Cheka forces, fresh from the civil war, were sent to suppress the uprising and were extremely cruel toward the population. The government was aware of the inhuman Cheka methods of operation, but stern measures to frighten the peasantry seemed the only way to maintain the authority of the Soviet regime. "In some villages," a Soviet description of the Antonov movement tells us, "the families of the bandits began to leave their homes. . . . Then the plenipotentiary commission decided to demolish or burn the homes of bandits whose families were in hiding, to treat those who concealed bandits' families as harborers of bandits, to shoot the oldest in such families." 2 Antonov's movement reached its climax early in 1921, by which time Antonov had reduced the Soviet administration in many districts to impotence. It was not until Lenin's retreat to a "New Economic Policy," which meant that requisitions would stop, that the uprising began to abate; they finally ceased in the fall of 1921. . . . Antonov himself escaped capture for some time longer. But, like most peasant leaders, he could not stay away permanently from his native region. The Chekists reckoned with this; and on June 24, 1922, they surrounded a house in the village Nizhni Shibrai, in Borisoglebsk County, where Antonov and his brother had taken refuge. This house was set on fire and the Antonovs were shot down as they fled from it.3 In other parts of the country similar, though less extensive, movements were taking place about the same time. Unorganized, lacking experienced leaders, disunited, the local revolts and mutinies were not of immediate danger to the Moscow government; however, in their entirety they appeared ominous as an obvious proof of a profound dissatisfaction and indignation of the great majority of the population. After prompting Lenin to make significant concessions, the peasant movements gradually abated in the subsequent era. 2. Petrograd and Kronstadt In the latter part of February 1921 serious unrest, which grew into spontaneous strikes, developed among the workers of Petrograd. Beginning on February 22, meetings took place in industrial plants all over the city. On February 24 strikes broke out at the Trubochnyi, Laferm, Patronnyi, and Baltiiskii plants. The Trubochnyi plant took the lead in the political movement against Soviet power.* Though nonparty and nonpolitical, the sentiment behind the movement-the first large popular movement since 1918, at least in the 2 Ibid., p. 439. 2 Ibid. Pravda o Kronshtadte (The Truth About Kronstadt) (Prague: Volya Rossii (Russia's Will), 1921), p. 6. former capital-was obviously anti-Communist. The unrest soon spread to the fortress of Kronstadt, with its thousands of troops; the role played by the Kronstadt sailors in the revolution-Trotsky had called them the "pride and glory of the Revolution"-was fresh in the memory of the people and their loyalty was beyond doubt. Now, 3 years later, however, they turned against the Communist regime. The Kronstadt uprising, which started in late February 1921 and lasted until March 17, was a distinctly leftist but at the same time antiCommunist movement. At a meeting attended by 16,000 persons on March 1, a resolution was adopted which announced the demands of the insurrectionists: 1. Seeing that the present Soviets do not express the wishes of the workers and peasants, to organize immediately re-elections to the Soviets with secret vote, and with care to organize free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants. 2. To grant liberty of speech and of press to the workers and peasants, to the anarchists and the left socialist parties. 3. To secure freedom of assembly, freedom of labor unions and of peasant organizations. 5. To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labor and peasant movements. 8. To abolish immediately all "zagraditelnye otryady" [special armed detachments assigned to check the bundles and luggage of the passengers on trains]. 10. To abolish the communist fighting detachments in all branches of the army, as well as the communist guards kept on duty in mills and factories. 11. To give the peasants full freedom of action in regard to the whole land and also the right to keep cattle on condition that the peasants manage with their own means; that is, without employing hired labor. 15. To permit free artisan production which does not employ hired labor.5 Only three persons voted against the resolution, and these three were arrested. The next day another mass meeting took place at which a Provisional Revolutionary Committee was elected, the leader of which was Petrichenko, a senior clerk from one of the ships. The committee established itself on the cruiser Petropavlovsk. "Rezolyutsiya Obshchego Sobraniya Komand 1-i i 2-i Brigad Lineinykh Korablei Sostoyavshegosya 1 Marta 1921 goda" (Resolution of the General Meeting of the Crews of the First and Second Brigades of Line-of-Battleships Which Took Place on March 1, 1921), Pravda o Kronshtadte, pp. 9, 10. By March 3 the Revolutionary Committee began to publish a daily paper, Izvestia, which gave news of the rising: The peaceful character of the Kronstadt movement is beyond doubt. Kronstadt has raised demands in the spirit of the Soviet constitution. In the fortress itself, and without a single shot, power has passed into the hands of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee by the unanimous decision of the sailors, Red army men, workers and Soviet employees. The Revolutionary Committee refused to take the offensive against Soviet forces: All proposals of the military specialists to take the offensive, to open military operations, to use the opportunity created by the initial confusion of the bolsheviks, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee answered with flat rejection. "The basis of our insurrection was that we did not want to shed blood. Why shed blood, if everybody understands anyway that our cause is just. Despite the Bolsheviks' deceits it will be realized now that Kronstadt is revolting for the people and against the Communists." A number of hostages from among the families of the insurgent sailors were taken in Petrograd. The government announced that: If even one hair falls from the head of the detained comrades [in Kronstadt] ... the named hostages will pay for it with their heads.R Government airplanes dropped leaflets on Kronstadt informing the rebelling sailors that hostages had been taken; in its reply, the Kronstadt