Russia & The Struggle for Peace/Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE PROCESS OF DISINTEGRATION
THE "patriotic" Press in this country and in France would like to shift the responsibility for the disintegration of the Russian army to the Revolution and the Revolutionary democracy. According to them, the disintegration of the army was the evil work of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates and of the "Committee System."
This interpretation of events has two obvious advantages for the Press and for their Russian correspondents. In the first place, it relieves them of responsibility for their two years of silence, during which time they concealed the truth about the real condition of the Russian army from the British public. Secondly, it helps them to discredit the hated Revolution. Having shown that the Revolution and the Socialist parties are guilty of the destruction of the Russian army, the "patriotic" Press can turn to the workers of Britain and France and say: "Look what the Socialists and Revolutionaries have done with the 'brave and gallant army of the Tsar'! Beware!"
But, however convenient it may be for the capitalist Press to blame the Revolution for the decomposition of the army, it is nevertheless a falsehood. The disintegration of the army began long before the Revolution, and the revolutionary democracy is by no means responsible for the process, which was already completed under the old régime. Fraternisation with the enemy, refusal to fight, mass desertions and panic-stricken flight before advancing Germans—these and other symptoms of disintegration in the army, for which the "patriotic" Press would blame the Revolution, the "revolutionary talkers," "German agents," and "Bolshevik treachery"—all these appeared in perfectly palpable forms long before the Revolution.
Take the desertions. The first news about the desertions in the Russian army which reached this country was sent by the correspondents in Russia shortly after the Revolution. And the explanation given suggested that the desertions were brought about by the extremists of the Revolution, who aroused dangerous illusions among the peasant soldiers, making them think that the division of the land was imminent. The uneducated soldiers (it was said), anxious to secure their share, dropped their rifles, deserted from their units and hastened back to their native villages.
I have no hesitation in saying that this explanation was not only misleading but untrue. It was equally false as to the facts about the desertions and as to the origin of desertion as a mass phenomenon. It was the first of a long series of grave and far-reaching misrepresentations. I see that Mr. Wilton, the Petrograd correspondent of the "Times," in his recently published book, admits that the desertions began to occur in the winter of 1916.[1] At the time, Mr. Wilton was, of course, silent about these facts. Not only did he conceal them from the British public, but the whole gist and tenor of his dispatches was such as to exclude the possibility of even a guess or a suspicion that there was anything wrong with the Russian army. But after the Revolution, he, in common with the majority of British and French newspaper correspondents, asserted that the disintegration of the Russian army began with the Revolution and with the renowned "Order No. 1."
Mr. Wilton states that the desertions began to occur in the winter of 1916. As a matter of fact, they had already begun in the autumn of 1915, and by the winter of 1916 they had grown to a disastrous magnitude. Early in 1916 there were so many deserters roaming about Russia that the military authorities paid money to anyone who would bring them back. The chief "catchers" were the notorious "strazhniki," the village guards; and the more zealous of them not only received money payments, but were rewarded with military crosses and medals, to the great indignation of the army. Deserters were often caught in villages very far from the front, and a whole system was elaborated for reinstating them in their units. There were collecting stations behind the lines where the "strazhniki" had to bring them, and from there whole train loads of deserters were despatched to the front.
The people in Russia nicknamed the deserters, with gentle humour, "lictchiki" or flying men. The majority of these flying men formed an utterly desperate and despondent class, which had no more desire or fear in life. They were indeed severely punished on their return to the army, but they had little fear of this punishment and were never likely to submit. They only waited for an opportunity to escape again. Officers have said that they never wanted to come near a train which was carrying back deserters to the front. The deserters drank home-made vodka which they got from the railway servants in exchange for their (army) boots, and they were wild and turbulent.
The actual number of such "flying men" is not known. Even the Russian General Staff never knew their real number. This is hardly surprising, considering that the General Staff did not even know the number of mobilised men.
When I was in Russia, I asked every officer I met about the character and extent of the desertions from the army before the Revolution. All evidence goes to prove that desertion was a mass phenomenon. Its beginning was remarkable, and had very little to do with any kind of insubordination or lack of discipline. It was the perfectly natural result of the great retreat from Galicia. During this catastrophic retreat, many divisions were dispersed in all directions; and often single soldiers or groups of soldiers found themselves many miles away from their units, and would naturally be left alone for some weeks before they rejoined. This was not desertion, but it could easily lead to desertion, and it was in fact the chief cause of the beginning of desertion on a large scale. On this occasion, desertion was unintentional, but later on it became intentional; and the longer the war went on, the more desertions there were and the more deliberate and malicious was their character. It is estimated that just before the Revolution there were about two million deserters in the country.
