and other barbarities. But life under the Communist dictatorship is more terrible than death. ***
There is no middle road. To conquer or to die! The example is being set by Kronstadt, the terror of counter-revolution from the right and from the left. Here has taken place the great revolutionary deed. Here is raised the banner of rebellion against the three-year old tyranny and oppression of Communist autocracy, which has put in the shade the three-hundred-year old despotism of monarchism. Here, in Kronstadt, has been laid the cornerstone of the Third Revolution which is to break the last chains of the worker and open the new, broad road to Socialist creativeness.
This new Revolution will rouse the masses of the East and the West, and it will serve as an example of new Socialist constructiveness, in contradistinction to the governmental, cut-and-dried Communist “construction.” The laboring masses will learn that what has been done till now in the name of the workers and peasants was not Socialism.
Without firing a single shot, without shedding a drop of blood, the first step has been taken. Those who labor need no blood. They will shed it only in self-defense. *** The workers and peasants march on: they are leaving behind them the utchredilka (Constituent Assembly) with its bourgeois régime and the Communist Party dictatorship with its Tcheka and State capitalism, which have put the noose around the neck of the workers and threaten to strangle them to death.
The present change offers the laboring masses the opportunity of securing, at last, freely elected Soviets which will function without fear of the Party whip; they can now reorganise the governmentalised labor unions into voluntary associations of workers, peasants, and the working intelligentsia. At last is broken the police club of Communist autocracy.That was the program, those the immediate demands, for which the Bolshevik Government began the attack of Kronstadt at 6.45 P.M., March 7, 1921.
V. BOLSHEVIK ULTIMATUM TO KRONSTADT
Kronstadt was generous. Not a drop of Communist blood did it shed, in spite of all the provocation, the blockade of the city and the repressive measures on the part of the Bolshevik Government. It scorned to imitate the Communist example of vengeance, even going to the extent of
