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

by Anton Ivanovich Denikin

(1) All citizens of both sexes, having attained the age of twenty, were given the suffrage in the town.

(2) No domiciliary qualification was established.

(3) A proportional system of elections was introduced.

(4) The Military were given the suffrage in the localities in which the respective garrisons were quartered.

I will not examine in detail these regulations, which are probably the most Democratic ever known in Municipal Law, because the experience gained in their application was too short to afford any ground for discussion. I will only note one phenomenon which accompanied the introduction of these regulations in the autumn of 1917. The free vote in many places became a mockery. Throughout the length and breadth of Russia, all the non-Socialist and politically neutral parties were under suspicion and were subjected to persecution. They were not allowed to conduct propaganda, and their meetings were dispersed. Electioneering was characterised by blatant abuses. Occasionally election agents were subjected to violence and lists of candidates destroyed. At the same time the licentious and demoralised soldiery of many garrisons—chance guests in the town in which, as often as not, they had only appeared a day or two before—rushed to the polls and presented lists drawn up by the extreme Anti-National parties. There were cases when military units, arriving after the elections, demanded a re-election and accompanied this demand by threats and sometimes murders. There can be no doubt that, among the circumstances that affected the August elections in Petrograd to the Municipal Duma, to which sixty-seven Bolsheviks out of two hundred were elected, the presence in the Capital of numerous demoralised garrisons was not the least important. The authorities were silent because they were absent. The Petite Bourgeoisie, the intellectual workers, in a word, the Town Democracy in the widest sense, was the weakest party and was always defeated in that Revolutionary struggle. The mutinies, rebellions, and separations of various Republics—the precursors of the bloody Soviet Régime—had the most painful effect on the life of that portion of the community. The “self-determination” of the soldiers caused uneasiness and even fear of unrestricted violence. Even travelling was unsafe and difficult, because the railways fell into the hands of deserters. The “self-determination” of the workmen resulted in the impossibility of obtaining supplies of the most necessary commodities, owing to a tremendous rise in prices. The “self-determination” of the villages produced a stoppage of supplies, and the villages were thus left to starve; not to mention the moral ordeal of the class which was subjected to insults and degradation. The Revolution had raised hopes for the betterment of the conditions of life for everyone except the Bourgeois Democracy, because even the moral conquests proclaimed by the new Revolutionary power—liberty of speech, of the Press and of meetings, etc.—soon belonged exclusively to the Revolutionary Democracy. The upper Bourgeoisie (intellectually superior) was organised to a certain extent by means of the Constitutional Democratic Party, but the Petite Bourgeoisie (the Bourgeois Democracy) had no organisation whatsoever and no means for an organised struggle. The Democratic Municipalities were losing their true Democratic aspect—not as a result of the new Municipal law, but of Revolutionary practice—and became mere class organs of the Proletariat, or the representatives of purely Socialistic parties, completely out of touch with the people.

Self-government in the districts and in the villages in the first period of the Revolution was of more or less the same nature. Towards the autumn there should have been a Democratic system of Zemstvo Administration, on the same basis as that in the municipalities. The District (Volost) Zemstvo was to undertake the administration of local agriculture, education, order and safety. As a matter of fact, the villages were administered—if such a word can be applied to Anarchy—by a complex agglomeration of revolutionary organisations, such as peasant Congresses, Supply and Land Committees, Popular Soviets, Village Councils, etc. Very often another peculiar organisation—that of the deserters—dominated them all. At any rate, the All-Russian Union of Peasants agreed with the following declaration made by the left wing: “All our work for the organisation of various Committees will be of no avail if these Social Organisations are to remain under the constant threat of being terrorised by accidental armed bands.”

The only question that deeply perturbed the minds of the peasantry and overshadowed all other events, was the old, painful, traditional question:

THE QUESTION OF THE LAND.

