Victor Serge, a belated convert to Bolshevism who tried to bridge the gulf between anarchism and Marxism, on why “after much hesitation, my Communist friends and I finally sided with the party” in the violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion:
"It was a painful step to take, and this is why we did it: the Kronstadt sailors, we reasoned, were right. They had begun a new freedom-giving revolution which would lead to popular democracy. Certain Anarchists who had not outgrown the illusions of childhood gave it a name: the 'Third Revolution'. The country, by this time, was in bad shape. Production had come virtually to a stop. Reserves of all kinds had been used up, including even the reserves of nervous energy which sustain popular morale. The workers' elite, formed in the course of the struggles under the old regime, had literally been decimated. The party, its membership swollen by the influx of bandwagon riders, inspired little confidence. And there was nothing left of the other parties but tiny cadres, of doubtful ability. Some of them, to be sure, might in a few weeks' time have put on flesh, but only by admitting en masse the soured, the bitter, the exasperated—very different types from the 1917 enthusiasts of the young revolution. Soviet democracy had lost its vitality. It lacked leadership. It had no organisational basis. And it had no defenders, except among the hungry and desperate masses of the people. "The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-elected Soviets into the slogan "Soviets without Communists!" If the Bolshevik dictatorship were to fall, we felt, the result would be chaos: peasant putsches, the massacre of the Communists, the return of the émigrés, and, finally, another dictatorship, of necessity anti-proletarian. The dispatches from Stockholm and Tallinn showed that the émigrés were thinking in precisely these terms. (These dispatches, by the way, strengthened the determination of the leaders to put down the Kronstadt rebellion quickly, and without regard to the cost.) Our thinking about all this had, furthermore, a factual basis. We knew of fifty rallying-points for peasant insurrections in European Russia alone. We knew that Antonov, the proponent of Revolutionary Socialism of the Right, was active in the area south of Moscow, and that he was preaching both the destruction of the Soviet regime and the reinstatement of the Constituent Assembly. He had at his command, in and around Tambov, a skillfully organized army made up of several tens of thousands of peasants, and he had negotiated with the Whites. (Tukachevsky liquidated this Vendee towards the middle of 1921.) "In these circumstances, the party should have beat a retreat by admitting that the existing economic set-up was indefensible. It should not, however, have given up power. 'In spite of its faults, in spite of its abuses, in spite of everything,' I wrote at the time, 'the Bolshevik party, because of its size, its insight, its stability, is the organized force to which we must pin our faith. The Revolution has at its disposal no other weapon, and it is no longer capable of genuine renewal from within’.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1945/memoirs/ch04x.htm#h3 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34565): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34565 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110564929/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
