure our
international position. *** This plan is being carried out within
Russia by a Tsarist general and former officers, and their activities
are supported by the Mensheviki and Socialist.Revolutionists.
The Petrograd    Committee of Defense, directed      by
Zinoviev, its Chairman, assumed full control of the City
and Province of Petrograd. The whole Northern District
was put under martial law and all meetings prohibited.
Extraordinary precautions were taken to protect the Govern"
ment institutions and machine guns were placed in the
Astoria, the hotel occupied by Zinoviev     and other high
Bolshevik functionaries. The proclamations posted on the
streecct bulletin boards ordered the immediate return of all
strikers to the factories, prohibited suspension of work, and


83





warned the people against congregating on the streets. "In
such cases", the order read, "the soldiery will resort to arms.
in case of resistance, shooting on the spot".
The Committee of Defense took up the systematic
"cleaning of the city". Numerous workers, soldiers and
sailors, suspected of sympathising with Kronstadt, were
placed under arrest. All Petrograd sailors and several Army
regiments thought to be "politically untrustworthy" were
ordered to distant points, while the families of Kronstadt
sailors living in Petrograd were taken into custody as
hostages. The Committee of Defense notified Kronstadt of
its action by a proclamation scattered over the city from an
aeroplane on March 4, which stated: "The Committee of
Defense declares that the arrested are held as hostages for
the Commissar of the Baltic Fleet, N. N. Kuzmin, the
Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, T. Vassiliev, and other
Communists. If the least harm be suffered by our detained
comrades, the hostages will pay with their lives".
"We do not want bloodshed. Not a single Communist
has been shot by us", was Kronstadt's reply.
IV. THE AIMS OF KRONSTADT
Kronstadt  revived  with new   life.  Revolutionary
enthusiasm rose to the level of the October days when the
heroism and devotion of the sailors played such a decisive
r6le. Now, for the first time since the Communist Party
assumed exclusive control of the Revolution and the fate of
Russia, Kronstadt felt itself free. A new spirit of solidarity
and brotherhood brought the sailors, the soldiers of the
garrison, the factory workers, and the nonpartisan elements
together in united effort for their common cause. Even
Communists were infected by the fraternisation of the
whole city and joined in the work preparatory to the
approaching elections to the Kronstadt Soviet.
Among the first steps taken by the Provisional
Revolutionary Committee was the preservation of revolutionary order in Kronstadt and the publication of the Com

84





mittee's official organ, the daily Izvestia. Its first appeal to
the people of Kronstadt (issue No. 1, March 3, 1921) was
thoroughly characteristic of the attitude and temper of the
sailors. "The Revolutionary Committee", it read, "is most
concerned that no blood be shed. It has exerted its best
efforts to organise revolutionary order in the city, the fortress
and the forts. Comrades and citizens, do not suspend work!
Workers, remain at your machines; sailors and soldiers, be
on your posts. All Soviet employees and institutions should
continue their labors. The Provisional Revolutionary Com,
mittee calls upon you all, comrades and citizens, to give it
your support and aid. Its mission is to organise, in fraternal
cooperation with you, the conditions necessary for honest
and just elections to the new Soviet".
The pages of the Izvestia bear abundant witness to the
deep faith of the Revolutionary Committee in the people of
Kronstadt and their aspirations toward free Soviets as the
true road of liberation from the oppr sion of ('cmmunist
bureaucracy. In its daily organ anm    radio messaics the
Revolutionary Committee indignantly re:..nted the Bolshevik
campaign' of calumny and repea.;tcdl     appealed  t( th<
proletariat of Russia and of the wvor!:' for understandinL
sympathy, and help. The radio o, 'i;-ch 6 soiund     ti
keynote of Kronstadt's call:
Our cause is just: we stand for the power of Soviets,;nct
parties. We stand for freely elected representatives of the laboring
masses. The substitute Soviets manipulated by the Communist
Party have always been deaf to our needs and demands; the only
reply we have ever received was shooting. *"* Comrades! They
not only deceive you: they deliberately pervert the truth and resort
to most despicable defamation.;* In Kronstadt the whole power
is exclusively in the hands of the revolutionary sailors, soldiers and
workers - not with counter-revolutionists led by some Kozlovsky.
as the lying Mloscow    radio tries to  make  you  believe.:" Do not delay, comrades! Join us, get in touch with us: demand
admission to Kronstadt for your delegates. Only they will tell yoi
the whole truth and will expose the fiendish calumny about Finnish
bread and Entente offers.
Long live the revolutionary proletariat and the peasantry!
Long live the power of freely elected Soviets!


85





The Provisional Revolutionary Committee first had its
headquarters on the flagship Petropavlovsk, but within a
few days it removed to the "People's Home", in the center
of Kronstadt, in order to be, as the Izvestia states, "in closer
touch with the people and make access to the Committee
easier than on the ship". Although the Communist press
continued its virulent denunciation of Kronstadt as "the
counter'revolutionary rebellion of General Kozlovsky", the
truth of the matter was that the Revolutionary Committee
was exclusively proletarian, consisting for the most part
of workers of known revolutionary record. The Committee
comprised the following 15 members:
1. PETRICHENKO, senior clerk, flagship Petropavlovsk;
2. YAKOVENKO, telephone operator, Kronstadt District;
3. OSSOSSOV, machinist, Sevastopol;
4. ARKHIPOV, engineer;
5. PEREPELKIN, mechanic, Sevastopol;
6. PATRUSHEV, head mechanic, Petropavlovsk;
7. KUPOLOV, senior medical assistant;
8. VERSHININ, sailor, Sevastopol;
9. TUKIN, electrical mechanic;
10. ROMANENKO, caretaker of aviation docks;
11. ORESHIN, manager of the Third Industrial School:
12. VALK, lumber mill worker,
13. PAVLOV, naval mining worker;
14. BAIKOV, carter;
15. KILGAST, deep sea sailor.
Not without a sense of humor did the Kronstadt
Izvestia remark in this connection: "These are our generals,
Messrs. Trotsky and Zinoviev, while the Brussilovs, the
Kamenevs, the Tukhachevskis, and the other celebrities of
the Tsarist regime are on your side."
The Provisional Revolutionary Committee enjoyed the
confidence of the whole population of Kronstadt. It won
general respect by establishing and firmly adhering to the


