With the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the Bolshevik victory was now complete and total. “The time has come,” Lenin decreed, “to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it; we have had enough opposition.”[xcix] A mere nine days after Kronstadt fell, Lenin publicly declared war on those former allies who had been useful in putting over Bolshevism to the Russian people: “An open proof of one’s Menshevism should be sufficient ground for our revolutionary courts to confer the highest punishment, that is, shooting.”
