The soldiers’ committees, which many commanders condemned as the principal channel of this trench ‘Bolshevism’, would discuss the coming offensive and resolve not to fight. ‘What’s the use of invading Galicia anyway?’ one soldier asked. ‘Why the hell do we need to take another hilltop,’ another added, ‘when we can make peace at the bottom?’ Many soldiers believed that the Soviet peace plan made further bloodshed pointless. They could not understand why their officers were ordering them to fight when the Soviet leaders had agreed on the need for peace. The question of a democratic peace, ‘without annexations or indemnities’, was much too complicated for most of them to understand. Many of the troops seemed to be under the impression that Anneksiia and Kontributsiia (‘annexations’ and ‘indemnities’) were two countries in the Balkans.20
As the offensive approached, the flood of deserters increased. Knox found the trains from the Front ‘constantly stormed’ by soldiers on their way home. They travelled on the roofs and hung on to the buffers of the wagons. The actual number of deserters during the offensive was very much higher than the official figure of 170,000. Whole units of deserters took over regions in the rear and lived as bandits. Many of them were family men aged over forty who believed they had been promised a special dispensation to go home for the harvest. In many units it was these older soldiers who led the resistance to the offensive (some of them must have taken part in the mutinies and peasant uprisings of 1905). On the Northern Front thousands ran away from the army and set up their own ‘soldiers’ republic’ at a camp near the Trotters’ Racecourse in Petrograd. They paraded through the capital with placards demanding their ‘liberation’ and were often to be seen in the streets and stations selling cigarettes. Somehow, the leaders of their ‘republic’ even managed to secure supplies from the government’s military depot.21
One of the most worrying manifestations of the soldiers’ pacifism with which Brusilov had to deal was their fraternization with the enemy troops. It was part of the German campaign to run down the Eastern Front in order to transfer troops to the west. They lured the Russian soldiers from their trenches with vodka, concerts and makeshift brothels set up between the two lines of trenches, and told them, in remarkably similar terms to the Bolshevik propaganda, that they should not shed any more blood to advance the imperial interests of Britain and France. During the Easter break from fighting thousands of Russians abandoned their trenches and crossed with white flags to the enemy lines. Many swam across the Dniester and Dvina rivers so as to join in the fun. German scouts were welcomed as heroes behind the Russian lines. Lieutenant Bauermeister, for example, gained a huge propaganda victory in the Thirty-Third Army Corps south of Galich, precisely the point where the main Russian blow was supposed to be dealt in the June offensive. While the impotent officers fumed with rage, he told the soldiers that Germany did not want to fight any more and that all the blame for the coming offensive should be heaped on the Provisional Government, which was a hireling of the Allied bankers. ‘If what you say is true,’ the soldiers’ delegates replied, ‘we’ll throw the Government out and bring in a new one that will quickly give the Russian people peace.’ The soldiers even agreed to sign an armistice along the whole of their sector. Bauermeister was astonished. He reminded the Russians that they did not have the legal authority to do this. But the soldiers said that, if they chose not to go on fighting, no one had the power to force them to do otherwise. For several weeks the armistice was enforced, right up until the offensive. Guns were taken out of service and white flags were raised along the Russian lines. The flamboyant Bauermeister, dressed in a white cap, became something of a hero. He even managed to speak in a village three miles behind the Russian Front. It was the headquarters of the Seventh Army.22