86





principle of "equal rights for all, privileges to none". The
pahyok (food ration) was equalised. The sailors, who under
Bolshevik rule always received rations far in excess of those
allotted to the workers, themselves voted to accept no more
than the average citizen and toiler. Special rations and
delicacies were given only to hospitals and children's homes.
The just and generous attitude of the Revolutionary
Committee toward the Kronstadt members of the Communist Party - few of whom had been arrested in spite of
Bolshevik repressions and the holding of the sailors' families
as hostages - won the respect even of the Communists.
The pages of the Izvestia contain numerous communications
from Communist groups and organisations of Kronstadt,
condemning the attitude of the Central Government and
indorsing the stand and measures of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Many Kronstadt Communists publicly
announced their withdrawal from the Party as a protest
against its despotism and bureaucratic corruption. In various
issues of the Izvestia there are to be found hundreds of
names of Communists whose conscience made it impossible
for them to "remain in the Party of the executioner Trotsky",
as some of them expressed it. Resignations from the Communist Party soon became so numerous as to resemble a
general exodus.* The following letters, taken at random
from a large batch, sufficiently characterise the sentiment
of the Kronstadt Communists:
(1)
I have come to realise that the policies of the Communist
Party have brought the country into a hopeless blind alley from
which there is no exit. The Party has become bureaucratic, it has
learned nothing and it does not want to learn. It refuses to listen
to the voice of 115 million peasants; it does not want to consider
that only freedom of speech and opportunity to participate in the
reconstruction of the country, by means of altered election methods,
can bring our country out of its lethargy.
"*) The Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Russia considered its Kronstadt Section so "demoralised" that after the defeat of
Kronstadt it ordered a complete rc=registration of all Kronstadt Communists.                                            A. B.


87





I refuse henceforth to consider myself a member of the Russian
Communist Party. I wholly approve of the resolution passed by
the all-city meeting on March 1, and I hereby place my energies
and abilities at the disposal of the Provisional Revolutionary
Committee.
HERMAN KANEV
Krasni y Komandir (Red Army Officer)
Son of the political exile in the Trial of 193.*:
Izvestia, No. 3, March 5, 1921
(2)     COMRADES, MY PUPILS OF THE INDUSTRIAL,
RED ARMY, AND NAVAL SCIHOOLS!
Almost thirty years I have lived in deep love for the people,
and have carried light and knowledge, so far as lay in my power,
to all who thirsted for it, up to the present moment.
The Revolution of 1917 gave greater scope to my work, increased my activities, and I devoted myself with greater energy
to the service of my ideal.
The Communist slogan, "All for the people", inspired me with
its nobility and beauty, and in February, 1920, I entered the Russian
Communist Party as a candidate. But the "first shot" fired at the
peaceful population, at my dearly beloved children of which there
are about seven thousand in Kronstadt, fills me with horror
that I may be considered as sharing responsibility for the blood
of the innocents thus shed. I feel that I can no longer believe in
and propagate that which has disgraced itself by a fiendish act.
Therefore with the first shot I have ceased to regard myself as a
member of the Communist Party.
MARIA NIKOLAYEVNA SHATEL
(Teacher)
Izvestia, No. 6, March 8, 1921
Such communications appeared in almdst every issue
of the Izvestia. Most significant was the declaration of the
Provisional Bureau of the Kronstadt Section of the Communist Party, whose Manifesto to its members was published
in the Izvestia, No. 2, March 4:
*) The celebrated trial of 193 in the early days of the revolutionary
movement of Russia. It began in the latter part of 1877, closing in the first
months of 1878.                                       A. B.


88







"** Let every comrade of our Party realise the importance of
the present hour.
Give no credence to the false rumors that Communists are
being shot, and that the Kronstadt Communists are about to rise
up in arms. Such rumors are spread to cause bloodshed.
We declare that our Party has always been defending the
conquests of the working class against all known and secret enemies
of the power of the workers' and peasants' Soviets, and will
continue to do so.
The Provisional Bureau of the Kronstadt Communist Party
recognises the necessity for new elections to the Soviet and calls
upon the members of the Communist Party to take part in the
elections.
The Provisional Bureau of the Communist Party directs all
members of the Party to remain at their posts and in no way to
obstruct or interfere with the measures of the Provisional Revoluk
tionary Committee.
Long live the power of the Soviets!
Long live the international union of, workers!
PROVISIONAL BUREAU. OF THE KRONSTADT SECTION
(O  THIE RUSSIAN COMMU(NIST PARTY:
F. PERVUSHIN
Y. YLYIN
A. KABANOV
Similarly various other organisations, civil and military,
expressed their opposition to the Moscow rdgime and their
entire agreement with the demands of the Kronstadt sailors.
Many resolutions to that effect were also passed by Red
Army regiments stationed in Kronstadt and on duty in the
forts. The following is expressive of their general spirit and
tendency:
We, Red Army soldiers of the Fort "Krasnoarmeetz", stand
wholly with the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, and to the
last nioment we will defend the Revolutionary Committee, the
workers and the peasants.
SLet no one believe the lies of the Communisti proclamations
thrown from aeroplanes. We have no generals here and no Tsarist
officers. Kronstadt has always been the city of workers and
peasants, and so it will remain. The generals are in the service of
the Communists.