It is a fact that the Revolution was accompanied by a considerable increase in the number of desertions—probably because the soldiers thought that the war would now soon be over, and perhaps also under the stimulus of alleged land division. But it is equally a fact that the Revolution was very quickly aware of the danger. It began to stimulate a movement to induce the deserters to return, which at first was very successful. The deserters, who were of course unconditionally pardoned by the Provisional Government, came back in heaps. In many towns meetings of deserters were held, at which resolutions were passed, followed by an immediate return to the front. Only at a later stage, when the army became the object and centre of the struggle between the Revolution and the counter-Revolution—only then did the deserters refuse to join their units. Then began the hideous scenes in several towns of Russia, where "patriotic" units, notably of military cadets, organised virtual stalking expeditions to round up deserters, resulting in much bloodshed and passionate resentment.
Thus desertion from the front on a large scale, which, owing to the false silence of the correspondents, was not heard of in this country till after the Revolution, was a notorious evil in Russia long before that event. Now let us consider fraternisation. Fraternisation with the enemy also did not begin with the Revolution, nor was it specially typical of the Revolution. It certainly showed a great increase after the Revolution, but it was known all through the war. The simple Russian soldiers always attempted to fraternise with the enemy, and artillery officers could tell many stories of how such attempts at fraternisation were stopped by artillery fire. The Slav soldiers of the Austrian regiments especially responded to this tendency to fraternise. There is not the slightest doubt that the enormous number of Slav prisoners in Russia was largely due to fraternisation between the soldiers of the two armies.
Once more in this case, not a word was said about fraternisation before the Revolution, and after the Revolution the fraternisation was attributed to deliberate and malicious treachery on the part of the revolutionary extremists. But as a matter of fact the great increase of fraternisation in the first days of the Revolution was a spontaneous outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm in the soldiers at the front, and the revolutionary democracy at Petrograd certainly could not have influenced it. Only at a later stage did they try to influence it, some sections doing their best to mitigate it, while others encouraged it and tried to give it a definitely political impulse and purpose.
There is a notion, which has been diligently spread, that the idea of fraternisation was given to the soldiers by Lenin on his first return to Russia. But as a matter of fact fraternisation began immediately the news about the Revolution reached the front line trenches. In the first convention of soldiers and officers which took place in Minsk at the end of April, 1917, the delegates from the front line gave a very interesting description of how the fraternisation began and how it was carried out. It was unanimously recognised that it was a spontaneous movement on the part of the soldiers themselves, who went out to meet the enemy in the "neutral zone"—first singly and then in larger and larger groups—conveying the news of the Revolution. Eventually they met in the trenches of the enemy or in their own trenches, and sometimes as many as 500 were present at single meetings.
When this spontaneous movement became known to the revolutionary democracy at home, it was at first received with unanimous approval and joy, but after a short period it divided them into two camps. The moderates were afraid that fraternisation would lead to disorganisation of the army; while the extremists, who were tremendously impressed by the unexpected impulse of the movement, overestimated its possibilities. For them fraternisation was "the way to peace." They saw in it "the revolutionary initiative of the masses, an awakening of the conscious intelligence and courage of the oppressed classes; in a word, one of the links in the chain leading up to the proletarian Revolution" of the world. Lenin wrote on the first of May: "Fraternisation has begun; let us help it!" But even the Bolsheviks emphasised the necessity of turning fraternisation into an active political weapon, and of taking precautions lest it should lead to strategical advantages for the enemy or to the decomposition of the army. In a manifesto to the troops entitled "How to Fraternise" the Bolsheviks said:—
"Fraternisation must not be transformed into a trap for the revolutionary soldiers on one side or the other. We are in favour of fraternisation of revolutionary soldiers on both sides in the name of the transformation of the Russian Revolution into the European Revolution, and in order to carry the spirit of the Russian Revolution into Germany and into the German trenches. We see in it the great beginning of a great deed. But we want this to be actually a fraternisation of revolutionaries and not a trap set by imperialists to catch revolutionaries. The soldier comrades at the front, weighing all the circumstances, will know how to avoid such traps and transform these fraternisations into a means of carrying the Revolution from Russia into Germany."
