Red Dusk and the Morrow · Chapter 11 (1/4)

XI

The Red Army

The day I joined my regiment I donned my Red army uniform, consisting of a khaki shirt, yellow breeches, putties, a pair of good boots which I bought from another soldier (the army at that time was not issuing boots), and a grey army overcoat. On my cap I wore the Red army badge⁠—a red star with a mallet and plough imprinted on it.

This could not be said to be the regular Red army uniform, though it was as regular as any. Except for picked troops, smartly apparelled in the best the army stores could provide, the rank and file of recruits wore just anything, and often had only bast slippers in place of boots. There is bitter irony and a world of significance in the fact that in 1920, when I observed the Red army again from the Polish front, I found many of the thousands who deserted to the Poles wearing British uniforms which had been supplied, together with so much war material, to Denikin.

“Tovarishtch Kommandir,” I would say on presenting myself before my commander, “pozvoltye dolozhitj.⁠ ⁠… Comrade Commander, allow me to report that the allotted task is executed.”

“Good, Comrade So-and-so,” would be the reply, “I will hear your report immediately,” or: “Hold yourself in readiness at such and such an hour tomorrow.”

The terminology of the former army, like the nomenclature of many streets in the capitals, has been altered and the word “commander” substituted for “officer.” When we were alone I did not say “Comrade Commander” (unless facetiously) but called him “Vasili Petrovitch,” and he addressed me also by Christian name and patronymic.

“Vasili Petrovitch,” I said one day, “what made you join the Red army?”

“You think we have any option?” he retorted. “If an officer doesn’t want to be shot he either obeys the mobilization order or flees from the country. And only those can afford to take flight who have no family to leave behind.” He drew a bulky pocketbook from his pocket, and fumbling among the mass of dirty and ragged documents, unfolded a paper and placed it before me. “That is a copy of a paper I was made to fill in and sign before being given a Red commission. We all have to sign it, and if you were discovered here I should have signed away my wife’s life as well as my own.”

The paper was a typewritten blank, on which first the name, rank in the old army, present rank, regiment, abode, etc., had to be filled in in detail. Then followed a space in which the newly mobilized officer gave an exhaustive list of his relatives, with their ages, addresses, and occupations; while at the bottom, followed by a space for signature, were the following words:

I hereby declare that I am aware that in the event of my disloyalty to the Soviet Government, my relatives will be arrested and deported.

Vasili Petrovitch spread out his hands, shrugging his shoulders.

“I should prefer to see my wife and my little daughters shot,” he said, bitterly, “rather than that they be sent to a Red concentration camp. I am supposed to make my subordinates sign these declarations, too. Pleasant, isn’t it? You know, I suppose,” he added, “that appointment to a post of any responsibility is now made conditional upon having relatives near at hand who may be arrested?” (This order had been published in the Press.) “The happiest thing nowadays is to be friendless and destitute, then you cannot get your people shot. Or else act on the Bolshevist principle that conscience, like liberty, is a ‘bourgeois prejudice.’ Then you can work for No. 2 Gorokhovaya and make a fortune.”

Not only my commander but most of the men in my unit talked like this amongst themselves, only quietly, for fear of Bolshevist spies. One little fellow who was drafted into the regiment was uncommonly outspoken. He was a mechanic from a factory on the Viborg side of the city. His candour was such that I suspected him at first of being a provocateur, paid by the Bolsheviks to speak ill of them and thus unmask sympathizers. But he was not that sort. One day I overheard him telling the story of how he and his fellows had been mobilized.

“As soon as we were mobilized,” he said, “we were chased to all sorts of meetings. Last Saturday at the Narodny Dom [the biggest hall in Petrograd] Zinoviev spoke to us for an hour and assured us we were to fight for workmen and peasants against capitalists, imperialists, bankers, generals, landlords, priests, and other bloodsucking riffraff. Then he read a resolution that every Red soldier swears to defend Red Petrograd to the last drop of blood, but nobody put up his hand except a few in the front rows who had, of course, been put there to vote ‘for.’ Near me I heard several men growl and say, ‘Enough! we aren’t sheep, and we know for what sort of freedom you want to use us as cannon fodder.’ Son of a gun, that Zinoviev!” exclaimed the little man, spitting disgustedly; “next day⁠—what do you think?⁠—we read in the paper that ten thousand newly mobilized soldiers had passed a resolution unanimously to defend what Zinoviev and Lenin call the ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’!”

