But, in the difficult circumstances of Russia at war, it was inevitable that Lenin would forego this gradualism and do what he wanted with a maximum of dispatch. The harshness and momentary brutality of centralism did prove necessary to defeat the Whites. In a country that had always been far from rich, it seemed fairly impossible to allow local autonomy in the distribution of material resources and still succeed in drawing the whole nation together. By and large, the Soviet citizenry acknowledged the need, if not the desirability, of centralism at the time of the civil war.

IN A SENSE, this reasoning may be inadequate when applied to the Kronstadt revolt itself: the war was over, the people were clamoring for an end of centralism, and the demands of the mutineers were certainly justified. But from another point of view, the conditions of war still existed: resources were scarce and needed to be carefully handled, and that meant there had to be a national as well as a local reckoning. And, more immediately, the enemies of the Soviet republic, inveterate as they were, still sought an opportunity to topple the government.

The Russian expatriates, as Avrich points out, were scheming to turn the Kronstadt uprising to their own advantage. The rebels and the emigres had nothing in common, and Lenin and Trotsky know it; the sailors called for the realization of the "toilers republic," while the Whites stood for a bourgeois or even a Tsarist restoration, and all the dreaded forms of exploitation which that involved. The threat of the sailors was serious enough, but for the most part it was reformist in nature; the reactionaries would settle on nothing less than the final overthrow of Bolshevik rule.

If the strategic fortress, now held by rebels of their own stripe, were truly to fall into enemy hands, who knew what might occur? The Whites could play upon popular discontent, of which there was now an excess; or they might simply muster a large militia and drive the Soviets under for the last time. In any event, the prospect was a dangerous one.

It is in these terms that Avrich views the uprising. The rebels may have had cause, but the government needed also to protect itself against undue threats to its existence. In the Russia of 1921, a protest such as this, owing to the dreadful state of affairs, seemed inevitable; the government's reaction, equally predictable. It is what Avrich, speaking in literary terms, calls "the tragedy of Kronstadt."

And so it happened. Bombardments, raids, and finally, a massive expedition of 50,000 troops crossing the thick layer of ice atop the Finnish Gulf to take back the fortress from the insurrectionists. The rebels blow gigantic holes in the ice, and hundreds of loyalist troops drown in chilling graves. The expedition's survivors bludgeon their way into the city, defended by 15,000 men, and there is fierce hand-to-hand combat raging in the city's homes and streets. Then a silence, and it is over, some of the sailors fleeing across the ice to Finland and the rest on their way to Soviet trials and labor camps.

WHO, then, was responsible for Kronstadt? Avrich never attempts to solve the riddle, but it seems that the beginning of an answer is at hand. Those forces which attempted to set back Soviet Russia, to retard her economic and political progress, to make her life and her people's lives as wretched and unendurable as possible, are the real villains of the episode. To set the blame, one must look first to the Tsarists and the Allied powers who fired the opening shots of the civil war itself, who attacked what had begun as a new human experiment, a genuinely popular social revolution, and attacked it without the slightest measure of compassion or concern.

The legacy of suppression that began with the Soviet bombardment of Kronstadt led directly to the Stalinist terror and to the faceless, cynical technocracy that the Soviet Union is today. That alone, in retrospect, would make the attack on the fortress absurd. But the burning irony of Kronstadt is that, before the siege began, at a time when it might have been stopped or called off, the real perpetrators were nowhere to be found.