LIES AND SLANDER OF THE BOLSHEVIKS

    It has already been shown above how the Bolsheviks used the name of the harmless Kozlovsky, who had served them faithfully and truly for three years. It has been shown how, having formed their staff nine-tenths of generals and colonels from the tsarist structure, and with their aid bombarded a revolutionary town, they spread shameless lies about "tsarist generals" supposedly located in Kronstadt.

    The truth is that, in this matter, the Bolsheviks were aided not a little by the Russian emigrant and foreign press, especially the reactionary press. Krasnaia Gazeta, Izvestiia, Pravda, Kommuna and so on greedily reprinted all possible rubbish from reactionary Russian and foreign newspapers. Every kind of idiocy by the half-intelligent Burtsev, sending his unasked for greetings to the people of Kronstadt, every "donation" by the financial bigshots in Paris, all the dreams of the Guchkovs, and the foolish rumors of the foreign press, all was used by the Bolsheviks. It was used to portray the people of Kronstadt, cut off from the entire world by ice, as marionettes, by means of whom, after the inevitable "Mensheviks and SR's," "sneak in supposed Kadets [Constitutional Democrats], then Monarchists and, finally, the greedy and clutching Entente..."

    In their lies, the Bolsheviks came even to the foolish assertion that the pretender to the throne, the former Great Prince Dmitri Pavlovich, was supposedly coming to Kronstadt!

    The people of Kronstadt were simultaneously indignant with and amused by these absurd, and for them evident, lies. For the Red Army, and the workers of Russia, however, this grandiosely performed falsehood, this fraud, could not fail to have a corrupting influence, could not fail but to undermine trust in Kronstadt.

    'Izvestiia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee,' was a thousand times correct in its description of Kronstadt's attitude toward the undesired joy of Russian reactionaries at the movement which had burst out there, given in the article "'Sirs' or 'Comrades.'" "You, comrades, now celebrate a great and bloodless victory over the Communist dictatorship, and your enemies celebrate with you. But your motives for joy and theirs are completely opposed. You are inspired with a burning desire to build true Soviet power, and by the noble hope of granting the worker freedom of labor and the peasant the right to control his own land and the produce of his work. They are driven by the hope of raising anew the tsarist whip, and the privilege of generals. Your interests are not the same, and your path is not theirs!"

    And the article finishes with the following call. "Be vigilant. Do not allow wolves in sheep's clothing close to the helmsman's bridge..."