John Reed - Red Russia

PART ONE

I.

THE real revolution has begun. All the swift events of the last eight crowded months – the sudden debacle of Czarism in February, the brief inglorious attempt of Miliukov to establish a safe and sane bourgeois republic, the rise of Kerensky and the precarious structure of hasty compromise which constituted the Provisional Government – these were merely the prologue to the great drama of naked class-struggle which has now opened. For the first time in history the working-class has seized the power of the state, for its own purposes – and means to keep it.

Today the Bolsheviki are supreme in Russia. The ominous onward march of Kaledine, self-proclaimed military dictator and restorer of middle-class order, has stopped – his own Cossacks are turning against him. Yesterday Kerensky, after his defeat and the surrender of his staff at Galchina, fled in disguise. The news has just come that Moscow, after a bloody battle that wrecked the Kremlin and smashed thousands of lives, is undisputedly in the possession of the military Revolutionary Committee. As far as anyone can see, there is no force in Russia to challenge the Bolshevik power. And yet, as I write this, in the flush of their success, the new-born revolution of the proletariat is ringed round with a vast fear and hatred.

Last night two thousand Red Guards – the proletarian militia organized and armed by Trotzky just before the final clash – swung down the Zagarodny in triumph. Ahead a military band was playing – and never did it sound so appropriate – the Marseillaise. Blood-red flags drooped over the dark ranks of the marching workers. They were going to meet and welcome home to “Red Petrograd” the saviors of the new proletarian revolution – the troops who had just fought so desperately and so successfully against Kerensky and his Cossacks. In the bitter dusk they tramped, singing, men and women, their tall bayonets swinging, through streets faintly lighted and slippery with mud. And as they marched they passed always between crowds that were hostile, contemptuous, fearful.

The proletarian revolution has no friends except the proletariat. The bourgeoisie – business men, shop-keepers, students, land-owners, officers, political office holders and their fringe of clerks and servants and hangers-on, are solidly in opposition to the new order. The moderate Socialist parties – though they may find themselves forced by circumstances to combine with the Bolsheviks – hate them bitterly. But these elements are so far powerless. Their military strength is represented only by part of the Cossacks, and the Junkers – cadets of the Officers Schools. While on the side of the Bolsheviks are ranged the whole rank and file of the workers and the poorer peasants ; and the soldiers and sailors are with and of them. On one side the workers, on the other side, everybody else. For the moment the cleavage has all the clear and beautiful distinctness of familiar theory...

And at this date[1] – I am writing Nov. 4 – the workers are in complete control. No one can know what the next few days may bring forth. If they can persuade the other Socialist parties to join with them in accomplishing their gigantic immediate program of Bread, Peace and Land for the Peasants, this proletarian government will probably last until the Constituent Assembly – and after that, in history, a pillar of fire for mankind forever.

This is the moment toward which all revolutions tend. The course of every revolution is toward the left, swifter and swifter. And the Government which would retain power in revolutionary times must do the will of the revolutionary masses – or smash it with cannon. The Provisional Government did neither.

Since last February, when the roaring torrents of work-men and soldiers bearing upon the. Tauride Palace compelled the frightened Duma to assume the supreme power in Russia, it is the masses of the people – workmen, soldiers and peasants – who have forced every change in the course of the Revolution. It was they who hurled down the Miliukov ministry. It was their Soviets, their Council of Workingmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates which proclaimed to the world the Russian peace terms : “no annexations, no indemnities, the right of peoples to dispose of themselves !” And again in July, it was the spontaneous rising up of the unorganized masses, again storming the Tauride Palace, which forced the Soviets to assume power in the name of the proletariat.

The Bolshevik party was the ultimate political expression of this popular will. It was useless to hunt down the Bolsheviks as rioters and imprison them – as was done after the riots which grew out of the July demonstrations. Useless, too, to fling at them the accusation manufactured by provocateurs and reactionaries, and repeated until it was believed by all the world, that they were the paid agents of Germany. Unable to substantiate the accusations against the arrested Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government was obliged to release them, one by one, without trial, until of the original hundred less than twenty remained in prison.

