Brusilov, by contrast, was beginning to have second thoughts about the morale of the troops. ‘The soldiers are tired,’ he wrote to his wife at the end of April, ‘and in many ways no longer fit to go on to the offensive.’ On taking over the supreme command of the army, he set off on his own tour of the Northern and Western Fronts. In contrast to the soldiers of his own South-Western Front, far removed from the influence of the revolutionary cities, he found the troops in a state of complete demoralization. According to one of his senior aides, Brusilov had to avoid using the words ‘offensive’ or ‘advance’ in case the soldiers attacked him. Brusilov was not a natural orator. He would draw the soldiers round him and take off his cap and jacket, holding them — ‘democratically’ — over his left arm, to create an informal atmosphere. But his speeches failed to convince the soldiers that — as they might have said of Kerensky — ‘he is one of us’. On one occasion, for example, whilst addressing a group of particularly Bolshevized soldiers near Dvinsk, Brusilov claimed that the Germans had destroyed ‘one of the French people’s finest properties, the beautiful vineyards that produce champagne’. This of course merely alienated and enraged the soldiers, who began to shout at their Commander-in-Chief: ‘Shame on you! You want to spill our blood so that you can drink champagne!’ Brusilov became afraid, put his cap back on his head, as if to reassert his old authority, and summoned his protectors to surround him. When the shouts had died down he called on one of the most vociferous soldiers to step forward and state his views. The soldier, a young red-bearded peasant, stood next to Brusilov, leant on his rifle with both arms, and, looking askance at the Commander, delivered a speech in which he claimed that the soldiers had ‘had enough of fighting’, that ‘for three long years the Russian people had spilled their blood for the imperialist and capitalist classes’, and that ‘if the general wanted to go on fighting for champagne then let him go and spill his own blood’. The troops all cheered; Brusilov was lost for words, and began to leave; and as he did so the soldier, who was evidently a Bolshevik, read out the declaration of the soldiers’ committee calling for the conclusion of an immediate peace. The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army had been upstaged by a simple soldier.17
This was only one of many incidents to persuade Brusilov that a new offensive would be ill-advised. On the Northern Front he came across a whole division of men which had driven out its officers and threatened to go home en masse:
When I arrived at their camp I demanded to speak to a delegation of the soldiers: it would have been dangerous to appear before the whole crowd. When these arrived I asked them which party they belonged to, and they replied that before they had been Socialist Revolutionaries, but that now they supported the Bolsheviks. ‘What do you want?’ I asked them. ‘Land and Freedom,’ they all cried. ‘And what else?’ The answer was simple: ‘Nothing else!’ When I asked them what they wanted now, they said they did not want to fight any more and pleaded to be allowed to go home in order to share out the land their fellow villagers had taken from the squires and live in freedom. And when I asked them: ‘What will happen to Mother Russia, if no one wants to defend it, and everyone like you only thinks of themselves?’ they replied that it was not their job to think about what should become of the state, and that they had firmly decided to go home.18
As Brusilov saw it, the soldiers were so obsessed with the idea of peace that they would have been prepared to support the Tsar himself, so long as he promised to bring the war to an end. This alone, Brusilov claimed, rather than the belief in some abstract ‘socialism’, explained their attraction to the Bolsheviks. The mass of the soldiers were simple peasants, they wanted land and freedom, and they began to call this ‘Bolshevism’ because only that party promised peace. This ‘trench Bolshevism’, as Allan Wildman has called it in his magisterial study of the Russian army during 1917, was not necessarily organized through formal party channels, or even encouraged by the Bolshevik agents. Although both of these were apparent at the Front, neither was as well developed as most of the commanders were apt to assume when they blamed ‘the Bolsheviks’ or ‘Bolshevik agents’ for virtually every setback in the field.fn2 It was more a case of tired and angry soldiers picking up the slogans of the Bolshevik press and using these to legitimize their own growing resistance to the war. Few soldiers belonged to any political party during 1917, and of those who did most belonged to the SRs rather than the Bolsheviks.19