radio termed this act shameful and cowardly, and refused to retaliate. There were mass defections from the Communist party. The consciences of the defectors made it impossible for them to "remain in the Party of the executioner Trotsky." Exaggerating the political unrest in Petrograd and underestimating the ruthlessness of the regime, the Kronstadt rebels hoped for an early victory. Under the heading "What Are We Fighting For," the Kronstadt Izvestia wrote on March 8: With the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But there resulted an even greater enslavement of human personality. The power of the police and the gendarme monarchy fell into the hands of usurpers the Communists-who, instead of giving the people liberty, have instilled in them only the constant fear of the Tcheka, which by its horrors surpasses even the gendarme régime of Tsarism.10 As quoted in Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion (Berlin: Der Syndikalist, 1922), p. 21. Meantime, having gathered military forces, the Soviet government was preparing a military offensive against Kronstadt. Trotsky, the leader of the operations, sent an ultimatum to Kronstadt on March 5: The Workers' and Peasants' Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore I command all who have raised their hand against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. The obdurate are to be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The arrested Commissars and other representatives of the Government are to be liberated at once. Only those surrendering unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic.11 On March 7, the Soviet artillery went into action against Kronstadt. The first attack was followed by an attempt to take the fortress by storm, but this attack was unsuccessful. Hundreds of Red Army men perished on the ice surrounding the island fortress. Next day the Kronstadt Izvestia said: Many of you perished that night on the icy vastness of the Gulf of Finland. And when day broke and the storm quieted down, only pitiful remnants of you, worn and hungry, hardly able to move, came to us clad in your white shrouds. Early in the morning there were already about a thousand of you and later in the day a countless number. Dearly you have paid with your blood for this adventure, and after your failure Trotsky rushed back to Petrograd to drive new martyrs to slaughter-for cheaply he gets our workers' and peasants' blood! 12 During the next 8 days the Soviet offensive continued relentlessly: Almost nightly the Bolsheviki continued their attacks. All through March 10 Communist artillery fired incessantly from the southern and northern coasts. On the night of the 12-13 the Communists attacked from the south, again resorting to the white shrouds and sacrificing many hundreds of the kursanti [military students]. . . . On March 16 the Bolsheviki made a concentrated attack from three sides at once-from north, south and east. . . . On the morning of March 17 a number of forts had been taken. Through the weakest spot of Kronstadt-the Petrograd Gates-the Bolsheviki broke into the city, and then there began most brutal slaughter.13 The Kronstadt uprising was suppressed. The Soviet press stopped reporting the tragic events as the Cheka went into action: For several wecks the Petrograd jails were filled with hundreds of Kronstadt prisoners. Every night small groups of them were taken out by order of the Tcheka and disappeared-to be seen among the living no 11 Ibid., p. 31. 12 Ibid., p. 36. (Note: "White shrouds" refer to white garments which are used for camouflage purposes in military operations in a northern country.) 13 Ibid., pp. 37, 38. more. Among the last to be shot was Perepelkin, member of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt. The prisons and concentration camps in the frozen district of Archangel and the dungeons of far Turkestan are slowly doing to death the Kronstadt men who rose against Bolshevik bureaucracy and proclaimed in March, 1921, the slogan of the Revolution of October, 1917: "All Power to the Soviets!" 14 3. Mushrooming of Factions In the ranks of the Communist party, including the supreme leadership, discord was growing. A number of Communist factions emerged, but suppression of Communist groups by terroristic methods was out of the question in this early period of the Soviet regime. At the root of the discord and confusion was the widespread disappointment in the "Socialist system" and "workers' state" as they appeared now in reality. The main target of criticism was what the oppositionists called "bureaucratism❞—a term which comprises more than it does in English; in the Russian sense it meant the resurrection of a huge state machinery, egotistical and comparatively secure during a time of general debacle, and deaf to the people's needs and worries; it meant the emergence of a new, relatively well-to-do class, after "landlords and capitalists" had been abolished. The inefficiency of the new management was another source of discontent. More freedom to propagate their views-but only in the framework of the Communist party and not for other political trends was demanded by the leaders of the factions. Each faction had its own program of reform, most of them consisting of petty demands which could not rally the people. Many Communists arrived at the conclusion that trade unions, as purely workers' organizations, must be given a greater role in order to reduce the power of the "bureaucracy." One Communist faction, the Democratic Centralists, which emerged in 1919, achieved some importance in 1920-21. Speaking at the party congress in 1920, its leader, T. V. Sapronov: .. described the Leninist Central Committee as a "small handful of party oligarchs." Other members of the opposition complained that the Central Committee "was banning those who hold deviant views." [I.A.] Yakovlev was even more specific. "The Ukraine," he charged, "is being transformed into a place of exile. Those comrades who for any reason are not agreeable to Moscow are exiled there." [P.C.] Yurenev accused the Central Committee of "playing with men" and spoke of the dispatching of oppositionists to far places as a "system of exile." . . . The disciplining of oppositionists took the relatively mild form of transfer of work assignments from the center to the periphery, and even such actions were not openly acknowledged.15 14 Ibid., p 38. 15 Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 132, 133. |