On Kronstadt in 1917, during the Provisional Government, there had never been “dual power,” just soviets as the island fortress became a socialist ministate. In 1921, the island garrison contained 18,000 sailors and soldiers as well as 30,000 civilians, and on March 1 around 15,000 of them gathered on Kronstadt’s Anchor Square and overwhelmingly approved a fifteen-point resolution stipulating freedom of trade as well as “freedom of speech and the press for all workers and peasants, anarchists and left socialist parties”—that is, not for the bourgeoisie or even rightist socialists. The sailors also demanded “All power to the soviets and not to parties.”239 Only two Bolshevik officials present voted against the resolution, while Mikhail Kalinin—the chairman of the All-Russia Soviet (head of state)—who had come to address the sailors, was shouted down, and lost a vote on whether he could resume. A socialist regime was faced with determined socialist rebellion among its armed forces.
Later that night of March 1, the sailors formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to oversee order on the island and prepare free and fair, multicandidate, secret ballot elections to the Kronstadt soviet. The next day, in the House of Enlightenment (the former Engineers’ School), Stepan Petrichenko (b. 1892), a clerk on the battleship Petropavlovsk, who had been a Communist but in a “reregistration” had lost his party status, opened a gathering of 202 delegates whose presidium consisted solely of non-party people. Communists at the fortress arrived at party HQ requesting 250 grenades, but that evening, most party members and Cheka operatives evacuated across the ice to the mainland—the Revolutionary Committee had come to power without bloodshed. The next day the regime in Moscow issued a statement, signed by Lenin and Trotsky, denouncing the rebellion as a “White Guard Conspiracy” incited by French intelligence and adopting “Socialist Revolutionary-Black Hundred” resolutions.240 Some Cheka operatives accurately reported the sailors’ demands as “freedom of the press, the removal of barring detachments, freedom of trade, reelections to the soviets with a universal and secret ballot.”241 But the Bolshevik political police seized sailors’ wives and children in Petrograd as hostages, cut off all communication in a blockade of the island, and dropped leaflets from an airplane: “You are surrounded on all sides. . . . Kronstadt has no food, no fuel.” “You are being told fairy tales, like how Petrograd stands behind you. . . .”242 The sailors, unlike in 1917, had no means to communicate the truth about their insurrection. The regime used its press monopoly to slander the rebels and rally stalwarts to suppress proletarian sailors and soldiers in the name of a higher proletarian goal of defending the revolution. Moreover, the authorities, unlike in 1917, possessed a reliable instrument of repression—the Cheka.
Inside the Kronstadt republic, heated discussions broke out about whether to go on the attack, seizing Oranienbaum, on the mainland to the south, and Sestroretsk, on the mainland to the north, in order to extend the island’s defense perimeter; the Revolutionary Committee rejected the idea. The sailors behaved transparently, living the ideals they professed, publishing almost all Soviet government notices without shortening in the Kronstadt newspaper (edited by the chairman of the 1917 Kronstadt soviet), and sending delegations to Petrograd to negotiate; the Bolshevik authorities arrested the negotiators (they would be executed), instituted a vicious smear campaign, and issued an ultimatum to surrender—acting just like the repressive tsarist regime, as the sailors pointed out.243 On March 5, 1921, the politburo secretly assigned the task of “liquidating” the uprising to Tukhachevsky, and set the date of attack as March 8, the opening of the 10th Party Congress (which had been postponed from March 6). On the afternoon of March 5, Trotsky arrived on his armored train in Petrograd, where only months before he had vanquished Yudenich; the war commissar was accompanied by Tukhachevsky as well as Sergei Kamenev.244 On the night of March 7 an artillery barrage hit Kronstadt, and in the morning at 5:00 a.m. a multiprong crackdown began as Red Army infantry (many wearing white sheets) crossed the frozen white Gulf of Finland. The heavy assault across several miles of ice was turned back, however. “The sailors’ position is defended and they answer artillery with fire,” Tukhachevsky sheepishly reported to Sergei Kamenev.245 Trotsky telephoned for an explanation.246 The news was shocking: even specially chosen, archreliable Red Army units had vacillated.247