89





".:: At this moment, when the fate of the country is in the
balance, we who have taken the power into our own hands and
who have entrusted the Revolutionary Committee with leadership
in the fight - we declare to the whole garrison and to the workers
that we are prepared to die for the liberty of the laboring masses.
Freed from the three=year old Communist yoke and terror we shall
die rather than recede a single step. Long live Free Russia of the
Working People!
CREW OF THE FORT "KRASNOARMEETZ"
Izvestia, No. 5, March 7, 1921
Kronstadt was inspired by passionate love of a Free
Russia and unbounded faith in true Soviets. It was confident of gaining the support of the whole of Russia, of
Petrograd  in  particular, thus bringing about the final
liberation  of  the  country.   The   Kronstadt   Izvestia
reiterates  this  attitude  and  hope, and  in  numerous
articles and appeals it seeks to clarify its position toward
the Bolsheviki and its aspiration to lay the foundation of a
new, free life for itself and the rest of Russia. This great
aspiration, the purity of its motives, and its fervent hope of
liberation stand out in striking relief on the pages of the
official organ of the Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary
Committee and thoroughly express the spirit of the soldiers,
sailors and workers. The virulent attacks of the Bolshevik
press, the infamous lies sent broadcast by the Moscow radio
station accusing Krorstadt of counter-revolution and White
conspiracy, the Revolutionary Committee replied to in a
dignified manner.   It often reproduced in its organ the
Moscow proclamations in order to show       to the people
of Kronstadt to what depths the Bolsheviki had sunk.
Occasionally  the  Communist     methods   were   exposed
and characterised by the Izvestia with just indignation, as
in its issue of March 8, (No. 6), under the heading "We and
They":
Not knowing how to retain the power that is falling from
their hands, the Communists resort to the vilest provocative means.
Their contemptible press has mobilised all its forces to incite the
masses and put the Kronstadt movement in the light of a White
guard conspiracy. Now a clique of shameless villains has sent


90







word to the world that "Kronstadt has sold itself to Finland".
Their newspapers spit fire andc poison, and because they have
failed to persuade the proletariat that Kronstadt is in the hands of
counter-revolutionists, they are now  trying to play on the
nationalistic feelings.
The whole world already knows from our radios what the
Kronstadt garrison  and workers are fighting for.   But the
Communists are striving to pervert the meaning of events and thus
mislead our Petrograd brothers.
Petrograd is surrounded by the bayonets of the kursanti
and the Party "guards", and Mlaliuta Skuratov - Trotsky -- does
not permit the delegates of the nonpartisan workers and soldiers
to go to Kronstadt.  He fears they would learn the whole
truth  there, and  that truth  would immediately sweep   the
C(ommunists away and the thus enlightened laboring masses would
take the power into their own horny hands.
That is the reason that the Petro-Soviet (Soviet of Petrograd)
did not reply to our radio-telegram in which we asked that really
impartial comrades be sent to Kronstadt.
Fearing for their own skins, the leaders of the Communists
suppress the truth and disseminate the lie that White guardists are
active in Kronstadt, that the Kronstadt proletariat has sold itself
to Finland and to French spies, that the Finns have already
organised an army in order to attack Petrograd with the aid of
the Kronstadt myatezhniki (mutineers), and so forth.
To all this we can reply only this: All power to the Soviets!
Keep your hands off them, the hands that are red with the blood
of the martyrs of liberty who have died fighting against the
White guardists, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie!
In  simple  and   frank  speech  Kronstadt sought to
express the will of the people yearning for freedom and
for the opportunity to shape their own destinies. It felt itself
the advance guard, so to speak, of the proletariat of Russia
about to rise in defense of the great aspirations for which
the  people  had   fought and    suffered  in the  October
Revolution. The faith of Kronstadt in the Soviet system
was deep and firm; its all-inclusive slogan, All power to the
Soviets, not to parties! That was its program; it did not
have time to develop it or to theorize. It strove for the
emancipation   of the people from    the Communist yoke.
That yoke, no longer bearable, made a new revolution, the


91





Third Revolution, necessary. The road to liberty and peace
lay in freely elected Soviets, "the cornerstone of the new
revolution". The pages of the Izvestia bear rich testimony
to the unspoiled directness and singlemindedness of the
Kronstadt sailors and workers, and the touching faith they
had in their mission as the initiators of the Third Revolution.
These aspirations and hopes are clearly set forth in No. 6
of the Izvestia, March 8, in the leading editorial entitled
"What We Are Fighting For":
With the October Revolution the working class had hoped to
achieve its emancipation. But there resulted an even greater
enslavement of human personality.
The power of the police and gendarme monarchy fell into
the hands of usurpers - the Communists - who, instead of giving
the people liberty, have instilled in them only the constant fear of
the Tcheka, which by its horrors surpasses even the gendarme regime
of Tsarism. **' Worst and most criminal of all is the spiritual
cabal of the Communists: they have laid their hand also on the
internal world of the laboring masses, compelling everyone
to think according to Communist prescription.
*** Russia of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of
labor's emancipation, is drenched with the blood of those martyred
for the greater glory of Communist dominion. In that sea of blood
the Communists are drowning all the bright promises and
possibilities of the workers' revolution. It has now become clear
that the Russian Communist Party is not the defender of the
laboring masses, as it pretends to be.  The interests of the
working people are foreign to it. Having gained power it is now
fearful only of losing it, and therefore it considers all means
permissible: defamation, deceit, violence, murder, and vengeance
upon the families of the rebels.
There is an end to long-suffering patience. Here and there
the land is lit up by the fires of rebellion in a struggle against
oppression and violence. Strikes of workers have multiplied, but
the Bolshevik police rdgime has taken every precaution against
the outbreak of the inevitable Third Revolution.
But in spite of it all it has come, and it is made by the hands
of the laboring masses. The Generals of Communism see clearly
that it is the people who have risen, the people who have become
convinced that the Communists have betrayed the ideas of
Socialism. Fearing for their safety and knowing that there is no
place they can hide in from the wrath of the workers, the
Communists still try to terrorise the rebels with prison, shooting.


