The Government had two courses open to it; it could combat the disintegrating influences which began to appear in the Army by stern and ruthless measures, or it could encourage them. Owing to pressure from the Soviet and partly through want of firmness and through misunderstanding of the laws of existence of armed forces, the Government chose the second course.
This circumstance decided the fate of the Army. All other circumstances could but influence the duration of the process of disruption and its depth.
Types of soldiers of the Old Army. This company was sent to the West European Front.
The festive days of touching and joyous union between the officers and the soldiers vanished rapidly, being replaced by tiresome, weary week-days. But they had been in the past, those days of joy, and, therefore, no impassable abyss existed between the two Ranks, over which the inexorable logic of life had long been casting a bridge. The unnecessary, obsolete methods, which had introduced an element of irritation into the soldiery, fell away at once, as of themselves; the officers became more thoughtful and industrious.
Then came a torrent of newspapers, appeals, resolutions, orders, from some unknown authority, and with them a whole series of new ideas, which the soldier masses were unable to digest and assimilate. New people appeared, with a new speech, so fascinating and promising, liberating the soldiers from obedience and inspiring hope that they would be saved from deadly danger immediately. When one Regimental Commander naïvely inquired whether these people might not be tried by Field Court-Martial and shot, his telegram, after passing through all official stages, called forth the reply from Petrograd that these people were inviolable, and had been sent by the Soviet to the troops for the very purpose of explaining to them the true meaning of current events.
When such leaders of the Revolutionary Democracy, as have not yet lost their feeling of responsibility for crucified Russia, now say that the movement, caused by the deep class differences between the officers and the soldiers and by “the enslavement” of the latter, was of an elemental nature, which they could not resist, this is deeply untrue.
All the fundamental slogans, all the programmes, tactics, instructions and text-books, forming the foundation of the “democratisation” of the Army, had been drawn up by the military sections of the secret Socialist parties long before the War, outside of “elemental” pressure, on the grounds of clear, cold calculation, as a product of “Socialist reasoning and conscience.”
True, the officers strove to persuade the men not to believe the “new words” and to do their duty. But from the very beginning the Soviets had declared the officers to be foes of the Revolution; in many towns they had been subjected to cruel torture and death, and this with impunity. Evidently not without some reason, when even the “Bourgeois” Duma issued such a strange and unexpected “announcement” as the following: “This first day of March, rumours were spread among the soldiers of the garrison of Petrograd to the effect that the officers in the regiments were disarming the soldiers. These rumours were investigated and found to be false. As President of the Military Commission of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, I declare that the most decided measures will be taken to prevent such action on the part of the officers, up to the shooting of those guilty of it. Signed, Colonel Engelhardt.”