Blackwell Reference Online

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The Kronstadt Mutiny refers to an uprising in the early part of March 1921 by Russian sailors at the Kronstadt naval base on Kotlin Island, near the Gulf of Finland, against the Bolshevik regime. The uprising remains of key historical importance to this day, drawing differing and opposing positions on the Russian Revolution , and questions of workers' control, the nature of post-revolutionary politics, and where power should lie. Broadly speaking, left communists and class struggle anarchists almost without exception take the view that the Kronstadt revolt was an authentic proletarian uprising against an authoritarian regime, controlled by a new bureaucratic class. Leninists, by contrast, are equally firm in their belief, albeit with a few variations, that the suppression of the rebellion led by Leon Trotsky was vital – however regrettable – to the survival of the revolution. The uprising was the culmination of a period of discontent across a country ravaged by famine and poverty, following the end of the Russian Civil War . Lenin's policy of War Communism saw production in many sectors falling to around 20 percent of pre-World War I levels, creating intense hardship for the general population in the process. Elsewhere, in the Ukraine, Nestor Makhno's anarchist guerrilla army would soon finally be crushed by the Bolshevik regime it had helped sustain against the counterrevolutionary ... log in or subscribe to read full text