Part 7 (1/2)

The bourgeoisie left the task of settling things with the workers to the socialists. Re-ferring to the fact that the victory already won ”has suf.ciently guaranteed the position of the working cla.s.s in its revolutionary struggle”-to be sure, have not the liberal landlords come into power?-the Executive Committee designated March 5 as the date for resuming work in the Petrograd district. Workers to the shops! Such is the iron-clad egotism of the educated cla.s.ses, liberals and socialists alike. Those people believed that millions of workers and soldiers lifted to the heights of insurrection by the inconquerable pressure of discontent and hope, would after their victory tamely submit to the old conditions of life. From reading historical works, they had got the impression that it happened this way in previous revolutions. But no, even in the past it has never been so. If the workers have been driven back into their former stalls, it has been only in a roundabout way, after a whole series of defeats and deceptions. Marat was keenly aware of this cruel social perversion of political revolutions. For that reason he is so well slandered by the of.cial historians. ”A revolution is accomplished and sustained only by the lowest cla.s.ses of society,” he wrote a month before the revolution of August 10, 1792, ”by all the disinherited, whom the shame-less rich treat as canaille, and whom the Romans with their usual cynicism once named proletarians.” And what will the revolution give to the disinherited? ”Winning a certain success at the beginning, the movement is .nally conquered; it always lacks knowledge, skill, means, weapons, leaders and a de.nite plan of action; it remains defenceless in the face of conspirators possessed of experience, adroitness and craft.” Is it any wonder that Kerensky did not want to be the Marat of the Russian revolution?

One of the former captains of Russian industry, V. Auerbach, relates with indignation how ”the revolution was understood by the lower orders as something in the nature of an Easter carnival: servants, for example, disappeared for whole days, promenaded in red rib-bons, took rides in automobiles, came home in the morning only long enough to wash up and again went out for fun.” It is remarkable that in trying to demonstrate the demoralising effect of a revolution, this accuser describes the conduct of a servant in exactly those terms which-with the exception, to be sure, of the red ribbon-most perfectly reproduce the daily life of the bourgeois lady-patrician. Yes, a revolution is interpreted by the oppressed as a holiday-or the eve of a holiday-and the .rst impulse of the drudge aroused by it is to loosen the yoke of the day-by-day humiliating, anguis.h.i.+ng, ineluctable slavery. The working-cla.s.s as a whole could not, and did not intend to, comfort themselves with mere red ribbons as a symbol of victory-a victory won for others. There was agitation in the factories of Pet-rograd. A considerable number of shops openly refused to submit to the resolution of the Soviet. The workers were of course ready to return to the shops, for that was necessary-but upon what terms? They demanded the eight-hour day. The Mensheviks answered by allud-ing to 1905 when the workers tried to introduce the eight-hour day by forcible methods and were defeated. ”A struggle on two fronts-against the reaction and against the capitalist-is too much for the proletariat.” That was the central idea of the Mensheviks. They recog-nised in a general way the inevitability of a break in the future with the bourgeoisie. But this purely theoretical recognition did not bind them to anything. They considered that it was wrong to force the break. And since the bourgeoisie is driven into alliance with the reaction not by heated phrases from orators and journalists, but by the independent activity of the toiling cla.s.ses, the Mensheviks tried with all their power to oppose this activity-to oppose the economic struggle of the workers and peasants. ”For the working cla.s.s,” they taught, ”social questions are not now of the .rst importance. Its present task is to achieve political freedom.” But just what this speculative freedom consisted of, the workers could not understand. They wanted in the .rst place a little freedom for their muscles and nerves. And so they brought pressure on their bosses. By the irony of fate it was exactly on the 10th of March, when the Mensheviks were explaining that the eight-hour day is not a current issue that the Manufacturers' a.s.sociation-which had already been obliged to enter into of-.cial relations with the Soviet announced its readiness to introduce the eight-hour day and permit the organisation of factory and shop committees. The industrialists were more far-seeing than the democratic strategists of the Soviet. And no wonder: these employers came face to face with the workers, and the workers in no less than half of the Petrograd plants among them a majority of the biggest ones were already leaving the shops in a body after eight hours of work. They themselves took what the soviet and the government refused them. When the liberal press unctuously compared this gesture of the Russian industrial-ists of March 10, 1917 with that of the French n.o.bility of August 4, 1789, they were far nearer the historic truth than they themselves imagined : like the feudalists of the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian capitalists acted under the club of necessity, hoping by this temporary concession to make sure of getting back in the future what they had lost. One of the Kadet publicists, breaking through the of.cial lie, frankly acknowledged this: ”Unfor-tunately for the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks had already by means of terror compelled the Manufacturers' a.s.sociation to agree to an immediate introduction of the eight-hour day.” In what this terror consisted we already know. Worker-Bolsheviks indubitably occupied the front ranks in the movement, and here as in the decisive days of February an overwhelming majority of the workers followed them.