On the same morning of March 8 nearly 900 delegates (694 with voting rights), representing more than 700,000 Communist party members, gathered in Moscow for the 10th Party Congress underneath red banners proclaiming the victory of “the proletariat.”248 The Bolshoi Theater’s expansive parterre and five tiers of boxes were crammed to bursting. The Whites had been scattered—in the ground, prison, or exile—but large-scale industry had fallen 82 percent since 1913, coal output was one quarter of the 1913 level, electricity, one third.249 Combat with Poland had exposed the limits of the Red Army’s economic base, demanding a respite to rebuild, somehow.250 Politically, the non-agricultural labor force had declined since the October coup from 3.6 million to 1.5 million, and more than one third of the latter were artisans, leaving just 950,000 industrial workers in the workers state.251 That contrasted with perhaps 2.4 million functionaries. Workers in Petrograd and elsewhere, as well as sailors of the Baltic fleet, were demanding the same program urged upon them by Bolshevik agitators in 1917—“All Power to the Soviets!”—but now expressly without Bolshevik party members. Peasants, too, had taken up arms in the name of a genuine people’s power. World revolution had failed to materialize; on the contrary, the attempted revolutions surrounding Soviet Russia had been crushed. And to top it all off, Lenin faced organized opposition within party circles. Of course, party opposition to him had been constant: in the underground days, Martov and the Mensheviks opposed Lenin’s vision of the party and tactics; in 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the seizure of power; in 1918, Bukharin and the Left Communists opposed Brest-Litovsk; in 1919, the military opposition opposed tsarist officers. But now, a self-styled Workers’ opposition, headed by two stalwart Bolsheviks, Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, were demanding “party democracy” and real trade unions to defend workers’ rights.
Lenin was infuriated at the Workers’ opposition, but after all, he himself had allowed it ample opportunity to air its critique. By Central Committee decision, the party press had been carrying nasty polemics over trade unions since November-December 1920.252 This public debate beyond the halls of party meetings, so uncharacteristic, might actually have been a provocation by Lenin to make Trotsky discredit himself by broadcasting his unpopular turn-up-the-screws approach. Trotsky was demanding that unions become an arm of the state. Lenin seems to have conspired with Zinoviev to bait and then counterattack Trotsky (whom Zinoviev despised); Stalin counterattacked Trotsky, too.253 At the congress, Lenin won the policy battle: unions were neither merged into the state (Trotsky) nor afforded autonomy (Shlyapnikov). And yet, Lenin proved a sore winner.254 “Comrades,” he noted in his opening greetings, “we allowed ourselves the luxury of discussions and debates within our party.”255 The implication was that this “luxury” was going to end. Lenin also flashed his anger, telling Shlyapnikov that the fitting response to his criticism ought to be a gun.256 And although Trotsky, unlike Shlyapnikov, had refused his supporters’ urgings to form a formal faction for the congress, Lenin did not take kindly to his grandstanding. “Comrades, today comrade Trotsky polemicized with me especially politely and reproached or called me hyper-cautious,” Lenin told the delegates on March 14, in one of his milder outbursts. “I ought to thank him for the compliment and express regrets that I lack the opportunity to return it.”257
RELATIONS AMONG SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
Stalin’s responsibility at the 10th Party Congress, predictably, was the national question. The battle against Denikin and other Whites in 1919–20 had allowed the Red Army to reconquer Ukraine in the name of Soviet power, but the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic felt constrained to sign a so-called union treaty with the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the many such treaties with the different Soviet republics, on December 28, 1920.258 Despite the treaty’s name, however, the RSFSR and Ukrainian SSR did not establish an overarching union citizenship or supreme organs of rule above those of the member states, and they both continued to act separately in international relations. Soviet Ukraine, like Soviet Russia, would go on to sign a plethora of state-to-state treaties—with Poland, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—right through late 1921.259 Ukraine maintained missions abroad in Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, often in the same building as the RSFSR missions; Ukraine also had a representative office in Moscow.260 On the eve of the Party Congress, Stalin published theses on relations among the non-integrated Soviet republics. He