Soviets without Communists

The Slogan and Its Demands

"Soviets without Communists" (Советы без коммунистов) was raised alongside "Power to the Soviets, not to the parties!" at the rally of some 16,000 people in Kronstadt's Anchor Square on 1 March 1921. What the slogan demanded was not the abolition of the soviet system but the return of party-controlled soviets to workers and peasants through free elections. The fifteen-point resolution adopted on 28 February by the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol, and endorsed unchanged by the square, began from the finding that "the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants" and made re-election by secret ballot its first clause. Further clauses demanded the abolition of political departments, freedom of speech, assembly and association for workers and peasants and for anarchists and left socialist parties, the release of political prisoners, peasants' free disposal of the land, equalised rations, and the immediate removal of the food-requisitioning detachments. The crews voted down clauses permitting unrestricted free trade and expelling Jews.

Continuity and Rupture with 1917

The slogan threw the Bolsheviks' own 1917 watchword, "All power to the Soviets!", back at the party that had come to rule in their name. The rebels cast themselves as a "third revolution" that would remove party dictatorship and restore power to freely elected soviets, completing the October Revolution; even a plenipotentiary of the All-Russian Cheka's Special Section reported to Trotsky that these sailors "could well form the basis for a possible third revolution." The movement sought reform rather than the overthrow of the party, and many local Communists at the rally supported the resolution; the Communists arrested by the delegate assembly on 2 March numbered 326, about a fifth of the local party membership.

How the Bolsheviks and Soviet Historiography Defined It

Lenin characterised the demands as "semi-anarchist" and "petty-bourgeois," and the Labour and Defence Council decree of 3 March signed by Lenin and Trotsky branded the rebels' resolution "Black-Hundred SR" while naming the former tsarist general Alexander Kozlovsky as the leader of the revolt. Trotsky issued an ultimatum on 5 March demanding immediate and unconditional surrender. That framing became canonical in Soviet scholarship: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia holds that the leaders of the revolt advanced the slogan "Soviets without Communists" counting on power passing to petty-bourgeois parties, which in practice would have meant the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the creation of conditions for open White Guardism and capitalist restoration.

Legacy and Historiography

The New Economic Policy resolution had already been submitted to the party's Central Committee on 24 February, five days before the revolt, and the Kronstadt crisis accelerated the abandonment of War Communism; in 1924 Stalin named Kronstadt and the Tambov peasant uprising as the reasons for the policy change. After the fortress fell, 2,103 people were sentenced to death and 6,459 to forced labour camps. Historiography divided between the concept of a "Kronstadt anti-Soviet mutiny," developed in Soviet scholarship, and the concept of a "Kronstadt anti-communist uprising," current outside the USSR, with a distinct version that Trotsky put forward in exile in 1938 added to them. In 1994 President Boris Yeltsin rehabilitated the participants of the revolt.