The Soviet, led by Mensheviks, recorded with mixed feelings this gigantic victory gained essentially against its opposition. The disgraced leaders were compelled, however, to make a still further step forward; they had to propose to the Provisional Government the promulgation in advance of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly of an eight-hour law for all Rus-sia. The government, however, in agreement with the manufacturers, resisted. Hoping for better days, they refused to ful.l this demand-presented to them, to be sure, without any particular insistence.

In the Moscow region the same struggle arose, but it lasted longer. Here too the soviet in spite of the resistance of the workers demanded a return to work. In one of the biggest factories a resolution against calling off the strike received 7,000 votes against 0. Other fac-tories reacted in much the same way. On the 10th of March the soviet again proclaimed the duty of returning immediately to the shops. Although work began after that in a majority of shops, there developed almost everywhere a struggle for the shortening of the working day. The workers corrected their leaders by direct action. After a long resistance the Moscow Soviet was obliged on the 21st of March to introduce the eight-hour day by its own act. The industrialists immediately submitted. In the provinces the same struggle was carried over into April. Almost everywhere the soviets at .rst refrained and resisted, and after-wards under pressure from the workers entered into negotiations with the manufacturers. And where the latter did not accede, the soviets were obliged independently to decree the eight-hour day. What a breach in the system!

The government stood aside on purpose. In those days, a furious campaign was opening under liberal leaders.h.i.+p against the workers. In order to subdue them it was decided to turn the soldiers against them. To shorten the working day means, you see, to weaken the front. How can anybody think only of himself in war time? Are they counting the hours in the trenches?When the possessing cla.s.ses make a start on the road of demagogism, they stop at nothing. The agitation a.s.sumed a frenzied character, and was soon carried into the trenches. The soldier Pireiko in his reminiscences of the front confesses that this agitation-carried on chie.y by half-baked socialists among the of.cers-was not without success. ”But the great weakness of the of.cial staff in their effort to turn the soldiers against the workers lay in the fact that they were of.cers. It was too fresh in the mind of every soldier what his of.cer had been to him in the past.” This baiting of the workers was most bitter, however, in the capital. The industrialists along with the Kadet staff found unlimited means and opportunities for agitation in the garrison. ”Towards the end of March,” says Sukhanov, ”you could see at all street crossings, in the tram-ways, and in every public place, workers and soldiers locked together in a furious verbal battle.” Even physical .ghts occurred. The workers understood the manoeuvre and skilfully warded it off. For this it was only necessary to tell the truth-to cite the .gures of war pro.ts, to show the soldiers the factories and shops with the roar of machines, the h.e.l.l .res of the furnaces, their perpetual front where victims are innumerable. On the initiative of the workers there began regular visits by the troops of the garrison to the factories, and especially to those working on munitions. The soldiers looked and listened. The workers demonstrated and explained. These visits would end in triumphant fraternisation. The socialist papers printed innumerable resolutions of the military units as to their indestructible solidarity with the workers. By the middle of April the very topic of the con.ict had disappeared from the newspapers. The bourgeois press was silent. Thus after their economic victory, the workers won a political and moral victory.

