Kronstadt: Trotsky Was Right!¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter mounts a vigorous defence of the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921, arguing that newly opened Soviet archives vindicate the position taken by Trotsky at the time and refute the anti-Bolshevik mythology that has since accumulated around the event. The author, A. Kramer, frames the piece as a response to decades of bourgeois historiography that sought to use Kronstadt to collapse the distinction between Lenin and Trotsky’s revolutionary government and the later Stalinist degeneration. The core claim is that the rebellion was not a spontaneous workers’ and sailors’ uprising against Bolshevik dictatorship, but a petit-bourgeois putsch led by counterrevolutionary officers, financed by émigré and foreign capital, and opposed by a significant section of the Kronstadt garrison itself.
Kramer draws on two recent Russian publications—The Unknown Trotsky: the Red Bonaparte (2000) and Kronstadt 1921 (2001)—neither written by Bolshevik sympathisers, to substantiate this case. He cites documentary evidence that the real command lay not with the Kronstadt Soviet but with the “Court for the Defence of Kronstadt Fortress,” headed by Rear Admiral Dmitriev and General Kozlovsky, both tsarist officers. Financial backing came from the former tsarist minister Kokovzev and the Russian-Asian Bank, with promises of aid from French Prime Minister Briand. The author also notes that the rebel leader Petrichenko later became a Stalinist agent, a fact that undermines romanticised anarchist accounts.
Crucially, Kramer challenges the myth of mass Red Army sympathy for the rebels. He reports that only one battalion—recruited from former White prisoners—defected, and that refusals to attack were motivated by poor conditions and fear of crossing ice, not politics. Inside Kronstadt, some ships declared neutrality or moved against the rebels, and intelligence reports indicate that many sailors wanted to surrender but were terrorised by their commanders. Most strikingly, the workers of the town itself rose against the putschists and liberated Kronstadt before the Red Army arrived.
The chapter’s polemical target is broad: bourgeois historians, anarchists, and leftists who treat Kronstadt as a founding myth of anti-Bolshevism. Kramer explicitly aligns with Trotsky’s 1938 article Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt and includes an appendix quoting Ted Grant, who emphasises that the 1921 garrison bore no relation to the Bolshevik sailors of 1917, having been replaced by raw peasant levies. The argument is that in conditions of civil war and imperialist intervention, the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks” could only clear the path for counterrevolution—a fact understood by ordinary workers and soldiers at the time, if not by later intellectuals.