Disintegration of the Army - Civil War In Soviets

M. GORKY, V. MOLOTOV, K. VOROSHILOV, S. KIROV, A. ZHDANOV, J. STALIN

THE HISTORY THE CIVIL WAR

( From the beginning of the War to the beginning of October 1917)

The army was passing through a similar school of privation and revolutionary training. The war shambles and the frightful loss of human life, were opening the eyes of the deceived soldiers. The killing and maiming of millions of people ruthlessly revealed the true purpose of the war, its predatory character.

The nightmare of the war shambles was accompanied by material privations too great to be borne. Trenches full of mire and filth, lice, the absence of warm food, a shortage even of bread-such was the life of the soldier at the front.

"Do you know what things are like at the front?"­ we read in one of many typical letters from soldiers."
"We stand in the trenches. Cold, mud and vermin; food once a day at ten o'clock at night, and that lentils so black that pigs would not eat it. We are simply starving to death..." ... "1

Badly armed, commanded by inefficient generals, robbed by corrupt commissaries, the army suffered defeat after defeat. Without faith in itself or confidence in its commanders, not knowing why the millions were perishing, untrained, hungry and barefoot, it abandoned towns, whole regions and tens of thousands of men to the enemy. The severe defeats enraged the soldiers. Discontent seethed in the ranks, passing into suppressed unrest and then into open outbreaks. Cursing the incompetence and confusion, the soldiers refused to obey orders, declined to attack and avoided fighting.

"There is great unrest in the army here," we read in a letter from the Northern Front. 

"We are sick and tired of fighting. Several times already orders have been given to attack, but the soldiers simply refuse point blank to leave the trenches, and so the attack has to be abandoned."2

Another soldier, serving in the 408th Kuznetsk Infantry Regiment on the same front, wrote: "I went into attack four times, but nothing came of it: our regiments refused to advance. Some went, but others did not leave the trenches, :io I too did not crawl out of the trench."3

1,2,3 "Central Archives of Military History," Records of the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the South-Western Front. File No. 25-045, folio 107.

According ti 0 of the tsarist censors who opened reports the soldiers' letters, over 60 per cent of the soldiers referred to the steady spread of  the defeatist mood. The soldiers fled from the front, surrendered to the enemy, or shot themselves in the arm or leg so as to be sent to hospital.

The frightful horrors of the war drove the soldiers to desert. The deserters were constantly hounded, they lived in fear of being betrayed to the police at any minute. Yet they preferred the life of half-starved deserters, hunted like wild beasts by the military police, to life at the front.

In 1916 there were already over one and a half million deserters from the Russian army.

The hard lot of the soldiers was rendered still more intolerable by the brutality of the officers, who would beat and bully the soldiers without the slightest provocation. Th were punished for the most trifling misdemeanors. They were beaten for mistakes in military exercises, they were thrashed for not saluting smartly enough, or for not procuring vodka for the officers. Officers while drunk would cripple their men, and while sober would punch their faces, venting their spleen on the soldiers for their own mistakes. "A soldier's face is like a tambourine: the harder you strike it the happier you feel," the soldiers used to say in bitter irony, in reference to the face-punching proclivities of their officers.

Thousands of letters confiscated by the tsarist police describe the horrors and privations of the soldier's life: 

" The longer it goes on, the worse it is. Our officers are throttling us, draining our last drop of blood, of which we have little as it is. Will we ever see the end of this?"1 

Here are a few lines from another letter, for which a heart-broken mother waited in vain:

"Darling mother, it would have been better if you had never brought me into the world or if I had been drowned as a baby than for me to suffer as I do now."2

Cases of vengeance wreaked by the soldiers on their brutal commanders became more and more 

frequent. Detested officers were shot in action by their own men.

l ''Central .Archives of 11ilitary Ihstory, etc.'' folio 5.

2 Ibid. folio 2.7,

The author L. Voitolovsky, who observed the life of the army, recorded a song sung by soldiers 

which vividly expressed their hatred of the officers:

" Oh, orphan me,

To the woods I'll go, 

The woods deep and black, 

With my rifle on my back,

I'll go hunting. Three deeds I'll do: The first black deed,

The captain off I'll lead. 

The second black deed, 

Put my rifle to his head. 

The third black deed,

Right there I'll shoot him dead. 

Cursed son of a bitch,

My captain!"1

1 L. Voitolovsky, “In the Track of the War. Campaign Notes,' ' 1916-17, Vol I-II, Leningrad, 1926, p. 251.

The avenger as a rule went undiscovered. Officers were killed not only at the front, but also in the rear, in the depot battalions. The foundation of the old discipline-fear of superior-was disappearing. Open attacks by men on their officers, not only by individuals but also by groups, became more and more frequent. Instead of-the futile, individual outbursts of indignation and protest, which usually ended disastrously, the soldiers began to act in concert. 