The events connected with this struggle for the eight-hour day had an immense signif-icance for the whole future development of the revolution. The workers had gained a few free hours a week for reading, for meetings, and also for practice with the ri.e, which be-came a regular routine from the moment of the creation of the workers' militia. Moreover, after this clear lesson, the workers began to watch the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p more closely. The authority of the Mensheviks suffered a serious drop. The Bolsheviks grew stronger in the factories, and partly too in the barracks. The soldier became more attentive, thoughtful, cautious: he understood that somebody was stalking him. The treacherous design of the demagogues turned against its own inspirers. Instead of alienation and hostility, they got a closer welding together of workers and soldiers.

The government, in spite of the idyll of ”Contact,” hated the Soviet, hated its leaders and their guardians.h.i.+p. It revealed this upon the very .rst occasion. Since the Soviet was ful.lling purely governmental functions, and this moreover at the request of the govern-ment itself whenever it became necessary to subdue the ma.s.ses, the Executive Committee requested the payment of a small subsidy for expenses. The government refused, and in spite of the repeated insistence of the Soviet, stood pat: it could not pay out the resources of the state to a ”private organisation.” The Soviet swallowed it. The budget of the Soviet lay on the workers who never tired of taking collections for the needs of the revolution. In those days both sides, the liberals and the socialists, kept up the decorum of a complete mutual friendliness. At the All-Russian Conference of Soviets the existence of the duel power was declared a .ction Kerensky a.s.sured the delegates from the army that between the government and the soviets there was a complete unity of problems and aims. The dual power was no less zealously denied by Tseretelli, Dan and other Soviet pillars. With the help of these lies, they tried to reinforce a rgime which was founded on lies.

However, the rgime tottered from the very .rst weeks. The leaders were tireless in the matter of organisational combinations. They tried to bring to bear all sorts of accidental representative bodies against the ma.s.ses-the soldiers against the workers, the new dumas, zemstvos and cooperatives against the soviets, the provinces against the capital, and .nally the of.cers against the people.

The soviet form does not contain any mystic power. It is by no means free from the faults of every representative system-unavoidable so long as that system is unavoidable. But its strength lies in that it reduces all these faults to a minimum.

We may con.dently a.s.sert-and the events will soon prove it-that any other representative system, atomising the ma.s.ses, would have expressed their actual will in the revolution incomparably less effectively, and with far greater delay. Of all the forms of revolutionary representation, the soviet is the most .exible, immediate and transparent. But still it is only a form. It cannot give than the ma.s.ses are capable of putting into it at a given moment. Beyond that, it can only a.s.sist the ma.s.ses in understanding the mistakes they have made and correcting them. In this function of the soviets lay one of the most important guarantees of the development of the revolution.

What was the political plan of the Executive Committee? You could hardly say that any one of the leaders had a plan thoroughly thought out. Sukhanov subsequently a.s.serted that, according to his plan, the power was turned over to the bourgeoisie only for a short time, in order that the democracy, having strengthened itself, might the more surely take it back. However, this construction-naive enough in any case-was obviously retrospective. At least it was never formulated by anybody at the time. Under the leaders.h.i.+p of Tseretelli, the vacillations of the Executive Committee, if they were not put an end to, were at least organised into a system. Tseretelli openly announced that without a .rm bourgeois power the revolution would inevitably fail. The democracy must limit itself to bringing pressure on the liberal bourgeoisie, beware of pus.h.i.+ng it. over by some incautious step into the camp of the reaction, and conversely, support it in so far as it backs up the conquests of the revolution. In the long run that half-minded rgime would have ended in a bourgeois republic with the socialists as a parliamentary opposition.

