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

by Anton Ivanovich Denikin

The appearance, on a large scale, of the new Socialist Press was accompanied by a series of unfavourable circumstances. It had no normal past, no traditions. Its prolonged life below the surface, the exclusively destructive method of action adopted by it, its suspicious and hostile attitude towards all authority, put a certain stamp on the whole tendency of this Press, leaving too little place and attention for creative work. The complete discord in thought, the contradictions and vacillation which reigned both within the Soviet and also among the party groups and within the parties, were reflected in the Press, just as much as the elemental pressure from below of irresistible, narrowly egotistic class demands; for neglect of these demands gave rise to the threat, which was once expressed by the “beauty and pride of the Revolution,” the Kronstadt sailors to Tchernov, the Minister: “If you will not give us anything, Michael Alexandrovitch will.” Finally, the Press was not uninfluenced by the appearance in it of a number of such persons as brought into it an atmosphere of uncleanness and perfidy. The papers were full of names, which had emerged from the sphere of crime, of the Secret Police and of international espionage. All these gentlemen—Tchernomazov (a provocator in the Secret Police and director of the pre-Revolutionary Pravda), Berthold (the same and also editor of the Communist), Dekonsky, Malinovsky, Matislavsky, those colleagues of Lenin and Gorky—Nahamkes, Stoutchka, Ouritsky, Gimmer (Soukhanov), and a vast number of equally notorious names—brought the Russian Press to a hitherto unknown degree of moral degradation.

The difference was only a matter of scope. Some papers, akin to the Soviet semi-official organ, the Izvestia of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, undermined the country and the Army, while others of the Pravda type (the organ of the Bolshevik Social Democrats) broke them down.

At the same time as the Izvestia would call on its readers to support the Provisional Government, while secretly ready to strike a blow at it, the Pravda would declare that “the Government is counter-Revolutionary, and therefore there can be no relations with it. The task of the Revolutionary Democracy is to attain to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” And Tchernov’s Socialist Revolutionary organ, the Delo Naroda, would discover a neutral formula: all possible support to the Coalition Government, but “there is not, and cannot be, any unanimity in this question; more than that, there must not be, in the interests of the double defence.”

At the same time as the Izvestia began to preach an advance, but without a final victory, not abandoning, however, the intention of “deciding over the heads of the Government and the ruling classes the conditions on which the War might be stopped,” the Pravda called for universal fraternisation, and the Socialist Revolutionary, Zemlia i Volia, alternately grieved that Germany still wished for conquest, or demanded a separate peace. Tchernov’s paper, which in March had considered that, “should the enemy be victorious, there would be an end to Russian freedom,” now, in May, saw in the preaching of an advance “the limit of unblushing gambling on the fate of the Fatherland, the limit of irresponsibility and demagogy.” Gorky’s paper, Novaya Zhizn, speaking through Gimmer (Soukhanov), rises to cynicism when it says: “When Kerensky gives orders for Russian soil to be cleared of enemy troops, his demands far exceed the limits of military technique. He calls for a political act, one which has never been provided for by the Coalition Government. For clearing the country by an advance signifies ‘complete victory’....” Altogether the Novaya Zhizn supported German interests with especial warmth, raising its voice in all cases when German interests were threatened with danger, either on the part of the Allies or on ours. And when the advance of the disorganised Army ended in failure—in Tarnopol and Kalush—when Riga had fallen, the Left Press started a bitter campaign against the Stavka and the commanding personnel, and Tchernov’s paper, in connection with the proposed reforms in the Army, cried hysterically: “Let the proletarians know that it is proposed again to give them up to the iron embrace of beggary, slavery and hunger.... Let the soldiers know that it is proposed again to enslave them with the ‘discipline’ of their commanders and to force them to shed their blood without end, so long as the belief of the Allies in Russia’s ‘gallantry’ is restored.” The most straightforward of all, however, was afterwards the Iskra, the organ of the Menshevist Internationalists (Martov-Zederbaum), which, on the day of the occupation of the island of Oesel by a German landing-party, published an article entitled “Welcome to the German Fleet!”

The Army had its own military Press. The organs of the Army staffs and of those at the Front, which used to appear before the Revolution, were of the nature of purely military bulletins. Beginning with the Revolution, these organs, with their weak literary forces, began to fight for the existence of the Army, conscientiously, honestly, but not cleverly. Meeting with indifference or exasperation on the part of the soldiers, who had already turned their backs on the officers, and especially on the part of the Committee organs of the “Revolutionary” movement, which existed side by side with them, they began to weaken and die out, until at last, in the days of August, an order from Kerensky closed them altogether; the exclusive right of publishing Army newspapers was transferred to the Army Committee and the Committees of the troops at the Front. The same fate befell the News of the Active Army, the Stavka organ, started by General Markov and left without support from the weighty powers of the Press of the capital.

The Committee Press, widely spread among the troops at the expense of the Government, reflected those moods of which I have spoken earlier in the chapter on the Committees, ranging from Constitutionalism to Anarchism, from complete victory to an immediate conclusion of peace, without orders. It reflected—but in a worse, more sorry form, as regards literary style and content—that disharmony of thought and those tendencies towards extreme theories which characterised the Socialist Press of the Capital. In this respect, in accordance with the personnel of the Committees, and to some extent with their proximity to Petrograd, the respective Fronts differed somewhat from one another. The most moderate was the South-Western Front, somewhat worse, the Western, while the Northern Front was pronouncedly Bolshevist. Besides local talent, the columns of the Committee Press were in many cases opened wide to the resolutions not only of the extreme national parties, but even of the German parties.

It would be incorrect, however, to speak of the immediate action of the Press on the masses of the soldiers. It did not exist any more than there were any popular newspapers which these masses could understand. The Press exercised an influence principally on the semi-educated elements in the ranks of the Army. This sphere turned out to be nearer to the soldiers, and to it passed a certain share of that authority which was enjoyed earlier by the officers. Ideas gathered from the papers and refracted through the mental prism of this class passed in a simplified form to the soldiery, the vast majority of which unfortunately consisted of ignorant and illiterate men. And among these masses all these conceptions, stripped of cunningly-woven arguments, premises and grounds, were transformed into wondrously simple and terrifically logical conclusions.

In them dominated the straightforward negation: “Down!”

Down with the Bourgeois Government, down with the counter-Revolutionary Commanders, down with the “sanguinary slaughter,” down with everything of which they were sick, of which they were wearied, all that in one way or another interfered with their animal instincts and hampered “free will”—down with them all!

In such an elementary fashion did the Army at innumerable soldiers’ meetings settle all the political and social questions that were agitating mankind.