"Strikes" involving whole regiments and divisions had occurred several times already. One such 

strike is described in a letter written by a soldier from the front in 1916:

" The divisional commander got to know about this strike. He came to the regiment and did not find a single officer. They were somewhere in hiding. He found only one sub-lieutenant, compelled him to take charge of the regiment and ordered him to attack immediately. But all the companies again refused to move, shouting: 'Give us food, clothes and shoes, otherwise we won't fight, or we'll all surrender to the enemy!' The situation was serious, even critical. If the enemy had got to know about it, he could have captured us to a man without firing a shot. The strike in our regiment was followed by a strike in the Tsarevsky Regiment and in other regiments of our division. Two whole battalions of one regiment of our division surrendered to the enemy voluntarily ... They wanted to shoot all the soldiers, they wanted to take away their rifles, bombs and other weapons, but the soldiers refused to give them up, and besides, other divisions went on strike, so that there was nobody to do the shooting: everybody is on strike ..
..... And how can they avoid striking-they are almost barefoot, hungry and cold, it is
heartrending to see them."2

1, 2 L. Voitolovsky, "In the '!'rack of the ,var. Campaign Notes,'' 1016-17, ,-01

A factor which contributed very largely to the disintegration of the army was the change that had taken place in the class character of the commanding ranks. The regular officers ,constituted a carefully-selected, militant caste, closely-knit by class, drawn mainly from the landed aristocracy and blindly devoted to the throne. The tsarist, government Carefully protected the officer ranks from adulteration by plebians. The officers themselves resisted the mission of members of the lower classes· to their ranks. But the war undermined the foundation of this closed caste. The regular officers had suffered heavy losses in the very first months of the war. They were gradually replaced by members of other social strata. The old caste became submerged by plebeian junior officers. The commanding· ranks were reinforced by lawyers, teachers, officials, seminarists, high-school students and mobilized university students. The old officers greeted the newcomers with undisguised contempt and hostility. The democratization of the corps of officers accentuated the disunity in the commanding ranks, which, in its turn, in- creased the discord in the army. 

·

The meaningless destruction of human life, the brutality of the officers, the inefficient commandership, the chaos and the severe conditions of life aroused even 'the most backward of the soldiers. The war provoked horror and despair in some, and in others a desire to find a way of escape and to discover those who were responsible for the senseless bloodshed.

The yellow patriotic newspapers with which the army was flooded succeeded at first in diverting the 

suppressed rage of the soldiers into the usual channel-hatred of the "enemy." Every defeat, every slightest set-back, was attributed to the machinations of the external foe-the Germans, and the "internal foe "-the Jews. A wave of po­groms destroyed hundreds of Jewish towns in the war area and drove tens of thousands of refugees to distant, unknown parts. The soldiers even had a saying: "Jewish spies are again mentioned in the day's orders-that means we are going to retreat."

Among other soldiers the war provoked hatred for the bourgeoisie and the government. The longer the war lasted the more detested the ruling classes became. The Bolshevik Party introduced the factor of organisation into this spontaneous process.

Outlawed by the tsarist government, the Bolsheviks carried on their work in the army with supreme self-sacrifice. When a soldier spasmodically gripped his rifle, not knowing on whom to vent his rage, the Bolsheviks would skillfully turn his indignation against the government and the bourgeoisie. When the soldiers, driven to fury, tried to find an outlet for their feelings in aimless acts of viol­ence against the "aliens "-the national minorities--the Bolsheviks would carry on internationalist propaganda in opposition to the reactionary policy of the tsarist government and the nationalists. By working persistently, the  Bolsheviks transformed the spontaneous expressions of despair into an organised movement against the government. Persecuted by the secret police, liable to court ­martial merely for being members of the Party, the Bol­sheviks unswervingly discharged their duty as fighters.

The tsarist government widely resorted to the draft­ing of "malcontents" to the front as a means of combating "subversion." A worker had only to grumble at the hard conditions in the factories to be singled out by the boss or the foreman. and on the following day he would be called before the military authorities and drafted to the front. People suspected of sympathy with the Bolsheviks were the first to be classed as "malcontents." The shortsighted tsarist government mobilized not less than 40 per cent of the industrial workers for the army on the very outbreak of the war. Furthermore, the ranks of the army and navy contained quite a number of men who had taken an active part in the 1905 Revolution, as well as a number of former readers of the Bolshevik paper "Pravda" ("Truth"), which had been closed down by the government on the outbreak of the war. The Bolshevik Party found de­voted propagandists among these people, who helped to spread its influence among the soldiers.