92





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REDUCED FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF THE KRONSTADT IZVESTIA
93







and other barbarities. But life under the Communist dictatorship
is more terrible than death.***
There is no middle road. To conquer or to die! The example
is being set by Kronstadt, the terror of counter-revolution from the
right and from  the left.  Here has taken place the great
revolutionary deed. Here is raised the banner of rebellion against
the three-year old tyranny and oppression of Communist autocracy,
which has put in the shade the threehundred~year old despotism
of monarchism. Here, in Kronstadt, has been laid the cornerstone
of the Third Revolution which is to break the last chains of the
worker and open the new, broad road to Socialist creativeness.
This new Revolution will rouse the masses of the East and the
West, and it will serve as an example of new       Socialist
constructiveness, in contradistinction to the governmental, cut.and,
dried Communist "construction". The laboring masses will learn
that what has been done till now in the name of the workers and
peasants was not Socialism.
Without firing a single shot, without shedding a drop of blood,
the first step has been taken.  Those who labor need no blood.
They will shed it only in self-defense. *** The workers and
peasants march on: they are leaving behind them the utchredilka
(Constituent Assembly) with its bourgeois regime and the
Communist Party dictatorship with its Tcheka and State capitalism.
which have put the noose around the neck of the workers and
threaten to strangle them to death.
The present change offers the laboring masses the opportunity
of securing, at last, freely elected Soviets which will function
without fear of the Party whip; they can now reorganise the
governmentalised labor unions into voluntary associations of
workers, peasants, and the working intelligentsia. At last is broken
the police club of Communist autocracy.
That was the program, those the immediate demands,
for which the Bolshevik Government began the attack of
Kronstadt at 6.45 P.M., March 7, 1921.
V. BOLSHEVIK ULTIMATUM TO KRONSTADT
Kronstadt was generous. Not a drop of Communist
blood did it shed, in spite of all the provocation, the
blockade of the city and the repressive measures on the part
of the Bolshevik Government. It scorned to imitate the Com=
munist example of vengeance, even going to the extent of


94





warning the Kronstadt population not to be guilty of
excesses against members of the Communist Party. The
Provisional Revolutionary Committee issued a call to the
people of Kronstadt to that effect, even after the Bolshevik
Government had ignored the demand of the sailors for the
liberation of the hostages taken in Petrograd. The Kron.
stadt demand sent by radio to the Petrograd Soviet and the
Manifesto of the Revolutionary Committee were published
on the same day, March 7, and are hereby reproduced:
In the name of the Kronstadt garrison the Provisional
Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt demands that the families
of the sailors, workers and Red Army men held by the Petro%
Soviet as hostages be liberated within 24 hours.
The Kronstadt garrison declares that the Communists enjoy
full liberty in Kronstadty and their families are absolutely safe. The
example of the PetroSoviet will not be followed here, because we
consider such methods (the taking of hostages) most shameful and
vicious even if prompted by desperate fury. History knows no
such infamy.
SAILOR PETRICHENKO
Chairman Provisional Revolutionary Committee
KILGAST
Secretary
The Manifesto to the people of Kronstadt read in part:
The long continued oppression of the laboring masses by the
Communist dictatorship has produced very natural indignation and
resentment on the part of the people. As a result of it relatives of
Communists have in some instances been discharged from their
positions and boycotted. That must not be. We do not seek
vengeance - we are defending our labor interests.
Kronstadt lived, in the spirit of its holy crusade. It had
abiding faith in the justice of its cause and felt itself the true
defender of the Revolution. In this state of mind the sailors
did not believe that the Government would attack them by
force of arms. In the subconsciousness of these simple
children of the soil and sea there perhaps germinated the
feeling that not only through violence may victory be gained.
The Slavic psychology seemed to believe that the justice of
the cause and the strength of revolutionary spirit must win.


95





At any rate, Kronstadt refused to take the offensive. The
Revolutionary Committee would not accept the insistent
advice of the military experts to make an immediate landing
in Oranienbaum, a fort of great strategic value. The Kron=
stadt sailors and soldiers aimed to establish free Soviets
and were willing to defend their rights against attack; but
they would not be the aggressors.
In Petrograd there were persistent rumors that the
Government was preparing military operations against
Kronstadt, but the people did not credit such stories: the
thing seemed so outrageous as to be absurd. As already
mentioned, the Committee of Defense (officially known as
the Soviet of Labor and Defense) had declared the capital
to be in an "extraordinary state of siege". No assemblies
were permitted, no gathering on the streets. The Petrograd
workers knew little of what was transpiring in Kronstadt,
the only information accessible being the Communist press
and the frequent bulletins to the effect that the "Tsarist
General Kozlovsky   organised  a counter revolutionary
uprising in Kronstadt".  Anxiously the people looked
forward to the announced session of the Petrograd Soviet
which was to take action in the Kronstadt matter.
The Petro:Soviet met on March 4, admission being by
cards which, as a rule, only Communists could procure. The
writer, then on friendly terms with the Bolsheviki and
particularly with Zinoviev, was present. As Chairman of
the Petrograd Soviet Zinoviev opened the session and in a
long speech set forth the Kronstadt situation. I confess
that I came to the meeting disposed rather in favor of the
Zinoviev viewpoint: I was on my guard against the vaguest
possibility of counter-revolutionary influence in Kronstadt.
But Zinoviev's speech itself convinced me that the Comr
munist accusations against the sailors were pure fabrication,
without a scintilla of truth. I had heard Zinoviev on several
previous occasions. I found him a convincing speaker, once
his premises were admitted. But now his whole attitude, his
argumentation, his tone and manner -- all gave the lie to


