Kronstadt 1921: Counterrevolution – Russian Archives Refute Anarchists (Part 2 of 2)

Kronstadt 1921: Russian Archives Refute Anarchist Lies, Again (Spartacist) Spring 2006 (Part Two of Two) In March 1921, the garrison of the Baltic island fortress of Kronstadt, gateway to revolutionary Petrograd, revolted against the Bolshevik government. The mutineers held Kronstadt for two weeks, until the Soviet regime finally retook it by a direct assault across the ice, at a cost of many lives on both sides. The rebels claimed to be fighting to restore a purified Soviet power freed from the monopoly of the Communists. The Bolsheviks charged that the revolt was a counterrevolutionary mutiny: whatever the sailors’ intentions, it could only aid the forces of capitalist restoration—ranging from avowed democrats to outright monarchists—united behind the White standard of clerical/tsarist reaction. Though militarily repulsed by the Soviet Red Army after nearly three years of civil war, the White Guards and their imperialist patrons remained intent on reversing the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917 and crushing the young Soviet workers state.

Nearly 73 years later, on 10 January 1994, self-selected White Guard heir Boris Yeltsin, president of a now-capitalist Russia, placed his double-headed-eagle seal of approval on the Kronstadt revolt (see “Kronstadt and Counterrevolution: Then and Now,” Workers Vanguard No. 595, 4 March 1994). The fact that Yeltsin, who had led the 1991-92 overturn of the Bolshevik Revolution, “rehabilitated” the Kronstadt mutineers simply confirmed once again whose class interests were served by the 1921 uprising. The Kronstadt mutiny is the center of a great myth, assiduously propagated by anarchists but seized upon by a whole array of anti-revolutionary forces ranging from social democrats to tsarist restorationists... (cont. https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/kronstadt-1921-bolshevism-vs-counterrevolution-russian-archives-refute-anarchist-lies-again-spartacist-spring-2006/ )