Living My Life - Emma Goldman [286]
The final warning was signed by Trotsky, as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Soviet, and by Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army. Daring to question the divine right of rulers was again to be punished by death.
Trotsky kept his word. [ . . . ] From my room window in the Hotel International I saw them led by in small groups, surrounded by strong detachments of Cheka troops. Their step had lost its spring, their hands hung at their sides, and their heads were bowed in grief.
The Petrograd strikers were no longer feared by the authorities. They were weakened by slow starvation and their energy sapped. They were demoralized by the lies spread against them and their Kronstadt brothers, their spirit broken by the poison of doubt instilled by Bolshevik propaganda. They had no more fight nor faith left to come to the aid of their Kronstadt comrades who had so selflessly taken up their cause and who were about to give up their lives for them.
Kronstadt was forsaken by Petrograd and cut off from the rest of Russia. It stood alone. It could offer almost no resistance. “It will go down at the first shot,” the Soviet press proclaimed. They were mistaken. Kronstadt had thought of nothing less than of mutiny or resistance to the Soviet Government. To the very last moment it was determined to shed no blood. It appealed all the time for understanding and amicable settlement. But, forced to defend itself against unprovoked military attack, it fought like a lion. During ten harrowing days and nights the sailors and workers of the besieged city held out against a continuous artillery fire from three sides and bombs hurled from aeroplanes upon the non-combatant community. Heroically they repulsed the repeated attempts of the Bolsheviki to storm the fortresses by special troops from Moscow. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky had every advantage over the men of Kronstadt. 39 The entire machinery of the Communist State backed them, and the centralized press continued to spread venom against the alleged “mutineers and counter-revolutionists.” They had unlimited supplies and men whom they had masked in white shrouds to blend with the snow of the frozen Finnish Gulf in order to camouflage the night attack against the unsuspecting men of Kronstadt. The latter had nothing but their unflinching courage and abiding faith in the justice of their cause and in the free soviets they championed as the saviour of Russia from the dictatorship. They lacked even an ice-breaker to halt the onrush of the Communist enemy. They were exhausted by hunger and cold and sleepless nights of vigil. Yet they held their own, desperately fighting against overwhelming odds.
During the fearful suspense, the days and nights filled with the rumbling of heavy artillery, there sounded not a single voice amid the roar of guns to cry out against or call a halt to the terrible blood bath. Gorki, Maxim Gorki, where was he? His voice would be heard. “Let us go to him,” I pleaded with some of the intelligentsia. He had never made the slightest protest in grave individual cases, neither in those concerning members of his own profession nor even when he knew of the innocence of doomed men. He would not protest now. It was hopeless.
The intelligentsia, the men and women that had once been revolutionary torch-bearers, leaders of thought, writers and poets, were as helpless as we and paralysed by the futility of individual effort. Most of their comrades and friends were already in prison or exile; some had been executed. They felt too broken by the collapse of all human values.
I turned to the Communists of our acquaintance, imploring them to do something. Some of them realized the monstrous crime their party was committing against Kronstadt. They admitted that the charge of counter-revolution was a downright fabrication. [ ...