Kronslacb PAUL AVRICH THE UPRISING OF SAILORS NAVAL 1921 AT THE KRONSTADT BASE IS EXAMINEDINTI-iE CONT EXT OFTHE POLlTfCAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEW SOVIET ST ATE BONST.fIDT 1921 PAUL AVRICH The Norton Library W·W·NORTON & COMPANY·INC· NEW YORK COPYRIGHT © 1970 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS First published in the Norton Library 1974 by arrangement with Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published simultaneously in Canada by George ]. McLeod Limited, Toronto Books That Live The Norton imprint on a book means that in the publisher's estimation it is a book not for a single season but for the years. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A vrich, Paul. Kronstadt, 1921. (The Norton library) Reprint of the ed. published by the Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.]., in series: Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University. 1. Kronstadt, Russia-History-Revolt, 1921. I. Title. II. Series: Columbia University. Russian Institute. Studies. [DK265.8.K7 A88 1974] 947'.45'0841 73-22130 ISBN 0-393-00724-3 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 345 6 7 890 For Ina, Jane, and Karen Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 1. The Crisis of War Communism 7 2. Petrograd and Kronstadt 35 3. Kronstadt and the Russian Emigration 88 4. First Assault 131 5. The Kronst!idt Program 157 6. Suppression 193 7. Epilogue 218 APPENDIXES A. Memorandum on the Question of Organizing an Uprising in Kronstadt 235 B. What We Are Fighting For 241 C. Socialism in Quotation Marks 244 Annotated Bibliography 247 Index 261 Illustrations (following page 100) (All of the illustrations are from the collection of the Helsinki University Library with one exception as noted) The City of Kronstadt The Battleship Sevastopol Seaman S. M. Petrichenko Major General A. N. Kozlovsky Lieutenant Colonel E. N. Solovianov A Kronstadt Refugee in Finland Kronstadt Refugees Arriving at Terijoki Kronstadt Refugees at Work in Finland Lenin with Party Delegates Fresh from Kronstadt Victory (Novosti Press Agency: Soviet Life) Acknowledgments I am pleased to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who assisted me in the preparation of this vol­ ume. lowe a special debt of thanks to three outstanding teachers and scholars, Professors Geroid T. Robinson, Henry L. Roberts, and Michael T. Florinsky, who guided my study of Russian history at Columbia University. I am also indebted to Max Nomad and Professor Loren Graham, who read the entire manuscript and made valuable comments and criti­ cisms. Marina Tinkoff, Xenia J. Eudin, Anna M. Bourguina, N. Zhigulev, Peter Sedgwick, Edward Weber, Alexis Struve, and Eino Nivanka were good enough to answer my inquiries and to make a number of helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Professor Philip E. Mosely for granting me access to the Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University, and to its curator, L. F. Magerovsky, for his assistance in finding pertinent documents. My thanks are due also to the staffs of the Columbia, Harvard, and Hoover Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Helsinki University Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives for their courteous help in my search for materials. Although I have drawn on numerous sources, I am especial­ ly indebted to the pioneering studies of Ida Mett and George Katkov which are listed in the bibliography. Needless to say, however, responsibility for this volume is entirely my own. I am deeply grateful to the Russian Institute of Columbia University, with which I have been associated as a Senior Fellow, and particularly to its Director, Professor Marshall Shulman, for his warm hospitality and encouragement. I am also indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Amer­ ican Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council for supporting my research on Russian anarchism and mass revolts, of which the present study is a byproduct. KRONST ADT 1921 NOTE: In transliterating Russian words and proper names, I have followed the Library of Congress system in the footnotes and bibliography, but have modified this slightly in the text for the sake of readability. It should also be noted that the terms "Bolshevik" and "Communist" are used interchangeably throughout the book (the Bolsheviks officially changed their name to Communists in March 1918). Introduction "This was the flash,"said Lenin of the Kronstadt rebellion, "which lit up reality better than anything else."l In March 1921 the sailors of the naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, the "pride and glory" of the Russian Revolution, rose in revolt against the Bolshevik government, which they them­ selves had helped into power. Under the slogan of "free soviets," they established a revolutionary commune that sur­ vived for 16 days, until an army was sent across the ice to crush