A People's Tragedy (78 page)

The deadlock continued through the spring, as Tokoi's government came under growing popular pressure to make a unilateral declaration of Finnish independence, while Petrograd saw in this a reason to stand even more firmly against all the Finnish demands. Both positions were largely determined by the fact that the Bolsheviks, who had taken up the Finnish cause in the hope of gaining an ally against the Provisional Government, were building up a powerful base of support among the sailors of Helsingfors, where they controlled their own Soviet organ of the Baltic Fleet (TsentroBalt). Tokoi underlined this Bolshevik threat in the hope of pressurizing the Provisional Government into making concessions. But the government was determined to stand firm. Even Kerensky, speaking like a true Great Russian patriot as the new Minister of War in May, warned the Finns not to try the patience of the 'open-hearted Russian people' by trying to 'deprive them of their rights to their own national territory'.33

Relations with Russia reached a crisis in June and July. A resolution of the All-Russian Soviet Congress calling on the Provisional Government to

negotiate a treaty of independence with Finland at the end of the war was interpreted by the Sejm as a green light for it to pass its own declaration of independence
(valtalaki)
on 23 June. The
valtalaki
was greeted by nationwide celebrations. People falsely assumed that it had been supported by the 'Russian parliament'. But the Soviet was just as outraged by it as the Provisional Government. The
valtalaki
was a unilateral declaration of Finnish independence, whereas the Soviet resolution had meant it to be the result of bilateral negotiations with the Provisional Government. A Soviet delegation attempted to persuade the Finns to withdraw the
valtalaki
and, when this failed, the Soviet leaders gave their support to the government's decision to put down the Finnish movement by military force. Throughout July the Russians built up their troops on Finnish soil, threatening to use them against the Sejm if it did not withdraw its
valtalaki.
On 21 July the Sejm was dissolved. Most Russian socialists, despite their recognition of Finland's right to self-determination, accepted the need for this repressive measure and blamed it on the tactics of the Sejm. But others, like Gorky, warned that this action was bound to strengthen Finnish resolve, leading to the 'deepening of the conflict' and to the loss of Russia's democratic prestige in the West. In fact the dissolution did much more than that. By ruling out the possibility of a negotiated settlement, it effectively undermined the government in Helsingfors and pushed Finland along the path that would end in civil war, as the struggle for independence became intertwined with a broader social conflict between the liberal propertied classes, hesitant to make the final break with Russia, and an increasingly Bolshevized mass of workers, sailors and landless labourers, eager to declare independent Finland Red.34

In the Ukraine the February Revolution had immediately given rise to a nationalist movement based around the Rada, or parliament, established in Kiev on 4 March. While the Rada was ultimately committed to the Ukraine's right of self-determination, it saw its immediate task as the negotiation of cultural freedoms, greater political autonomy, and a radical land reform within a federal Russian state. The issue of land reform was especially important, for although the Rada could be sure of the support of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, it could not be so sure of the peasants, the vast majority of the Ukrainian population, although most of the Ukrainian soldiers, who were simply peasants in uniform, were, it is true, solidly behind the nationalist cause.

In mid-May a Rada delegation presented its demands to the Provisional Government.

These demands were moderate — a recognition of the Ukraine's autonomy, a seat for the Ukraine at the peace settlement, a commissar for Ukrainian affairs, separate Ukrainian army units in the rear, and the appointment of Ukrainians to most civil posts

— and the Provisional Government could have easily agreed to them without prejudicing the resolution of the Ukrainian question by the Constituent Assembly. But the Russian government and Soviet

leaders dismissed the influence of the Rada — its declaration was not published by a single Russian newspaper — and appeared to assume that if they ignored it the whole problem would go away. Prince Lvov tried to bury the issue by setting up a special commission, packed with Russian jurists, which raised complicated legal questions about the legitimacy of every single Rada demand before concluding, predictably enough, that nothing could be resolved until the Constituent Assembly. It was yet another illustration of the Russian liberals using legal postures to hide from politics.

Yet the result of this ostrich-like reaction was merely to strengthen the nationalist cause and to drive it towards the more radical demand for independence from Russia. Urged by the Second Ukrainian Military Congress to make a unilateral declaration of autonomy, the Rada published its First Universal on 10 June. The Universal was a declaration of the Ukraine's freedom modelled on the charters of the seventeenth-century Cossack Hetmans, whom the nationalists claimed to be the founders of the

'Ukrainian nation', and in the context of 1917 it took on a symbolic role equal to the yellow and light blue flag of the Ukraine. The Universal called for the convocation of a Sejm, or sovereign national assembly, and declared the establishment of a General Secretariat, headed by V K. Vinnichenko, which effectively assumed executive power, replacing the authority of the Provisional Government in the Ukraine. It was only now that the Ukrainian crisis, coinciding as it did with the Finnish declaration of independence, came to the top of the political agenda. Just as the army was about to launch a fresh offensive in the West, Russia was threatened with the loss of two vital regions behind the Front. Lvov immediately accused the Rada of threatening to 'inflict a fatal blow on the state', while
Volia naroda
expressed the general Soviet
view
that the Universal was 'a stab in the back of the Revolution'.35

Yet it was clear that some compromise was needed, and on 28 June the government despatched a three-man delegation (Tereshchenko, Kerensky and Tsereteli) to negotiate with the Rada. On 2 July the two sides reached a makeshift compromise: the Provisional Government broadly recognized the national autonomy of the Ukraine, the popular legitimacy of the Rada and the executive authority of the General Secretariat. This was enough to cool down Ukrainian tempers for the rest of the summer. But it outraged the Russian nationalists in Kiev, Shulgin's chauvinist supporters in particular, who took to fighting the Ukrainians in the streets. The right-wing Kadets in Lvov's cabinet took up the cause of the Russian minority in the Ukraine. They refused to endorse the settlement on the grounds that only the Constituent Assembly had the legal authority to resolve such matters, which was really no more than a pretext for the defence of Russia's imperial interests in the Ukraine. In a conversation with his secretary, Lvov condemned the Kadets for 'behaving like the worst Black

Hundred bastards' on the issue.36 On 4 July three Kadets resigned from the cabinet. This was the trigger for the start of a protracted political crisis which would end in the collapse of the Provisional Government.