Meanwhile, day by day, the Bolshevik power was growing. It was bound to grow. For the whole Bolshevik program was simply a formulation of the desires of the masses of Russia. It called for a general, democratic immediate peace (that got the army, sick of war) ; the land to be immediately at the disposal of the Peasant Land Committees (that got the peasants) ; and control of industry by the workers (that got Labor). The demand that the government should be simply the Soviets of the Workingmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, without participation by the propertied classes, until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly at the end of November, when the political form of the new Russia should be definitely decided – this completed their program. And it is worthy of remark that when the Bolsheviks first demanded that all power should be given to the Soviets, the majority of the Soviets were still bitterly anti-Bolshevik. It is a mark both of their utter consistency and of their complete confidence in the approaching triumph of their cause. Their cry, “All power to the Soviets !” was the voice of the Russian masses ; and in the face of the increasing impotence and indecision of the ever-changing Provisional Government, it grew louder day by day.

So it was that, while the “center” Socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionist moderates, involved themselves in compromise with the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks were rapidly capturing the Russian masses. In July they had been hunted and despised ; by September the metropolitan workingmen, the sailors of the Baltic fleet, and the hotly of the army, had been won almost entirely to their cause.

It was the fate of the hesitating successive ministries of the Provisional Government to be blind to this inexorable trend of affairs. To the Soviets’ call for peace without annexations or indemnities, the Government replied by ordering the June offensive into Austrian Galicia. In answer to the whole country’s longing for peace, the Government permitted the Allies to postpone and again postpone the promised Conference on the Aims of the War, and finally to announce that war aims would not be discussed at all. In regard to the land question, the Government’s course was equally indecisive. In the summer, Peasant Land Committees had been appointed for the purpose of temporary disposal of the great estates ; but when they began to act, they were arrested and imprisoned. To the agrarian disorders that resulted from the holding back of the long-promised land, the Government replied by sending Cossacks to put down the “anarchy.” The army was demoralized by suspicion of its officers ; the Government, instead of attempting the democratization of the reactionary staffs, tried to suppress the Soldiers’ Committees, and restored the death-penalty in behalf of discipline. Industry was in a terrible state of disorganization, a struggle to the death between manufacturers and workingmen ; but instead of establishing some sort of state control over the factories, and making use of the immensely valuable democratic workingmen’s organizations, Minister of Labor Skobelev tried to abolish the Shop Committees.

But the final collapse of the Provisional Government may be laid most of all to three colossal blunders : the Galician offensive of June, the Kornilov affair, and Coalition with the bourgeoisie.

After the Soviets’ worldwide call for peace without annexations and indemnities, the Russian and German armies had fraternized for several months, until, according to the testimony of Rosa Luxembourg,[2] the German troops were thoroughly unwilling to fight. In June, by tricks, exhortations and lies, the Russians were cajoled into advancing the whole movement crumbling and crashing down in disaster at Kalusz and Tarnopol ; and as a result, the morale of the Russian armies and their faith in their officers irreparably ruined.

Then, after the fall of Riga, came the Kornilov attempt to march on Petrograd and establish a military dictatorship. All the details of the story have not yet come out, but it is plain that Kerensky and other members of the Government were in some way involved in the scheme. Whatever the secret facts might be, enough was disclosed to make the masses utterly lose faith in Kerensky as a friend of the revolution. After that event, the Provisional Government was doomed.

Then the Coalition, the last chapter of preparation for the final struggle. At the time of the Kornilov attempt, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets proposed that an All-Russian Congress be called at Petrograd, to broaden the base of the Provisional Government and create some sort of temporary organ or pre-Parliament to which the Ministry could be responsible until the Constituent Assembly. The basis of the new body was, of course, to be the Soviets ; but as the Bolshevik power continued to grow, the Central Committee became anxious, and began to invite all sorts of non-political and conservative organizations, such as the Cooperatives, to participate. With the same object, to keep the pre-Parliament from being Bolshevik, it reduced the Soviet membership and increased the representation of the bourgeoisie in the last few days, until, even though the propertied classes had been expressly excluded, it was certain that the majority of the gathering would be “safe.”

It was a pre-Parliament carefully calculated to vote for the sharing of governmental power with the liberal bourgeois party. So far as plans could effect it, even the pretense of a Socialist regime was at an end.

But these plans were not easy to carry out. Russia had been shocked and frightened by the Kornilov affair, with its ominous threat against the very existence of the Republic. Investigation had proved how widespread was the responsibility for that affair, and there was profound distrust of the bourgeois politicians. In spite of Kerensky’s impassioned speech of self-defense, the Assembly proved to be overwhelmingly against his project of Coalition. But on the Government’s plea that the national danger demanded it, Coalition was pushed through by a narrow majority. Compromise had won. The Bolsheviks left the Assembly. The new “representative-consultative” body, the Council of the Russian Republic, with its immense proportion of business men and cadets, was officially instituted.

