Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
Kronstadt has a false mythology and this was quickly picked up by Western anarchists who were beginning to create a mythological canon of one-directional oppression by and the necessity of division from what they termed Marxists. The Soviet Archives dispute the narratives sold and resold, with the most important being that Kronstadt’s uprising was coordinated by new recruits from Eastern Ukraine, not those who had previously been key to revolution in Kronstadt. And, as in Eastern Ukraine - sometimes Makhnovschina - they started much of the infifhting and agitation against Bolsheviks, started campaigns to remove them from all soviets, created self-serving structures to isolate their islands of production from everyone else, and created self-serving organizational positions that even oppressed those sailors thst had been part of revolution there.