The system of political control is as follows. Side by side with the hierarchy of military officers there exists a corresponding hierarchy of members of the Communist Party, small numerically, but endowed with far-reaching powers of supervision. These branches of the Communist Party extend their tentacles to the smallest unit of the army, and not a single soldier is exempt from the omnipresent Communist eye. The responsible Communist official in a regiment is called the Commissar, the others are called “political workers,” and constitute the “cell.” In my own unit, numbering nearly 200 men, there were never more than half-a-dozen Communists or “political workers,” and they were regarded with hatred and disgust by the others. Their chief duty obviously was to eavesdrop and report suspicious remarks, but their efforts were crowned with no great success because the commissar, to whom the Communists reported, was himself a sham Communist and a personal friend of my commander.
In other regiments in Petrograd with which I was in touch it was different. I particularly remember one commissar, formerly a locksmith by trade. He had had an elementary education and was distinguished by a strange combination of three marked traits: he was an ardent Communist, he was conspicuously honest, and he was an inveterate toper. I will refer to him as Comrade Morozov. Knowing that drunkenness was scheduled as a “crime unworthy of a Communist,” Morozov tried to cure himself of it, a feat which should not have been difficult considering that vodka had been almost unobtainable ever since the Tsar prohibited its production and sale at the beginning of the Great War. But Morozov nevertheless fell to vodka every time there was a chance. On the occasion of the wedding of a friend of his who was a speculator (and a genuine speculator) in foodstuffs, he invited two or three regimental companions, one of whom I knew well, to the feast. Although Petrograd was starving, there was such an abundance of good things at this repast and such a variety of wines and spirits, extracted from cellars known only to superior “speculators” who supplied important people like commissars, that it lasted not only one night, but was continued on the morrow. Morozov disappeared from his regiment for three whole days and would undoubtedly have lost his post and, in the event of the full truth leaking out, have been shot, had not his friends sworn he had had an accident.
Yet Morozov could not have been bribed by money, and would have conscientiously exposed any “speculator” he found in his regiment. He was thoroughly contrite after the episode of the marriage feast. But it was not the wanton waste of foodstuffs that stirred his conscience, nor his connivance and participation in the revels of a “speculator,” but the fact that he had failed in his duty to his regiment and had only saved his skin by dissembling. His sense of fairness was remarkable for a Communist. At the elections to the Petrograd Soviet for which he was candidate for his regiment, he not only permitted but positively insisted that the voting should be by secret ballot—the only case of secret voting that I heard of. The result was that he was genuinely elected by a large majority, for apart from this quite unusual fairness he was fond of his soldiers and consequently popular. His intelligence was rudimentary and may be described as crudely locksmithian. An eddy of fortune had swept him to his present pinnacle of power, and judging others by himself he imagined the soviet regime was doing for everyone what it had done for him. Possessing plenty of heart but a weak head, he found considerable difficulty in reconciling the ruthless attitude of the Communists toward the people with his own more warmhearted inclinations, but the usual argument served to stifle any inner questionings—namely, that since the Communists alone were right, all dissentients must be “enemies of the State” and he was in duty bound to treat them as such.
During the six or eight weeks that I had the opportunity to study Morozov after his appointment as regimental commissar, a perceptible change came over him. He grew suspicious and less frank and outspoken. Though he would scarcely have been able to formulate his thoughts in words, it was clear that the severity with which any criticism, even by Communists, of political commands from above was suppressed, and the rigid enforcement of iron discipline, within and without the party, differed greatly from the prospect of proletarian brotherhood which he had pictured to himself. At the same time he could only escape from these shackles by becoming an “enemy of the State,” and finally he, like all Communists, attributed the non-realization of his dreams to the insidious machinations of the scapegoats designated by his superiors, the non-Bolshevist Socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who must be exterminated wholesale.
Morozov’s responsibilities, like those of all commissars, were heavy. Though in purely military affairs he
