Radek and the party had now conceded the principle that, no matter the actual facts of the case, the Central Committee was always right.
In 1936-38 Radek, along with Rykov, Tomsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Shliapnikov–and thousands of other Old Bolsheviks–would all be purged from the party, arrested and executed. One of the reasons used to justify their infamous Moscow Trials was the “factionalism” (mixed with sabotage, espionage and other alleged crimes) of the accused, and how any such activity was, objectively, counter-revolutionary. The other charges were false, supported by manufactured evidence and confessions extracted by torture, but the claim that any opposition to Stalin, and to a Central Committee dominated by Stalin, was inherently counter-revolutionary had a twisted logic derived from the ban on factions. Those who had supported the ban, like Radek and Bukharin, stood helpless before these accusations. Their dilemma was captured perfectly in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), a novel which expresses more about the grim logic of Leninism than the entire army of Lenin apologists then and since.
Stalin began the purge with the arrest and execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev and others classed as a “Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc”, and expanded it to take in tens of thousands of people accused of political crimes. NKVD Order 00447 authorised mass arrests of all whom the NKVD considered anti-Soviet elements, such as most of the intelligentsia, “ex-Kulaks” and non-Russian nationalists. These were divided into those to be immediately shot and those sent to the Gulag. The order also authorised execution of those already held in work camps on the grounds of “continuing counter-revolutionary activity”. Unlike previous purges, this one annihilated the party itself. Of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested and most of these were executed. Of 139 members of the Central Committee of 1934, only 29 were still alive by 1939, the rest having been shot or driven to suicide. By its end point the Great Terror saw between 600,000 and 1.2 million people executed.29
Trotsky himself offered the ultimate capitulation at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, the first after Lenin’s death, which Stalin’s Secretariat organised so well that not a single Oppositionist attended as a delegate. Faced with a storm of condemnation of his The Lessons of October (1924), which had made criticisms of the “Triumvirate” of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky had to bend the knee. “The party in the last analysis is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems”, he told the Congress. “I know that one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through the party, for history has not created other ways for the realisation of what is right”.30
The National Bolsheviks had won. Of all the “oppositions” within the Bolshevik Party, only Shliapnikov and Kollontai could honestly claim that they had opposed the termination of internal party democracy and the subsequent fast-track to Stalinism. And even they were as complicit as all other Bolshevik leaders in establishing the one-party state and the denial of civil and democratic rights to non-party oppositionists in 1917-18. With hardly any exceptions, they all forged the weapons which killed them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Meet the New Boss
In comparison to the Workers’ Opposition, the Left Opposition of 1923-24 and the “United Opposition” of 1927, though later lauded as the authentic Bolshevik opposition to Stalinist bureaucracy, were internal splinter groups easily suppressed. By the time Trotsky stirred to overt opposition the battle was already over, and Trotsky himself had played a leading role in disarming all who might have defeated Stalin–the trade unions, the Workers’ Opposition and, most especially, the Kronstadt sailors. The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 did not spring from nowhere, nor was it an anarchist-monarchist conspiracy (as some on the Marxist left, even today, maintain). It was a genuine, mass-based and popular working-class revolt against an oppressive state in favour of a system of radical socialist democracy.
The Fortress and the city of Kronstadt were situated on Kotlin Island, 20 miles west of Petrograd in the Gulf of Finland. A series of sea forts ran across the gulf to further protect Petrograd. In winter the sea between the mainland and Kotlin Island froze. Onto this unique and enclosed location–close to revolutionary Petrograd yet isolated enough to create a great sense of camaraderie and professional pride–were thrown some of the most independent-minded and instinctively rebellious workers and peasants in the Russian Empire.
Once inducted into the massive Baltic Fleet they were given a level of technical training and professional responsibility denied most production-line factory workers. The sailors of the Fleet were temperamentally anarchist and politically syndicalist, instinctively resistant to the hierarchy and discipline imposed by their aristocratic officers. Between the formation of the SR Party in 1901 and the 1905 Revolution, they soaked up the political propaganda of the SRs that reached them across the ice from Petrograd, and formed mini-Soviets of their own to discuss politics and organise around their own grievances.
The Kronstadt Soviet established in the February 1917 Revolution was virtually independent from 1917 to 1921. The unique nature of Kronstadt, where the sailors both lived and worked, made it more of a mass commune than a political forum. Inside the base were mini-communities where sailors, workers and bourgeois intellectuals laboured together on urban garden plots. Unlike the chaotic property sequestrations of Petrograd, Kronstadt distributed property according to family size. The sailors–recipients of the “special rations” that went to party cadres and militias–shared their portions with the rest of the city. Not for nothing has the Kronstadt commune been called “one of the most vivid utopian socialist experiments to surface in the revolution”.1
After the suppression of the 1921 revolt, the Bolsheviks claimed the sailors who had rebelled were not the same individuals as “the pride and glory of the revolution” hailed by Trotsky in 1917. Yet Kronstadt as a city, a workplace and a forge of revolutionary sentiment was basically the same in February 1921 as in October 1917. Three quarters of the sailors serving in the Baltic Fleet in 1921 had been serving in March 1918. It is true there had been a “churn” of sailors during those years as some went to fight on various fronts of the Civil War, but the nature of the Fleet (i.e. it consisted of warships that departed and returned to a fixed base) meant there was a definite degree of continuity. Nor were new recruits depoliticised. Israel Getzler’s history of Kronstadt from 1917-21 found that “by the end of 1919 thousands of veteran sailors, who had served on many fronts of the civil war, and in the administrative network of the expanding Soviet state, had returned to the Baltic Fleet and to Kronstadt, most by way of remobilisation”.2
If anything, the experience of the Civil War gave the sailors a sharper sense of the surrounding political environment than they had possessed in 1917, when their actions were driven more by visceral anti-government emotion rather than conscious political ideology. The record of the Kronstadt sailors and the Baltic Fleet bears out Paul Avrich’s conclusion that “throughout the Civil War of 1918-1920 the sailors of Kronstadt, and the Baltic Fleet as a whole, remained the torchbearers of revolutionary militancy”.3