From the Kronstadt Rebellion to the Paris Commune: The Two Legacies, and the Form of Power

• In Event: Soviet Legacies of the Paris Commune of 1871

Abstract

My talk will address the legacy of the Paris Commune as divided into two conflicting narratives by the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921. The notion of the Kronstadt Commune as an heir to the fragile utopia of 1871, violently crushed by the government, emerged while the events were still unfolding and became central to the libertarian memory of the rebellion. At the same time, the French workers’ cause was invoked to justify the Kronstadt massacre on the other side of the barricades: the Party dedicated the massacre to the Commune’s fiftieth anniversary. These two opposing visions of the Paris Commune—and what might constitute its legacy—reflect a major division in understanding the revolutionary form of power. The Civil War in France, Marx’s paradigmatic reading of the Commune, gave rise to both the centralist and libertarian interpretations; there seem to be, moreover, “two Leninisms” contributing to either of them. My talk will trace this bifurcating narrative and, most importantly, the fluctuation of its key notions in the writings of Lenin, Alexander Berkman, Victor Serge, and other participants and witnesses of the Kronstadt events. I will also show how the clash of these visions was explored in-depth in the Kronstadt poetry and used to develop an alternative to the Party’s politics of the “total war.” I will argue that the memory of the Paris Commune provides the Kronstadt rebellion—and, more broadly, the popular resistance to Bolshevik violence—with a theoretical framework that maps out the main dilemmas of the revolution, particularly the clash between top-down rule and collective action from below.

Author

• Victoria Buyanovskaya, U of Wisconsin-Madison