From the first the Bolsheviks refused to sanction the existence of the Council. At its first meeting in the Marinsky Palace, Trotzky took the tribune in the name of the Bolsheviks, and made a speech which contains the full premises of the Bolshevik insurrection. And when it became clear that there was nothing more to be said in opposition to the compromisers, but only something to be done, the Bolsheviks quitted the Council of the Russian Republic in a body.

That was on October 5th.

II. The True Revolution

The true revolution may be said to have begun on that day. For their withdrawal was a sign of the withdrawal of confidence from the Government by the whole mass of the Russian people. Those who were left behind, the hostile Cadets, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, realized what it meant, and there were many pale faces. Shrieks, curses, execrations, and imploring cries of “Come back !” followed the departing Bolsheviks. But they did not come back. And it was a blow from which the Council never recovered. It was to go on deliberating and speech-making, amid lethargic silence or uproarious tumult, for three weeks-appointing commissions, on land, on foreign affairs ; Terestchenko was to come and make a dull, non-committal statement of international policy ; Kerensky was to come twice to appeal with tears for national unity, and once to curse the Bolsheviks, along with the reactionaries, as traitors ; there were to be illusory conflicts between the Right and the Left, and a multitude of words added to the immense torrent of hot Russian talk that flows, turbulent and endless, on and on. Only in the last days of its existence did the denatured Council hurriedly pass a resolution to solve the land question at once and to adopt an energetic foreign policy to secure peace. It was too late, then. But they would keep on discussing until that cold grey morning, three weeks after the departure of the Bolsheviks, when they were to be interrupted – all the doors of the great imperial council room suddenly filled with rough-looking big soldiers and sailors, bristling with bayonets, and a sailor shouting, “No more Council. Run along home.”

I had seen the Bolsheviks leave the earlier Assembly. In the corridor I stopped Volodarski. “Why are you fellows going ?” I asked. “We can’t work with that counter-revolutionary gang,” he replied. “They’ve packed the hall, and now they’ve put over a combination with the Kornilovtsi, to wreck the revolution.” “What are you going to do ?” I asked, “We’re going to call a new All-Russian Convention of the Soviets. That’s where the real revolutionary force lies. Then we’ll take over the power. All power to the Soviets, where it belongs !”

It was this All-Russian Congress of Soviets that now loomed over Russia like a thunder-cloud. It was recognized to be the beginning of the Bolshevik regime, and by the bourgeoisie, the “center” Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionists, the Central Army and Fleet Committees, the Peasants Soviets, and especially the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets itself, no pains were spared to try to prevent it. Solemn resolutions, declarations in the press, delegations from the front, the fleet, from factories, Peasants’ Union (reactionary), Union of Cossacks, Knights of St. George, Death Battalions. ... In the Isvestia, official organ of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, a determined campaign against the Congress was carried on. The “center” Mensheviks and Social Revolutionists, led by the “Lieber-Dans” as they are called, sent instructions far and wide over the country for their party members to influence local Soviets into refusing to send delegates. But the Petrograd Soviet stubbornly insisted. At the date set, October 10, only fifteen delegates out of a possible 900 odd had arrived ; the Petrograd Soviet merely postponed the meeting until October 25, and sent another call. The next day more than a hundred arrived – among them many who had been delegated irregularly, over the heads of hostile executive committees. Confident of a majority, the Bolshevik Petrograd Soviet sent word that it would grant increased representation to small Soviets, and seat all delegates. The Central Executive Committee realized that it was beaten, and sent frantic calls over the country to the Soviets to elect Menshevik and Social Revolutionist delegates – a despairing attempt to get a majority of the “right” and “center.”

In the meantime there were more sinister signs of resistance to the will of the masses. The Government was making preparations to evacuate Petrograd ; and Rodzianko, former president of the Duma and one of the Cadet leaders, declared before a conference of business men in Moscow that the loss of Petrograd would not be a serious blow ; for in the first place the revolutionary Petrograd workers would not cause any more trouble and in the second place, the revolutionary Baltic fleet would be disposed of. And then came the declaration of the new government : suppression of mutiny at the front and anarchy in the country by force, and the transfer of the power of “irresponsible organizations” (that is, the Soviets) to the Dumas and Zemstvos.

