triumph in the three great Soviet succession struggles. See also: HISTORIOGRAPHY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARI- ONOVICH; SUSLOV, MIKHAIL ANDREYEVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1961). Power and Policy in the USSR. New York: Macmillan. D’Agostino, Anthony. (1998). Gorbachev’s Revolution, 1985-1991. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Gelman, Harry. (1984). The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of D?tente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1962). The Kremlin Since Stalin, tr. Elizabeth Wiskemann. New York: Praeger. Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Nicolaevsky, Boris. (1965). Power and the Soviet Elite. New York: Praeger.. Rush, Myron. (1974). How Communist States Change Their Rulers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
(1890-c. 1937), Soviet economist and agrarian expert.
Born in 1890, Kritzman became a Menshevik in 1905. After a long period in exile, he returned to Russia in early 1918 when he joined the Bolshevik Party. An expert in economic policy and a strong advocate of planning, he held various posts in the Supreme Council for the National Economy and in 1921 joined the Presidium of Gosplan (State Planning Agency).
In addition to his professional duties, he published numerous works on planning and the economy in which he argued for introducing a single economic plan. He was criticized by Lenin for this position. After the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, Kritzman, together with Ya. Larin, Leon Trotsky, and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, continued to advocate an extension of state planning. During the 1920s, Kritzman produced a number of important works, including a major study of war communism, Geroichesky period velikoi russkoi revolyutsy (The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution), still one of the key analyses of economic policy in the early Soviet period. As director of the Agrarian Institute of the Communist Academy from 1925 and editor of its journal Na Agrarnom Fronte (On the Agricultural Front), he promoted empirical research into class differentiation among the peasantry and called for greater state support for socialized agriculture. He also served during his career as assistant director of the Central Statistical Administration and a member of the editorial boards of Pravda, Problemy Ekonomiki (Problems of Economics) and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Stalin’s launch of mass collectivisation and dekulakization in late 1929 rendered Kritzman’s work and ideas obsolete by eradicating the individual household farm. After
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some years conducting private research, he was arrested and died in prison either in 1937 or 1938. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANT ECONOMY; WAR COMMUNISM
Cox, Terry. (1986). Peasants, Class and Capitalism. The Rural Research of L.N. Kritzman and his School. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Solomon, Susan Gross. (1977). The Soviet Agrarian Debate: A Controversy in Social Science 1923-1929. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
The Kronstadt Uprising was a well-known revolt against the Communist government from March 1 to 18, 1921, at Kronstadt, a naval base in the Gulf of Finland, base of the Russian Baltic Fleet, and a stronghold of radical support for the Petrograd Soviet in 1917.
By early 1921 the Bolshevik government had defeated the armies of its White opponents, but had also presided over a collapse of the economy and was threatened by expanding Green rebellions in the countryside. The Kronstadt garrison was disillusioned by reports from home of the depredations of the food requisitioning detachments, and by the corruption and malfeasance of Communist leaders. In response to strikes and demonstrations in Pet-rograd in February 1921, a five-man revolutionary committee took control of Kronstadt. It purged local administration, reorganized the trade unions, and prepared for new elections to the soviet, while preparing for a Communist assault. It called for an end to the Communist Party’s privileges; for new, free elections to soviets; and an for end to forced grain requisitions in the countryside.
Communist reaction was quick. A first attack on March 8 resulted only in bloodshed; however, on March 18 a massive assault across the ice by 50,000 troops, stiffened by Communist detachments and several hundred delegates to the Tenth Party Congress and led by civil war hero Mikhail Tukhachevsky, captured the island stronghold. Thousands of Kronstadt activists died in the assault or in the repression that followed. The Kronstadt rebellion, along with the Green Movement, presented a direct threat to Communist control. While the rebellions were put down, their threat led to important policy changes at the Tenth Party Congress, including the abandonment of War Communism (the grain monopoly and forced grain requisitions) and a ban on factions within the Communist Party. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; GREEN MOVEMENT; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avrich, Paul. (1970). Kronstadt 1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Getzler, Israel. (1983). Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1842-1921), Russian revolutionary.
Born into a family of the highest nobility, Kropotkin (the “Anarchist Prince,” according to his 1950 biographer George Woodcock) swam against the current of convention all his life. He received his formal education at home and then at the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, graduated in 1862, and, to the tsar’s astonishment, requested a posting to Siberia rather than the expected court career. There he remained until 1867. Siberia was a liberation for Kropotkin, contrary to the experience of others. He participated as a geographer and naturalist in expeditions organized by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGS). He was also entering his parallel career as a revolutionary: for him, Russia’s Age of Great Reforms was that of the discovery of unchanging corruption among Siberian state officials.
In 1867 Kropotkin returned to St. Petersburg where he enrolled at the University (he never graduated), supporting himself by working for the IRGS. His scientific reputation grew and in 1871 he was offered the post of IRGS secretary, which he rejected. Events in his own life (the death of his tyrannical father), in Russia (the growth of a revolutionary student movement), and in the world (the Paris Commune) strengthened his revolutionary feelings. In 1872 he visited Switzerland for the
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first time to discover more about the International Workingmen’s Association and on his return to Russia began to frequent the Chaikovsky Circle. As his 1976 biographer Martin Miller revealed, Kropotkin authored the Circle’s principal pamphlet, “Must We Examine the Ideal of the Future Order?” (1873).
Kropotkin was by this time (though the title was yet to be invented) an anarchist-communist- that is, he advocated the destruction of state tyranny over society (as anarchist predecessors like William Godwin, Pierre Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin had done) on one hand, while on the other he sought a communist, egalitarian transformation of society (like Karl Marx, only without using the authority of the state). This paradox required the dissolution of national government and its post-revolutionary replacement by a free federation of small communes, a local government freely administered from below rather than national and imposed from above. Revolutionaries from privileged backgrounds must organize the preceding popular revolt by propaganda and persuasion only: Workers and peasants must make the revolution themselves.
In March 1874 Kropotkin was arrested for his revolutionary activities and interrogated over a two-year period. Moved to a military hospital, he was liberated in a complex, sensational escape organized by his comrades. Kropotkin continued his revolutionary career in the Jura Federation, Switzerland, comprising the anarchist sections of the International, and from early 1877 began for the first time to take part in public political life: demonstrating, making speeches, attending congresses, writing articles. This activity is chronicled in detail in Caroline Cahm’s 1983 biography. Around 1880, the issue of terrorism or “propaganda by the deed,” as was the expression of the time,
