Volume 17, Number 2 · August 12, 1971
Tell Me Where You Stand On Kronstadt
By Alasdair MacIntyre
Kronstadt 1921
by Paul Avrich
Princeton University Press, 271 pp., $8.50
Twenty miles to the west of Leningrad there is an island in the Gulf of Finland on which stands the naval base and city of Kronstadt. But Kronstadt is not only the name of a place; it is also a symbol of that moment when, in February and March, 1921, the Bolshevik regime faced for the first time the enmity of its own working class in the rebellion of the sailors and other workers of Kronstadt against Lenin's government. They were suppressed by the Red Army. Everybody who takes an attitude toward communism and Marxism has been forced to try to settle accounts with what happened at Kronstadt when the sailors revolted: Russian émigrés, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, anarchists, later historians of the revolution, each has given his account.
Review, 2350 words
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