The air was full of talk of the Bolshevik “demonstration” – the vistuplenntie, or “coming out” of the workers and soldiers. Bolshevik agitators went the rounds of the Petrograd barracks and factories, insisting that the counter-revolutionary Government wanted to open the front to the Germans, wreck the Constituent Assembly, destroy the Revolution. Lenine made his appearance – in print in the columns of the Bolshevik paper “Rabotchi Poot” preaching armed insurrection. On the extreme right the reactionary papers “Novaia Rus” and “Jivoe Slovo” called for a bloody drowning of the left elements in blood, a pitiless military dictatorship. Burtsev’s paper, “Obshee Dielo,” advocated a strong patriotic government of Kornilov, Kaledine and Kerensky ! Evidently some of the Bolshevik chiefs themselves opposed the idea of an uprising, preferring to wait for the Constituent Assembly, but Lenine’s great voice roared continuously, “Either armed insurrection or abandon the program of All Power to the Soviets ! The counter-revolutionists are preparing to destroy the All-Russian Congress and the Revolution !” Volodarski told me in the corridors of Smolny that the will of the masses of all Russia was that the power should immediately be given to the Soviets. “The Lieber Dan crowd are sabotaging this Congress,” he said. “But if they succeed in preventing enough delegates to come here to make a quorum, well, we are realists enough not to depend on that !” Kamenev was of the opinion that as soon as the All-Russian Soviets had declared themselves, the Provisional Government would be forced to resign...

Finally, the intention of the Bolsheviks in general was, I think, expressed best by Trotsky, who made a categorical public statement that the workers and soldiers would make no vistuplennie unless provoked, or unless some counter-revolutionary attempt was made. He was perfectly clear in his opinion that the masses of Russia, as represented in the Congress of Soviets, would demand by a huge majority that the power should pass to the Soviets ; and of course if the government resisted !

At the meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in Smolny, the night of October 17th, Trotsky branded the assertions of the bourgeois press that the Bolsheviks contemplated armed insurrection as “an attempt of the reactionaries to discredit and wreck the Congress of Soviets... The Petrograd Soviet,” he declared, “has not ordered any demonstration in the streets. When it will be necessary we will do so, and we are sure we will be supported by the workers and the Petrograd garrison...They (the Government) are preparing a counter-revolution ; and we will answer with an offensive which will be merciless and to the end !”
An Interview with Trotzky

That very day Trotsky gave me an interview about the projects of the new power – the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – which Volodarski had described to me as being in form “a loose government, sensitive to popular will, giving local forces full play.” He said :

“The Provisional Government is absolutely powerless. The bourgeoisie is in control, but this control is masked by a fictitious coalition with the moderate parties. Now, during the revolution, one sees revolts of peasants who are tired of waiting for their promised land, and all over the country, in all the toiling classes, the same disgust is evident. The domination of the bourgeoisie is only possible by civil war. The Kornilov method is the only way by which the bourgeoisie can dominate. But it is force which the bourgeoisie lacks...The army is with us. The conciliators and pacificators, Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviks, have lost all authority – because the struggle between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the bankers, between the soldiers and the Kornilovist officers, has become more bitter, more irreconcileable than ever. Only by the struggle of this popular mass, only by the victory of the proletarian dictatorship, can the revolution be achieved and the people saved ! The Soviets are the most perfect representatives of the people – perfect in their revolutionary experience, in their ideas and objects. Based directly on the army in the trenches, the workers in the factories, and the peasants in the fields, they are the backbone of the Revolution.

“They have tried to create a power disdaining the Soviets, and they have created only powerlessness. Counter-revolutionary schemes of all sorts organize now in the corridors of the Council of the Russian Republic. The Cadet party represents the counter-revolution militant. On the other side, the Soviets represent the cause of the people. Between the two camps there are no serious groups. It is the inevitable lutte finale. The bourgeois counter-revolution organizes all its forces and waits for a moment to attack us. Our answer will be decisive. We will finish the work scarcely begun in February, and advanced during the Kornilov affair...”

He described to me how the new government would he composed ; instead of a ministry, the different departments of the state would be directed by a series of collegia, headed by titulary commissars, who would be responsible to the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets – the new parliament. I asked about the new government’s foreign policy.