Despite the terrorism of the government, the Bolshevik Party managed to create organisations in a number of the regiments in the rear, where its activities were facili­tated by the influence of the local proletarians. Intense work was carried on everywhere-in Petrograd, MoscDW, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov. Ekaterinoslav, Saratov, Nizhni Novgorod, Samara, Tsaritsyn, Ekaterinburg, Tver, Baku, Batum, Tiflis, Kutais and in the province of Lettland. The fact that the Bolsheviks exiled to Narym, in Siberia, had been summoned to the colours made it possible to form a fairly strong Bolshevik organisation in the army in Tomsk. Another important channel of influence on the army in the rear was the contacts between the soldiers and the local 1 Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers among the workers. The strikes of the workers opened the eyes of the soldiers to the possibility of a revolutionary escape from the war. Here is a typical description of the influence exerted by the revolutionary struggle, of the workers on the soldiers:

"During the numerous demonstrations on January 9 (1916---Ed.) many meetings took place between the demonstrators and the soldiers. For example, the workers met lines of automobiles carrying soldiers on the Vyborg Chaussee. Friendly greetings were exchanged. Seeing the red banners, the soldiers bared their heads and shouted•' Hurrah!' ' Down with the war!' etc. the.evening of January 10 a large column of working women, working men and soldiers paraded along the Bolshoi Sampsonievsky Prospect. . . . The police all the time kept in the background . . . The presence of three or four hundred soldiers in a crowd of over a thousand people had a ' soothing ' effect on the police . . . The de­monstration lasted more than an hour."1

How much energy and self-sacrifice was displayed by the Bolshevik Party in its efforts to revolutionize the army can be judged from one of the numerous reports of the tsarist police, who tried in vain to exterminate the revolutionary organisation:

" The Leninists, who have acquired a dominating· in­fluence in the party and who have the support of the overwhelming majority of the underground Social-De­mocratic organisations in Russia, on the outbreak of the war issued a large number of revolutionary appeals in their largest centres (Petrograd, Moscow, Kharkov. Kiev, Tula, Kostromia the Vladimir Province and Samara) demanding the cessation of the war, the overthrow of the existing government and the establishment of a republic, and this work of the Leninists produced tangible results in the form of workers' strikes and disorders."2

The Bolsheviks laid before the soldiers a clear pro­gramme, which had been drawn up by Lenin, with precise and comprehensive demands on the most urgent questions of. the day. Relying on the discontent of the soldiers and their passionate desire for peace, and exposing the brutal treatment of the soldiers by their officers and the treachery and inefficiency of the commanders, the Bolsheviks cautiously but persistently led the awakening soldiers to accept a programme of revolutionary action.

"The transformation of modern imperialist war into civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan,"3

is the way a manifesto of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, issued on November 4, 1914, described the programme of revolutionary action. This was the only way by which the proletariat and the toiling population generally could escape from the fatal clutches of war. 

1 "A Dl'monstration or Soldiers ond, vorkcrs,"' Sotsial-Demokrat,'' No. 53 pril 13, 1916, Geneva.

2 ''Archives of the Revolution nnd Foreign Policy.'' Files of the Department of Police. Special Register A5, 1015, folio 103.

8 Lenin, "War and Russian Social-Democracy/' ''Collected Works, "Vol.XVIII

This was the only way of escape from the impasse into which the bourgeoisie and its lackeys-the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries-had led the country.

But this programme demanded definite revolutionary• action, and Lenin showed precisely what must 

be done:

"Revolution in time of war is civil war, a.rid the transformation of war of governments into a civil war, on the one hand, is facilitated by the military failures ('defeat') of the governments, while, on the other hand, it is impossible in practice to strive for such a transformation without contributing to defeat."1

Lenin further said:

"The only policy of real, and not verbal, termination of the 'civil peace' and recognition of the class struggle, is the policy that the proletariat should take advantage of the difficulties of its government and its bourgeoisie to bring about their overthrow. And one cannot achieve this, one cannot strive for this, unless one desires the defeat of one's government, unless one contributes to this defeat."2

 I Lenin, 11 The Defeat of One's Government in the Imperialist War,,, "Collected Works," Vol. XVIII.

2 Ibid.,

The slogan calling for the defeat of one one's own gov­ernment was the guiding slogan of Bolshevik tactics during the imperialist war. It was the aim of the Bolsheviks to take the fullest possible advantage of the decline of military discipline and the spread of defeatist views in the army and in the country in order to stimulate the activity of the workers and soldiers. 