Meanwhile the Generals—Gurko, Brusiloff and others—gave orders to the artillery to shoot at sight any groups of soldiers who were seen to leave the trenches for fraternisation. In fact a large number were killed in this way, and there was a bitter conflict between the infantry and the artillery, the latter being less infected with the revolutionary impulse. But this was unable to stop the fraternisation. It came to an end only when the people realised that fraternisation and cessation of hostilities at the front were liberating large numbers of German troops for the Western front. They began to call it a separate truce, and they saw that it led to no positive results. It lost its ideal significance, and only then, being really discredited in the minds of the people, it died a natural death.
It is difficult at present to give a true estimate of the total results of fraternisation. Only the future historian will be able to estimate its true significance. But at the time all elements in Russia, including the Generals, who regarded it as unmitigated treason, realised that apart from its effects on the Russian army it had a very considerable positive effect in undermining the discipline and organisation of the German army. Early in May, the then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, General Alexeiev, said, in an interview which was published in all the Petrograd newspapers: "Without however shutting our eyes to the immense harm done by this practice of fraternisation, we cannot help coming to the conclusion that it has had a powerful effect on the ranks of the enemy, and that things are not all well with them." General Dragomirov, in an interview published in the "Den" of May 5th, said: "Undoubtedly fraternisation, while having a demoralising effect on our armies, is not without effect on the mood of the German soldier either." Kerenski himself, who referred to the fraternisation as a most deplorable practice which must be arrested at all costs, told me on the 1st of May that its effect on the front line of the enemy was so great that if they wished to undertake an offensive they would have to replace all their first line units by fresh troops.
Fraternisation was by no means instigated by the Revolution. It had existed before the Revolution; it certainly showed a great increase immediately after the Revolution, but then only as a spontaneous manifestation of the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Russian soldier. Even the refusal to fight and the panic-stricken rout before the advancing enemy were not unknown things in the days before the Revolution. It is true that in the Galician disaster last summer they assumed the most terrible proportions, but they were by no means an entirely new occurrence.
The Revolution is not, then, guilty of the decomposition of the Russian army. All the elements of decomposition were present before the Revolution; and its causes lay in the exhaustion of Russia. Nevertheless, future history will heavily censure the Revolution for not stopping the rot. The Revolution certainly should and could have stopped it. The new democracy of Russia had the true instinct, and the Soviet truly understood the great task of reorganising the Russian army. The inclusion of soldiers' representatives in the Soviet bears witness to its realisation that the strength of the new Russia must be based on unity between the workers and the soldiers. The much-discussed "Order No. 1," whether right or wrong in some details, clearly indicates that the Soviet realised the necessity of reorganising the army. The war had finally and definitely destroyed the army of Tsarist slaves. The "poor little grey cattle" ceased to exist; but there was a long way to go before the broken army of slaves could become a strong revolutionary army of the Republic. This could not be achieved by a miracle. It could only be brought about by a courageous and consistent realisation of the democratic programme of the Revolution. The new democracy of Russia should mercilessly have cleared the army of all reactionary elements. It was imperative to create an army permeated from top to bottom by unity of thought and revolutionary feeling. To achieve this end no price was too dear, and the revolutionary democracy ought if necessary to have sacrificed the majority of the reactionary generals and high officers. A smaller army with younger officers, but united in spirit and devoted to the ideas of the new Russia, would have been infinitely more effective than the huge and broken military machine permeated by mutual distrust. The so-called discipline of the old régime and the pre-revolutionary organisation of the army were not only useless but harmful. So long as these outworn and rotten elements were retained, they only prolonged the decomposition of the army.
The revolutionary democracy saw the danger perfectly clearly, but they had not sufficient courage and will-power to accomplish what was necessary. Many times they boldly attempted the great task of thoroughly reorganising the army. But the shoutings of the Russian and Allied Imperialists and reactionaries led them astray. Therein lay the weakness of the Revolution. The revolutionary democracy had not courage enough to reorganise the army, and it compromised on this great question with the Imperialists and reactionaries. That was the greatest misfortune of Russia.
- ↑ "During the winter 1916–1917, scurvy was very prevalent at the front. Desertions began to occur. Many companies were reduced by these causes to one-third of their normal strength."—"Russia's Agony," page 64.