CHAPTER V THE COMMITTEE MANIA
In writing a plain statement of the condition of anarchy into which Russia has fallen, I am very far from wishing to create a prejudice against the Russian people. I don’t want anybody to distrust or scorn the Russians. I want the American people to understand their situation in order that, through sympathy, patience and common sense, they can find some way of helping them out of the blind morass that surrounds them. All the educated Russians I have met like Americans and trust them. They will not soon forget that the United States was the first great power to recognize the new government and to hail the revolution. The American ambassador, David R. Francis, is easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd. Every one knows him, and he rarely appeared in a meeting or convention without being applauded. Over and over again, during my three months’ visit to Russia, I was told that it was to America they looked for help and guidance, and after the war they want to enter into the closest commercial relations with us. One business man said to me just before I left: “Tell your people that we will never trade with Germany again unless the Americans force us to do so. If they will supply us with chemicals, with manufactures and machinery, we will gladly buy them. If they will send us experts for our manufacturing plants we will be delighted to have them instead of the Germans we used to employ, who never taught our people any of their knowledge because they did not want us to develop.”
The Russians want us to help them establish public schools; to show them how to build and operate great railroad systems; to farm scientifically; to do any number of things we have learned to do well. We mustn’t despise the Russians, we must help them. And we can’t do that unless we understand them. Take, for example, the army situation. It is very bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion against all authority. But consider the past history, the very recent past history of those soldiers. Aside from brutal personal treatment at the hands of some of the officers, they were cheated and starved and neglected by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then again by their commanders at the front. The Russian soldier’s wants are simple enough. He eats the same food seven days in the week and rarely complains. This food consists of soup made of salt meat and cabbage; kasha, a porridge made of buckwheat; black bread and tea. “Ivan” wears coarse clothes and big, clumsy boots, and he has none of the small comforts we think essential to the fighting man in the field. But slight as the Russian soldier’s equipment is he did not invariably get it in the old days. It was stolen from him by a band of official crooks with which the war department and the army were honeycombed. Every department of the army, from the commissariat to the Red Cross, was full of corruption and graft. The traffic in army supplies and ammunition, even in hospital supplies, that went on constantly beggars description. Gen. Sukhomlinoff, the former minister of war, who has been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for the part he played in this business, was only one of the big thieves. Under him were myriads more, and among them all the soldiers were often stripped of their overcoats in the dead of winter, and of half of their rations the year round. When a Russian soldier was badly wounded he might as well have been shot as succored. I have seen these men, pitiful wretches, having lost one or more arms or legs, blind perhaps, or frightfully disfigured, begging in the streets of Petrograd. Clad in tattered uniform, pale and miserable, these poor soldiers stand on the steps of the churches or on street corners and beg a few kopecks from the passersby. There is no such thing as a pension for them, no soldiers’ homes. They suffered for a country that knew no such thing as gratitude. Russia sent her men into battle without sufficient arms or ammunition with which to fight. It fed them to the German guns without mercy, that a band of looters in the government might buy sables and bet on horse races. It let them shiver and freeze in shoddy uniforms that army contractors might grow rich. And, after they were wounded, it let them beg their bread.
Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July Bolshevik risings.
Small wonder, then, after the revolution, that there was a great popular demand for swift justice for the soldiers. The provisional government announced that henceforth each regiment should have an elected committee, an executive body which should have entire charge of regimental affairs. Food, clothing, supplies of all kinds, were to pass through the hands of these committees, and they were to hear and pass on all complaints. The committees were the vocal organs of the army. For the first time in Russian history the soldier was allowed to speak. The plan might have worked excellently had the provisional government not made the mistake of too much zeal in democratizing the army. It gorged the soldiers with freedom, gave them such heady doses of self-government that they got drunk on the idea and ran amuck like so many crazed Malays. Kerensky decreed that the soldiers need not salute their officers. “Well then, we won’t,” they said. “And just to show how free we are we won’t wash our faces, or wear clean clothes, or touch our caps to women, or stand up straight——” and from that it was an easy journey to “We won’t take any orders from anybody.”
The government told the soldiers to elect their own officers, and they did, after butchering a thousand or so of their old ones. They elected them wisely in some instances, but in a great many more they did not. They chose men, not for their capacity to lead in a military way, but for their political views. In a Bolshevik regiment the best Bolsheviki were elected. If there was a Minshevik majority the new officers were pretty sure to be Minsheviki. And after they were elected nobody respected them, nor did they dare give orders. But of all the madness that took possession of the “free” soldiers, the committee madness went farthest. The Russians love to talk. To make speeches, to heckle and be heckled is the joy of their lives. The committee gave them a new chance to talk, and they got the habit of calling a committee meeting on every conceivable occasion. Petrograd heard with horror last summer that the men in the trenches, when ordered to advance, actually called meetings to discuss the orders and to vote whether or not they were to be followed. They did this at times when the Germans were at the very gates of an important strategic point.