The main dif.culty for the leaders was not so much to .nd a general plan, as a current programme of action. The Compromisers had promised the ma.s.ses to get from the bour-geoisie by way of ”pressure” a democratic policy, foreign and domestic. It is indubitable that under pressure from the popular ma.s.s, ruling cla.s.ses have more than once in history made concessions. But ”pressure” means, in the last a.n.a.lysis, a threat to crowd the rul-ing cla.s.s out of the power and occupy its place. Just this weapon however was not in the hands of the democracy. They had themselves voluntarily given over the power to the bour-geoisie. At moments of con.ict the democracy did not threaten to seize the power, but on the contrary the bourgeoisie frightened them with the idea of giving it back. Thus the chief lever in the mechanics of pressure was in the hands of the bourgeoisie. This explains how, in spite of its complete impotence, the government succeeded in resisting every somewhat serious undertaking of the Soviet leaders.

By the middle of April, even the Executive Committee had proved too broad an organ for the political mysteries of the ruling nucleus, who had turned their faces completely toward the liberals. A ”bureau” was therefore appointed, consisting exclusively of right defensists. From now on big politics was carried on in its own small circle. Everything seemed nicely and permanently settled. Tseretelli dominated in the Soviet without limit. Kerensky was riding higher and higher. But exactly at that moment appeared clearly the .rst alarming signs from below-from the ma.s.ses. ”It is amazing,” writes Stankevich, who was close to the circle of Kerensky, ”that at the very this committee was formed, when responsibility for the work was a.s.sumed by a bureau selected only from defensist parties, exactly at this moment they let slip from their hands the leaders.h.i.+p of the ma.s.ses-the ma.s.ses moved away from them.” Not at all amazing, but quite in accord with the laws of things.

CHAPTER 13.

THE ARMY AND THE WAR.

In the months preceding the revolution discipline in the army was already badly shaken. You can pick up plenty of of.cers' complaints from those days: soldiers disrespectful to the command; their treatment of horses, of military property, even of weapons, indescribably bad; disorders in the military trains. It was not equally serious everywhere. But everywhere it was going in the same direction-toward ruin.

To this was now added the shock of revolution. The uprising of the Petrograd garrison took place not only without of.cers, but against them. In the critical hours the command simply hid its head. Deputy-Octobrist s.h.i.+dlovsky conversed on the 27th of February with the of.cers of the Preobrazhensky regiment obviously in order to feel out their att.i.tude to the Duma-but found among these aristocrat-cavaliers a total ignorance of what was hap-pening, perhaps a half-hypocritical ignorance, for they were all frightened monarchists.

”What was my surprise,” says s.h.i.+dlovsky, ”when the very next morning I saw the whole Preobrazhensky regiment marching down the street in military formation led by a band, their order perfect and without a single of.cer! ”To be sure, a few companies arrived at the Tauride with their of.cers-more accurately, they brought their of.cers with them. But the of.cers felt that in this triumphal march they occupied the position of captives. Countess Kleinmichel, observing these scenes while under arrest, says plainly The of.cers looked like sheep led to the slaughter.”

The February uprising did not create the split between soldiers and of.cers but merely brought it to the surface. In the minds of the soldiers the insurrection against the monarchy was primarily an insurrection against the commanding staff. ”From the morning of the 28th of February,” says the Kadet Nabokov, then wearing an of.cer's uniform, ”it was dangerous to go out, because they had begun to rip off the of.cers' epaulets.” That is how the .rst day of the new rgime looked in the garrison.

177.

The .rst care of the Executive Committee was to reconcile soldiers with of.cers. That meant nothing but to Subordinate the troops to their former command. The return of the of-.cers to their regiments was supposed, according to Sukhanov, to protect the army against ”universal anarchy or the dictators of the dark and disintegrated rank-and-.le.” These revo-lutionists, just like the liberals, were afraid of the soldiers, not of the of.cers. The workers on the other hand, along with the ”dark” rank-and-.le, saw every possible danger exactly in the ranks of those brilliant of.cers. The reconciliation therefore proved temporary.