argued that the treaty approach, essentially just begun, was already “exhausted,” demanding a new approach. “Not one Soviet republic taken separately can consider itself safe from economic exhaustion and military defeat by world imperialism,” he wrote. “Therefore, the isolated existence of separate Soviet republics has no firm basis in view of the threats to their existence from the capitalist states. . . . The national Soviet republics that have freed themselves from their own and from the foreign bourgeoisie will be able to defend their existence and conquer the united forces of imperialism only by joining in a close political union.”261 Such an integrated state, however, would require significant concessions by the non-Russian republics such as Ukraine.262
Amplifying these theses at the Party Congress in a report on March 10, Stalin called for “a federation of Soviet republics” and held up the RSFSR, a federation, as the model. He criticized Chicherin, the foreign affairs commissar, who was emerging as a rival, and praised “the state-ness in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkestan and other borderlands,” but warned of pan-Islam and pan-Turkism as a “deviation” rooted in national oppression of the past, rather than a forward-looking program to be embraced.263 The impact of Stalin’s speech appears to have been underwhelming. Trotsky and Zinoviev were absent, in Petrograd, taken up with the Kronstadt rebellion. From the rostrum the Georgian spoke slowly, in his characteristically accented and soft voice—there were no microphones yet. After polite applause, Klim Voroshilov, the Stalin loyalist assigned to preside over his session, recommended a break. “If we do not break,” Voroshilov admonished the delegates, “we must forbid here in the strictest way the milling about, reading of newspapers and other acts of impertinence.”
Voroshilov further announced that because of scheduling changes related to the Kronstadt situation, the delegates would have the night off and could go to the Bolshoi Theater. “Today,” he informed them, “the Bolshoi has ‘Boris Godunov,’ only without Chaliapin.”264 Voroshilov could have sung the part himself, but he was soon to depart for Kronstadt.
Forty delegates, apparently of the Turkestan delegation, had signed a petition demanding a coreport on nationalities by Georgy Voldin, known as Safarov (b. 1891). A half Armenian-half Pole born in St. Petersburg who alternated British-style pith helmets with a worker’s cap, he had arrived in Turkestan along with Frunze and was soon named to the Turkestan party bureau. Now he offered a rambling coreport, admitting that “in the [eastern] borderlands we did not have a strong revolutionary movement,” and that “in Turkestan the Communist party arose only after the October Revolution,” his way of explaining why it was full of rogues.265 Safarov demanded “corrections” to Stalin’s theses. In the discussion one of those given the floor, Anastasy Mikoyan, an ethnic Armenian party official in Azerbaijan, also challenged Stalin, objecting that “in the theses of comrade Stalin nothing is said about how we should approach classes in the borderlands, how precisely we should determine the class structure of these nationalities.” Again and again and again, even in cases when people, such as Mikoyan, urged that local conditions had to be accommodated, the Bolsheviks were trying to think and act through the ideology.266
When discussion was abruptly cut off, Mykola Skrypnyk (b. 1872), a Communist from Ukraine six years Stalin’s senior, interjected from the floor, “The national question is important, painful; comrade Stalin in his report did not in the least degree resolve this question.”267 But the Stalin tormentor Skrypnyk was not given the podium. Nor was Safarov allowed a closing statement. Stalin got the last word, and attacked an array of objections. “Here I have a written note to the effect that we, Communists, supposedly artificially forced a Belorussian nation,” he stated. “This is false, because a Belorussian nation exists, which has its own language, different from Russian, and that the culture of the Belorussian nation can be raised only in its own language. Such speeches were made five years ago about Ukraine, concerning the Ukrainian nation. . . Clearly, the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists. One cannot go against history.”268
The congress voted to adopt Stalin’s theses in toto as a basis and to form a seventeen-person commission for further action. His fundamental point—that “the national Soviet republics . . . will be able to defend their existence and conquer the united forces of imperialism only by joining in a close political union”—pointed toward resolute action on his part.269 Shortly after the Party Congress, on April 11, 1921, Stalin would have the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic annexed by the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
