A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The next morning hundreds of prisoners from the Kronstadt base were marched through Petrograd on their route to prison. Near the centre they saw a group of workers carrying sacks of potatoes on their backs. 'Traitors!' the sailors shouted, 'you have sold our lives for Communist potatoes. Tomorrow you will have our flesh to eat with your potatoes.' Later that night some 500 rebels were shot without trial on Zinoviev's orders: the regular executioners refused to do it, so a brigade of teenage Komsomols was ordered to shoot the sailors instead. Some of the rebels managed to flee to Gorky's flat and tell him of these executions. Gorky was outraged — like many socialists he had supported the rebellion from the start — and at once called Lenin to complain. The Bolshevik leader ordered Zinoviev to explain his actions before a party meeting in Gorky's flat. But at the meeting Zinoviev promptly had a heart attack (Gorky later claimed that it was faked) and the result was that he was only lightly reprimanded for an action which, in any case, Lenin had probably approved. During the following months 2,000 more rebels were executed, nearly all of them without trial, while hundreds of others were sent on Lenin's orders to Solovki, the first big Soviet concentration camp on an island in the White Sea, where they died a slower death from hunger, illness and exhaustion. About 8,000 Kronstadt rebels escaped across the ice to Finland, where they were interned and put to public works. Some of them were later lured back to Russia by the

promise of an amnesty — only to be shot or sent to concentration camps on their return.⁵⁷

The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion had a shattering effect on socialists throughout the world. There could not be a more conclusive proof that the Bolsheviks had turned into tyrants. Alexander Berkman, with 'the last thread of his faith in the Bolsheviks broken', wandered in despair through the streets of Petrograd — the city where the revolution had been born and where it had now died. On 18 March he noted with bitter irony in his diary: 'The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.'⁵⁸

Military might and ruthless terror also held the key to the suppression of the major peasant revolts, although in some places such as the Volga region famine and exhaustion did the job instead. The turning point came in the early summer, when the Bolsheviks rethought their military strategy: instead of sending in small detachments to fight the rebels they swamped the rebel areas with troops and unleashed a campaign of mass terror against those villages that supported the rebels whilst trying to ween away the others through propaganda. The new strategy was first applied in Tambov province, where Tukhachevsky, fresh from his success against Kronstadt, was sent in April to crush the Antonov revolt. By the height of the operation in June the insurgent areas were occupied by a force of over 100,000 men, most of them crack troops from the elite Communist security units and the Komsomol, together with several hundred heavy guns and armoured cars. Aeroplanes were used to track the movement of the bands and to drop bombs and propaganda on to their strongholds. Poison gas was also used to 'smoke the bands out of the forests'. Through paid informers, the rebels and their families were singled out for arrest as hostages and imprisoned in specially constructed concentration camps: by the end of June there were 50,000 peasants in the Tambov camps, including over 1,000 children. It was not unusual for whole village populations to be interned and later shot or deported to the Arctic Circle if the rebels did not surrender. Sometimes the rebel villages were simply burned to the ground. In just one volost of the Tambov district — and it was not even particularly noted as a rebel stronghold — 154 peasants were shot, 227 families were taken hostage, 17 houses were burned down and 46 were torn down or transferred to informers. Overall, it has been estimated that 100,000 people were imprisoned or deported and 15,000 people shot during the suppression of the revolt.⁵⁹

Along with the big stick there was also a small carrot to induce the peasants to abandon their support for the rebels. Villages that passed a resolution condemning the 'bandits' were rewarded from a special fund of salt and manufactured goods. The Bolsheviks were counting on the rebels, once they heard of these resolutions, to take reprisals against the treacherous villages so that they