In a sense it was not just the Bolsheviks but all the political parties which Gorky despaired of in 1917. ‘Politics’, he wrote on 20 April, ‘is the seedbed of social enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual. Name anything bad in man, and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with abundance.’ His cri de cœur was based on the belief that the role of the intelligentsia, in which he included the political parties, was to defend the moral and cultural values of the Enlightenment against the destructive violence of the crowd. Its role was to safeguard the revolution as a constructive and creative process of national civilization. Gorky, in this respect, was moving closer to the viewpoint of the liberals and the Soviet leaders, who were just as concerned by the growing tide of anarchy. And like them, during the spring and early summer he was becoming increasingly inclined to view a new offensive on the Front as a galvanizing and disciplining force. For, as Gorky put it on 18 June, ‘although I am a pacifist, I welcome the coming offensive in the hope that it may at least bring some organization to the country’.82 How wrong he would be.
10 The Agony of the Provisional Government
*
i The Illusion of a Nation
At their first meeting Kerensky made Brusilov the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. The new Minister of War had gone down to see Brusilov at his headquarters on the South-Western Front and, after inspecting the troops, had driven with him through the night to the town of Tarnopol. There was a violent storm and the lonely motorcar seemed in constant peril as it trundled along the muddy country roads. Huddled together inside the car, with the rain beating down against the windows and lightning flashing overhead, the two men drew closer together. They started to talk informally, telling each other their private thoughts, as if they were old friends. Both men agreed on the need to launch a summer offensive, and it was this, as he recalled in his memoirs, that made Kerensky decide ‘there and then that Brusilov should be given the command of the entire army in time for the opening of the offensive’.1
Brusilov’s appointment was an act of faith in the fighting capacity of the new revolutionary army. It was, above all, his optimism that had won him the post. ‘I needed men who believed that the Russian army was not ruined,’ Kerensky later wrote. ‘I had no use for people who could not genuinely accept the fait accompli of the Revolution, or who doubted that we could rebuild the army’s morale in the new psychological atmosphere. I needed men who had lived through the utter folly of the years of war under the old regime and who fully understood the upheaval that had occurred’.2 Brusilov fitted the bill. He was perhaps the only senior tsarist general to emerge with honour from the war — and one of the first to throw in his lot with the revolution. Like Kerensky, he hoped the defence of liberty might at last inspire the sort of civic patriotism that Russia needed to continue the war.
Brusilov’s support for the democracy, and the soldiers’ committees in particular, had won him few friends among the rest of the senior generals. They denounced him as an ‘opportunist’ and a ‘traitor’ to the army. The General Staff at Stavka received their new commander with open hostility on 22 May. ‘I became aware at once, upon my arrival, of their frosty feelings for me,’ Brusilov recalled. Instead of the usual mass ovation, to which he had grown accustomed, Brusilov was met at the station at Mogilev by a small and rather formal delegation of sullen-faced generals. To make matters worse, Brusilov at once caused grave offence by failing to receive a group of senior officers, who had come to the station to welcome him, and, in a gesture of democracy, turning instead to shake the hands of the private soldiers. The first soldiers were so confused — it was customary for the generals to salute them — that they dropped their rifles or grasped them clumsily in their left arm whilst shaking hands with their new Commander-in-Chief.3
