Word: kronstadt
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...heart of hearts, he is an anarchist. Russia's rulers have lived in constant dread of the kind of spontaneous, popular uprisings that troubled the czarist era and set off the Bolshevik Revolution. After the communists came to power, others strove to topple them as the sailors of Kronstadt and the Tambov peasants rebelled against the new regime. It has been this way throughout Russian history: early chronicles describe how ancestors of the Russians appealed to neighboring Vikings to come in and rule over them because "our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order...
...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...
...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...
...then, was responsible for Kronstadt? Avrich never attempts to solve the riddle, but it seems that the beginning of an answer is at hand. Those forces which attempted to set back Soviet Russia, to retard her economic and political progress, to make her life and her people's lives as wretched and unendurable as possible, are the real villains of the episode. To set the blame, one must look first to the Tsarists and the Allied powers who fired the opening shots of the civil war itself, who attacked what had begun as a new human experiment, a genuinely popular...
...legacy of suppression that began with the Soviet bombardment of Kronstadt led directly to the Stalinist terror and to the faceless, cynical technocracy that the Soviet Union is today. That alone, in retrospect, would make the attack on the fortress absurd. But the burning irony of Kronstadt is that, before the siege began, at a time when it might have been stopped or called off, the real perpetrators were nowhere to be found...