Section Four: Kronstadt and Makhno¶
Core Argument¶
This section argues that the Kronstadt rebellion and the Makhno movement were not heroic, libertarian uprisings against Bolshevik tyranny, as later anti-communist mythology claims, but rather expressions of the petty-bourgeois peasantry’s contradictory position in a backward, agrarian Russia during the Civil War. The core narrative thrust is that these movements, despite their anarchist or anti-Bolshevik slogans, were objectively reactionary, driven by the conservatism of a peasantry that had secured land through the October Revolution and sought to defend its new property against both the White counter-revolution and the demands of the urban working class.
The chapter grounds its analysis in the socio-economic structure of post-revolutionary Russia, where peasants constituted 86% of the population. It argues that the Bolsheviks, unlike the Mensheviks, correctly understood the need for a worker-peasant alliance, demonstrated by the Decree on Land and the inclusion of the Left SRs in the first Soviet government. However, the Civil War’s pressures—grain requisitioning (prodrazverstka), conscription, and the collapse of urban industry—drove a wedge between city and countryside. The peasantry, having gained its land, swung toward conservatism, a mood the chapter compares to later Third World peasant movements like the Khmer Rouge.
The Makhno movement is dissected as a typical peasant army, strong in guerrilla warfare but incapable of sustained operations or urban governance. The chapter uses primary sources to demolish its libertarian pretensions: Makhno’s regime was brutally centralised, with appointed commanders, a secret police led by the notorious Leo Zadov, and a hostility toward workers that saw railwaymen denied wages and an armoured car seized without payment. The movement’s alliance with the Red Army was tactical and short-lived, collapsing over Makhno’s refusal to accept discipline and his banditry against Red convoys. The New Economic Policy, by replacing grain requisitions with a tax, undercut Makhno’s peasant base, leading to his defeat and flight.
The Kronstadt rebellion is treated as a parallel case, but the chapter’s main polemic is directed at the “mythology” constructed by ex-Trotskyists like Victor Serge and Max Eastman, who portrayed it as a workers’ revolt and the “first step towards Stalinism.” The chapter counters with archival evidence: by 1921, the Kronstadt garrison had been flooded with over 10,000 green conscripts from Makhno-influenced regions, with only 5,000 of the 18,707 total actually rebelling. The old revolutionary sailors, far from leading the uprising, actively resisted it, publishing pamphlets against the “counter-revolutionary putsch” and eventually surrendering the battleship Petropavlovsk to Soviet forces. The leadership is exposed as including General Elvengern, an agent of the counter-revolutionary Boris Savinkov, who cynically adopted the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks” as a tactical ploy. The chapter’s most damning evidence is a letter from sailor Dmitry Urin, revealing the rebellion’s antisemitic character: “We dismissed the commune… we made a resolution to send all the Jews to Palestine.”
The theoretical context is Lenin and Trotsky’s analysis of the petty-bourgeoisie’s vacillating nature in a period of intense class war. The chapter argues that slogans like “Soviets without Bolsheviks” are not a third path but a bridge to counter-revolution, and that no revolution can succeed without a revolutionary party. It concludes by distinguishing between rank-and-file anarchists, Mensheviks, and SRs who fought alongside the Bolsheviks, and their anti-Bolshevik leaders, whose legacy is now being exposed by newly opened Soviet archives.