Introduction to anarchist communism - Anarchist Federation
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A Communist Left Critique of Platformism (Part I): The Makhnovshchina
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The digital version of this text was originally published at Anarchy Archives.
On March 1, 1921, a citizen’s assembly in Kronstadt approved the Petropavlovsk Resolution listing 15 demands to the Bolshevik government in Petrograd. This date marks the start of the Kronstadt Rebellion in which sailors, soldiers and citizens took a stance against the demagoguery of the Bolsheviks in power.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1921 uprising, we are republishing Emma Goldman’s account of the material and ideological motivations behind it and her reflections on the government’s repression, which, in her words, “was characterized by ruthless savagery” and led her to break all ties with the Communist Party.
For three-quarters of a century, anarchists and other opponents of the 1917 Bolshevik putsch and subsequent counterrevolution have cited the uprising of the mutinous Baltic Fleet sailors and garrison soldiers at Kronstadt as one of the final social eruptions of the Russian Revolution.
The March 1921 events at the naval base on Kotlin Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of St. Petersburg, are one of the landmark occurrences in the history of revolutionary resistance to the authoritarian state. In the wake of Kronstadt’s suppression, Lenin and his cabal were left in uncontested command of the solidified “dictatorship of the proletariat.”