The history of the Russian revolution - volume1 by Leon Trotsky

Author:Leon Trotsky [Trotsky, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: non.fiction, economics
ISBN: 9780913460832
Publisher: Monad Press (NY)
Published: 1930-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Footnote

1. The term is applied to0 those who attended the conference of anti-war socialists held in Zimmerwald in 1915, or adhered to its programme. The conference reassembled the following year in Kienthal. – Trans.

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Chapter 13: The Army and the War

In the months preceding the revolution discipline in the army was already badly shaken. You can pick up plenty of officers’ complaints from those days: soldiers disrespectful to the command; their treatment of horses, of military property, even of weapons, indescribably bad; disorders in the military trains. It was not equally serious everywhere. But everywhere it was going in the same direction – toward ruin.

To this was now added the shock of revolution. The uprising of the Petrograd garrison took place not only without officers, but against them. In the critical hours the command simply hid its head. Deputy-Octobrist Shidlovsky conversed on the 27th of February with the officers of the Preobrazhensky regiment obviously in order to feel out their attitude to the Duma – but found among these aristocrat-cavaliers a total ignorance of what was happening, perhaps a half-hypocritical ignorance, for they were all frightened monarchists.

“What was my surprise,” says Shidlovsky, “when the very next morning I saw the whole Preobrazhensky regiment marching down the street in military formation led by a band, their order perfect and without a single officer!” To be sure, a few companies arrived at the Tauride with their officers – more accurately, they brought their officers with them. But the officers felt that in this triumphal march they occupied the position of captives. Countess Kleinmichel, observing these scenes while under arrest, says plainly: “The officers looked like sheep led to the slaughter.”

The February uprising did not create the split between soldiers and officers but merely brought it to the surface. In the minds of the soldiers the insurrection against the monarchy was primarily an insurrection against the commanding staff. “From the morning of the 28th of February,” says the Kadet Nabokov, then wearing an officer’s uniform, “it was dangerous to go out, because they had begun to rip off the officers’ epaulettes” That is how the first day of the new régime looked in the garrison.

The first care of the Executive Committee was to reconcile soldiers with officers. That meant nothing but to Subordinate the troops to their former command. The return of the officers to their regiments was supposed, according to Sukhanov, to protect the army against “universal anarchy or the dictators of the dark and disintegrated rank-and-file.” These revolutionists, just like the liberals, were afraid of the soldiers, not of the officers. The workers on the other hand, along with the “dark” rank-and-file, saw every possible danger exactly in the ranks of those brilliant officers. The reconciliation therefore proved temporary.

Stankevich describes in these words the mental attitude of the soldiers to the officers who returned to them after the uprising: “The soldiers, breaking discipline and leaving their barracks, not only without officers, but in many cases against their officers and even after killing them at their posts, had achieved, it turned out, a great deed of liberation.

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