Word: kronstadt
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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...
Lenin's policy change, however, came too late to avert the Kronstadt uprising. The sailors, mostly of peasant origin, had visited their homes after the end of the civil war and saw for the first time how difficult life was for their families in the countryside. They, too, blamed the party for most of the nation's ills; after all, had the government not carried out the forcible seizure of peasant grain, and in many instances denied the farmers even a subsistence of their own produce...
...case, a sailors' seizure of Petrograd. But it is precisely this spontaneous characteristic of the revolt, its self-imposed locality, its conformity, in fact, with the Bolshevik catchword 'soviet,' that raises the crucial question: Did the regime act honestly and fairly when it moved against the sailors at Kronstadt...
Were it not for this question, Kronstadt would remain a historical fantasy, of some topical interest to be sure, but not really worth dragging off the shelf. Yet as it is, the dilemma is worthy of attention because it poses the difficulty that must accompany the inclusion of "democracy" and "centralism" into a single thread of political practice. The Kronstadters argument, of course, was that the revolution had really begun with the promise of autonomous soviets; the Bolshevik hard-liners had supposed that the soviets must compromise their independence in favor of a more central and powerful body. Lenin, throughout...
...SENSE, this reasoning may be inadequate when applied to the Kronstadt revolt itself: the war was over, the people were clamoring for an end of centralism, and the demands of the mutineers were certainly justified. But from another point of view, the conditions of war still existed: resources were scarce and needed to be carefully handled, and that meant there had to be a national as well as a local reckoning. And, more immediately, the enemies of the Soviet republic, inveterate as they were, still sought an opportunity to topple the government...