Soviets without Communists
당 없는 소비에트
The slogan raised by Kronstadt sailors during their March 1921 rebellion, demanding free elections to new soviets that would exclude Bolshevik one-party domination and include left socialist parties and anarchists. Under the principle of 'Power to the Soviets, not to the parties!,' the demand was elaborated in the fifteen-point Petropavlovsk Resolution, which called for abolishing party political departments, restoring freedom of speech and assembly, granting peasants full control over land, and ending grain requisitioning. The revolt was crushed, but the popular discontent crystallized in this slogan directly impelled the Bolshevik leadership to abandon War Communism and adopt the New Economic Policy.
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- Wikipedia (EN) the Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921, its Petropavlovsk Resolution of 15 demands, and the slogan "Soviets without Communists" as the rebels' central political demand
- booksite.ru Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry on the Kronstadt anti-Soviet mutiny, recording the slogan "Советы без коммунистов" and the rebels' aim of transferring power to petty-bourgeois parties
- diletant.media full text of the Kronstadt garrison resolution of 1 March 1921, whose first point demanded re-election of soviets by secret ballot because "present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants"
- newpol.org Alexei Gusev, New Politics (2021): scholarly analysis of the Kronstadt revolt as part of the Great Russian Revolution, discussing the "third revolution" slogan and its place in the revolutionary process