The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political

by Anton Ivanovich Denikin

The very first steps taken by the new Minister dissipated our hopes: the choice of collaborators, who were even greater opportunists than their predecessors, but void of experience in military administration and in active service;[50] the surrounding of himself with men from “underground”—perhaps having done very great work in the cause of the Revolution, but without any comprehension of the life of the Army—all this introduced into the actions of the War Ministry a new party element, foreign to the military service.

A few days after his appointment Kerensky issued the Declaration of the rights of the soldier, thereby predestining the entire course of his activity.

On May 11th the Minister was passing through Moghilev to the Front. We were surprised by the circumstance that the passage was timed for 5 a.m., and that only the Chief-of-Staff was invited into the train. The Minister of War seemed to avoid meeting the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. His conversation with me was short and touched on details—the suppression of some disturbances or other that had broken out at one of the railway junctions and so forth. The most capital questions of the existence of the Army and of the coming advance, the necessity for unity in the views of the Government and the Command, the absence of which was showing itself with such marked clearness—all this, apparently, did not attract the attention of the Minister. Among other things, Kerensky passed a few cursory remarks on the inappropriateness of Generals Gourko and Dragomirov, Commanders-in-Chief of fronts, to their posts, which drew a protest from me. All this was very symptomatic and created at the Stavka a condition of tense, nervous expectation.

Kerensky was proceeding to the South-Western front, to begin his celebrated verbal campaign which was to rouse the Army to achievement. The word created hypnosis and self-hypnosis. Brussilov reported to the Stavka that throughout the Army the Minister of War had been received with extraordinary enthusiasm. Kerensky spoke with unusual pathos and exaltation, in stirring “revolutionary” images, often with foam on his lips, reaping the applause and delight of the mob. At times, however, the mob would turn to him the face of a wild beast, the sight of which made words to stick in the throat and caused the heart to fail. They sounded a note of menace, these moments, but fresh delight drowned their alarming meaning. And Kerensky reported to the Provisional Government that “the wave of enthusiasm in the Army is growing and widening,” and that a definite change in favour of discipline and the regeneration of the Army was displaying itself. In Odessa he became even more irresistibly poetical: “In your welcome I see that great enthusiasm which has overwhelmed the country and feel that great exaltation which the world experiences but once in hundreds of years.”

Let us be just.

Kerensky called on the Army to do its duty. He spoke of duty, honour, discipline, obedience, trust in its commanders; he spoke of the necessity for advancing and for victory. He spoke in the language of the established revolutionary ritual, which ought to have reached the hearts and minds of the “revolutionary people.” Sometimes, even, feeling his power over his audience, he would throw at it the words, which became household words, of “rebel slaves” and “revolutionary tyrants.”

In vain!

At the conflagration of the temple of Russia, he called to the fire: “Be quenched!” instead of extinguishing it with brimful pails of water.

Words could not fight against facts, nor heroic poems against the stern prose of life. The replacement of the Motherland by Liberty and Revolution did not make the aims of the conflict any clearer. The constant scoffing at the old “discipline,” at the “Czar’s generals,” the reminders of the knout, the stick, and the “former unprivileged condition of the soldier” or of the soldier’s blood “shed in vain” by someone or other—nothing of this could bridge the chasm between the two component parts of the Army. The passionate preaching of a “new, conscious, iron revolutionary discipline,” i.e., a discipline based on the “declaration of the rights of the soldier”—a discipline of meetings, propaganda, political agitation, absence of authority in the commanders, and so forth—this preaching was in irreconcileable opposition to the call to victory. Having received his impressions in the artificially exalted, theatrical atmosphere of meetings, surrounded both in the Ministry and in his journeyings, by an impenetrable wall of old political friends and of all manner of delegations and deputations from the Soviets and the Committees, Kerensky looked on the Army through the prism of their outlook, either unwilling or unable to sink himself in the real life of the Army and in its torments, sufferings, searchings, and crimes, and finally to attain a real standing-ground, get at vital themes and real words. These everyday questions of Army life and organisation—dry in their form and deeply dramatic in their content—never served as themes for his speeches. They contained only a glorification of the Revolution and a condemnation of certain perversions of the idea of national defence, created by that Revolution itself. The masses of the soldiery, eager for sentimental scenes, listened to the appeals of the recognised chief for self-sacrifice, and they were inflamed with the “sacred fire”; but as soon as the scene was over, both the chief and the audiences reverted to the daily occupations: the chief—to the “democratisation” of the Army, and the masses—to “deepening the Revolution.” In the same way, probably, Djerzinsky’s executioners in Soviet Russia now admire, in the temple of proletarian art, the sufferings of young Werther—before proceeding to their customary occupation of hanging and shooting.