Thus the Stavka had no means at all, not only for actively combating the disintegration of the Army, but for resisting German propaganda, which was spreading rapidly.
Ludendorff says frankly and with a national egotism rising to a high degree of cynicism: “I did not doubt that the débâcle of the Russian Army and the Russian people was fraught with great danger for Germany and Austria-Hungary.... In sending Lenin to Russia our Government assumed an enormous responsibility! This journey was justified from a military point of view; it was necessary that Russia should fall. But our Government should have taken measures that this should not happen to Germany.”[21]
Even now the boundless sufferings of the Russian people, now “out of the ranks,” did not call forth a single word of pity or regret from its moral corrupters....
With the beginning of the campaign, the Germans altered the direction of their work with respect to Russia. Without breaking their connections with the well-known reactionary circles at Court, in the Government and in the Duma, using all means for influencing these circles and all their motives—greed, ambition, German atavism, and sometimes a peculiar understanding of patriotism—the Germans entered at the same time into close fellowship with the Russian Revolutionaries in the country, and especially abroad, amongst the multitudinous emigrant colony. Directly or indirectly, all were drawn into the service of the German Government—great agents in the sphere of spying and recruiting, like Parvus (Helfand); provocateurs, connected with the Russian Secret Police, like Blum; propaganda agents—Oulianoff (Lenin), Bronstein (Trotsky), Apfelbaum (Zinovieff), Lunacharsky, Ozolin, Katz (Kamkoff), and many others. And in their wake went a whole group of shallow or unscrupulous people, cast over the frontier and fanatically hating the régime which had rejected them—hating it to the degree of forgetfulness of their native land, or squaring accounts with this régime, acting sometimes as blind tools in the hands of the German General Staff. What their motives were, what their pay, how far they went—these are details; what is important is that they sold Russia, serving those aims which were set before them by our foe. They were all closely interlaced with one another and with the agents of the German Secret Service, forming with them one unbroken conspiracy.
The work began with a widespread Revolutionary and Separatist (Ukrainian) propaganda among the prisoners of war. According to Liebknecht, “the German Government not only helped this propaganda, but carried it on itself.” These aims were served by the Committee of Revolutionary Propaganda, founded in 1915 at The Hague by the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Austria by the Copenhagen Institute (Parvus’s organisation), and a whole series of papers of a Revolutionary and Defeatist character, partly published at the expense of the German Staff, partly subsidised by it—the Social Democrat (Geneva—Lenin’s paper), Nashe Slovo (Paris—Trotsky’s paper), Na Tchoozhbeenie (Geneva—contributions from Tchernoff, Katz and others), Russkii Viestnik, Rodnaya Retch, Nedielia, and so forth. Similar to this was the activity—the spread of Defeatist and Revolutionary literature, side by side with purely charitable work—of the Committee of Intellectual Aid to Russian Prisoners of War in Germany and Austria (Geneva), which was in connection with official Moscow and received subsidies from it.
To define the character of these publications it is enough to quote two or three phrases expressing the views of their inspirers. Lenin said in the Social Democrat: “The least evil will be the defeat of the Czarist monarchy, the most barbarous and reactionary of all Governments.” Tchernoff, the future Minister of Agriculture, declared in the Mysl that he had one Fatherland only—the International!
Along with literature the Germans invited Lenin’s and Tchernoff’s collaborators, especially from the editorial staff of Na Tchoozhbeenie, to lecture in the camps, while a German spy, Consul Von Pelche, carried on a large campaign for the recruiting of agitators for propaganda in the ranks of the Army—among the Russian emigrants of conscript age and of Left Wing politics.
All this was but preparatory work. The Russian Revolution opened boundless vistas for German propaganda. Along with honest people, once persecuted, who had struggled for the good of the people, there rushed into Russia all that revolutionary riff-raff which absorbed the members of the Russian secret police, the international informers and the rebels.
The Petrograd authorities feared most of all the accusation of want of Democratic spirit. Miliukov, as Minister, stated repeatedly that “the Government considers unconditionally possible the return to Russia of all emigrants, regardless of their views on the War and independently of their registration in the International Control List.”[22] This Minister carried on a dispute with the British, demanding the release of the Bolsheviks, Bronstein (Trotsky), Zourabov and others, who had been arrested by the British.