![]() In the main, the fleet is now composed of peasant elements from the Ukraine. Where have these new crews of the fleet been recruited from? Finland and the Baltic provinces no longer belonging to Russia, there only remains Southern Russia and the coasts of the Black Sea. Only an insignificant of these former militants have remained at Kronstadt and all of these now occupy command positions, they constitute the Communist apparatus of the fleet and it is against them that the new crews have rebelled. The former crews of Kronstadt have given the Soviet government thousands upon thousands of fighters, who, in all the armies, in all the services, have played the most glorious role in the defence and the reconstruction of Soviet Russia. These highly qualified workers acted as a moral cement, transforming the indiscipline of the mass into a revolutionary factor.īut these revolutionary proletarian elements have been singularly weakened during the last three years. It is a fatal consequence of their life and of the union which they form with their ship: once they come ashore, they run riot.Īs a result of this undisciplined spirit and of the great number of highly qualified workers among their ranks, the Kronstadt sailors an eminent role in the revolutions of both 19 as agents of the destruction of the bourgeois state. Everywhere, but especially in Russia, sailors have always been a particularly ill-disciplined element and given to excess. That is expressly confirmed by the central organ of the Whites, Les Dernières Nouvelles of Milyukov, who writes, according to a refugee sailor, that the discontent had already manifested itself the year before and that it had been stirred up by the radical measures taken by the Soviet government in order to arrest the degeneration of the fleet. The local discontent of the sailors was directed first and foremost against the discipline and order established by the Soviet government. The sailors of Kronstadt live better than the rest of the army or the working class, they are well dressed and their other material conditions of life are without a doubt better than the average of those experienced by the rest of the Russian proletariat. ![]() The latter consisted first of all in the fact that it was not provoked by a very high level of material deprivation. The Kronstadt uprising was not a local event, although it naturally bore numerous local characteristics. The real character of the Kronstadt uprising does not only cast light on the current situation in Russia, it also illuminates at the same time one of the most important problems of the world revolution in general: the problem of the relationship between the Communist Party and the mass of the proletariat and the form of the dictatorship: dictatorship of the Party or dictatorship of the class (to employ the customary expression, which is in any case inexact). ![]() Nevertheless, the crushing of this mutiny by military force did not erase its significance. The Kronstadt uprising, just as they proudly declared it, they fled into the land of Canaan, into Finland, where grass had just begun to grow on the graves of 30,000 proletarians murdered by the Finnish Whites, they abandoned the sailors to the revolutionary tribunals of Soviet Russia. But things didn’t work out as they had expected. And more than one was already banking on the end of the Soviet government. Upon whom will the government support itself now?” That is what was repeated by all the possible, imaginable organs of the Russian counter-revolution. “The odious sailors of Kronstadt, who brought revolution into every corner of Russia, the maniacal enemies of the bourgeoisie, have broken from the Soviet government. “I have made you, and I shall kill you” – that was the caption below a cartoon that appeared in a big broadsheet in Paris, showing a tall, lanky sailor pointing his revolver at Trotsky. The following is a translation of a rare article by Karl Radek from the French organ of the Communist International, "Bulletin communiste", April 1st, 1921.Ī great joy seized white-guards all over the world when on the 2nd of March, news reached the outside world that that the sailors of Kronstadt had risen up against the Soviets.
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