Free Trotsky by Bertrand M. Patenaude Page B

Trotsky. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the outstanding civil war commander, and seven other top-ranking officers were tried in secret and executed the following day. This was the start of a massive purge of the army’s officer corps. Tens of thousands would perish, including a large majority of the civil war commanders.
    This time there was no show trial, so there was no call to battle stations at the Blue House. Instead, Trotsky was forced to deal with a challenge from an entirely different quarter. Friends and former comrades in the United States and Europe, without questioning Trotsky’s legal innocence in the trials, began to raise doubts about his moral right to challenge Stalin. In doing so, they threatened to erase the thick line Trotsky had drawn between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Had not Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they asked, suppressed the rival socialist parties shortly after the Revolution so that Soviet power quickly came to mean Bolshevik power? Had not Lenin’s regime conducted a Red Terror against its declared enemies during the civil war? Had not War Commissar Trotsky, who now condemned Stalin for threatening to execute the wives and children of the trial defendants, seized as hostages the families of former czarist officers serving in the Red Army?
    Trotsky had been asked such questions during the hearings in Coyoacán. Typically he invoked the exigencies of the civil war in order to justify Bolshevik violence. Those who confronted him now, however, were far more knowledgeable about these matters. And they believed they could identify Bolshevism’s defining moment: the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Kronstadt was a fortress city and naval base on an island in the Gulf of Finland, some twenty miles west of Petrograd. The sailors there had played a crucial role in the revolutionary events of 1917. Trotsky, who was their favorite, honored them at the time as “the pride and glory” of the Russian Revolution.
    Only a few years later, however, Kronstadt came to symbolize something entirely different. In the frozen winter of 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, which was the main base of the Baltic fleet, rose up in rebellion against Bolshevik rule. They demanded an end to the Communist monopoly of power, genuine elections to the Soviets, and the cessation of political terror, among other things. A special target of their wrath was “the bloody Field Marshal Trotsky.”
    The Bolsheviks portrayed the uprising as an act of counterrevolution, in danger of being exploited by Western imperialists and White Guard generals, who perhaps had instigated it. Red Army troops under the command of General Tukhachevsky crossed over the ice to crush the rebellion, which they managed to do only with great difficulty and after suffering heavy losses. Fifty thousand Red Army soldiers made the final assault against nearly 15,000 defenders. Afterward, hundreds if not thousands of rebels were executed without trial.
    Trotsky’s critics now revived the memory of Kronstadt, making it the centerpiece of their case for an essential continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism. Trotsky could hardly believe the bad timing of this assault on his reputation, in the middle of his campaign against the Moscow trials. “One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago but only yesterday,” he complained. He accused his critics of romanticizing the Kronstadt sailors, and he claimed he played no role in suppressing the rebellion, although in fact as war commissar his role was central. When he learned of the revolt, he issued a demand for unconditional surrender. The Petrograd authorities then warned the sailors not to put up resistance, or “you will be shot like partridges.”
    Trotsky answered his critics in a series of short articles and in correspondence, while worrying about the effect this discussion might have on the deliberations of the Dewey Commission. A special source of concern was that one of his most