Stankevich describes in these words the mental att.i.tude of the soldiers to the of.cers who returned to them after the uprising: ”The soldiers, breaking discipline and leaving their barracks, not only without of.cers, but in many cases against their of.cers and even after killing them at their posts, had achieved, it turned out, a great deed of liberation. If it was a great deed, and if the of.cers themselves now af.rm this, then why didn't they lead the soldiers into the streets? That would have been easier and less dangerous. Now, after the victory, they a.s.sociate themselves with this deed. But how sincerely and for how long' These words are the more instructive that the author himself was one of those ”left” of.cers to whom it did not occur to lead his soldiers into the streets.

On the morning of the 28th, on Sampsonievsky Prospect, the commander of an engi-neers' division was explaining to his soldiers that ”the government which everybody hated is overthrown,” a new one is formed with Prince Lvov at the head therefore it is necessary to obey of.cers as before. ”And now I ask all to return to their places in the barracks.” A few soldiers cried : ”Glad to try”. The majority merely looked bewildered: ”Is that all'

The scene was observed accidentally by Kayurov. It jarred him. ”Permit me a word, Mr. Commander......” And without waiting for permission, Kayurov put this question: ”Has the workers' blood been .owing in the streets of Petrograd for three days merely to exchange one landlord for another' Here Kayurov took the bull by the horns. His question sum-marised the whole struggle of the coming months. The antagonism between the soldier and the of.cer was a refraction of the hostility between peasant and landlord.

The of.cers in the provinces, having evidently got their instructions in good season, explained the events all in the same way: ”His Majesty has exceeded his strength in his efforts for the good of the country, and has been compelled to hand over the burden of government to his brother.” The reply was plain on the faces of the soldiers, complains an of.cer in a far corner of the Crimea: ”Nicholas or Mikhail-it's all the same to us.” When, however, this same of.cer -was compelled next morning to communicate the news of the revolutionary victory, the soldiers, he tells us, were transformed. Their questions, gestures, glances, testi.ed to the ”prolonged and resolute work which somebody had been doing on those dark and cloudy brains, totally unaccustomed to think.” What a gulf between the of.cer, whos brain accommodates itself without effort to the latest telegram from Petrograd, and those soldiers who are, however stif.y, nevertheless honestly, de.ning their att.i.tude to the events, independently weighing them in their calloused palms!

The high command, although formally recognising the revolution, decided not to let it through to the front. The chief of staff ordered the commander-in-chief of all the fronts, in case revolutionary delegations arrived in his territory delegations which General Alexeiev called ”gangs” for short-to arrest them immediately and turn them over to court-martial. The next day the same general, in the name of ”His Highness,” the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, demanded of the government ”an end of all that is now happening in the rear of the army”-in other words, an end of the revolution.

The command delayed informing the active army about the revolution as long as pos-sible, not so much through loyalty to the monarchy as through fear of the revolution. On several fronts they established a veritable quarantine: stopped all letters from Petrograd, and held up newcomers. In that way the old rgime stole a few extra days from eternity. The news of the revolution rolled up to the line of battle not before the 5th or 6th of March-and in what form? About the same as above: ”The grand duke is appointed commander-in-chief; the czar has abdicated in the name of the Fatherland; everything else as usual.” In many trenches, perhaps even in the majority, the news of the revolution came from the Germans before it got there from Petrograd. Could there have been any doubt among the soldiers that the whole command was in a conspiracy to conceal the truth? And could those same soldiers trust those same of.cers to the extent of two cents, when a couple of days later they pinned on a red ribbon?