Few people ventured to be so outspoken as this, for everybody feared the four or five Communists who were attached to the regiment to eavesdrop and report any remarks detrimental to the Bolsheviks. One of these Communists was a Jew, a rare occurrence in the rank and file of the army. He disappeared when the regiment was moved to the front, doubtless having received another job of a similar nature in a safe spot in the rear. The only posts in the Red army held by Jews in any number are the political posts of commissars. One reason why there appear to be so many Jews in the Bolshevist administration is that they are nearly all employed in the rear, particularly in those departments (such as of food, propaganda, public economy) which are not concerned in fighting. It is largely to the ease with which Jewish Bolsheviks evade military service, and the arrogance some of them show toward the Russians, whom they openly despise, that the intense hatred of the Jew and the popular belief in Russia that Bolshevism is a Jewish “put-up job” are due. There are, of course, just as many Jews who oppose the Bolsheviks, and many of these are lying in prison. But this is not widely known, for like Russian anti-Bolsheviks they have no means of expressing their opinions.

Leo Bronstein, the genius of the Red army, now universally known by his more Russian-sounding pseudonym of Trotsky, is the second of the triumvirate of “Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev,” who guide the destinies of the Russian and the world revolution. That the accepted order of precedence is not “Trotsky, Lenin, and Zinoviev” must be gall and wormwood to Trotsky’s soul. His first outstanding characteristic is overweening ambition; his second⁠—egoism; his third⁠—cruelty; and all three are sharpened by intelligence and wit of unusual brilliancy. According to his intimate associates of former days, his nature is by no means devoid of cordiality, but his affections are completely subordinated to the promotion of his ambitious personal designs, and he casts off friends and relatives alike, as he would clothing, the moment they have served his purpose.

A schoolmate, prison-companion, and political colleague of Trotsky, Dr. Ziv, who for years shared his labours both openly and secretly, travelled with him to exile, and was associated with him also in New York, thus sums up his character:

In Trotsky’s psychology there are no elements corresponding to the ordinary conceptions of brutality or humanity. In place of these there is a blank.⁠ ⁠… Men, for him, are mere units⁠—hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of units⁠—by means of which he may satisfy his Wille zur Macht. Whether this end is to be achieved by securing for those multitudes conditions of supreme happiness or by mercilessly crushing or exterminating them, is for Trotsky an unessential detail, to be determined not by sympathies or antipathies but by the accidental circumstances of the moment.4

The same writer throws some interesting light on how Bronstein chose his pseudonym. His present assumed name of “Trotsky” was that of the senior jailer of the Tsarist prison-house at Odessa, where Bronstein and Dr. Ziv were incarcerated. The latter describes this jailer as “a majestic figure, leaning on his long sabre and with the eagle eye of a field-marshal surveying his domain and feeling himself a little tsar.”5 The motive impelling Trotsky to use a pseudonym is peculiar. “To call himself Bronstein would be once and for all to attach to himself the hated label designating his Jewish origin, and this was the very thing that he desired everyone to forget as quickly and thoroughly as possible.” This estimation is the more valuable in that the writer, Dr. Ziv, is himself a Jew.

The creation and control of a huge militarist machine have hitherto afforded full and ample scope for the exercise of Trotsky’s superhuman energy and indomitable will. Regarding the Russian peasants and workers as cattle and treating them as such, he naturally strove at an early date, by coercion or by flattering and alluring offers, to persuade the trained Tsarist officer staff, with whose technical knowledge he could not dispense, to serve the Red flag. The ideas of a “democratic army” and “the arming of the entire proletariat,” the demand for which, together with that for the constituent assembly, had served to bring Trotsky and his associates to power, were discarded the moment they had served their purpose.

The same measures as were employed by the Tsarist army were introduced to combat wholesale robbery and pillage⁠—an inevitable phenomenon resulting from Bolshevist agitation⁠—and with even greater severity. Soldiers’ committees were soon suppressed. The “revolutionary” commanders of 1918, untrained and unqualified for leadership, were dismissed and supplanted by “specialists”⁠—that is, officers of the Tsarist army, closely watched, however, by carefully selected Communists.