96





his words. I could sense his own conscience protesting.
The only "evidence" presented against Kronstadt was the
famous Resolution of March 1, the demands of which were
just and even moderate. Yet it was on the sole basis of that
document, supported by the vehement, almost hysterical
denunciation of the sailors by Kalinin, that the fatal step
was taken. Prepared beforehand and presented by the
stentorian-voiced Yevdokimov, the     right-hand man of
Zinoviev, the resolution against Kronstadt was passed b)y
the delegates wrought up to a high pitch of intolerance and
blood thirst - passed amid a tumult of protest from several
delegates of Petrograd factories and the spokesmen of the
sailors. The resolution declared Kronstadt guilty of a
counter-revolutionary uprising against the Soviet power and
demanded its immediate surrender.
it was a declaration of war. Even many Communists
refused to believe that the resolution would be carried out:
it were a monstrous thing to attack by force of arms the
"pride and glory of the Russian Revolution", as Trotsky had
christened the Kronstadt sailors. In the circle of their
friends many   sober-minded   Communists threatened to
resign from the Party should such a bloody deed come to
pass.
Trotsky had been expected to address the PetroSoviet,
and his failure to appear was interpreted by some as
indicating  that the  seriousness of the    situation  was
exaggerated. But during the night he arrived in Petrograd
and the following morning, March 5, he issued his ultimatum
to Kronstadt:
The Workers' and Peasants' Government has decreed that
Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the
authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore I command all who
have raised their hand against the Socialist fatherland to lay down
their arms at once. The obdurate are to be disarmed and turned
over to the Soviet authorities. The arrested Commissars and other
representatives of the Government are to be liberated at once.
Only those surrendering unconditionally may count on the mercy
of the Soviet Republic.


97





Simultaneously I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the
mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms. Responsibility
for the harm that may be suffered by the peaceful population will
fall entirely upon the heads of the counter.revolutionary mutineers.
This warning is final.
TROTSKY
Chairman Revolutionary Military Soviet of the Republic
KAM E NE:V
KAMENEV  Commander-in-Chief
The situation looked ominous.    Great military forces
continuously  flowed   into  Petrograd  and   its  environs.
Trotsky's ultimatum was followed by a prikaz which contained
the historic threat, "I'll shoot you like pheasants". A group
of Anarchists then in Petrograd made a last attempt to
induce  the Bolsheviki to    reconsider their decision of
attacking Kronstadt. They felt it their duty to the Revolution
to make an effort, even if hopeless, to prevent the imminent
massacre of the revolutionary flower of Russia, the Kronstadt
sailors and workers. On March 5 they sent a protest to the
Committee of Defense, pointing out the peaceful intentions
and just demands of Kronstadt, reminding the Communists
of the heroic revolutionary history of the sailors, and
suggesting a method of settling the dispute in a manner
befitting comrades and revolutionists. The document read:
To the Petrograd Soviet of Labor and Defense
Chairman Zinoviev:
To remain silent now is impossible, even criminal. Recent
events impel us Anarchists to speak out and to declare our attitude
in the present situation.
The spirit of ferment and dissatisfaction manifest among the
workers and sailors is the result of causes that demand our serious
attention. Cold and hunger have produced disaffection, and the
absence of any opportunity for discussion and criticism is forcing
the workers and sailors to air their grievances in the open.
Whitelguardist bands wish and may try to exploit this
dissatisfaction in their own class interests. Hiding behind the
workers and sailors they throw out slogans of the Constituent
Assembly, of free trade, and similar demands.
We Anarchists have long since exposed the fiction of these
slogans, and we declare to the whole world that we will fight with


98





arms against any counter-revolutionary attempt, in cooperation
with all friends of the Social Revolution and hand in hand with the
Bolsheviki.
Conceining the conflict between the Soviet Government
and the workers and sailors, we hold that it must be settled not
by force of arms but by means of comradely, fraternal revolutionary
agreement. Resorting to bloodshed, on the part of the Soviet
Government, will not-in the given situation-intimidate or quieten
the workers. On the contrary, it will serve only to aggravate
matters and will strengthen the hands of the Entente and of
internal counter-revolution.
More important still, the use of force by the Workers' and
Peasants' Government against workers and sailors will have a
reactionary effect upon the international revolutionary movement
and will everywhere result in incalculable harm to the Social Revo;
lutio'n.
Comrades Bolsheviki, bethink yourselves before it is too late!
Do not play with fire: you are about to make a most serious and
decisive step.
We hereby submit to you the following proposition: Let a
Commission be selected to consist of five persons, inclusive of two
Anarchists. The Commission is to go to Kronstadt to settle the
dispute by peaceful means. In the given situation this is the most
radical method. It will be of international revolutionary significance.
ALEXANDER BERKMAN
Petrograd                          EMMA GOLDMAN
March 5, 1921                      PERKUS
PETROVSKY
Zinoviev, informed that a document in connection with
the Kronstadt problem was to be submitted to the Soviet
of Defense, sent his personal representative for it. Whether
the letter was discussed by that body is not known to the
writer. At any rate, no action was taken in the matter.
VI. THE FIRST SHOT
Kronstadt, heroic and generous, was dreaming of liber.
ating Russia by the Third Revolution which it felt proud to
have initiated. It formulated no definite program. Liberty
and universal brotherhood were its slogans. It thought of
the Third Revolution as a gradual process of emancipation,
the first step in that direction being the free election of


