principle of “equal rights for all, privileges to none.” The pahyok (food ration) was equalised. The sailors, who under Bolshevik rule always received rations far in excess of those allotted to the workers, themselves voted to accept no more than the average citizen and toiler. Special rations and delicacies were given only to hospitals and children’s homes.
The just and generous attitude of the Revolutionary Committee toward the Kronstadt members of the Communist Party—few of whom had been arrested in spite of Bolshevik repressions and the holding of the sailors’ families as hostages—won the respect even of the Communists. The pages of the Izvestia contain numerous communications from Communist groups and organisations of Kronstadt, condemning the attitude of the Central Government and indorsing the stand and measures of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. Many Kronstadt Communists publicly announced their withdrawal from the Party as a protest against its despotism and bureaucratic corruption. In various issues of the Izvestia there are to be found hundreds of names of Communists whose conscience made it impossible for them to “remain in the Party of the executioner Trotsky,” as some of them expressed it. Resignations from the Communist Party soon became so numerous as to resemble a general exodus.[1] The following letters, taken at random from a large batch, sufficiently characterise the sentiment of the Kronstadt Communists:
I have come to realise that the policies of the Communist Party have brought the country into a hopeless blind alley from which there is no exit. The Party has become bureaucratic, it has learned nothing and it does not want to learn. It refuses to listen to the voice of 115 million peasants; it does not want to consider that only freedom of speech and opportunity to participate in the reconstruction of the country, by means of altered election methods, can bring our country out of its lethargy.
- ↑ The Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Russia considered its Kronstadt Section so “demoralised” that after the defeat of Kronstadt it ordered a complete re-registration of all Kronstadt Communists.A. B.
