Part 7 (2/2)

Even many .ghting of.cers, those who seriously cared about the fate of the army, insisted upon the necessity of a general clean-up of the commanding staff. Without that, they said, it is useless to think of reviving the .ghting ability of the troops. The soldiers presented to the deputies of the Duma no less convincing arguments. Formerly, they said, when they had a grievance, they had to complain to the of.cers, who ordinarily paid no attention to their complaint. And what were they to do now? The of.cers were the same-the fate of their complaints would be the same. ”It was very dif.cult to answer that question,” a deputy confesses. But nevertheless that question contained the whole fate of the army and fore-ordained its future.

It would be a mistake to represent the state of affairs in the army as h.o.m.ogeneous throughout the country in all kinds of troops and all regiments. The variation. was very considerable. While the sailors of the Baltic .eet responded to the .rst news of the revo-lution by killing of.cers, right beside them in the garrison at Helsingfors the of.cers were occupying a leading position in the soldiers' soviet by the beginning of April, and here an imposing general was speaking at celebrations in the name of the Social Revolutionaries. There were many such contrasts between hate and trustfulness. But nevertheless the army was like a system of communicating vessels, and the political mood of the soldiers and sailors gravitated to wards a single level.

Discipline was maintained somehow while the soldiers were counting on a quick and decisive change. ”But when the soldiers saw,” to quote a delegate from the front, ”that everything remained as before-the same oppression, slavery, ignorance, the same insults-an agitation began.” Nature, who was not thoughtful enough to arm the majority of men with rhinoceros skin, also endowed the soldier with a nervous system. Revolutions serve to remind us from time to time of this carelessness on the part of nature.

In the rear as well as at the front, accidental pretexts easily led to con.icts. The soldiers were given the right to attend theatres, meetings, concerts, etc., ”equally with all citizens.” Many soldiers interpreted this as a right to attend theatres free. The ministry explained that ”freedom” was to be understood in a speculative sense. But a people in insurrection has never shown any inclination towards Platonism or Kantianism.

The worn-out tissue of discipline broke through in various ways at different times, in different garrisons, and in different regiments. A commander would often think that everything had gone well in his regiment until certain newspapers appeared, or until the arrival of some outside agitator. It was all really the work of deep inexorable forces.

The liberal deputy Ya.n.u.shkevich came back from the front with a generalisation-that the disorganisation is worst of all in the ”green” troops composed of muzhiks. ”In the more revolutionary regiments the soldiers are getting along very well with the of.cers.” As a matter of fact discipline rested for the most part on two foundations: the privileged cavalry made up of well-off peasants, and the artillery or technical branch in general with a high percentage of workers and intellectuals. The land-owning Cossacks held out longest of all, dreading an Agrarian revolution in which the majority of them would lose, and not gain. More than once after the revolution individual Cossack divisions carried out punitive operations, but in general these differences were merely in the date and tempo of disintegration.

The blind struggle had its ebbs and .ows. The of.cers would try to adapt themselves; the soldiers would again begin to bide their time. But during this temporary relief, during these days and weeks of truce, the social hatred which was decomposing the army of the old rgime would become more and more intense. Oftener and oftener it would .ash out in a kind of heat lightning. In Moscow, in one of the amphitheatres, a meeting of invalids was called, soldiers and of.cers together. An orator-cripple began to cast aspersions on the of.cers. A noise of protest arose, a stamping of shoes, canes, crutches. ”And how long ago were you, Mr. Of.cer, insulting the soldiers with lashes and .sts' These wounded, sh.e.l.l-shocked, mutilated people stood like two walls, one facing the other. Crippled soldiers against crippled of.cers, the majority against the minority, crutches against crutches. That nightmare scene in the amphitheatre foreshadowed the ferocity of the coming civil war.

Above all these .uctuations and contradictions in the army and in the country, one eternal question was hanging, summed up in the short word, war. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Black Sea to the Caspian and beyond into the depths of Persia, on an immeasurable front, stood sixty-eight corps of infantry and nine of cavalry. What should happen to them further? What was to be done with the war?