The chief of staff of the Black Sea .eet tells us, that the news of the events in Petrograd at .rst made no marked impression on the soldiers. But when the .rst socialist papers arrived from the capital, ”in the wink of an eye the mood changed, meetings began, criminal agitators crawled out of their cracks.” The admiral simply did not understand what was happening before his eyes. The newspapers did not create this change of mood. They merely scattered the doubt of the soldiers as to the depth of the revolution, and permitted them to reveal their true feelings without fear of reprisals from the staff. The political physiognomy of the Black Sea staff, his own among them, is characterised by the same author in a single phrase: ”The majority of the of.cers of the .eet thought that without the czar the Fatherland would perish.” The democrats also thought that the Fatherland would perish-unless they brought back bright lights of this kind to the ”dark” sailors!

The commanding staff of the army and .eet soon divided into two groups. One group tried to stay in their places, tuning in on the revolution, registering as Social Revolution-aries. Later a part of them even tried to crawl into the Bolshevik camp. The other group strutted a while and tried to oppose the new order, but soon broke out in some sharp con-.ict and were swept away by the soldier .ood. Such groupings are so natural that they have been repeated in all revolutions. The irreconcilable of.cers of the French monarchy, those who in the words of one of them ”fought as long as they could,” suffered less over the disobedience of the soldiers than over the knuckling under of their n.o.ble colleagues. In the long run the majority of the old command were pushed out or suppressed, and only a small part re-educated and a.s.similated. In a more dramatic form the of.cers shared the fate of those cla.s.ses from which they were recruited.

An army is always a copy of the society it serves-with this difference, that it gives social relations a concentrated character, carrying both their positive and negative features to an extreme. It is no accident that the war did not create one single distinguished military name in Russia. The high command was suf.ciently characterised by one of its own members: ”Much adventurism, much ignorance, much egotism, intrigue, careerism, greed, mediocrity and lack of foresight” writes General Zalessky-”and very little knowledge, talent or desire to risk life, or even comfort and health.” Nikolai Nikolaievich, the .rst commander-in-chief, was distinguished only by his high stature and august rudeness. General Alexeiev, a grey mediocrity, the oldest military clerk of the army, won out through mere perseverance. Kornilov was a bold young commander whom even his admirers regarded as a bit simple; Kerensky's War Minister, Verkhovsky, later described him as the lion heart with the brain of a sheep. Brussilov and Admiral Kolchak a little excelled the others in culture, if you will, but in nothing else. Denikin was not without character, but for t e rest, a perfectly ordinary army general who had read .ve or six books. And after these came the Yudeniches, the Dragomirovs the Lukomskies, speaking French or not speaking it, drinking moderately or drinking hard, but amounting to absolutely nothing.

To be sure, not only feudal, but also bourgeois and democratic Russia had its repre-sentatives in the of.cers' corps. The into the ranks of the army tens of thousands of petty bourgeois youths in the capacity of of.cers, military engineers. These circles, standing al-most solid for war to complete victory, felt the necessity of some broad measures of reform, but submitted in the long run to the reactionary command. Under the czar they submitted through fear, and after the revolution through conviction-just as the democracy in the rear submitted to the bourgeoisie. The conciliatory wing of the of.cers shared subsequently the unhappy fate of the conciliatory parties-with this difference, that at the front the situation developed a thousand times more sharply. In the Executive Committee you could hold on for a long time with ambiguities; in the face of the soldiers it was not so easy.