It was an exceptionally complex and tangled question. It arose more than once in the shape of fruitless mutinies, which were ruthlessly suppressed. The wave of agrarian troubles which swept over Russia in the years of the First Revolution (1905-6) and left a trail of fire and ruined estates was an indication of the consequences that were bound to follow the Revolution of 1917. It is difficult to form an exhaustive idea of the motives which prompted the land-owners to defend their rights so stubbornly and so energetically: was it atavism, a natural yearning for the land, statesmanlike considerations as to the desirability of increasing the productivity of the land by introducing higher methods of agriculture, a desire to maintain a direct influence over the people, or was it merely selfishness?... One thing is certain—the agrarian reforms were overdue. Retribution could not fail to overtake the Government and the Ruling Classes for the long years of poverty, oppression, and, what is most important, the incredible moral and intellectual darkness in which the peasant masses were kept, their education being entirely neglected.

The peasants demanded that all land should be surrendered to them, and would not wait for the decision of the Central Land Committee or of the Constituent Assembly. This impatience was undoubtedly due, to a great extent, to the weakness of the Government and to outside influences, which will be described later. There was no divergence of opinion as to the fundamental idea of the reforms. The Liberal Democracy and the Bourgeoisie, the Revolutionary Democracy and the Provisional Government, all spoke quite definitely about “handing the land over to the workers.” With the same unanimity these elements favoured the idea of leaving the final decision on the reform of the land and legislation on the subject to the Constituent Assembly. This irreconcilable divergence of opinion arose by reason of the very essence of land reform. Liberal circles in Russia stood for the private ownership of the land—an idea which found increasing favour with the peasants—and demanded that the peasants should receive allotments rather than that the land should be entirely redistributed. On the other hand, the Revolutionary Democracy advocated, at all meetings of every party, class and profession, the adoption of the Resolution of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants, which was passed on May 25th, with the approval of the Minister Tchernov on “the transfer of all lands ... to the people as a whole, as their patrimony, on the basis of equal possession without any payment.” The peasants did not or would not understand this Social Revolutionary Resolution, which caused dissensions. The peasants were private owners by nature and could not understand the principle of nationalisation. The principle of equal possession meant that many millions of peasants, whose allotments were larger than the normal, would lose their surplus allotments, and the whole question of the redistribution of the land would lead to endless civil war; because there were innumerable peasants who had no land at all, and only 45,000,000 dessiatines of arable land which did not belong to the peasants to divide among 20,000,000 peasant households.

The Provisional Government did not consider itself entitled to solve the land problem. Under the pressure of the masses, it transferred its rights partly to the Ministry of Agriculture, partly to the Central Land Committee, which was organised on the basis of broad, democratic representation. The latter was entrusted with the task of collecting data and of drawing up a scheme of land reform, as well as of regulating the existing conditions with regard to the land. In practice, the use of the land transfer, rent, employment of labour, etc., were dealt with by the Local Land Committees. These bodies contained illiterate elements—the intellectuals as a rule were excluded—which had selfish motives and had no perception either of the extent or of the limits of their powers. The Central Representative Institutions and the Ministry of Agriculture, under Tchernov, issued appeals against arbitrariness and for the preservation of the land, pending the decision of the Constituent Assembly. At the same time they overtly encouraged “temporary possession of the land,” as seizure of the land was then described, on the excuse that the Government were obliged to sell as much land as possible. The propaganda that was conducted on a large scale in the villages by irresponsible representatives of Socialist and Anarchist circles completed Tchernov’s work.

The results of this policy were soon apparent. In one of his circulars to Provincial Commissars, the Minister of the Interior, Tzeretelli, admitted that complete anarchy reigned in the villages: “Land is being seized and sold, agricultural labourers are forced to stop working, and landowners are faced with demands which are economically impossible. Breeding stock is being destroyed and implements plundered. Model farms are being ruined. Forests are being cut down irrespective of ownership, timber and logs are being stolen, and their shipment prevented. No sowing is done on privately-owned farms, and harvests of grain and hay are not reaped.” The Minister accused the Local Committees and the Peasant Congresses of organising arbitrary seizures of the land, and came to the conclusion that the existing conditions of agriculture and forestry “would inevitably bring about endless calamities for the Army and the country, and threatened the very existence of the State.” If we recall the fires, the murders, the lynchings, the destruction of estates, which were often filled with treasures of great historical and artistic value, we shall have a true picture of the life of the villages in those days.