“Our first act,” said Trotsky, “will be to call for an immediate armistice on all fronts, and a conference of the peoples to discuss democratic peace terms. The quantity of democracy we get in the peace settlement depends upon the quantity of revolutionary response there is in Europe. If we create here a government of the Soviets, that will be a powerful factor for immediate peace in Europe ; for this government will address itself immediately and directly to the peoples, over the heads of their governments, proposing an armistice. At the moment of the conclusion of peace the pressure of the Russian Revolution will be in the direction of : no annexations, no indemnities, the rights of peoples to dispose of themselves, and a Federated Republic of Europe.

“At the end of this war I see Europe recreated, not by diplomats, but by the proletariat. The Federated Republic of Europe – the United States of Europe – that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain in national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic can give peace to Europe and to the world.” He smiled, that singularly fine and somewhat melancholy smile of his. “But without the action of the European masses, these ends cannot be realized now.”

It is fashionable among the bourgeoisie to speak of the Bolshevik coup d’état as an “adventure.” Adventure it is, and one of the most splendid mankind ever embarked on, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires. Peace, land, bread. Why not ? Already the machinery was created by which the land of the great estates could be taken over and distributed to the peasants, each according to his powers. Already the factory shop committees were ready to put into operation workmen’s control of industry. The different nationalities of Russia were all ready for months to assume the administration of their own people. In every village, town, city, district and government, Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Delegates were prepared to assume the local powers of government. Liberate the local forces of Russia – how simple, and how tremendous ! As for peace – well unless all signs lied, the peoples of the world were sick of and disillusioned with the War... What it meant was simply the liberation of the local forces of the world !

If the Bolsheviki Had Not Won

At that same meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, on October lath, some soldiers, workmen and peasants spoke, revealing very clearly the feeling of the masses, and some officers, members of the Army Central Committees, the Central Committee of Soviets, etc., opposed them. As for these last, suffice it to say that they opposed with all their might “All power to the Soviets” – and there was not a proletarian among them, just as there were no bourgeois among the representatives of the masses. The division was clean...

The peasant described the agrarian disorders in Kaluga Government, which he said were caused by the Government’s arresting members of the Land Committees who were trying to distribute the uncultivated fields of the local great estates. “This Kerensky is nothing but a comrade to the pomiestchiks (landlords),” he cried. “And they know we will take the land anyway at the Constituent Assembly, so they are trying to destroy the Constituent Assembly !”

A workman from the Obukovsky Zavod, a government shop, described how the superintendents and managers were trying to close down certain departments one by one, complaining of lack of material, of fuel, etc., and how the shop committee had discovered that there was no real necessity for closing down. “They are trying to drive the revolutionary Petrograd workers out of the city,” he declared. “It is provocaisi, they want to starve us to death, or drive us to violence...”

Among the soldiers one began, “Comrades ! I bring you greetings from the spot where men are digging their own graves and call them trenches ! We must have peace !”

Another man told of the electoral campaign now being waged in the Fifth Army for the Constituent Assembly. “The officers, and especially the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, are trying deliberately to cripple the Bolshevik campaign. Our papers are not allowed to go to the trenches. Our speakers are arrested. Our mail is censored.”

“Why don’t you speak about the lack of bread ?” cried a voice. “They are sabotaging the food supply. They want to starve Red Petrograd !”

And so it went. Now is there any truth in the accusation that the bourgeoisie were trying to wreck the Revolution ? I happened, barely two weeks before, to have an exceedingly significant talk with one of the Great Russian capitalists, Stepan Georgevitch Lianosov –“the Russian Rockefeller,” as he is called.

“We manufacturers,” he said, among other things, “will never consent to allow the workmen, through their unions or any other way, any voice whatsoever in the administration or control of production in our business. ... In the government which is to cone there will be no coalition with the democratic parties – an all-Cadet ministry...

“How will this new government come into being ? I will explain. The Bolsheviks threaten to make an insurrection on the twentieth of October. We are prepared. This uprising will be crushed by military force, and from this military force will come the new government... Kornilov is not dead yet ; he failed, but he still has enough support among the people to succeed...And if the Bolsheviks do not rise, the propertied class will make a coup d’état at the Constituent Assembly ? No, we do not fear the Bolsheviks. They are cowards, and will run at the first few shots of the troops. They will be suppressed by the military... There are the Cossacks, several guard regiments, and the Junkers. That will be more than enough...It is my personal opinion that the republic will not last long in Russia. There will be a monarchy.”