The ill-will and friction between the democratic and aristocratic of.cers, incapable of reviving the army, only introduced a further element of decomposition. The physiognomy of the army was determined by the old Russia, and this physiognomy was completely feu-dal. The of.cers still considered the best soldier to be a humble and unthinking peasant lad, in whom no consciousness of human personality had yet awakened. Such was the ”national” tradition of the Russian army-the Suvorov tradition-resting upon primitive agri-culture, serfdom and the village commune. In the eighteenth century Suvorov was still creating miracles out of this material. Leo Tolstoy, with a baronial love, idealised in his Platon-Karatayev the old type of Russian soldier, unmurmuringly submitting to nature, tyranny and death (War and Peace). The French revolution, initiating the magni.cent tri-umph of individualism in all spheres of human activity, put an end to the military art of Suvorov. Throughout the nineteenth century, and the twentieth too-throughout the whole period between the French and Russian revolutions-the czar's army was continually de-feated because it was a feudal army. Having been formed on that ”national” basis, the commanding staff was distinguished by a scorn for the personality of the soldier, a spirit of pa.s.sive Mandarinism, an ignorance of its own trade, a complete absence of heroic prin-ciples, and an exceptional disposition toward petty larceny. The authority of the of.cers rested upon the exterior signs of superiority, the ritual of caste, the system of suppression, and even a special caste language-contemptible idiom of slavery which the soldier was sup-posed to converse with his of.cer. Accepting the revolution in words and swearing fealty to the Provisional Government, the czar's marshals simply shouldered off their own sins on the fallen dynasty. They graciously consented to allow Nicholas II to be declared scapegoat for the whole past. But farther than that, not a step! How could they understand that the moral essence of the revolution lay in the spiritualisation of that human ma.s.s upon whose inertness all their good fortune had rested? Denikin, appointed to command the front, an-nounced at Minsk: ”I accept the revolution wholly and irrevocably. But to revolutionise the army and bring demagogism into it, I consider ruinous to the country.” A cla.s.sic formula of the dull-wittedness of major-generals! As for the rank-and-.le generals, to quote Zalessky, they made but one demand: ”Only keep your hands off us-that is all we care about' How-ever, the revolution could not keep its hands off them. Belonging to the privileged cla.s.ses, they stood to win nothing, but they could lose much. They were threatened with the loss not only of of.cer privileges, but also of landed property. Covering themselves with loyalty to the Provisional Government, the reactionary of.cers waged so much the more bitter a campaign against the soviets. And when they were convinced that the revolution was pen-etrating irresistibly into the soldier ma.s.s, and even into their home estates, they regarded this as a monstrous treachery on the part of Kerensky, Miliukov, even Rodziankoto say nothing of the Bolsheviks.

The life conditions of the .eet even more than the army nourished the live seeds of civil war. The life of the sailors in their steel bunkers, locked up there by force for a period of years, was not much different even in the matter of food, from that of galley slaves. Right beside them the of.cers, mostly from privileged circles and having voluntarily chosen naval service as their calling, were identifying the Fatherland with the czar, the czar with themselves, and regarding the sailor as the least valuable part of the battles.h.i.+p. Two alien and tight-shut worlds thus live in close contact, and never out of each other's sight. The s.h.i.+ps of the .eet have their base in the industrial seaport towns with their great population of workers needed for building and repairing. Moreover, on the s.h.i.+ps themselves, in the engineering and machine corps, there is no small number of quali.ed workers. Those are the conditions which convert the .eet into a revolutionary mine. In the revolutions and military uprisings of all countries the sailors have been the most explosive material; they have almost always at the .rst opportunity drastically settled accounts with their of.cers. The Russian sailors were no exception.

In Kronstadt the revolution was accompanied by an outbreak of b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance against the of.cers, who attempted, as though in horror at their own past, to conceal the revolution from the sailors. One of the .rst victims to fall was Admiral Viren, who enjoyed a well-earned hatred. A number of the commanding staff were arrested by the sailors. Those who remained free were deprived of arms.

In Helsingfors and Sveaborg, Admiral Nepenin did not admit the news of the insurrec-tion in Petrograd until the night of March 4, threatening the soldiers and sailors meanwhile with acts of repression. So much the more ferocious was the insurrection of these soldiers and sailors. It lasted all night and all day. Many of.cers were arrested. The most hateful were shoved under the ice. ”Judging by Skobelev's account of the conduct of the of.cers of the .eet and the Helsingfors authorities,” writes Sukhanov, who is by no means indulgent to the ”dark rank-and .le,” ”it is a wonder these excesses were so few.”

