Kronstadt

[ClichéGuevara]

I lack the enthusiasm to copy and paste the article but it discusses the Kronstadt uprising that was ultimately repressed by the vanguard party. The USSR would've been markedly different had Leninism never reared its head and the Soviets had been left to it.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mett/1938/kronstadt.htm

[1871]

Interesting - Ive read about this before. The flaw is in Marxism itself. It is an authoritarian ideology.

[ClichéGuevara]

Yeah. The Kronstadt sailors had played a key role in the revolution but the party was quick to turn on them when the sailors exhibited dissent to war communism.

[Younes]

I definitely will read this, seems pretty interesting, also, how long have the deportation of people to worker camps in Siberia been going on? Because I usually assumed it was during Stalin's reign that mass deportations happend with the Ukrainians, Tartars and Chechens...

[1871]

From the early 17th century Siberia was used as a penal colony. Theres lead, copper and gold and its cold. Prisoners werent the best labour so most miners were voluntary. The synthesis of the railway network and the Gulag was a crucial factor.

[Boboulas]

Lenin on Kronstadt "There they do not want either the White Guards or our government"

Suppression of revolts calling for democracy was a key policy of the Bolsheviks.

[Rick Ross 187]

anyone who attempts to appropriate the sailors of Krondstadt into their anti-Bolshevik view of the revolution in russia is being disingenuous. The Krondstadt sailors were the crack troops of the 1917 revolution. They were the biggest supporters in the army of the Bolsheviks programme. What is seen by the Bolshevik party crushing of the sailors revolt is the general rot, decline, degradation and death of what started in 1917.

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(10-26-2012 04:37 PM)Boboulas Wrote:  Suppression of revolts calling for democracy was a key policy of the Bolsheviks.

Sounds like an A Level 'key fact'.

A 'policy' which the sailors were all too happy to comply with and array out in 1917 and 1918

[1871]

(11-17-2012 05:35 PM)Rick Ross 187 Wrote:  anyone who attempts to appropriate the sailors of Krondstadt into their anti-Bolshevik view of the revolution in russia is being disingenuous.9

Get away with that nonsense. The Krondstadt sailors, like many, understandably were initially supporters of the revolution. And why not given the tyranny of Tsarist rule? The Bolshevik high command who closed down the anarchists and were the second lot to gradually realise the Bolsheviks programme was authoritarian.

quote;

Kronstadt is a naval base on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, about 18 miles west of St Petersburg/Petrograd. The sailors there were young and literate. The March Revolution of 1917 there had been one of the bloodiest uprisings in Russia, with the sailors massacring hundreds of their officers.


In May 1917, about 3,000 sailors had joined the Bolsheviks, but it is important to note that many of the Kronstadt sailors were and remained Anarchists and Social Revolutionaries. On 16 May 1917, the Kronstadt Soviet declared independence from the Provisional Government – a move which infuriated Lenin, since the Bolsheviks were not yet ready to make their move, and he did not want anyone ‘jumping the gun’. The sailors were ordered to call off their action, and they backed down, but it was a sign that they were not unquestioning supporters of the Bolsheviks.


When the Provisional Government tried to close down the Anarchist headquarters in Petrograd in June 1917, 50 armed Kronstadt sailors turned up to defend it. Kronstadt sailors also turned out during the July Days to help the Bolsheviks try to overthrow the Provisional Government, 20,000 of them fought with the Bolshevik Red Guards who defeated Kornilov in August, and, they went to Petrograd again to help the Bolshevik coup d’état in November. In January 1918 Lenin used them to close down the Constituent Assembly and set up his ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ – Raskolnikov, the sailors’ leader, proposed a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Working People’, and when the anti-Bolshevik members voted it down, an armed party of Kronstadt sailors and Red Guards closed down the Assembly.

Quote: The Krondstadt sailors were the crack troops of the 1917 revolution. They were the biggest supporters in the army of the Bolsheviks programme. What is seen by the Bolshevik party crushing of the sailors revolt is the general rot, decline, degradation and death of what started in 1917.

