MacNeill on Rua on Trotsky

It is a very great pity that Graham Rua, in his article "Blood on Trotsky's Toga", presented such an incredibly biased selection of 'facts' and quotations in an article dedicated to the laudable aim of 'revolutionary demystification'.

As Trotsky pointed out in 1938 those who make great play of the Kronstadt uprising "try to present the matter as if at the beginning of 1921 the Bolsheviks turned their guns on those very Kronstadter sailors who guaranteed the victory of the October revolution. Here is the point of departure of all subsequent falsehoods".

Precisely because they were the best revolutionaries the Kronstadt sailors were dispersed over more than a dozen fronts of Russia. Many of their replacements at the garrison were revolutionary peasants who haled the landlords but had no particular love for the working class or socialism. Trotsky wrote that by 1919 there were complaints from the from that the new contingents of Kronstadt were "unreliable in battle and doing more harm than good".

By the end of the Civil War there were incredibly harsh conditions of starvation etc. throughout Russia. The peasants in particular felt aggrieved because for more than 3 years they had been forced to supply food to the towns for little or no return. The situation at Kronstadt, where food speculation was rife, reflected the tremendous discontent throughout the country, and the desire for a free market in food.

A free market was introduced under the New Economic Policy in 1924. Trotsky in fact advocated the idea a year before Lenin did, and had his view prevailed earlier the discontent that gave rise to the uprising would largely have been dissipated.

G. Rua falsely imputes a direct personal responsibility to Trotsky for the suppression of the uprising. Certainly as a member of the Bolshevik Government he accepted his share of the political responsibility, saying that though the New Economic Policy should have been implemented earlier that did not mean that the revolution should cut its own throat to atone for it.

Had the Bolsheviks failed to storm Kronstadt while the sea remained frozen, the naval forces of the capitalist states would undoubtedly have intervened and seized a position of immense strategic value. However in the administrative sense Trotsky bore no responsibility for suppressing the uprising. All counterinsurgent action was directed by Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka.

G. Rua talks naively about the anarchist Makhno. For all his 'successes' against the White armies Mahkno was unable to defeat the Red Army because the well-to-do Kulaks who supported him failed to gain the support of either the workers or the poor peasants. Why is G. Rua so reticent about Mahkno's blatant anti-semitism. His atrocities against Jews require some explanation.

For further information to refute anarchist accounts of Kronstadt, Mahkno etc. write to the Marxist labour Group, P.O. Box 3906, Wellington.