Vol. 73/No. 34 September 7, 2009
After 10 days of bitter fighting, the Bolshevik government suppressed the mutiny, which had threatened to unleash counterrevolutionary forces against the Bolshevik-led workers state. The events occurred shortly after the young Soviet republic emerged from several years of a hard-fought civil war.
The excerpt below is from a March 8, 1921, report by Lenin to the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, a day after the Red Army forces began operations to suppress the Kronstadt uprising. Copyright © 1979 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY V.I. LENIN
I should now like to deal with the Kronstadt events. I have not yet received the latest news from Kronstadt, but I have no doubt that this mutiny, which very quickly revealed to us the familiar figures of White Guard generals, will be put down within the next few days, if not hours. There can be no doubt about this. But it is essential that we make a thorough appraisal of the political and economic lessons of this event.
What does it mean? It was an attempt to seize political power from the Bolsheviks by a motley crowd or alliance of ill-assorted elements, apparently just to the right of the Bolsheviks, or perhaps even to their “left”—you can’t really tell, so amorphous is the combination of political groupings that has tried to take power in Kronstadt. You all know, undoubtedly, that at the same time White Guard generals were very active over there. There is ample proof of this. Two weeks before the Kronstadt events, the Paris newspapers reported a mutiny at Kronstadt. It is quite clear that it is the work of Social Revolutionaries and White Guard émigrés, and at the same time the movement was reduced to a petty-bourgeois counterrevolution and petty-bourgeois anarchism. That is something quite new. This circumstance, in the context of all the crises, must be given careful political consideration and must be very thoroughly analyzed. There is evidence here of the activity of petty-bourgeois anarchist elements, with their slogans of unrestricted trade and invariable hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This mood has had a wide influence on the proletariat. It has had an effect on factories in Moscow and a number of provincial centers. This petty-bourgeois counterrevolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak put together, because ours is a country where the proletariat is in a minority, where peasant property has gone to ruin, and where, in addition, the demobilization has set loose vast numbers of potentially mutinous elements. No matter how big or small the initial, shall I say, shift in power, which the Kronstadt sailors and workers put forward—they wanted to correct the Bolsheviks in regard to restrictions in trade—and this looks like a small shift, which leaves the same slogans of “Soviet power” with ever so slight a change or correction. Yet, in actual fact the White Guards only used the nonparty elements as a stepping-stone to get in. This is politically inevitable. We saw the petty-bourgeois anarchist elements in the Russian revolution, and we have been fighting them for decades. We have seen them in action since February 1917, during the Great Revolution, and their parties’ attempts to prove that their program differed little from that of the Bolsheviks, but that only their methods in carrying it through were different. We know this not only from the experience of the October revolution but also from the experience of the outlying regions and various areas within the former Russian empire where the Soviet power was temporarily replaced by other regimes. Let us recall the Democratic Committee in Samara.* They all came in demanding equality, freedom, and a constituent assembly, and every time they proved to be nothing but a conduit for White Guard rule. Because the Soviet power is being shaken by the economic situation, we must consider all this experience and draw the theoretical conclusions a Marxist cannot escape. The experience of the whole of Europe shows the practical results of trying to sit between two stools. That is why in this context we must say that political friction, in this case, is a great danger. We must take a hard look at this petty-bourgeois counterrevolution, with its calls for freedom to trade. Unrestricted trade—even if it is not as bound up initially with the White Guards as Kronstadt was—is still only the thin end of the wedge for the White Guard element, a victory for capital and its complete restoration. We must, I repeat, have a keen sense of this political danger.
It shows what I said in dealing with our platforms discussion: in face of this danger we must understand that we must do more than put an end to party disputes as a matter of form—we shall do that, of course. We need to remember that we must take a much more serious approach to this question.
We have to understand that, with the peasant economy in the grip of a crisis, we can survive only by appealing to the peasants to help town and countryside. We must bear in mind that the bourgeoisie is trying to pit the peasants against the workers; that behind a facade of workers’ slogans it is trying to incite the petty-bourgeois anarchist elements against the workers. This, if successful, will lead directly to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, consequently, to the restoration of capitalism and of the old landowner and capitalist regime. The political danger here is obvious. A number of revolutions have clearly gone that way; we have always been mindful of this possibility and have warned against it.