"THE THIRD REVOLUTION"

    The word has been found. Henceforward, it will enter into the consciousness of those masses, which until now still followed the Bolsheviks, believing that the October Revolution was the "Second Revolution."

    "Here," they declare in the article 'What We Are Fighting For,' "a great new revolutionary step has been taken. Here has been raised the banner of a rebellion for liberation from the three year violence and oppression of Communist dominion, which has eclipsed the three-hundred year yoke of monarchism. Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the Third Revolution, which is breaking the last fetters from the laboring masses, and opening a wide new path for socialist creativity. This new revolution stirs the laboring masses of both East and West. It is an example of the new socialist construction, opposed to bureaucratic Communist 'creativity.' It convinces the laboring masses abroad, by the testimony of their own eyes, that everything created here until now by the will of workers and peasants was not socialism."

    The people of Kronstadt did not develop the programs of this new socialist "construction," but they wanted to lay its first cornerstone. They emancipated the people, and expressed their will. And they came to this emancipation by the path to which they were most accustomed after three years of Soviet power, by freely elected Soviets.

    "The present Revolution gives the laborers the possibility to finally have their own freely chosen Soviets, working without any and all coercive party pressure, and to reform the bureaucratic trade unions into free societies of workers, peasants and the laboring intelligentsia. At long last the police stick of the Communist autocracy is broken."

    This then is the most immediate program, these are the goals, for which at 6 hours 45 minutes in the evening on March 5th, 1921, the Bolshevik authorities began the bombardment of Kronstadt...