A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss that one cannot cross. Whatever they might think of us as individuals, we in their eyes remain no more than barins (masters). When we talk of 'the people' we have in mind the nation as a whole, but they mean only the common people. In their view what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, of which we are the losers and they are the winners. They think that things should get better for them and that they should get worse for us. They do not believe us when we talk of our devotion to the soldiers. They say that we were the barins in the past, and that now it is their turn to be the barins over us. It is their revenge for the long centuries of servitude.

The peasant soldiers clearly did not share their officers' language of 'citizenship'. They did not see the revolution in the same terms of civic rights and duties. Their revolution in the trenches was another version of the social revolution in the countryside. The peasant conscripts naturally assumed that, if only they could overthrow their noble officers, then peace, bread and land would be the result. As one soldier put it at a meeting of his regiment in March to discuss the abdication of the Tsar:

Haven't you understood? What is going on is a ryvailoosbun! Don't you know what a ryvailoosbun is? It's when the people take all the power. And what's the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It's obvious — it means that the power belongs to us. And while we're about it, the country is ours too, and all the land is ours, and if we choose to fight or not is up to us as well. Now do you understand? That's a ryvailoosbun.³⁹

This assertion of 'soldier power' was essential to the spirit of 'trench Bolshevism' which swept through the armed forces in 1917. Brusilov described it thus:

The soldiers wanted only one thing — peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme. They did not have the slightest understanding

of what either Communism, or the International,* or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called 'Bolshevism'.

From the start of the revolution there was a sharp rise in the rate of desertion, especially among the non- Russian soldiers. Perhaps a million soldiers left their units between March and October. Most of these were soldiers 'absent without leave', men who had simply got fed up with fighting or sitting around unfed in the trenches and the garrisons, and had run off to the nearest town, where they ate and got drunk, went to brothels and often terrorized the local population. 'The streets are full of soldiers,' complained a Perm official in mid-March. 'They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.'⁴⁰

* * * Russia's war aims occupied the centre-stage of politics during the spring of 1917. Indeed the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end. This was not just a political clash, it was also a social one. Left-wing propaganda made it clear that the war was being waged for different class interests. Enormous mistrust and even hatred of the 'bourgeoisie' and the 'imperialist' or 'capitalist' system could be stirred up by the stories of war-profiteering industrialists, merchants, 'kulaks' and black marketeers. Supporters of the war were instantly tarnished with the stigma of placing their own 'imperial' interests above those of the people. 'We see', declared a workers' resolution of the Dinamo factory in Moscow, 'that the senseless slaughter and destruction of the war is essential to no one but the parasite bourgeoisie.'⁴¹

The Provisional Government had so far shied away from the crucial question of its policy on the war. There were too many conflicting views within the cabinet. Miliukov, with the loose support of Guchkov, saw no reason to give up Russia's imperial ambitions, contained in the 'secret treaties' with the Allies, to gain control of Constantinople. As Russia's new Foreign Minister, he made this clear to the press and embassies abroad. But his views were sharply at odds with the Soviet peace campaign, launched on 14 March with its Appeal to the Peoples of All the World, in which it renounced the war aims of tsarist Russia and called on the peoples of all the belligerent nations to protest against the 'imperialist war'. The Soviet peace campaign was immediately endorsed by a

* According to General Polovtsov, some of the soldiers thought the International was some sort of deity.

series of military congresses; most soldiers declared their allegiance to the Soviet on the basis that it promised peace. Its campaign was also backed by the more liberal ministers in the Provisional Government, once the left-wing idea of a separate peace, favoured in certain Soviet circles, was abandoned, and instead, on 21 March, the Soviet adopted the moderate line of Revolutionary Defensism (national unity for the defence of Russia combined with an international peace campaign for a democratic settlement 'without annexations or indemnities').

On 27 March the Provisional Government came out with its own Declaration of War Aims which was broadly in line with the Soviet peace campaign. But Miliukov told the Manchester Guardian that it would not alter Russia's commitment to her imperial allies. This began a bitter political struggle for the control of the Provisional Government's foreign policy. Miliukov was accused in democratic circles of speaking without cabinet authority. He was, in the words of one liberal newspaper, no more than a 'Minister of Personal Opinion'. The Soviet leaders, who saw the declaration of 27 March as a sacred achievement of the revolution, urged the Provisional Government to present it in the form of a diplomatic note to the Allies, which would give it effect as Russia's practical foreign policy, albeit without the approval of her Foreign Minister. After a great deal of fuss, Miliukov was forced to agree to this plan: the endorsement of the Soviet peace programme by a visiting delegation of French and British socialists had undercut his main objection that it would not be acceptable to the Allies. But when he came to despatch the declaration to the foreign embassies he added a covering note of his own in which he stressed, in contravention of the declaration, that Russia was still firmly committed to a 'decisive victory', including, at least by implication, the imperial war aims of the tsarist government.⁴²

The effect of the Miliukov Note was like a red rag to the Soviet bull. Gorky, who had helped to write the Soviet Appeal of 14 March, denounced it as part of a 'bourgeois assault on the democracy with the purpose of prolonging the war'. Miliukov's action had, to be sure, greatly strengthened the Soviet message — that only 'the bourgeoisie' stood to gain from the 'imperialist war' — in the minds of the workers and soldiers. On 20 April thousands of armed workers and soldiers came out to demonstrate on the streets of Petrograd. Many of them carried banners with slogans calling for the removal of the 'ten bourgeois ministers', for an end to the war and for the appointment of a new revolutionary government. Linde, who had led the mutiny in February, was outraged by the Miliukov Note. He saw it as a betrayal of the revolution's fundamental promise, to bring the war to a democratic end. Inclined by nature to spontaneous protest (February had proved that), he led a battalion of the Finland Regiment in an armed demonstration to the Marinsky Palace in the expectation that the Soviet would call for the arrest of the government and the establishment of Soviet power.

By the time they reached the palace Linde's street army had been joined by crowds of angry soldiers from the Moscow and Pavlov regiments, so that it had swollen to 25,000 men. Linde's show of force was completely improvised — he had not consulted with anyone — but he was clearly under the illusion that the Soviet Executive (of which he was a member) would give its full approval to his actions. He was mistaken. The Executive had passed a resolution condemning Linde's demonstration on the grounds that it, the Soviet, was not prepared to assume power but, on the contrary, should help the Provisional Government to restore its own authority. It was only the far Left, the Vyborg Bolsheviks and the Anarchists, who had encouraged the demonstrators and had put the wild idea into their heads that they should 'get rid of the bourgeoisie'. The right-wing press immediately condemned Linde as a 'Bolshevik' and depicted his armed