Having decided to fight, it was necessary to preserve the Army by admitting a certain conservatism into it. Such a conservatism serves as a guarantee for the stability of the Army and of that authority which seeks support in it. If the participation of the Army in historical cataclysms cannot be avoided, neither can it be turned into an arena for political struggle, creating, instead of the principle of service—pretorians or opritchniks, whether of the Czar, of the Revolutionary Democracy, or of any party is a matter of indifference.
The Army was broken up.
On those principles which the Revolutionary Democracy took as a basis for the existence of the Army, the latter could neither build nor live. It was no mere chance that all the later attempts at armed conflict with Bolshevism began with the organisation of an Army on the normal principles of military administration, to which the Soviet command as well sought to pass gradually. No elemental circumstances, no errors on the part of military dictatorships and of the powers co-operating with or opposing them which led to the failure of the struggle (of this some truths will be spoken later) are able to cast this undeniable fact into the shade. Nor is it a mere chance that the leading circles of the Revolutionary Democracy could create no armed forces, except that pitiful parody on them—the “National Army” on the so-called “front of the Constituent Assembly.” It was just this circumstance that led the Russian Socialist emigrants to the theory of non-resistance, of the negation of armed struggle, to the concentration of all their hopes on the inner degeneration of Bolshevism and its overthrow by some immaterial “forces of the people themselves,” which, however, could not express themselves otherwise than by blood and iron: “the great, bloodless” Revolution is drowned in blood from its beginning to its end.
To refuse to consider that vast question—the re-creation of a National Army on firm principles—is not to solve it.
What then? On the day that Bolshevism falls will peace and good-will immediately show forth in a land corrupted by a slavery worse than that of the Tartar yoke, saturated with dissension, revenge, hatred, and ... an enormous quantity of arms? Or, from that day forward, will the self-interested desires of many foreign Governments disappear, or will they grow stronger when the menace of the moral infection of the Soviet has vanished? Finally, even should the whole of old Europe, morally regenerated, beat out its swords into ploughshares, is it impossible for a new Tchingiz-Khan to come out of the depths of that Asia which has accounts age-long and huge beyond measure, against Europe?
The Army will be regenerated. Of that there can be no doubt.
Shaken in its historical foundations and traditions, like the heroes of the Russian legends, it will stand for no short time at the cross-roads, gazing anxiously into the misty distances, still wrapped in the gloom before the dawn, and listening intently to the vague sounds of the voices calling to it. And among the delusive calls it will seek, straining its hearing to the utmost, for the real voice ... the voice of its own people.
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