“PEASANT BREST-LITOVSK,” PARTY “UNITY”
After trade unions and the national question, the 10th Party Congress turned to the question of the ruined, seething countryside. Siberia’s delegation had set out for Moscow “armed to the teeth,” as one delegate recalled, needing to cross territories overrun by rebellious peasants with primitive weapons.270 On Lenin’s initiative, on the morning of March 15, after the elections to the new Central Committee had taken place, the congress took up a resolution to concede a tax in kind not just in Tambov but across Soviet Russia. The tax was to be lower than the most recent obligatory quotas, and whatever grain the peasants would have left over after paying the tax they would be able sell at market prices—which presupposed the legalization of private trade.271 “There is no need for me to go into great detail on the causes of the reconsideration,” Lenin explained to the congress, adding “there is no doubt that in a country where the immense majority of the population belongs to the petty land-holding producers, a socialist revolution is possible only via a whole host of transition measures, which would be unnecessary in a developed capitalist country.”272
Illegal private trade already accounted for at least 70 percent of grain sales. But opposition to legalization persisted. The relative merits of obligatory quotas versus taxation and private trade had been debated on and off since 1918, nearly always ending with affirmations of the proletariat needing “to lead” the peasantry (signifying grain requisitioning to feed the cities).273 Trotsky, in February 1920, had proposed a tax in kind that would incentivize more planting, meaning that successful farmers (kulaks) would not be penalized, but he did not mention accompanying free trade, instead writing of “goods exchange” (tovaroobmen) and “labor obligations” (povinnost’). His dirigiste theses had been rejected.274 True, as a result of the uprising in Tambov, even the leftist hothead Bukharin had come around to the need for concessions.275 But for the majority in the hall, Lenin’s proposal came as a stunning blow because he admitted, unlike Trotsky in 1920, that introduction of the tax necessitated legal private trade.276
The need for a new policy was obvious, but demoralizing all the same. “How is it possible for a Communist party to recognize freedom of trade and transition to it?” Lenin asked himself in front of the delegates. “Are there not here irreconcilable contradictions?” He did not answer, only calling the questions “extremely difficult.”277 But whatever the theoretical morass, Lenin belatedly insisted that the war-torn country absolutely had to have a breathing spell. His leadership was crucial in breaking what he had helped to create: namely, the militant vicious circle of requisitioning whereby a dearth of grain supplied to
cities induced ever more gun-point requisitioning, resulting in ever less grain.278 Lenin caught a break at the evening session that same day (March 15) when David Ryazanov, a respected Marxist theoretician, felicitously dubbed the shift to a tax in kind and free trade a “peasant Brest-Litovsk.”279 The Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been widely opposed in the party, of course, but it had quickly proved Lenin right. Lenin again got his way.
Lenin’s peasant Brest-Litovsk went hand in hand with an absolute refusal of concessions to political critics. On March 16, the last day of the 10th Party Congress, a surprise took place that was no less consequential than the shift to legal private trade: Lenin took the floor again, and spoke in support of a resolution “on party unity.” It required immediate dissolution of groups supporting separate platforms on pain of expulsion from the party. (Ironically, the emergence of the Workers’ opposition had resulted from a decision to allow public discussion of the trade union question and elect congress delegates by “platform.”) In other words, the archfactionalist Lenin now wanted an end to all factions (besides his own). “I do not think it will be necessary for me to say much on this subject,” he again disingenuously remarked when introducing the unity resolution, which in effect rendered “opposition” illegal.280 The congress delegates present voted 413 in favor and 25 against, with 2 abstentions.281 Karl Radek, in his characteristic out-of-the-mouths-of-babes fashion, stated that “in voting for this resolution I feel that it can well be turned against us.” Nonetheless, he supported “on party unity,” saying, “Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best party comrades, if it finds this necessary.”282
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