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

Hadji-Murad. The peasant soldiers, in particular, objected to the way their officers addressed them with the familiar 'you' (tyi) — normally used for animals and children — rather than the polite 'you' (vyi). It was how the masters had once addressed their serfs; and since most of the officers were nobles, and most of the soldiers were sons of former serfs, this mode of address symbolized the continuation of the old feudal world inside the army. The first thing a recruit did on joining the army was to learn the different titles of his officers: 'Your Honour' up to the rank of colonel; 'Your Excellency' for generals; and 'Your Radiance' or 'Most High Radiance' for titled officers. Colonels and generals were to be greeted not just with the simple hand salute but by halting and standing sideways to attention while the officer passed by for a strictly prescribed number of paces. The soldier was trained to answer his superiors in regulation phrases of deference: 'Not at all, Your Honour'; 'Happy to serve you, Your Excellency.' Any deviations were likely to be punished. Soldiers could expect to be punched in the face, hit in the mouth with the butt of a rifle and sometimes even flogged for relatively minor misdemeanours. Officers were allowed to use a wide range of abusive terms — such as 'scum' and 'scoundrel' — to humiliate their soldiers and keep them in their place. Even whilst off-duty the common soldier was deprived of the rights of a normal citizen. He could not smoke in public places, go to restaurants or theatres, ride in trams, or occupy a seat in a first- or second-class

railway carriage. Civic parks displayed the sign: DOGS AND SOLDIERS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER. The determination of the soldiery to throw off this 'army serfdom' and gain the dignity of citizenship was to become a major story of the revolution.²⁹

It was not just the peasant infantry who joined the mutinies after 1905. Even some of the Cossack cavalry — who since the start of the nineteenth century had been a model of loyalty to the Tsar — joined the rebellions. The Cossacks had specific grievances. Since the sixteenth century they had developed as an elite military caste, which in the nineteenth century came under the control of the Ministry of War. In exchange for their military service, the Cossacks were granted generous tracts of fertile land — mainly on the southern borders they were to defend (the Don and Kuban) and the eastern steppes — as well as considerable political freedom for their self-governing communities (yoiskos, from the word for 'war'). However, during the last decades of the nineteenth century the costs of equipping themselves for the cavalry, of buying saddles, harnesses and military- grade horses, as they were obliged to in the charters of their estate, became increasingly burdensome. Many Cossack farmers, already struggling in the depression, had to sell part of their livestock to meet their obligations and equip their sons to join. The voiskos demanded more and more concessions — both economic and political — as the price of their military service. They began to raise the flag of 'Cossack nationalism' — a parochial and nasty form of local patriotism based on the idea of the Cossacks' ethnic superiority to the Russian peasantry, and the memory of a distant and largely mythic past when the Cossacks had been left to rule themselves through their 'ancient' assemblies of elders and their elected atamans.''⁰

The government's treatment of the army provoked growing resentment among Russia's military elite. The fiercest opposition came from the new generation of so-called military professionals emerging within the officer corps and the Ministry of War itself during the last decades of the old regime. Many of them were graduates from the Junker military schools, which had been opened up and revitalized in the wake of the Crimean defeat to provide a means for the sons of non-nobles to rise to the senior ranks. Career officers dedicated to the modernization of the armed services, they were bitterly critical of the archaic military doctrines of the elite academies and the General Staff. To them the main priorities of the court seemed to be the appointment of aristocrats loyal to the Tsar to the top command posts and the pouring of resources into what had become in the modern age a largely ornamental cavalry. They argued, by contrast, that more attention needed to be paid to the new technologies — heavy artillery, machine-guns, motor transportation, trench design and aviation — which were bound to be decisive in coming wars. The strains of

modernization on the politics of the autocracy were just as apparent in the military as they were in all the other institutions of the old regime.

