On March 18, 1921, the young Soviet Government sponsored public celebrations in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune. According to all radical leftists, the commune was a revolt led by Parisian workers and petty-bourgeois radicals against the authority of the defeated French government in Tours. For all who witnessed, watched, and historicized, it was (and is) a symbol of revolutionary action, where the proletariat barricaded the city and took control, forming collective defense and mutual aid organizations for two months. For example, according to Karl Marx and his disciple Vladimir Lenin, the Paris Commune was the first instance of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in action.[1] But to Anarchists like Marx’s rival Mikhail Bakunin, the Paris Commune of 1871 reflected the heart of Anarchism: a “spontaneous and continu[ing] action of the masses, [groups] and the associations of the people” brought together to destroy the state.[2] After the dust cleared and the government of the French Third Republic reclaimed power, the legacy of the Paris Commune became a central point of contention between Marxist and Anarchist revolutionaries that has conditioned its historiography ever since. Both groups wanted to claim the communards as part of their hagiography, and hence they differed over how to interpret the causes and failures of the commune.
It is ironic, then, that as Soviet Petrograd celebrated the historic Paris commune, the Red Army moved to suppress a similar revolutionary commune in Kronstadt. In March 1921, Bolshevik soldiers surrounded Kotlin Island across the Neva Delta in the Baltic Sea and made their way for the garrison at Kronstadt. The sailors in the city were renowned revolutionaries: they helped the Bolsheviks come to power in 1917, and now they were leading their own “third revolution” against the Bolsheviks who, they argued, imposed repressive, monopolistic policies.[3] The ensuing uprising and its consequences, much like the Paris Commune before it, has since become a point of contention between Marxists and Anarchists, leaving gaps and unanswered questions in the historiography along the way.
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