99





indpeindent Soviets, uncontrolled by any political party and
expressive of the will and interests of the people. The
vw!olechearted, unsophisticated sailors were proclaiming to
the wvrkers of the world their great Ideal, and calling upon
the proletariat to join forces in the common fight, confident
that their Cause would find enthusiastic support and that
tlhe workers of Petrograd, first and foremost, would hasten
to their aid.
Meanwhile Trotsky had collected his forces. The most
trusted divisions from the fronts, kursanti regiments, Tcheka
detachments, and military units consisting exclusively of
Communists were now gathered in the forts of Sestroretsk,
Lissy Noss, Krasnaia Gorka, and neighboring fortified
places. The greatest Russian military experts were rushed
to the scene to form plans for the blockade and attack of
Kronstadt, and the notorious Tukhachevski was appointed
Commandcer-inChief in the -ice of Kronstadt.
On March 7, at 6. 45 in the evening, the Communist
batteries of Sestroretk,and Lissy Noss fired the firr.t 'hots
against Kronstadt.
It was the anniversary  t:   \\o   n \orkers Day.
Kronstadt, besieged and attackcc., id i,,i lorget the great
holiday. Under fire of numerous batteries, the brave sailors
sent a radio greeting to the workingwomen of the world, an
act most characteristic of the psychology of the Rebel City.
The radio read:
Today is a universal holiday - Women Workers' Day. We
of Kronstadt send, amid the thunder of cannon, our fraternal
greetings to the workingwomen of the world. *** May you soon
accomplish your liberation from every form of violence and oppression. ** Long live the free revolutionary workingwomen!
Long live the Social Revolution throughout the world!
No less characteristic was the heart-rending cry of Kron.
stadt, "Let The Whole World Know", published after the
first shot had been fired, in No. 6 of the Izvestia, March 8:
The first shot has been fired... Standing up to his knees in
the blood of the workers, Marshal Trotskv was the first to open


100





fire against revolutionary Kronstadt which has risen against the
autocracy of the Communists to establish the true power of the
Soviets.
Without shedding a drop of blood we, Red Army men, sailors.
and workers of Kronstadt have freed ourselves from the yoke of
the Communists and have even preserved their lives. By the threat
of artillery they want now to subject us again to their tyranny.
Not wishing bloodshed, we asked that nonpartisan delegates of
the Petrograd proletariat be sent to us, that they may learn that
Kronstadt is fighting for the Power of the Soviets. But the Comrn
munists have kept our demand from the workers of Petrograd and
now they have opened fire -    the usual reply of the pseudo
Workers' and Peasants' Government to the demands of the laboring masses.
Let the workers of the whole world know that we. the dcfenders of Soviet Power, are guarding the conLquests of the Sa1il
Revolution.
We will win or perish beneath the ruins of Kronstadt. fightini
for the just cause of the laboring masses.
The workers of the world will be our judges. The blood of the
innocent will fall upon the heads of the Communist fanatics drunk
with authority.
Long live the Power of the Soviets!
VII. THE DEFEAT OF KRONSTADT
The artillery bombardment of Kronstadt, which bean
on the evening of March 7, was followed by the attempt
to take the fortress by storm. The attack was made from
the north and the south by picked Communist troops clad
in white shrouds, the color of which protectively blended
with the snow lying thick oni the frozen Gulf of Finland.
These first terrible attempts to take the fortress by storm,
at the reckless sacrifice of life, are mourned by      the
sailors in touching commiseration for their brothers in arms,
duped into believing Kronstadt counter-revolutionary. Under
date of March 8 the Kronstadt Izveslia wrote:
We did not want to shed the blood of our brothers, and we did
not fire a single shot until compelled to do so. We had to defend the
just cause of the laboring people and to shoot - to shoot at our own


101





brothers sent to certain death by Communists who have grown fat
at the expense of the people.
*** To your misfortune there broke a terrific snowstorm and
black night shrouded everything in darkness. Nevertheless, the
Communist executioners, counting no cost, drove you along the
ice, threatening you in the rear with their machine guns operated
by Communist detachments.
Many of you perished that night on the icy vastness of the
Gulf of Finland. And when day broke and the storm quieted
down, only pitiful remnants of you, worn and hungry, hardly able
to move, came to us clad in your white shrouds.
Early in the morning there were already about a thousand of
you and later in the day a countless number. Dearly you have paid
with your blood for this adventure, and after your failure Trotsky
rushed back to Petrograd to drive new martyrs to slaughter - for
cheaply he gets our workers' and peasants' blood!...
Kronstadt lived in deep faith that the proletariat of
Petrograd would come to its aid.    But the workers there
were terrorised, and Kronstadt effectively blockaded and
isolated, so that in reality no assistance could be expected
from anywhere.
The Kronstadt garrison consisted of less than 14,000 men,
10,000 of them being sailors. This garrison had to defend a
widespread front, many forts and batteries scattered over
the vast area of the Gulf. The repeated attacks of the
Bolsheviki, whom   the Central Government continuously
supplied with fresh troops; the lack of provisions in the
besieged city; the long sleepless nights spent on guard in the
cold-allwere sapping thevitality of Kronstadt. Yet the sailors
heroically persevered, confident to the last that their great
example of liberation would be followed throughout the
country and thus bring them relief and aid.
In its "Appeal to Comrades Workers and Peasants" the
Provisional Revolutionary Committee says (Izvestia No. 9,
March 11):
Comrades Workers, Kronstadt is fighting for you, for the
hungry, the cold, the naked.:::*: Kronstadt has raised the banner
of rebellion and it is confident that tens of millions of workers and
peasants will respond to its call. It cannot be that the daybreak
which has begun in Kronstadt should not become bright sunshine


102





for the whole of Russia. It cannot be that the Kronstadt explosion
should fail to arouse the whole of Russia and first of all, Petrograd.
But no help was coming, and with every successive day
Kronstadt was growing more exhausted. The Bolsheviki
continued massing fresh troops against the besieged fortress
and weakening it by constant attacks. Moreover, every
advantage was on the side of the Communists, including
numbers, supplies, and position. Kronstadt had not been
built to sustain an assault from the rear. The rumor spread
by the Bolsheviki that the sailors meant to bombard
Petrograd was false on the face of it. The famous fortress
had been planned with the sole view of serving as a defense
of Petrograd against foreign enemies approaching from the
sea. Moreover, in case the city should fall into the hands of
an external enemy, the coast batteries and forts of Krasnaia
Gorka had been calculated for a fight against Kronstadt.
Foreseeing such a possibility, the builders had purposely
failed to strengthen the rear of Kronstadt.
Almost nightly the Bolsheviki continued their attacks.
All through March 10 Communist artillery fired incessantly
from the southern and northern coasts. On the night of
the 12-13 the Communists attacked from the south, again
resorting to the white shrouds and sacrificing many hundreds
of the kursanti. Kronstadt fought back desperately, in spite
of many sleepless nights, lack of food and men. It fought
most heroically against simultaneous assaults from the north,
cast and south, while the Kronstadt batteries were capable
of defending the fortress only from its western side. The
sailors lacked even an icecutter to make the approach of
the Communist forces impossible.
On March 16 the Bolsheviki made a concentrated attack
from three sides at once - from north, south and east. "The
plan of attack", later explained Dibenko, formerly Bolshevik
naval Commissar and later dictator of defeated Kronstadt,
"was worked out in minutest detail according to the
directions of Commanderlin;Chief Tukhachevsky and the
field staff of the Southern Corps. "" At dark we began the
attack upon the forts. The white shrouds and the courage