At the last meeting of the Council of the Russian Republic I was wandering around the corridors and chanced upon Professor Shatsky, a little, mean-faced, dapper man, who is influential in the councils of the Cadet party. I asked what he thought of the much-talked of Bolshevik vistuplennie. He shrugged, sneering :

“They are cattle-canaille,” he answered. “They will not dare, or if they dare they will be soon sent flying. From our point of view it will not be bad, for then they will ruin themselves and have no power in the Constituent Assembly... But, my dear sir, allow me to outline to you my plan for a form of government to be submitted to the Constituent Assembly. You see, I am chairman of a commission appointed from this body, in conjunction with the Government, to work out a constitutional project...We will have a legislative body of two chambers, much as you have in the United States. In the lower chamber will be territorial representatives, and in the upper, representatives of the liberal professions, Zemstvos, trades unions, cooperatives...”

On October sixteenth a special commission of the Council of the Russian Republic and the Ministry hurriedly hammered out two projects for giving the land temporarily to the peasants and for pushing an energetic foreign policy of peace. On the seventeenth Kerensky suspended the death penalty in the army. Too late. I went over to the Cirque Moderne to one of the Bolshevik meetings which grew more and more numerous every day. The bare, gloomy wooden amphitheater, with its five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof – soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, listening as if their lives depended upon it, and roaring applause. A soldier was speaking, from the 548th Division, whatever and wherever that is :

“Comrades !” he cried, and there was real anguish in his drawn face and despairing gestures. “The people at the head of things are always appealing to us to sacrifice more, sacrifice more, while those who have everything are left unmolested... We are at war with Germany, and we wouldn’t invite German generals to serve on our staff. Well, we’re at war with the capitalists, and yet we invite capitalists into our government... The soldier says, ‘Show me what I am fighting for. Is it the Dardanelles, or is it free Russia ? Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalists ? If you can prove to me that I am fighting for the Revolution, then I’ll go out and fight with capital punishment.’

“When the land is to the peasants, and the mills to the workers, and the power to the Soviets, then we’ll know we have something to fight for, and we’ll fight for it !”

The Last Days

Under date of October 16, I find entered in my notebook the following news culled from different newspapers :

Mogilev (Staff Headquarters). – Concentration here of Cossacks, the “Savage Division,” several guard regiments, and the “Death Battalions” – for action against the Bolsheviks.

The Junker regiments from the officers’ schools of Pavlovak, Tsarkow Selo, Peterhof, ordered by the government to be ready to come to Petrograd. Oranienbaum Junkers arrived in the city.

Part of the Armored Car Division of the Petrograd Garrison stationed at the Winter Palace.

At a meeting of the City Militia of the low-Liteiny district a resolution was passed demanding that all power be pivett to the Soviets.

Upon orders signed by Trotsky, several thousand rifles delivered by the Sestroretzk government arms factory. Petrograd workers being armed, and assigned in regiments. (This was the creation of the famous Red Guard.)

At Smolny, first meeting since Kornilov days of the Committee to Fight the Counter-Revolution.

At Smolny, meeting of representatives of the Petrograd garrison, and formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

This is just a fragmentary sample of the confused, violent happenings of those feverish clays, when everybody sensed that something was going to happen, but no one knew just what. On Sunday, the 22nd, the Cossacks had planned a “Chrestni Chod” – Procession of the Cross – in honor of the Ikon of 1624, by whose virtue Napoleon was driven from Moscow. The Petrograd Soviet published broadcast a proclamation, headed, “Brothers-Cossacks !”

“You, Cossacks, are wanted to be up against us, workmen and soldiers. This plan of Cain is being put into operation by our common enemies – oppressors of the privileged classes, generals, bankers, landlords, former officials, former servants of the Tsar. . . . We are hated by all grafters, rich men, princes, nobility, generals, including your Cossack generals. They are ready at any moment to destroy the Petrograd Council, and crush the Revolution. . . . On the 22nd of October somebody is organizing a Cossack religious procession. It is a question of the free consciousness of every individual whether he will or will not take part in this procession. We do not interfere in this matter and do not cause any obstruction to anybody. . . . However, we warn you, Cossacks ! Look out and see to it that under the pretext of a Chrestni Chad, your Kaledines do not instigate you against workmen, against soldiers.”

