The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

and the workers, who had all been armed, fought with desperate energy. The government had mobilised tens of
thousands of soldiers, of whom the majority came from Central Asia and so were more easily swayed by official
propaganda joined by members of the Bolshevik Party, including those of the Workers’ Opposition. 530 Behind
them were the Chekists, who shot the numerous deserters and fired on troops who went over to the Kronstadt
insurgents. Tukhatchevsky’s 531 troops finally defeated the insurgents; tens of thousands of sailors and workers
were shot; the survivors were sent to prison or to the camps where they perished. 532
The programme of the Kronstadt insurgents was not sufficiently clear to grasp the attention of left communists.
It certainly rejected any idea of the Constituent Assembly and any return to the past; it simply supported in a
confused way a dictatorship of the councils without parties of any sort, and not a dictatorship exercised by a
single party. However, this idea of a ‘dictatorship of the class’, as opposed to the ‘dictatorship of the party’ was
to be developed at the end of 1921 by the Dutch and German left communists, above all by the KAPD. By
contrast, the call for a ‘third revolution’ by the ‘Kronstadters’ remained very vague and offered no perspective.
The idea, besides, of “giving the peasants complete freedom of action on their land” but “without using any
wage labour” could only arouse the hostility of Gorter and the KAPD. 533 The latter was hostile to all concessions
to the peasantry, which they identified with the Kulaks.
In fact, at first the KAPD supported the official thesis of a plot against Soviet Russia. Claiming that the French
boats were in Reval to support the insurrection in Russia – which was false – they declared: “The counterrevolutionary
Russian emigrants are returning to Russia, and Count Wrangel is preparing in Hungary with the
aim of providing military support”. 534 The action of the insurgents was defined as anti-communist and counterrevolutionary:
“The exact knowledge of Russian conditions permits the counterrevolutionaries to provoke an insurrection,
which in its first phase was of the same kind as a third revolution. During the struggle through the demand for
the Constituent Assembly appears clearly the imprint of an uprising directed against communism.”
Nevertheless the organ of the KAP clearly shows the context: hunger and “discontent with the dictatorship of the
party and the Soviet bureaucracy’. 535
It took the detailed account of the delegates of the KAPD in Moscow, and in particular of Arthur Goldstein 536 –
assisted by Adolf Dethmann –, who represented the party on the Executive of the Komintern, to change the
(the differences in translation are underlined by us.) If there is a distinction to make between “executing” and “crushing the
mutineers by armed force”, it is a quite light distinction, which does not remove anything of Trotsky’s responsibility to
crush the uprising of Kronstadt. It is well known that the result was the immediate shooting of insurgents, or in the ‘best
case’ the death in the concentration camps. Later Trotsky tried to evacuate his own responsibility, when he was recalled in
the thirties to have been one of the main agents of the bloody repression. By an obvious lie, Trotsky affirmed in 1938 that he
“had not taken the smallest personal role in the pacification (sic) of the uprise of Kronstadt or in the repression which
followed it”. [Quoted by The New International, August 1938, p. 249-250.] At that time, Trotsky was involved in alliance
policy with the Spanish anarchists, and the recall of this unglorious past was not welcomed by him.
530 Alexandra Kollontai declared that the members of the Opposition would be the first to volunteer to crush the Kronstadt
revolt [cf. P. Avrich, op. cit., p. 175].
531 In 1939, the stalinian regime accused Tukhachevsky of being responsible for the Kronstadt insurrection!
532 It is highly significant that the insurgents who had imprisoned a small minority of communists who were hostile to the
uprising, used no violence against them. All violence was excluded in the insurgents’ camp: “[Kronstadt does not want] to
imitate Petrograd, for it considers a similar act, even carried out in a fit of desperate hatred, is the most shameful and
cowardly from all points of view. History has not yet seen such proceedings” [Izvestia, 7 th March 1921].
533 Resolution from the ship “Petropavlovsk”, 28 th February 1921; quoted by Avrich, op. cit., pp. 75-76. It is certain that the
weight of the small peasants was felt by the sailors, because two thirds were of peasant origin in 1921. But this social
composition was not very different from that of the Kronstadt sailors in 1918.
534 KAZ [Berlin], No. 177.
535 KAZ [Berlin], No. 179, ‚Die Offensive gegen Russland beginnt!’.
536 Goldstein, soon replaced by B. Reichenbach (1888-1975) [pseudonym: Johannes Seemann], was in contact with the
Russian Workers’ Opposition in Moscow. It was he who brought Kollontai’s manuscript of the Workers’ Opposition to the
west via a special KAPD courrier. It was immediately translated into German and Dutch and produced by the KAPD and
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