103





of the kursanti made it possible for us to advance in
columns."
On the morning of March 17 a number of forts had been
taken. Through the weakest spot of Kronstadt -    the
Ietrograd Gates - the Bolsheviki broke into the city, and
then there began most brutal slaughter. The Communists
spared by the sailors now betrayed them, attacking from the
rear. Commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin and Chairman
of the Kronstadt Soviet Vassiliev, liberated by the Cornm
munists from jail, now participated in the hand-to=hand
street fighting in fratricidal bloodshed. Till late in the night
continued the desperate struggle of the Kronstadt sailors
and soldiers against overwhelming odds. The city which
for fifteen days had not harmed a single Co(mmunist, now
ran red with the blood of Kronstadt men. women and even
c lildren.
Dibenko, appointed Commissar of Kronstadt, was vested
with absolute powers to "clean the mutinous city". An orgj
of revenge followed, with the Tcheka claiming numerous,
victims for its nightly wholesale razstrel (shooting).
On March 18 the Bolshevik Government and the Corin
munist Party of Russia publicly commemorated the ParisCommune of 1871, drowned in the blood of the French
workers by Gallifet and Thiers. At the same time they
celebrated the "victory" over Kronstadt.
For several weeks the Petrograd jails were filled with
hundreds of Kronstadt prisoners. Every night small groups
of them were taken out by order of the Tcheka and
disappeared -- to be seen among the living no more. Among
the last to be shot was Pcrepelkin, member of the
Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt.
The prisons and concentration camps in the frozen
district of Archangel and the cmlngeons of far Turkestan are
slowly doing to death the Kronstadt men who rose against
Bolshevik bureaucracy and proclaimed in March, 1921, the
slogan of the Revolution of October, 1917: "All Power to
the Soviets!"


104





AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD
LESSONS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF KRONSTADT
The Kronstadt movement was spontaneous, unprepared,
and peaceful. That it became an armed conflict, ending in
a bloody tragedy, was entirely due to the Tartar despotism
of the Communist dictatorship.
Though realising the general character of the Bolsheviki,
Kronstadt still had faith in the possibility of an amicable
solution. It believed the Communist Government amenable
to reason; it credited it with some sense of justice and
liberty.
The Kronstadt experience proves once more that
government, the State - whatever its name or form - is
ever the mortal enemy of liberty and popular self.
determination. The State has no soul, no principles. It has
but one aim - - to secure power and to hold it, at any cost.
That is the political lesson of Kronstadt.
There is another, a strategic, lesson taught by every
rebellion.
The success of an uprising is conditioned in its resoluteness,
energy, and aggressiveness. The rebels have on their side
the sentiment of the masses. That sentiment quickens with
the rising tide of rebellion. It must not be allowed to subside,
to pale by a return to the drabness of everyLday life.
On the other hand, every uprising has against it the
powerful machinery   of the State.   The  Government
is able to concentrate in its hands the sources of supply
and the means of communication. No time must be given
the Government to make use of its powers. Rebellion
should be vigorous, striking unexpectedly and determinedly.
It must not remain localised, for that means stagnation. It
must broaden and develop. A rebellion that localises itself,
plays the waiting policy, or puts itself on the defensive, is
inevitably doomed to defeat.
In this regard, especially, Kronstadt repeated the fatal
strategic errors of the Paris Communards. The latter did


105





not follow the advice of those who favored an immediate
attack on Versailles while the Government of Thiers was
disorganised. They did not carry the revolution into the
country. Neither the Paris workers of 1871 nor the Kron.
stadt sailors aimed to abolish the Government. The Communards wanted merely certain Republican liberties, and
when the Government attempted to disarm them, they drove
the Ministers of Thiers from Paris, established their liberties
and prepared to defend them - nothing more. Thus also
Kronstadt demanded only free elections to the Soviets.
Having arrested a few Commissars, the sailors prepared to
defend themselves against attack. Kronstadt refused to
act upon the advice of the military experts immediately
to take Oranienbaum. The latter was of utmost military
value, besides having 50,000 poods* of wheat belonging to
Kronstadt.    A   landing in Oranienbaum     was feasible, the
Bolsheviki having been taken by surprise and having had
no time to bring up reinforcements. But the sailors did not
want to take the offensive, and thus the psychologic moment
was lost. A few days afterward, when the declarations and
acts of the Bolshevik Government convinced Kronstadt that
they were involved in a struggle for life, it was too late to
make good the error.**
The same happened to the Paris Commune. When the
logic of the fight forced     upon   them   demonstrated the
necessity of abolishing the Thiers regime not only in their
own city but in the whole country, it was too late. In the
Paris Commune as in the Kronstadt uprising the tendency
toward passive, defensive tactics proved fatal.
*) A pood equals 40 Russian or about 36 English pounds.
**) The failure of Kronstadt to take Oranienbaum gave the Government
an opportunity to strenghten the fortress with its trusted regiments, eliminate the "infected" parts of the garrison, and execute. the leaders of the
aerial squadron which was about to join the Kronstadt rebels. Later the
Bolsheviki used the fortress as a vantage point of attack against Kronstadt.
Among those executed in Oranienbaum were: Kolossov, division chief
of the Red Navy airmen and chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary
Committee just organised in. Oranienbaum; Balabanov, secretary of the
Committee, and Committee members Romanov, Vladimirov, etc.  A. B.


