the Moscow Soviet. Thomas spoke in French and the small crowd that had gathered could not understand what he said. 'But everything in his speech could be understood without words. Bobbing up and down on his bowed legs, Thomas showed us graphically what would happen to Russia if it left the war. He twirled his moustaches, like the Kaiser's, narrowed his eyes rapaciously, and jumped up and down choking the throat of an imaginary Russia.' For several minutes the Frenchman continued with this circus act, hurling the body of Russia to the ground and jumping up and down on it, until the crowd began to hiss and boo and laugh. Thomas mistook this for a sign of approval and saluted the crowd with his bowler hat. But the laughter and booing got
louder: 'Get that clown off!' one worker cried. Then, at last, someone else appeared on the balcony and diplomatically led him inside.11
Some middle-class civilians volunteered for the new shock battalions which were formed to revive the army's morale. Most of these were made up of frightened officers, eager to flee their mutinous regiments. Bernard Pares, who attended several patriotic rallies to encourage these volunteers, compared their hysterical atmosphere to that of a revival meeting. On one occasion he was introduced to the soldiers as 'our English comrade, the Professor', a great war hero, who had won the George Cross by beating the Germans single-handed. This was of course a total invention; but when Pares urged his host to shut up, he was told that such tales were needed to raise the morale of the troops.12
One of the best-known volunteer units had been formed by women. The Women's Battalion of Death had been organized by Maria Bochkareva, a truly remarkable woman, who had worked before the war as a foreman on factory building sites. After 1914 she had campaigned to enlist in the army and, having petitioned the Tsar himself, had been allowed to fight under General Gurko. By February 1917, she had risen to the rank of sergeant, having spent two years in the trenches with several wounds and a number of medals to prove it. Concerned by the collapse of military discipline, she appealed to Brusilov to let her form a shock battalion of women in the hope that this would shame the rest of the soldiers into fighting. In fact it was to have the opposite effect: the soldiers viewed its formation as a sign of the government's desperate situation and this strengthened their resolve not to fight; while many soldiers, the Cossacks in particular, refused to fight alongside women. But Brusilov did not anticipate this and saw no reason to object. He was keen on the idea, much debated at that time, of establishing a new army based entirely on volunteer units. He saw it as a means of fighting the war on the basis of patriotic duty, and of breaking down the old divisions between the officers and the troops. Since his own wife was working in the medical services at the Front, he did not see why other women should not also go there to fight. The battalion was hastily formed and blessed by the Patriarch Nikon on Red Square in Moscow before their departure for the Front in June. The women shaved their heads and put on standard army trousers, although one was too fat to fit them and had to go into battle in a skirt.13
The army commissars were the other great hope of this civic patriotism. Most of them were junior officers of democratic or socialist persuasion. They enjoyed the confidence of their troops yet also understood the need for military discipline. Linde, the young NCO who had led the mutiny of several regiments during the February Days, was a typical case in point: he became the Commissar of the Special Army during the summer offensive. Dmitry Os'kin, the peasant NCO whom we encountered in Chapter 7, also became a military commissar.
The commissars were instituted by the Soviet on 19 March, and made responsible to the Provisional Government on 6 May. They were meant to smooth relations between the officers and the soldiers' committees and, as such, were seen as the basis for a new patriotic partnership between the democracy and the army.
That, too, was the hope of the Declaration 'On the Rights of Servicemen' issued by Kerensky on II May. Kerensky claimed — and he was surely right — that the Russian armed forces were now the 'freest in the world'; and he called on the soldiers to prove 'that there is strength, not weakness, in freedom' in the coming offensive. The Declaration retained the rights of Order Number One, but it also restored the authority of the officers at the Front, including the use of corporal punishment. This was seen in the ruling circles as an essential concession to the military leaders in preparation for the coming offensive. Brusilov was adamant that he would not fight without it. Yet there is no doubt that many soldiers saw the Declaration as an attempt by the government to restore the old system of discipline and this played into the hands of the Bolsheviks.