In the matter of military supplies the army had been considerably strengthened before the revolution. Domestic production for its needs had increased, and likewise the importa-tion of War material through Murmansk and Archangel-especially artillery from the Allies. Ri.es, cannon, cartridges, were on hand in incomparably greater quant.i.ties than during the .rst years of the war. New infantry divisions were in process of organisation. The engineer-ing corps had been enlarged. On this ground a number of the unhappy military chieftains attempted later to prove that Russia had stood on the eve of victory, and that only the rev-olution had prevented it. Twelve years before, Kuropatkin and Linevich had a.s.serted with as good a foundation that Witte prevented them from cleaning up the j.a.panese. In reality Russia was farther from victory in 1917 than at any other time. Along with the increase in ammunition there appeared in the army toward the end of 1916 an extreme lack of food sup-plies. Typhus and scurvy took more victims than the .ghting. The breakdown of transport alone cancelled all strategy involving large-scale regroupings of the military ma.s.s. More-over an extreme lack of horses often condemned the artillery to inaction. But the chief trouble was not even here; it was the moral condition of the army that was hopeless. You might describe it by saying that the army as an army no longer existed. Defeats, retreats, and the rottenness of the ruling group had utterly undermined the troops. You could no more correct that with administrative measures, than you could change the nervous system of the country. The soldier now looked at a heap of cartridges with the same disgust that he would at a pile of wormy meat; the whole thing seemed to him unnecessary and good for nothing; a deceit and a thievery. And his of.cer could say nothing convincing to him, couldn't even make up his mind to crack him on the jaw. The of.cer himself felt deceived by the higher command, and moreover not infrequently ashamed before the soldiers for his own superiors. The army was incurably sick. It was still capable of speaking its word in the revolution, but so far as making war was concerned, it did not exist. n.o.body believed in the success of the war, the of.cers as little as the soldiers. n.o.body wanted to .ght any more, neither the army nor the people.

To be sure, in the high chancelleries, where a special kind of life is lived, they were still chattering, through mere inertia, about great operations, about the spring offensive, the capture of the Dardanelles. In the Crimea they even got ready a big army for this latter purpose. It stood in the bulletins that the best element, of the army had been designated for the siege. They sent the regiments of the guard from Petrograd. However, according to the account of an of.cer who began drilling them on the 25th of February-two days before the revolution-these reinforcements turned out to be indescribably bad. Not the slightest desire to .ght was to be seen in those imperturbable blue, hazel and grey eyes. ”All their thoughts and their aspirations were for one thing only-peace.”

There is no lack of such testimony. The revolution merely brought to the surface what already existed. The slogan ”Down with the war' became for that reason one of the chief slogans of the February days. It came from demonstrations of women, from the workers of the Vyborg quarter, from the regiments of the Guard. Early in March when deputies from the Duma made a tour of the front, the soldiers, especially the older ones, would continually ask them:” What are they saying about the land' The deputies answered evasively that the land question would be decided by the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly. But here would sound out a voice betraying the hidden thought of everybody: ”Well, as for the land, if I'm not here, you know, I won't need it.” Such was the original soldier programme of revolution: .rst peace, and then the land.

Toward the end of March at the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, where there was a good deal of patriotic bragging, one of the delegates representing the soldiers in the trenches reported very sincerely how the front received the news of the revolution: ”All the soldiers said, ”Thank G.o.d! Maybe now we will have peace!” The trenches instructed the delegate to tell the conference ”We are ready to lay down our lives for freedom, but just the same, Comrades, we want an end of the war.” That was the living voice of reality-especially the latter half of it. We will wait a while if we have to, but you up there at the top, hurry along with the peace.

The czar's troops in France in a completely unnatural atmosphere-being moved by the same feelings, pa.s.sed through the same stages of disintegration. ”When we heard that the czar had abdicated,” an illiterate middle-aged peasant soldier explained to his of.cer, ”we all thought it meant that the war was over.... The czar sent us to war, and what is the use of freedom if I have got to rot in the trenches again?” That was the genuine soldier philosophy of the revolution-not brought in from the outside. No agitator could think up those simple and convincing words.

The liberals and the half-liberal socialists tried afterwards to represent the revolution as a patriotic uprising. On the 2nd of March, Miliukov explained to the French journalists: ”The Russian revolution was made in order to remove the obstacles on Russia's road to victory.” Here hypocrisy goes hand-in-hand with self-deceit-the hypocrisy somewhat the larger of the two. The candid reactionaries saw things clearer. Von Struve, a German Pan-Slavist, a Lutheran Greek Orthodox, and a Marxian monarchist, better de.ned the actual sources of the revolution, although in the language of reactionary hatred. ”In so far as the popular, and especially the soldier, ma.s.ses took part in the revolution, it was not a patriotic explosion, but a riotous self-demobilisation, and was directed straight against a prolongation of the War. That is, it was made in order to stop the War.”