But in the land forces too there were b.l.o.o.d.y encounters, several waves of them. At .rst this was an act of vengeance for the past, for the contemptible striking of soldier. The was no lack of memories that burned like ulcers. In 1915 disciplinary punishment by .ogging had been of.cially introduced into the czar's army. The of.cers .ogged soldiers upon their own authority-soldiers who were often the fathers of families. But it was not always a question of the past. At the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, a delegate speaking for the army stated that as early as the 15th or 17th of March an order had been issued introducing corporal punishment in the active army. A deputy of the Duma, returning from the front, reported that the Cossacks said to him, in the absence of of.cers: ”Here, you say, is the order. [Evidently the famous Order Number 1, of which we will speak further.] We got it yesterday, and yet to-day an of.cer soaked me on the jaw.” The Bolsheviks went out to try to restrain the soldiers from excesses as often as the Conciliators. But b.l.o.o.d.y acts of retribution were as inevitable as the recoil of a gun. The liberals had no other ground for calling the February revolution bloodless except that it gave them the power.

Some of the of.cers managed to stir up bitter con.icts about the red ribbons, which were in the eyes of the soldiers a symbol of the break with the past. The commander of the Sumsky regiment got killed in this way. Another commander, having ordered newly arrived reinforcements to remove their ribbons, was arrested by the soldiers, and locked up in the guard house. A number of encounters also resulted from the czar's portraits, not yet removed from the of.cial quarters. Was this out of loyalty to the monarchy? In a majority of cases it was mere lack of con.dence in the revolution, an act of personal insurance. But the soldiers were not wrong in seeing the ghost of the old rgime lurking behind those portraits.

It was not thought-out measures from above, but spasmodic movements from below, which established the new rgime in the army. The disciplinary power of the of.cers was neither annulled nor limited. It merely fell away of itself during the .rst weeks of March. ”It was clear,” said the chief of the Black Sea staff, ”that if an of.cer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed.” In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuinely popular revolution.

With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the practical bankruptcy of the staff of of.cers was laid bare. Stankevich, who possessed both a gift of observation and an interest in military affairs, gives a withering account in this respect of the commanding staff. The drilling still went on according to the old rules, he tells us, totally out of relation to the demands of the war. ”Such exercises were merely a test of the patience and obedience of the soldiers.” The of.cers, of course, tried to lay the blame for this, their own bankruptcy, upon the revolution.

Although they were quick with cruel reprisals, the soldiers were also inclined to child-like trustfulness and self-forgetful acts of grat.i.tude. For a short time the deputy Filomenko, a priest and a liberal, seemed to the soldiers at the front a standard-bearer of the idea of freedom, a shepherd of the revolution. The old churchly ideas united in funny ways with the new faith. The soldiers carried this priest on their hands, raised him above their heads, carefully seated him in his sleigh. And he afterward, choking with rapture, reported to the Duma: ”We could not .nish our farewells. They kissed our hands and feet.” This deputy thought that the Duma had an immense authority in the army. What had authority in the army was the revolution. And it was the revolution that threw this blinding re.ection on various accidental .gures.

The symbolic cleansing carried out by Guchkov in the upper circles of the army-the removal of a few score of generals-gave no satisfaction to the soldiers, and at the same time created a state of uncertainty among the high of.cers. Each one was afraid that he would lose his place. The majority swam with the current, spoke softly and clenched their .sts in their pockets. It was still worse with the middle and lower of.cers, who came face to face with the soldiers. Here there was no governmental cleansing at all. Seeking a legal method, the soldiers of one artillery battery wrote to the Executive Committee and the State Duma about their commander: ”Brothers, we humbly request you to remove our domestic enemy, Vanchekhaza.” Receiving no answer to such pet.i.tions, the soldiers would employ what means they had: disobedience, crowding out, even arrest. Only after that the command would wake up, remove the arrested or a.s.saulted of.cer, sometimes trying to punish the soldiers, but oftener leaving them unpunished in order to avoid complicating things. This created an intolerable situation for the of.cers, and yet gave no clear de.nition to the situation of the soldiers.