it. After a long and savage struggle, with heavy losses on both sides, the rebels were subdued. The rising at once provoked a bitter controversy that has never quite abated. Why had the sailors revolted? Accord­ ing to the Bolsheviks, they were agents of a White Guard conspiracy hatched in the West by Russian emigres and their Allied supporters. To their sympathizers, however, they were revolutionary martyrs fighting to restore the soviet idea against the Bolshevik dictatorship. The suppression of the revolt was, in their eyes, an act of brutality which shattered the myth that Soviet Russia was a "workers' and peasants' state." In the aftermath, a number of foreign Communists questioned their faith in a government which could deal so ruthlessly with genuine mass protest. In this respect Kron­ stadt was the prototype of later events which would lead dis­ illusioned radicals to break with the movement and to search for the original purity of their ideals. The liquidation of the kulaks, the Great Purge, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin--each produced an exodus of party members and supporters who were convinced that the rev­ olution had been betrayed. "What counts decisively," wrote Louis Fischer in 1949, "is the 'Kronstadt.' Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even 1 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn., 55 voIs., Mos­ cow, 1958-1965, XLIII, 138. 3 INTRODUCTION reject the cause altogether in one's mind and yet refuse to attack it. I had no 'Kronstadt' for many years."2 Others found their "Kronstadt" later still-in the Hun­ garian uprising of 1956. For in Budapest, as in Kronstadt, the rebels sought to transform an authoritarian and bureaucratic regime into a genuine socialist democracy. To the Bolsheviks, however, such heresy was a greater menace than outright opposition to the principles of socialism. Hungary-and again Czechoslovakia in 1968-was dangerous not because it was counterrevolutionary, but because, like Kronstadt, its concep­ tion of the revolution and of socialism diverged sharply from that of the Soviet leadership; yet Moscow, as in 1921, de­ nounced the rising as a counterrevolutionary plot and pro­ ceeded to suppress it. The crushing of Budapest, noted one critic of Soviet policy, showed again that the Communists would stop at nothing to destroy those who challenged their authority. 3 Yet such comparisons must not be pressed too far. For events separated by 35 years and occurring in different coun­ tries with entirely different participants cannot possess more than a superficial resemblance. Soviet Russia in 192 1 was not the Leviathan of recent decades. It was a young and insecure state, faced with a rebellious population at home and implacable enemies abroad who longed to see the Bolshe­ viks ousted from power. More important still, Kronstadt was in Russian territory; what confronted the Bolsheviks was a mutiny in their own navy at its most strategic outpost, guard­ ing the western approaches to Petrograd. Kronstadt, they feared, might ignite the Russian mainland or become the springboard for another anti-Soviet invasion. There was 2 Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed, New York, 1950, p. 207. 3 Emanuel Pollack, The Kronstadt Rebellion, New York, 1959, Introduction. Cf. Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann Arbor, 1964, pp. 58-59. 4 INTRODUCTION mounting evidence that Russian emigres were trying to assist the insurrection and to turn it to their own advantage. Not that the activities of the Whites can excuse any atrocities which the Bolsheviks committed against the sailors. But they do make the government's sense of urgency to crush the revolt more understandable. In a few weeks the ice in the Finnish Gulf would melt, and supplies and reinforcements could then be shipped in from the West, converting the for­ tress into a base for a new intervention. Apart from the propaganda involved, Lenin and Trotsky appear to have been genuinely anxious over this possibility. Few Western historians, unfortunately, have taken proper account of these anxieties. And Soviet writers, for their part, have done considerable violence to the facts by treating the rebels as dupes or agents of a White conspiracy. The present volume tries to examine the rebellion in a truer perspective. To accomplish this, Kronstadt must be set within a broader context of political and social events, for the revolt was part of a larger crisis marking the transition from War Com­ munism to the New Economic Policy, a crisis which Lenin regarded as the gravest he had faced since coming to power. It is necessary, moreover, to relate the rising to the long tradition of spontaneous rebellion in Kronstadt itself and in Russia as a whole. Such an approach, one hopes, will shed some interesting light on the attitudes and behavior of the insurgents. Beyond this, there are a number of specific problems that require careful analysis.