Along with a true thought, those words contain also a slander. The riotous demobilisa-tion was growing as a matter of fact right out of the war. The revolution did not create, but on the contrary checked it. Deserting, extraordinarily frequent on the eve of the revolution, was very infrequent in the .rst weeks after. The army was waiting. In the hope that the revolution would give peace, the soldier did not refuse to put a shoulder under the front: Otherwise, he thought, the new government won't be able to conclude a peace.

”The soldiers are de.nitely expressing the opinion,” reports the chief of the Grenadier Division on the 23rd of March, ”that we can only defend ourselves and not attack.” Military reports and political speeches repeat this thought in various forms. Ensign Krylenko, an old revolutionist and a future commander-in-chief under the Bolsheviks, testi.ed that for the soldier the war question was settled in those days with this formula: ”Support the front, but don't join the offensive.” In a more solemn but wholly sincere language, that meant: defend freedom.

”We mustn't stick our bayonets in the ground!” Under the in.uence of obscure and con-tradictory moods the soldiers those days frequently refused even to listen to the Bolsheviks. They thought perhaps, impressed by certain unskilful speeches that the Bolsheviks were not concerned with the defence of revolution and might prevent the government from conclud-ing peace. The social patriotic papers and agitators more and more cultivated this idea among the soldiers. But even though sometimes preventing the Bolsheviks from speaking, the soldiers from the very .rst days decisively rejected the idea of an offensive. To the politicians of the capital this seemed some kind of a misunderstanding which could be re-moved with appropriate pressure. The agitation for war reached extraordinary heights. The bourgeois press in millions of issues portrayed the problems of the revolution in the light of ”War to complete victory.” The Compromisers hummed the same tune-at .rst under their breath, then more boldly. The in.uence of the Bolsheviks, very weak in the army at the moment of the revolution, became even weaker when thousands of workers who had been banished to the front for striking left its ranks. The desire for peace thus found no open and clear expression exactly where it was most intense. This situation made it possible for the commanders and commissars, who were looking round for comforting illusions, to deceive themselves about the actual state of affairs. In the articles and speeches of those times it is frequently a.s.serted that the soldiers declined the offensive because they did not correctly understand the formula ”without annexations or indemnities.” The Compromisers spared no effort to explain that defensive warfare permits taking the offensive, and sometimes even requires it. As though that scholastic question were at issue! An offensive meant re-opening the war. A waiting support of the front meant armistice. The soldiers' theory and practice of defensive warfare was a form of silent, and later indeed of quite open, agreement with the Germans: ”Don't touch us and we won't touch you.” More than that the army had nothing to give to the war.

The soldiers were still less open to warlike persuasions because, under the form of preparation for an offensive, reactionary of.cers were obviously trying to get the reins in their hands. In the soldiers' conversation appeared the phrase: ”Bayonet for the Germans, b.u.t.t for the inside enemy.” The bayonet, however, had here a defensive signi.cance. The soldiers in the trenches never thought of the Dardanelles. The desire for peace was a mighty underground current which must soon break out on the surface.

Although he did not deny that negative signs were ”to be observed” in the army, Mil-iukov tried for a long time after the revolution to a.s.sert that the army was capable of ful-.lling the tasks laid out for it by the Entente. ”The Bolshevik propaganda,” he writes in his character of historian, ”by no means immediately reached the front. For the .rst month or moth and-a-half after the revolution the army remained healthy.” He approaches the whole question at the level of propaganda, as though that exhausts the historic process. Under the form of a belated struggle against Bolsheviks, to whom he attributes veritably mystic powers, Miliukov carries on his struggle against facts. We have already seen how the army looked in reality. Let us see how the commanders themselves appraised its .ghting capacity in the .rst weeks, and even days, after the revolution.

On March 6 the commander-in-chief of the northern front, General Ruszky, informs the Executive Committee that a complete insubordination of the soldiers is beginning, popular personalities must be sent to the front in order to introduce some sort of tranquillity into the army.

