The Kronstadt Revolt and the New Economic Policy

Abstract

The wave of strikes and workers’ demonstrations in Petrograd at the end of February 1921 and the revolt of the population and sailors of the naval base of Kronstadt against the dictatorship of the communist party have been much distorted in the telling by many Soviet, and some other historians. Most of them labour to demonstrate, with scant regard for the facts, that these events were inspired and directed from outside Russia by enemies of the Soviet state. The allegation is unsupported by evidence, and has been rejected by every serious historian of the period. The opponents of Trotsky—and their number naturally increased after his fall in 1927—strive to show that in Petrograd, where Zinoviev was in control of the party organization, order was much more easily restored and the threat much less serious than in Kronstadt, where, so far as the fleet was concerned, the party organization was subordinated to the military machine, and therefore to Trotsky. Trotsky and his supporters, on the other hand, are concerned to establish that the sailors’ revolt was only possible in 1921 because of the change in their social origins as compared with 1917. Although there appears to be some truth in each of these contentions, neither of them gives by any means the whole explanation of events which were due to much more complex causes.