I hereby declare that I am aware that in the event of my disloyalty to the Soviet Government, my relatives will be arrested and deported.
A Review of ‘Red’ Troops
Vasili Petrovitch spread out his hands, shrugging his shoulders.
“I should prefer to see my wife and my little daughters shot,” he said, bitterly, “rather than that they be sent to a Red concentration camp. I am supposed to make my subordinates sign these declarations, too. Pleasant, isn’t it? You know, I suppose,” he added, “that appointment to a post of any responsibility is now made conditional upon having relatives near at hand who may be arrested?” (This order had been published in the Press.) “The happiest thing nowadays is to be friendless and destitute, then you cannot get your people shot. Or else act on the Bolshevist principle that conscience, like liberty, is a ‘bourgeois prejudice.’ Then you can work for No. 2 Goróhovaya and make a fortune.”
Not only my commander but most of the men in my unit talked like this amongst themselves, only quietly, for fear of Bolshevist spies. One little fellow who was drafted into the regiment was uncommonly outspoken. He was a mechanic from a factory on the Viborg side of the city. His candour was such that I suspected him at first of being a provocateur, paid by the Bolsheviks to speak ill of them and thus unmask sympathizers. But he was not that sort. One day I overheard him telling the story of how he and his fellows had been mobilized.
“As soon as we were mobilized,” he said, “we were chased to all sorts of meetings. Last Saturday at the Narodny Dom [the biggest hall in Petrograd] Zinoviev spoke to us for an hour and assured us we were to fight for workmen and peasants against capitalists, imperialists, bankers, generals, landlords, priests, and other bloodsucking riff-raff. Then he read a resolution that every Red soldier swears to defend Red Petrograd to the last drop of blood, but nobody put up his hand except a few in the front rows who had, of course, been put there to vote ‘for.’ Near me I heard several men growl and say, ‘Enough! we aren’t sheep, and we know for what sort of freedom you want to use us as cannon fodder.’ Son of a gun, that Zinoviev!” exclaimed the little man, spitting disgustedly; “next day—what do you think?—we read in the paper that ten thousand newly mobilized soldiers had passed a resolution unanimously to defend what Zinoviev and Lenin call the ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’!”
Few people ventured to be so outspoken as this, for everybody feared the four or five Communists who were attached to the regiment to eavesdrop and report any remarks detrimental to the Bolsheviks. One of these Communists was a Jew, a rare occurrence in the rank and file of the army. He disappeared when the regiment was moved to the front, doubtless having received another job of a similar nature in a safe spot in the rear. The only posts in the Red army held by Jews in any number are the political posts of commissars. One reason why there appear to be so many Jews in the Bolshevist administration is that they are nearly all employed in the rear, particularly in those departments (such as of food, propaganda, public economy) which are not concerned in fighting. It is largely to the ease with which Jewish Bolsheviks evade military service, and the arrogance some of them show toward the Russians, whom they openly despise, that the intense hatred of the Jew and the popular belief in Russia that Bolshevism is a Jewish “put-up job” are due. There are, of course, just as many Jews who oppose the Bolsheviks, and many of these are lying in prison. But this is not widely known, for like Russian anti-Bolsheviks they have no means of expressing their opinions.
Leo Bronstein, the genius of the Red army, now universally known by his more Russian-sounding pseudonym of Trotzky, is the second of the triumvirate of “Lenin, Trotzky, and Zinoviev,” who guide the destinies of the Russian and the world revolution. That the accepted order of precedence is not “Trotzky, Lenin, and Zinoviev” must be gall and wormwood to Trotzky’s soul. His first outstanding characteristic is overweening ambition; his second—egoism; his third—cruelty; and all three are sharpened by intelligence and wit of unusual brilliancy. According to his intimate associates of former days, his nature is by no means devoid of cordiality, but his affections are completely subordinated to the promotion of his ambitious personal designs, and he casts off friends and relatives alike, as he would clothing, the moment they have served his purpose.