word to the world that “Kronstadt has sold itself to Finland.” Their newspapers spit fire and poison, and because they have failed to persuade the proletariat that Kronstadt is in the hands of counter-revolutionists, they are now trying to play on the nationalistic feelings.
The whole world already knows from our radios what the Kronstadt garrison and workers are fighting for. But the Communists are striving, to pervert the meaning of events and thus mislead our Petrograd brothers.
Petrograd is surrounded by the bayonets of the kursanti and the Party “guards,” and Maliuta Skuratov—Trotsky—does not permit the delegates of the nonpartisan workers and soldiers to go to Kronstadt. He fears they would learn the whole truth there, and that truth would immediately sweep the Communists away and the thus enlightened laboring masses would take the power into their own horny hands.
That is the reason that the Petro-Soviet (Soviet of Petrograd) did not reply to our radio-telegram in which we asked that really impartial comrades be sent to Kronstadt.
Fearing for their own skins, the leaders of the Communists suppress the truth and disseminate the lie that White guardists are active in Kronstadt, that the Kronstadt proletariat has sold itself to Finland and to French spies, that the Finns have already organised an army in order to attack Petrograd with the aid of the Kronstadt myatezhniki (mutineers), and so forth.
To all this we can reply only this: All power to the Soviets! Keep your hands off them, the hands that are red with the blood of the martyrs of liberty who have died fighting against the White guardists, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie!In simple and frank speech Kronstadt sought to express the will of the people yearning for freedom and for the opportunity to shape their own destinies. It felt itself the advance guard, so to speak, of the proletariat of Russia about to rise in defense of the great aspirations for which the people had fought and suffered in the October Revolution. The faith of Kronstadt in the Soviet system was deep and firm; its all-inclusive slogan, All power to the Soviets, not to parties! That was its program; it did not have time to develop it or to theorize. It strove for the emancipation of the people from the Communist yoke. That yoke, no longer bearable, made a new revolution, the