* * * Brusilov to his wife on I March:

You must know what is happening. I am of course pleased. But I pray to God that this awful crisis, in this awful war, may soon end, so that our external enemy may not reap the benefit of our collapse. The one fortunate circumstance is that it comes at a time of the year when it is very difficult, almost impossible, for the enemy to launch an attack, for this would be a catastrophe. It is all the more important now that we win this war, otherwise it will be the ruin of Russia.

Brusilov's untiring faith in Russia's victorious destiny was now, more than ever, a matter of hope against hope. It was, as he later acknowledged, entirely unrealistic to sustain a lengthy military campaign in the midst of a social revolution. And yet he still believed in the will of the people to continue fighting until the end, and, unlike most of the Tsar's generals, threw in his lot with the revolution in the hope that the defence of Russia's liberty might at last inspire their patriotism. Monarchists accused him of opportunism; and historians have repeated the charge. But Brusiiov had long been persuaded, despite his own sympathies for the monarchy, that without a complete change of government Russia could not win the war. 'If I have to choose between Russia and the Tsar,' Brusilov had said in 1916, 'then I choose Russia.'37

The army of Free Russia was in fact much less willing to go on with the war than the optimistic general had presumed. Order Number One gave the mass of the soldiers a new self-pride as 'citizens' on an equal par with the officers, and this soon led to the breakdown of all discipline. The newly established soldiers' committees, although dominated to begin with by the democratic junior officers and the uniformed intelligentsia, soon became the leaders of this revolution in the ranks. They held meetings on strategy and on whether to obey the officers' orders. Some soldiers refused to fight for more than eight hours a day, claiming the same rights as the workers. Many refused to salute their officers, or replaced them with their own elected officers.

Intimidation of officers was common. Brusilov himself received many letters from his men threatening to kill him if he ordered an advance. When, in May, Brusilov assumed the Supreme Command and reviewed the units on the Northern Front, where the spirit of mutiny was strongest, he found that hundreds of officers had already fled their posts, while more than a few had even been driven to suicide. 'I remember one case when a group of officers had overheard their soldiers talk in threatening tones of "the need to kill all the officers". One of the youngest officers became so terrified he shot himself that night. He thought it was better to kill himself than to wait until the soldiers murdered him.' Their methods of killing officers were so brutal, with limbs and genitals sometimes cut off or the victims skinned alive, that one can hardly blame the officer.38

One young captain wrote to his father on II March:

Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss that one cannot cross. Whatever they might think of us as individuals, we in their eyes remain no more than
barins
(masters).

When we talk of 'the people' we have in mind the nation as a whole, but they mean only the common people. In their view what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, of which we are the losers and they are the winners. They think that things should get better for them and that they should get worse for us. They do not believe us when we talk of our devotion to the soldiers. They say that we were the
barins
in the past, and that now it is their turn to be the
barins
over us. It is their revenge for the long centuries of servitude.

The peasant soldiers clearly did not share their officers' language of 'citizenship'. They did not see the revolution in the same terms of civic rights and duties. Their revolution in the trenches was another version of the social revolution in the countryside. The peasant conscripts naturally assumed that, if only they could overthrow their noble officers, then peace, bread and land would be the result. As one soldier put it at a meeting of his regiment in March to discuss the abdication of the Tsar: Haven't you understood? What is going on is a
ryvailoosbun!
Don't you know what a
ryvailoosbun
is? It's when the people take all the power. And what's the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It's obvious — it means that the power belongs to us. And while we're about it, the country is ours too, and all the land is ours, and if we choose to fight or not is up to us as well. Now do you understand? That's a
ryvailoosbun.39

This assertion of 'soldier power' was essential to the spirit of 'trench Bolshevism' which swept through the armed forces in 1917. Brusilov described it thus: The soldiers wanted only one thing — peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme.

They did not have the slightest understanding

of what either Communism, or the International,* or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called 'Bolshevism'.

From the start of the revolution there was a sharp rise in the rate of desertion, especially among the non-Russian soldiers. Perhaps a million soldiers left their units between March and October. Most of these were soldiers 'absent without leave', men who had simply got fed up with fighting or sitting around unfed in the trenches and the garrisons, and had run off to the nearest town, where they ate and got drunk, went to brothels and often terrorized the local population. 'The streets are full of soldiers,' complained a Perm official in mid-March. 'They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.'40

* * * Russia's war aims occupied the centre-stage of politics during the spring of 1917.

Indeed the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end. This was not just a political clash, it was also a social one. Left-wing propaganda made it clear that the war was being waged for different class interests. Enormous mistrust and even hatred of the 'bourgeoisie' and the

'imperialist' or 'capitalist' system could be stirred up by the stories of war-profiteering industrialists, merchants, 'kulaks' and black marketeers. Supporters of the war were instantly tarnished with the stigma of placing their own 'imperial' interests above those of the people. 'We see', declared a workers' resolution of the Dinamo factory in Moscow, 'that the senseless slaughter and destruction of the war is essential to no one but the parasite bourgeoisie.'41