Alexei Brusilov (1853—1926) typified the new professional outlook. He was perhaps the most talented commander produced by the old regime in its final decades; and yet, after 1917, he did more than any other to secure the victory of the Bolsheviks. For this he would later come to be vilified as a 'traitor to Russia' by the White Russian emigres. But the whole of his extraordinary career — from his long service as a general in the imperial army to his time as the commander of Kerensky's army in 1917 and finally to his years as a senior adviser in the Red Army — was dedicated to the military defence of his country. In many ways the bitter life of Brusilov, which we shall be tracing throughout this book, symbolized the tragedy of his class.

There was nothing in Brusilov's background or early years to suggest the revolutionary path he would later take. Even physically, with his handsome fox-like features and his fine moustache, he cut the figure of a typical nineteenth-century tsarist general. One friend described him as a 'man of average height with gentle features and a natural easy-going manner but with such an air of commanding dignity that, when one looks at him, one feels duty-bound to love him and at the same time to fear him'. Brusilov came from an old Russian noble family with a long tradition of military service. One of his ancestors in the eighteenth century had distinguished himself in the battle for the Ukraine against the Poles — a feat he would emulate in 1920 — and for this the family had been given a large amount of fertile land in the Ukraine. At the age of nineteen Brusilov graduated from the Corps des Pages, the most elite of all the military academies, where officers were trained for the Imperial Guards. He joined the Dragoons of the Tver Regiment in the Caucasus and fought there with distinction, winning several medals, in the war against Turkey in 1877—8, before returning to St Petersburg and enrolling in the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns and Cavalry Junkers, where he rose to become one of Russia's top cavalry experts. Not surprisingly, given such a background, he instinctively shared the basic attitudes and prejudices of his peers. He was a monarchist, a Great Russian nationalist, a stern disciplinarian with his soldiers and a patriarch with his family. Above all, he was a devout, even mystical, believer in the Orthodox faith. It was this, according to his wife, that gave him his legendary calmness and self-belief even at moments of impending disaster for his troops.³¹

But Brusilov's views were broader and more intelligent than those of the average Guards officer. Although by training a cavalryman, he was among the first to recognize the declining military significance of the horse in an age of modern warfare dominated by the artillery, railways, telephones and motor transportation. 'We were too well supplied with cavalry,' he would later recall in his memoirs, 'especially when trench fighting took the place of open warfare.'³²

He believed that everything had to be subordinated to the goal of preparing the imperial army for a modern war. This meant inevitably sacrificing the archaic domination of the cavalry, and if necessary even the dynastic interests of the court, for the good of defending the Russian Fatherland. While he was by instinct a monarchist, he placed the army above politics, and his allegiance to the Tsar weakened as he saw it undermined and destroyed by the leadership of the court.

Brusilov's disaffection with the monarchy was to conclude in 1917 when he threw in his lot with the revolution. But the roots of this conversion went back to the 1900s, when, like many of the new professionals, he came to see the court's domination of the military as a major obstacle to its reform and modernization in readiness for the European war that, with every passing year, seemed more likely to break out on Russia's western borders. The critical turning point was the failure of the General Staff to learn the lessons of the disastrous defeat in the Japanese war of 1904—5. Like many officers, he bitterly resented the way the military had been forced into this campaign, 6,000 miles away and virtually without preparation, by a small clique at court. The war in the Far East had led to the run-down of the country's defences in the west. When, in 1909, he assumed the command of the Fourteenth Army in the crucial Warsaw border region, Brusilov found a state of 'utter chaos and disorganization in all our forces':

In the event of mobilization there would have been no clothes or boots for the men called up, and the lorries would have broken down as soon as they were put on the roads. We had machine-guns, but only eight per regiment, and they had no carriages, so that in case of war they would have had to be mounted on country carts. There were no howitzer batteries, and we knew that we were very short of ammunition, whether for field artillery or for rifles. I [later] learnt that the state of affairs was everywhere the same as with the XIV Army. At that