To raise the morale of the troops Kerensky went on a tour of the Front during May. Here his hysterical oratory reached fever pitch. With his squeaky voice and waving arms, he appealed to the soldiers to make the supreme sacrifice for the glorious future of their Fatherland. At the end of these tirades he would collapse in a state of nervous exhaustion and have to be revived with the aid of valerian spirits. Though these fainting fits were not contrived, or at least not to begin with, they added an extra theatrical effect to Kerensky's performances. Everywhere he was hailed as a hero. Soldiers carried him shoulder-high, pelted him with flowers and threw themselves at his feet. An English nurse watched in amazement as they 'kissed him, his uniform, his car, and the ground on which he walked. Many of them were on their knees praying; others were weeping.'15 Nothing quite like it had been seen since the days of the Tsar.
Yet all this adulation merely gave Kerensky the false impression that the soldiers were eager to fight. Fifty years later, in his memoirs, he still insisted that a 'healthy mood of patriotism at the Front had become a definite force'.* But this was far from the truth. Kerensky's visits brought him into contact with a very unrepresentative cross-section of the army. The soldiers' meetings which he addressed were mainly attended by the officers, the uniformed intelligentsia and the members of the soldiers' committees. At these meetings Kerensky's
* The leaders of the Soviet and the Provisional Government were deceived by the fact that the soldiets, like the common people, expressed extreme hostility to everything 'German'. But the concept of 'German' was for the soldiers a general symbol of everything they hated — the Empress, the treasonable tsarist government, the war and all foreigners — rather than the German soldiers (for whom they often expressed sympathy) on the other side of the front line.
speeches had a mesmerizing effect: they conjured up the sweet illusion of a victorious end to the war with one more heroic heave. Now a weary soldier might well be tempted to believe in this, even if deep down he knew it to be false, simply because he wanted to. But such illusions were soon dispelled once he returned to the trenches. Outside these meetings, moreover, among the vast majority of the rank and file, the mood of the soldiers was much more negative. Kerensky was frequently heckled by such troops during his trips to the Front, yet he never seemed to register the warning that this conveyed. On one occasion near Riga, a soldier was pushed forward by his mates to question the Minister. 'You tell us we must fight the Germans so that the peasants can have the land. But what's the use of us peasants getting land if I am killed and get no land?' Kerensky had no answer — and there was none — but ordered the officer in command of this unit to send the soldier home: 'Let his fellow villagers know that we don't need cowards in the Russian army.' The soldier could not believe his luck, and at once fainted; while the officer scratched his head in disbelief. How many more men would have been sent home on this basis? It was clear that Kerensky saw the soldier as an exception, of whom he could make an example. He did not seem to realize that there were millions of others just like him.16
Brusilov, by contrast, was beginning to have second thoughts about the morale of the troops. 'The soldiers are tired,' he wrote to his wife at the end of April, 'and in many ways no longer fit to go on to the offensive.' On taking over the supreme command of the army, he set off on his own tour of the Northern and Western Fronts. In contrast to the soldiers of his own South-Western Front, far removed from the influence of the revolutionary cities, he found the troops in a state of complete demoralization. According to one of his senior aides, Brusilov had to avoid using the words 'offensive' or 'advance' in case the soldiers attacked him. Brusilov was not a natural orator. He would draw the soldiers round him and take off his cap and jacket, holding them — 'democratically' — over his left arm, to create an informal atmosphere. But his speeches failed to convince the soldiers that — as they might have said of Kerensky — 'he is one of us'. On one occasion, for example, whilst addressing a group of particularly Bolshev-ized soldiers near Dvinsk, Brusilov claimed that the Germans had destroyed 'one of the French people's finest properties, the beautiful vineyards that produce champagne'. This of course merely alienated and enraged the soldiers, who