The chief of the staff of the Black Sea .eet says in his memoirs: ”From the .rst days of the revolution it was clear to me that it was impossible to wage war, and that the war was lost.” Kolchak, according to him, was of the same opinion, and if he remained at his post as commander at the front, it was merely to defend the staff of.cers against violence.

Count Ignatiev, who occupied a high command in the Imperial Guard, wrote to Nabokov in March: ”You must clearly understand that the war is .nished, that we can't and won't .ght any longer. Intelligent people ought to be thinking up a way to liquidate the war painlessly, otherwise there will be a catastrophe....” Guchkov told Nabokov at the same time that he was receiving such letters by the thousand. Certain super.cially more hopeful reports, rare enough in any case, were mostly contradicted by their own supplementary ex-planations. ”The desire of the troops for victory remains,” says the commander of the 2nd Army, Danilov. ”In some regiments it is even stronger.” But just here he adds: ”Discipline has fallen off. . . . It would be well to postpone offensive action until the situation quiets down (say one to three months).” And then an unexpected supplement: ”Only 50 per cent. of the reinforcements are arriving. If they continue to melt away in the future, and are equally undisciplined, we cannot count on the success of the offensive.”

”Our Division is fully capable of defensive action,” reports the valiant commander of the 51st Infantry Division, and immediately adds: ”It is necessary to rescue the army from the in.uence of the Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies.” That, however, was not so easy to do.

The chief of the 182nd Division reports to the commander of the corps: ”With every day misunderstandings are increasing, essentially about tri.es, but ominous in their character. The soldiers are increasingly nervous, and the of.cers still more so.”

This is so far only scattered testimony, although there is much of it. But on the 18th of March there was held at staff head-quarters a conference of high of.cers on the condition of the army. The conclusion of the central organs of command was unanimous: ”It will be impossible to send troops to the front in suf.cient numbers to replace the losses, for there is unrest among all the reserves. The army is sick. It will probably take two or three months to adjust the relations between of.cers and soldiers.” The generals did not understand that the disease could only progress. For the present they observed a decline of spirits among the of.cers, agitation among the troops, and a considerable tendency to desert. ”The .ghting capacity of the army is lowered, and it is dif.cult at present to rely on the possibility of an advance.” Conclusion: ”It is now impossible to carry into execution the active operations indicated for the spring.”

In the weeks following, the situation continues to get worse a and similar testimony is endlessly multiplied. Late in March the commander of the 5th Army, General Dragomirov, wrote to General Ruszky: ”The .ghting spirit has declined. Not only is there no desire among the soldiers to take the offensive, but even a simple stubbornness on the defensive has decreased to a degree threatening the success of the war.... Politics, which has spread through all the layers of the army, has made the whole military ma.s.s desire only one thing-to end the war and go home.”

General Lukomsky, one of the pillars of the reactionary staff, dissatis.ed with the new order, took over the command of a corps and found, as he tells us, that discipline remained only in he artillery and engineering division in which there were many of.cers and soldiers of the regular army. ”As for the three infantry divisions, they were all on the road to complete disintegration.”

Deserting, which had decreased after the revolution under the in.uence of hope, in-creased again under the in.uence of disappointment. In one week, from the 1st to the 7th of April, according to the report of General Alexeiev, approximately 8,000 soldiers deserted from the northern and western fronts. ”I read with the utmost astonishment,” he wrote to Guchkov, ”the irresponsible reports as to the 'excellent' temper of the army, What is the use? It will not deceive the Germans, and for us it is a fatal self-deception.”

So far, it is well to note, there is hardly a reference to the Bolsheviks. The majority of of.cers had hardly learned that strange name. When they raised the question of the causes of the army's disintegration, it was newspapers, agitators, soviets, ”politics” in general-in a word, the February revolution.

You still could .nd individual of.cer-optimists who hoped that everything would turn out all right. There were still more who intentionally shut their eyes to the facts, in order not to cause unpleasantness to the new government. On the other hand a considerable number, especially of the highest of.cers, consciously exaggerated the signs of disintegration in order to get from the government some decisive action, which they themselves, however, were not quite ready to call by name. But the fundamental picture is indubitable. Finding the army sick, the revolution clothed the inexorable process of its decline in political forms which became more cruelly de.nite from week to week. The revolution carried to its logical end not only the pa.s.sionate thirst for peace, but also the hostility of the soldier ma.s.s to the commanding staff and to the ruling cla.s.ses in general.

