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...late 1920, as the conflict drew to a close, they were becoming highly sensitive to the wave of strikes and peasant revolts which began sweeping the country with the tightening of the government's reins. "A restless and independent breed who loathed all privilege and authority," Paul Avrich writes in Kronstadt 1921, "They seemed forever on the verge of exploding into open violence against their officers or against the central government, which they regarded as an alien and a coercive force...

Author: By M. DAVID Landau, | Title: Kronstadt 1921 | 8/7/1970 | See Source »

...AVRICH'S account of the Kronstadt explosion is, by any standard, a remarkably fair and balanced work. The important point, he understands, is that, in this particular bit of history, there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, no exploiters or toilers or even hypocrites. The sailors were, in effect, demanding the implementation of the government's own political and economic promises; at the outset, at least. they sought no breach with the party, but rather unity on the basis of the programs for which they and the party had struggled for so long. The sailors' echo of Lenin...

Author: By M. DAVID Landau, | Title: Kronstadt 1921 | 8/7/1970 | See Source »

...Russian expatriates, as Avrich points out, were scheming to turn the Kronstadt uprising to their own advantage. The rebels and the emigres had nothing in common, and Lenin and Trotsky know it; the sailors called for the realization of the "toilers republic," while the Whites stood for a bourgeois or even a Tsarist restoration, and all the dreaded forms of exploitation which that involved. The threat of the sailors was serious enough, but for the most part it was reformist in nature; the reactionaries would settle on nothing less than the final overthrow of Bolshevik rule...

Author: By M. DAVID Landau, | Title: Kronstadt 1921 | 8/7/1970 | See Source »

...these terms that Avrich views the uprising. The rebels may have had cause, but the government needed also to protect itself against undue threats to its existence. In the Russia of 1921, a protest such as this, owing to the dreadful state of affairs, seemed inevitable; the government's reaction, equally predictable. It is what Avrich, speaking in literary terms, calls "the tragedy of Kronstadt...

Author: By M. DAVID Landau, | Title: Kronstadt 1921 | 8/7/1970 | See Source »

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