The strength of the Red army now undoubtedly lies in its staff of officers. As the indispensability of expert military knowledge became more and more apparent, the official attitude toward Tsarist officers, which was one of contempt and hostility as bourgeois, became tempered with an obvious desire to conciliate. The curious phenomenon was observable of a ribald Red Press, still pandering to mob-instincts, denouncing all Tsarist officers as “counterrevolutionary swine,” while at the same time Trotsky, in secret, was tentatively extending the olive branch to these same “swine,” and addressing them in tones of conciliation and even respect. Officers were told that it was fully understood that, belonging to “the old school,” they could not readily acquiesce in all the innovations of the “proletarian” regime, that it was hoped in course of time they would come to adapt themselves to it, and that if in the meantime they would “give their knowledge to the revolution” their services would be duly recognized.

“We found it difficult to believe it was Trotsky talking to us,” an officer said to me after the extraordinary meeting of commissars and naval specialists of the Baltic fleet, at which Trotsky abolished the committee system and restored the officers’ authority. My friend participated at the meeting, being a high official in the Admiralty. “We all sat round the table in expectation, officers at one end and the Communist commissars at the other. The officers were silent, for we did not know why we had been called, but the commissars, all dressed in leathern jerkins, sprawled in the best chairs, smoking and spitting, and laughing loudly. Suddenly the door opened and Trotsky entered. I had never seen him before and was quite taken aback. He was dressed in the full uniform of a Russian officer with the sole exception of epaulettes. The dress did not suit him, but he held himself erect and leader-like, and when we all stood to receive him the contrast between him and the commissars, whom he himself had appointed, was striking. When he spoke we were thunderstruck⁠—and so were the commissars⁠—for turning to our end of the table he addressed us not as ‘Comrades’ but as ‘Gentlemen,’ thanked us for our services, and assured us he understood the difficulties, both moral and physical, of our situation. Then he suddenly turned on the commissars and to our amazement poured forth a torrent of abuse just such as nowadays we are accustomed to hear directed against ourselves. He called them skulking slackers, demanded to know why they dared sit in his presence with their jerkins all unbuttoned, and made them all cringe like dogs. He told us that the ship committees were abolished; that thenceforward the commissars were to have powers only of political control, but none in purely naval matters. We were so dumbfounded that I believe, if Trotsky were not a Jew, the officers would follow him to a man!”

The position of officers was grievous indeed, especially of those who had wives and families. Flight with their families was difficult, while flight without their families led to the arrest of the latter the moment the officer’s absence was noted. Remaining in the country their position was no better. Evasion of mobilization or a default in service alike led to reprisals against their kith and kin. Trotsky’s approaches were not an effort to make them serve⁠—that was unavoidable⁠—but to induce them to serve well. Alone his persuasions might have availed little. But with the passage of time the bitter disappointment at continued White failures, and growing disgust at the effect of Allied intervention, coming on the top of constant terror, drove many to desperate and some to genuine service in the Red ranks, believing that only with the conclusion of war (irrespective of defeat or victory) could the existing regime be altered. I believe that the number of those who are genuinely serving, under a conviction that the present order of things is a mere passing phase, is considerably larger than is generally supposed outside Russia.

One of the most pitiable sights I have ever witnessed was the arrest of women as hostages because their menfolk were suspected of anti-Bolshevist activities. One party of such prisoners I remember particularly because I knew one or two of the people in it. They were all ladies, with the stamp of education and refinement⁠—and untold suffering⁠—on their faces, accompanied by three or four children, who I presume had refused to be torn away. In the hot summer sun they trudged through the streets, attired in the remnants of good clothing, with shoes out at heel, carrying bags or parcels of such belongings as they were permitted to take with them to prison. Suddenly one of the women swooned and fell. The little party halted. The invalid was helped to a seat by her companions, while the escort stood and looked on as if bored with the whole business. The guards did not look vicious, and were only obeying orders. When the party moved forward one of them carried the lady’s bag. Standing beneath the trees of the Alexander Garden I watched the pitiful procession, despair imprinted on every face, trudge slowly across the road and disappear into the dark aperture of No. 2 Gorokhovaya.

Meanwhile their husbands and sons were informed that a single conspicuous deed on their part against the White or counterrevolutionary armies would be sufficient to secure the release of their womenfolk, while continued good service would guarantee them not only personal freedom, but increased rations and freedom from molestation in their homes. This last means a great deal when workmen or soldiers may be thrust upon you without notice at any time, occupying your best rooms, while you and your family are compelled to retire to a single chamber, perhaps only the kitchen.