In the middle of April, Alexeiev made a personal report to the government on the mood of the army, in which he evidently ,did not hesitate to lay on colours. ”I well remember,” writes ,Nabokov, ”what a feeling of awe and hopelessness seized me.” We may a.s.sume that, Miliukov was present during that report, which must have occurred in the .rst six weeks after the revolution. More likely indeed it was he who had summoned Alexeiev with the desire of frightening his colleagues, and through their, mediation, his friends the socialists.

Guchkov actually had a conversation after that with the representatives of the Exec-utive Committee. ”A ruinous fraternisation has begun,” he complained. ”Cases of direct insubordination are reported. Orders are talked over in army organisations and at general meetings before being carried out. In such and such regiments they wouldn't even hear of active operations. When people are hoping that peace will come tomorrow”-Guchkov added, wisely enough-” you can't expect them to give up their lives to-day.” From this the War Minister drew the conclusion: ”We must stop talking out loud about peace.” But since the revolution was just what had taught people to say out loud what they were formerly thinking in silence, this meant stop the revolution.

The soldier, of course, from the very .rst day of the war, did not want either to die or to .ght. But he did not want this just the way an artillery horse does not want to drag a heavy gun through the mud. Like the horse, he never thought that he might get rid of the load they had hitched to him. There was no connection between his will and the events of the war. The revolution showed him that connection. For millions of soldiers the revolution meant the right to a personal life, and .rst of all the right to life in general, the right to protect their lives from bullets and sh.e.l.ls, and by the same token their faces from the of.cers' .sts. In this sense it was said above, that the fundamental psychological process taking place in the army was the awakening of personality. In this volcanic eruption of individualism, which often took anarchistic forms the educated cla.s.ses saw only treachery to the nation. But as a matter of fact in the stormy speeches of the soldiers, in their intemperate protests, even in their b.l.o.o.d.y excesses, a nation was merely beginning to form itself out of impersonal prehistoric raw material. This .ood of ma.s.s individualism. so hateful to the bourgeoisie, was due to the very character of the February revolution, to the fact that it was a bourgeois revolution.

But that was not its only content, either. For besides the peasant and his soldier son, the worker took part in this revolution. The worker had long ago felt himself a personality, and into the war not only with hatred of it, but also with the thought of struggling against it. The revolution meant only the naked fact of conquering, but also the partial triumph of his ideas. The overthrow of the monarchy was for him only a .rst step, and he did not pause on it but hastened toward other goals. The whole question for him was, how much farther would the soldier and peasant go with him? What good is the land to me if I won't be there? asked the soldier. What good is freedom to me, he repeated after the worker before the closed doors of the theatre, if the keys to freedom are in the hand of the master? Thus across the immeasurable chaos of the February revolution, the steely gleams of October were already visible.

CHAPTER 14.

THE RULING GROUP AND THE WAR.

What did the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee intend to do with this war and this army?

First of all it is necessary to understand the policy of the liberal bourgeoisie, since they played the leading role. In external appearance the war policy of liberalism remained ag-gressive, patriotic, annexationist, irreconcilable. In reality it was self-contradictory, treach-erous, and rapidly becoming defeatist.

”Even if there had been no revolution,” wrote Rodzianko later, ”the war would have been lost just the same, and in all probability a separate peace signed.” Rodzianko's views were not distinguished by independence, and for that reason ably typify the average opin-ions of liberally conservative circles. The mutiny of the battalions of the Guard foretold to the possessing cla.s.ses not victory abroad but defeat at home. The liberals were the less able to deceive themselves about this, because they had foreseen, and to the best of their ability struggled against, this danger. The unexpected revolutionary optimism of Miliukov-declaring the revolution a step towards victory was in reality the last resort of desperation. The question of war and peace had almost ceased for the liberals to be an independent question. They felt that they would not be able to use the revolution for the purposes of war, and so much the more imperative became their other task: to use the war' against the revolution.

Problems concerning the international situation of Russia after the war, debts and new loans, the capital market and the sales market, of course still confronted the leaders of the Russian bourgeoisie; but these questions did not direc

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