Some middle-class civilians volunteered for the new shock battalions which were formed to revive the army’s morale. Most of these were made up of frightened officers, eager to flee their mutinous regiments. Bernard Pares, who attended several patriotic rallies to encourage these volunteers, compared their hysterical atmosphere to that of a revival meeting. On one occasion he was introduced to the soldiers as ‘our English comrade, the Professor’, a great war hero, who had won the George Cross by beating the Germans single-handed. This was of course a total invention; but when Pares urged his host to shut up, he was told that such tales were needed to raise the morale of the troops.12
One of the best-known volunteer units had been formed by women. The Women’s Battalion of Death had been organized by Maria Bochkareva, a truly remarkable woman, who had worked before the war as a foreman on factory building sites. After 1914 she had campaigned to enlist in the army and, having petitioned the Tsar himself, had been allowed to fight under General Gurko. By February 1917, she had risen to the rank of sergeant, having spent two years in the trenches with several wounds and a number of medals to prove it. Concerned by the collapse of military discipline, she appealed to Brusilov to let her form a shock battalion of women in the hope that this would shame the rest of the soldiers into fighting. In fact it was to have the opposite effect: the soldiers viewed its formation as a sign of the government’s desperate situation and this strengthened their resolve not to fight; while many soldiers, the Cossacks in particular, refused to fight alongside women. But Brusilov did not anticipate this and saw no reason to object. He was keen on the idea, much debated at that time, of establishing a new army based entirely on volunteer units. He saw it as a means of fighting the war on the basis of patriotic duty, and of breaking down the old divisions between the officers and the troops. Since his own wife was working in the medical services at the Front, he did not see why other women should not also go there to fight. The battalion was hastily formed and blessed by the Patriarch Nikon on Red Square in Moscow before their departure for the Front in June. The women shaved their heads and put on standard army trousers, although one was too fat to fit them and had to go into battle in a skirt.13
The army commissars were the other great hope of this civic patriotism. Most of them were junior officers of democratic or socialist persuasion. They enjoyed the confidence of their troops yet also understood the need for military discipline. Linde, the young NCO who had led the mutiny of several regiments during the February Days, was a typical case in point: he became the Commissar of the Special Army during the summer offensive. Dmitry Os’kin, the peasant NCO whom we encountered in Chapter 7, also became a military commissar. The commissars were instituted by the Soviet on 19 March, and made responsible to the Provisional Government on 6 May. They were meant to smooth relations between the officers and the soldiers’ committees and, as such, were seen as the basis for a new patriotic partnership between the democracy and the army.
That, too, was the hope of the Declaration ‘On the Rights of Servicemen’ issued by Kerensky on 11 May. Kerensky claimed — and he was surely right — that the Russian armed forces were now the ‘freest in the world’; and he called on the soldiers to prove ‘that there is strength, not weakness, in freedom’ in the coming offensive. The Declaration retained the rights of Order Number One, but it also restored the authority of the officers at the Front, including the use of corporal punishment. This was seen in the ruling circles as an essential concession to the military leaders in preparation for the coming offensive. Brusilov was adamant that he would not fight without it. Yet there is no doubt that many soldiers saw the Declaration as an attempt by the government to restore the old system of discipline and this played into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Pravda quipped that the Declaration should really be called a ‘Declaration on the Rightlessness of Servicemen’.14