106





Kronstadt fell. The Kronstadt movement for free
Soviets was stifled in blood, while at the same time the
Bolshevik  Government was making compromises with
European capitalists, signing the Riga peace, according to
which a population of 12 millions was turned over to the
mercies of Poland, and helping Turkish imperialism to suppress the republics of the Caucasus.
But the "triumph" of the Bolsheviki over Kronstadt held
within itself the defeat of Bolshevism. It exposed the true
character of the Communist dictatorship. The Communists
proved themselves willing to sacrifice Communism, to make
almost any compromise with international capitalism, yet
refused the just demands of their own people -- demands
that voiced  the  October slogans of the    Bolsheviki
themselves: Soviets elected by direct and secret ballot,
according to the Constitution of R.S.F.S.R.; and freedom of
speech and press for the revolutionary parties.
The Tenth AllRussian Congress of the Communist Party
was in session in Moscow at the time of the Kronstadt
uprising. At that Congress the whole Bolshevik economic
policy was changed as a result of the Kronstadt events and
the similarly threatening attitude of the people in various
other parts of Russia and Siberia. The Bolsheviki preferred
to reverse their basic policies, to abolish the razverstka
(forcible requisition), introduce freedom of trade, give coný
cessions to capitalists and give up Communism itself -  he
Communism for which the October Revolution was foul t,
seas of blood shed, and Russia brought to ruin and despaii -
but not to permit freely chosen Soviets.
Can anyone still question what the true purpose of
the Bolsheviki was? Did they pursue Communist Ideals or
Government Power?
Kronstadt is of great historic significance. It sounded
the death knell of Bolshevism with its Party dictatorship,
mad centralisation, Tcheka terrorism  and bureaucratic
castes. It struck into the very heart of Communist autocracy.
At the same time it shocked the intelligent and honest minds


107





of Europe and America into a critical examination of
Bolshevik theories and practices. It exploded the Bolshevik
myth of the Communist State being the "Workers' and
Peasants' Government".  It proved that the Communist
Party  dictatorship  and  the  Russian  Revolution  are
opposites, contradictory and mutually exclusive. It demon,
strated that the Bolshevik regime is unmitigated tyranny
and reaction, and that the Communist State is itself the
most potent and dangerous counter-revolution.
Kronstadt fell. But it fell victorious in its idealism and
moral purity, its generosity and higher humanity. Kronstadt
was superb. It justly prided itself on not having shed the
blood of its enemies, the Communists within its midst. It
had no executions. The untutored, unpolished sailors,
rough in manner and speech, were too noble to follow the
Bolshevik example of vengeance: they would not shoot
even the hated Commissars.   Kronstadt personified the
generous, all-forgiving spirit of the Slavic soul and the
centuryvold emancipation movement of Russia.
Kronstadt was the first popular and entirely independent
attempt at liberation from the yoke of State Socialism -- an
attempt made directly by the people, by the workers, soldiers and sailors themselves. It was the first step toward
the Third Revolution which is inevitable and which, let us
hope, may bring to long-suffering Russia lasting freedom
and peace.
ALEXANDER BERKMAN


108





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"Finally, on March 16th... the Bolsheviks made a thunderous, concentrated attack. " (The Unknown Revolution, B & R, Detroit).





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Members of the Kronstadt Council of Workers & Soldiers.





Publishing
Histor y
The three pamphlets comprising this work were first published by "Der
Syndikalist," an anarcho-syndicalist printing group in Berlin, in 1922, at
Alexander Berkman's own expense. (Incidentally, printing costs in
Berlin in 1922 were such that it cost between ~5 and ~10 to print 3000
copies). On leaving Russia, Berkman, Emma Goldman and Alexander
Schapiro made their way to Stockholm, arriving on 5th January 1922,
where they immediately issued an appeal on behalf of imprisoned
revolutionists in Russia. This appeal was dated 9th January.
Berkman took from 5th January to the 10th to write the first
pamphlet in the present series. It was ultimately published on 24th
June by which time he had managed to have himself smuggled into
Germany. Later in February (the 22nd) he wrote the sketch "In a
Pogromed City," which was never published in the Russian Revolution
series, but was incorporated into his book, "The Bolshevik Myth"
which he began writing on 3rd January 1923. There were to have been
ten or twelve different pamphlets in the Russian Revolution series, the
fourth of which was to have been about Nestor Makhno, but Berkman
later wrote that lack of co-operation from other groups of exiled
revolutionists forced him to suspend the series. He then devoted all his
lime to helping Emma Goldman with her work, "My Disillusionment
in Russia," and his own "Bolshevik Myth" (now long out of print). He
also gathered material for "Letters from Russian Prisons," practically
editing the book himself although receiving no credit for his work
from  the distinguished committee nominally the compilers who
apparently felt Berkman's name would bring into question the credibility
and objectivity of the work. Berkman was also the central figure in
relief work for imprisoned revolutionists.
It is not clear how many copies of the pamphlets were issued, or in
how many languages. There were Dutch, Italian and Japanese editions
and in Argentina over 100,000 copies of the Kronstadt pamphlet were
printed. The pamphlets, however, were never translated into French
and when a French edition was suggested to Berkman in 1934 lihe
opposed it on the grounds that he felt it more important to focus
activities on pressing contemporary affairs and because such an edition
might cause his expulsion from refuge in France. The English pamphlets
are difficult to locate today. Only the Labadie Library at the University of Michigan seems to have all three pamphlets among American
universities, and fewer than two dozen copies appear to exist in
American university libraries.





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