The army of Free Russia was in fact much less willing to go on with the war than the optimistic general had presumed. Order Number One gave the mass of the soldiers a new self-pride as ‘citizens’ on an equal par with the officers, and this soon led to the breakdown of all discipline. The newly established soldiers’ committees, although dominated to begin with by the democratic junior officers and the uniformed intelligentsia, soon became the leaders of this revolution in the ranks. They held meetings on strategy and on whether to obey the officers’ orders. Some soldiers refused to fight for more than eight hours a day, claiming the same rights as the workers. Many refused to salute their officers, or replaced them with their own elected officers. Intimidation of officers was common. Brusilov himself received many letters from his men threatening to kill him if he ordered an advance. When, in May, Brusilov assumed the Supreme Command and reviewed the units on the Northern Front, where the spirit of mutiny was strongest, he found that hundreds of officers had already fled their posts, while more than a few had even been driven to suicide. ‘I remember one case when a group of officers had overheard their soldiers talk in threatening tones of “the need to kill all the officers”. One of the youngest officers became so terrified he shot himself that night. He thought it was better to kill himself than to wait until the soldiers murdered him.’ Their methods of killing officers were so brutal, with limbs and genitals sometimes cut off or the victims skinned alive, that one can hardly blame the officer.38
One young captain wrote to his father on 11 March:
Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss that one cannot cross. Whatever they might think of us as individuals, we in their eyes remain no more than barins (masters). When we talk of ‘the people’ we have in mind the nation as a whole, but they mean only the common people. In their view what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, of which we are the losers and they are the winners. They think that things should get better for them and that they should get worse for us. They do not believe us when we talk of our devotion to the soldiers. They say that we were the barins in the past, and that now it is their turn to be the barins over us. It is their revenge for the long centuries of servitude.
The peasant soldiers clearly did not share their officers’ language of ‘citizenship’. They did not see the revolution in the same terms of civic rights and duties. Their revolution in the trenches was another version of the social revolution in the countryside. The peasant conscripts naturally assumed that, if only they could overthrow their noble officers, then peace, bread and land would be the result. As one soldier put it at a meeting of his regiment in March to discuss the abdication of the Tsar:
Haven’t you understood? What is going on is a ryvailooshun! Don’t you know what a ryvailooshun is? It’s when the people take all the power. And what’s the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It’s obvious — it means that the power belongs to us. And while we’re about it, the country is ours too, and all the land is ours, and if we choose to fight or not is up to us as well. Now do you understand? That’s a ryvailooshun.39
This assertion of ‘soldier power’ was essential to the spirit of ‘trench Bolshevism’ which swept through the armed forces in 1917. Brusilov described it thus:
The soldiers wanted only one thing — peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme. They did not have the slightest understanding of what either Communism, or the International,fn4 or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called ‘Bolshevism’.
From the start of the revolution there was a sharp rise in the rate of desertion, especially among the non-Russian soldiers. Perhaps a million soldiers left their units between March and October. Most of these were soldiers ‘absent without leave’, men who had simply got fed up with fighting or sitting around unfed in the trenches and the garrisons, and had run off to the nearest town, where they ate and got drunk, went to brothels and often terrorized the local population. ‘The streets are full of soldiers,’ complained a Perm official in mid-March. ‘They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.’40
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