Living My Life - Emma Goldman [284]
It was my first opportunity in Russia to hear Trotsky. We might remind him of his parting words in New York, I thought; the hope he had expressed that we should come to Russia soon to assist in the great work made possible by the overthrow of tsarism. We would plead with him to let us help settle the Kronstadt difficulty in a comradely spirit, to dispose of our time and energies, even of our lives, in the supreme test to which the Revolution was putting the Communist Party.
Unfortunately Trotsky’s train was delayed and he failed to appear at the session. The men who addressed the gathering were beyond reason or appeal. Fanaticism run mad was in their words, and blind fear in their hearts. [ ... ]
Above the din of the howling and stamping mob a single voice strove to be heard—the tense, earnest voice of a man in the front rows. He was a delegate of the striking employees at the arsenal works. He was moved to protest, he declared, against the misrepresentations uttered from the platform against the brave and loyal men of Kronstadt. Facing Zinoviev and pointing his finger directly at him, the man thundered: “It’s the cruel indifference of yourself and of your party that drove us to strike and that roused the sympathy of our brother sailors, who had fought side by side with us in the Revolution. They are guilty of no other crime, and you know it. Consciously you malign them and call for their destruction.” Cries of “Counter-revolutionist! Traitor! Shkurnik! Menshevik bandit!” turned the assembly into a bedlam. [... ]
A tall man in a sailor’s uniform stood up in the back. Nothing had changed in the revolutionary spirit of his brothers of the sea, he declared. To the last man they were ready to defend the Revolution with their every drop of blood. Then he proceeded to read the Kronstadt resolution adopted at the mass meeting on March i. The uproar his daring evoked made it impossible for any but those nearest to hear him. But he stood his ground and kept on reading to the end.
The only reply to these two sturdy sons of the Revolution was Zinoviev’s resolution demanding the complete and immediate surrender of Kronstadt on pain of extermination. It was rushed through the session amidst a pandemonium of confusion, with every opposing voice gagged.
The atmosphere, surcharged with the hysteria of passion and hate, crept into my being and held me by the throat. All evening I wanted to cry out against the mockery of men stooping to the lowest political trickery in the name of a great ideal. My voice seemed to have left me, for I could not utter a sound. My thoughts reverted to another occasion where the spirit of vengeance and hate had run amuck—the eve of registration, June 4, 1917, at Hunts Point Palace, New York. I had been able to speak out then, entirely oblivious of danger from the war-drunk patriots. Why could I not now? Why did I not brand the impending fratricide by the Bolsheviki, as I had Woodrow Wilson’s crime that had dedicated the young manhood of America to the Moloch of war? Had I lost the grit that had sustained me all through the years of fighting against every injustice and every wrong? Or was it helplessness which paralysed my will, the despair that had settled on my heart with the growing realization that I had mistaken a phantom for a life-giving force? Nothing could alter that crushing consciousness or make any protest worth while.
Yet silence in the face of the threatened slaughter was also intolerable. I had to make