True - though its in the political philosophy itself.

quote;

Raskolnikov was living like a lord, with banquets, servants and a chauffeur-driven car. On 28 February 1921 the crew of the ship Petropavlovsk mutinied. They did not – like the Moscow strikers – call for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, only for ‘equal rations for all the working people’ and ‘freedom for the peasants’. Because it thus merely asked for a return to true revolutionary principles, rather than for an end to the revolution, all the Kronstadt Bolsheviks joined the mutiny too. As Orlando Figes says: ‘this was a case of the Bolsheviks being abandoned by their own favoured sons’.



On 1 March 1921 a crowd of 15,000 soldiers met in the Anchor Square in Kronstadt and declared a revolution. The ‘Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee’ published its own newspaper, which complained about the ‘constant fear of torture by the Cheka … the mass executions and a bloodletting which exceeds even the tsarist generals’. ‘The glorious emblem of the workers’ state – the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window’ it declared.


The Mutiny

The Defeat of the Mutiny
Trotsky was given the job of defeating the rebellion. In Petrograd, the Bolsheviks took the sailors’ families as hostages. On 5 March, Trotsky reached Kronstadt and called on the sailors to surrender – or they would be ‘shot like partridges’. He knew that he had to act quickly – soon the pack ice would be melting and the naval base would become impregnable (the British navy had failed to capture it in 1918). But the first Bolshevik troops to attack Kronstadt were young and the Cheka with machine guns had to be placed behind them to stop them retreating. When they attacked on 7 March across the 5-mile stretch of open ice, the Kronstadt defenders mowed them down.



Trotsky continued to bombard the Kronstadt fortress with artillery, and gathered an army of 50,000 crack troops. On 16 March they attacked. In an 18-hour battle, 10,000 Red Guards were killed, but Kronstadt was taken. Hundreds of mutineers were imprisoned: 500 were shot on the spot, and a further 2000 were executed over the next few months. The rest were sent to Siberia.

[Asshole]

yo sean, seeing as i respect you and value your opinion imma hit you up on chat if you want to talk about this with a bolshevik.

[C.K.]

(07-10-2012 12:59 AM)1871 Wrote:  The flaw is in Marxism itself. It is an authoritarian ideology.

I disagree. Marxism itself is about achieving liberation for the people. A class wielding its power over another will of course require the use of authority, however. Marx didn't speak directly on the course of action the people should take after the onset of a revolution. But, when conditions are ripe, one class will be overwhelmingly poor, making up the vast majority of the populace; the other will be overwhelmingly wealthy, making up a very small portion of the populace. The exploited will of course attempt to seize power from the exploiters, that's the ultimate aim, and it will likely occur violently. How things proceed afterward depend on the leaders & their commitment to liberation for the people. Each revolution will exist under different circumstances, with varying degrees of counter-revolutionary opposition. How the many self-serving, power-thirsty politicians handled their 'Marxist' revolutions likely wouldn't have sat well with Karl Marx.

[1871]

I think if you actually read Marx youll discover otherwise. Marx undoubtedly made many interesting observations- especially about Capitalist economy, but there is an autocratic streak in his work. His use of the term 'bourgoisie' is particularly flexible. It was picked up by later 'revolutionaries' to be an all encompassing term for percieved enemies of the 'vanguard' who were the political clerics who could guide and steer the revolution. Its why Communism is a religion among its adherents and its what is has in common with religion - a central text, a set of indisputable beliefs, the guiding light of the elite, death to the heretics, etc. - new beliefs which supposedly replace the old ones. Marriage was 'bourgeois'. Intellectuals were' bourgeois',Enemies of the state were bourgeois, etc,etc.etc.

The problem (or one of them) is that Marx uses class as a means of combatting the effects of class.

http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Threa...ma+Goldman

[C.K.]

(11-22-2012 12:11 AM)1871 Wrote:  I think if you actually read Marx youll discover otherwise.

I have & continue to do so. Otherwise I wouldn't have opened up my thumbs.

Once again, what people have done in his 'name' & what he wrote & spoke on are 2 different things. Same thing happened to some cat named Jesus.