The soldiers mm:t be made to realise that the interests of the imperialist "fatherland" were incompatible with the interests of the working people, and that the imperialist war must be transformed into a civil war. That, of course, did not mean, as the Trotskyites tried to make out, aiding German imperialism, blowing up bridges in Russia, and so on. It meant undermining the strength of the tsarist monarchy, that most barbaric of governments, which was oppressing vast numbers of people in Europe and Asia. It meant persistently working for the revolutionary disintegration of the army, for the revolutionary awakening of the masses; it meant continuing and intensifying the revolutionary struggle under the conditions of imperialist war. That is why this slogan was so vigorously opposed by all the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties in Russia-the Cadets, the Trudoviki, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and all the varieties of Men­sheviks, including Trotsky. Plekhanov wrote of this Bol­shevik slogan:

" The defeat of Russia ... will retard her economic de­velopment and, consequently, the growth of her working-class movement." 1

Trotsky, on the other hand, declared that the defeat of Russia would mean victory for Germany. He hereby gross!y distorted Lenin's slogan, concealing the fact that Lenin advanced this slogan not only for the Russian revolutionaries but also for the working-class revolutionary parties of all countries.

It was not only frank social-traitors and Centrists of the Trotsky type who opposed the slogan of defeat for one's own government; it was also rejected by the Rights and the "Leftists" within the Bolshevik Party itself. Thus, at a conference of the Bolshevik fraction in the State Duma and representatives of the larger organisations of the Bolshevik Party held in Ozerki at the beginning of the war, Kamenev criticised Lenin's defeatist slogan. Kamenev tried to show that a defeat for Russia in the war would be undesirable in the interests of the working-class movement.

When he was brought to trial before the tsarist court, together with the Bolshevik members of the Duma, Ka­menev again attempted to dissociate himself from the Party on the question of  defeatism.

Similarly, a group of Russian political emigres led by Bukharin, who criticised Lenin "from the Left," stated in their theses that they categorically rejected "what was called 'the defeat of Russia' as a slogan for Russia" and spoke of "the absolute impossibility of carrying on practi­cal agitation along these lines."2

.. I G. V. Pleklmnov, " The Socialists and t]1c Voting of ,v ir Credits'' "Prizyv''  "(The Call,)" Paris, UHO, No. 17, p. 8.

2 "ThC' BC'rne ConfC'rence " 101.3, Appendix No. 2, Rcfio1ution of the Bangy Group, 1 'Proletar5kaya Hcvoiutsia (Proletarmn Revolution),"1925, No. 5 (40), p. 172.

The slogan calling for the defeat of one's own government was closely associated with the Bolshevik slogan calling for fraternisation between the soldiers of the hostile imperialist armies. Lenin observed that fraternisation was taking place spontaneously, and he attentively followed this revolutionary initiative of the masses. Lenin wrote an article dealing with a number of cases of fraterni­sation on the Franco-German front which were reported in German, British and Swiss newspapers.

Increasing cases of fraternisation also on the Russian front enabled the Bolshevik Party to advocate fraternisation as a practical slogan in the fight to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.

A conference of generals was held in December 1916 at which commanders of armies spoke of scores of inci­dents testifying to   the   disintegration   and   demoralisation of the troops. Desertion, cases of  whole  regiments  abandoning their positions,  refusal  to  attack,  vengeance wreaked on officers and,  in  particular,  fraternisation,  were  all  in full evidence at the end of 1916. The picture drawn by the generals fully corresponded with what was related of the situation   on  the   Austrian  front  by  a  former  tsarist  soldier, P.A. Karnaukhov:

"All was  quiet  on  the  front  in  the winter  of  1916.  In  the front trenches it sometimes happened that   the soldiers, on seeing the enemy, would not shoot.. The Austrians responded in the same way. Sometimes the Austrians would shout: 'stop   the  war.'   And   they   invited the Russians  into their trenches, while the   Rus­sians  invited the Austrians. In our  sector  fraternisation with the enemy began  as  early as October  1916, for  which, of course, the officers came down on us heavily. But by January fraternisation in our  sector  had become a  com­mon occurrence. It went so far that the soldier would exchange various articles, offering bread and sugar in return   for   pocket-knives   and   razors."1

The revolutionary significance of fraternisation consisted in the  fact that  it  helped  to  confirm  the  realisation of  the  international  unity  of the toilers  in  the  trenches  on both sides, led to a marked class differentiation between the officers and the soldiers, undermined the imperialist armies  and  stimulated  the  desire  for  peace.

The self-sacrificing activity of the Bolshevik Party, coupled with the disintegration of  the  army, rapidly yielded results.

1  P.  A.  Ifarnnukho,·,  "Reminiscences of Service In  the  Old  Army  nnd the   Red

.Ar my,"  l\1SS. Record s  of  the  " History  of  the  Civil Wnr," No.  452.