The Military Commander of the Petrograd district hastily called off the procession. On the 19th all the newspapers and all the house-walls of Petrograd carried a government proclamation, signed by Polkovnikov, Commander of Petrograd, ordering the arrest of all persons inciting the soldiers to armed manifestations, forbidding all street meetings, demonstrations, and processions, and ordering the soldiers and the militia to prevent by military force all unauthorized arrests and searches in houses. As if by magic, the walls were covered with proclamations, appeals, warnings, from all the Central Committees, from the Executive Committees of the moderate and conservative parties, calling upon the workmen and soldiers not to come out, not to obey the Petrograd Soviet. For instance, this from the Military Section of the Central Committee of the Social Revolutionist Party :

“Again rumors are spreading around the town of an intended vistuplennie. What is the source of these rumors ? What organisation authorizes these agitators who talk of the insurrection ? The Bolsheviks, to a question addressed to them in the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, replied in the negative. ... But these rumors themselves carry with them a great danger. It may easily happen that, not taking into consideration the state of mind of the majority of the workers, soldiers and peasants, the individual hot-heads will call out part of the workmen and soldiers on the streets, exciting them to rise. ... In this terrible hard time which revolutionary Russia is passing through, this insurrection can easily become civil war, and there can result from it the destruction of all organizations of the proletariat, founded with so much pains. ... The counter-revolutionary plotters are planning to take advantage of this insurrection to destroy the revolution, open the front to Wilhelm, and wreck the Constituent Assembly. ... Stick stubbornly to your posts ! Do not come out ! ...

Meanwhile from all sides the situation was growing tenser day by day. The Bolshevik papers steadily counseled that the All-Russian Soviets should assume the power, end the war, give the land to the peasants. On the extreme right, such organs as Purishkevitch’s “Narodny Tribun,” the illegal monarchist paper – and the “Novaia Rus,” “Jivoe Slam,” etc., openly advocated pogroms – massacres of the Jews, of the Soviets. Mysterious individuals circulated around the long lines of miserable people waiting in queue, long cold hours for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply –and that while the people starved, the Soviet members at Smolny lived luxuriously. But the Bolshevik papers spoke, and the masses listened, and were quiet – waiting.

A Picture of Petrograd

Petrograd presented a curious spectacle in those days. Ira the factories the committee rooms filled with stacks of arms, couriers came and went, the Red Guard drilled. ... In all the barracks meetings every night, and all day long interminable hot arguments. On the streets the crowds thickened toward gloomy evening, pouring in slow, voluble tides up and down the Nevski, bunched by the hundreds around some new proclamation pasted on a wall, and fighting for the newspapers. ... At Smolny there were new strict guards at the door, at both the gates and outer gates, demanding everybody’s pass. Inside the committee rooms :hummed and whirled all day and all night, hundreds of soldiers and armed workmen slept on the floor, wherever they could find room. Upstairs in the great hail which had been the ballroom of that one-time convent school for aristocratic girls, a thousand soldiers and workmen crowded for the uproarious all-night meetings of the Petrograd Soviet. From the thousand miles of battle-front the twelve millions of men in Russia’s armies, moved under the wind of revolt, with a noise like the sea rising, poured their hundreds upon hundreds of delegations into the capital, crying “Peace ! Peace !” There was a convention of the All-Russian Factory Shop Committees at Smolny, passing hot resolutions about the control of workers over industry. The peasants were doming in, denouncing the Central Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets as traitors, and demanding that all power be given to the Soviets. ...

And in the city the theatres were all going, the Russian Ballet appearing in new and extravagant spectacles, Chaliapine singing at the Narodny Dom. Hundreds of gambling clubs functioned feverishly all night long, with much champagne flowing, stakes of 2o,ooo roubles. ... Private entertainments were given by the millionaire speculators, who were buying and selling for fabulous prices the food, the munitions, the clothing. ... On the Nevski every night thousands of prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down, crowded the cafes. ... Monarchist plots, German spying, smugglers hatching schemes. ... And in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under gray skies rushing faster and faster toward – what ?

III.

Now while everybody was waiting for the Bolsheviks to appear suddenly on the streets one morning and begin to shoat down people with white collars on, the real insurrection took its way quite naturally and openly.

One of the recent blundering actions of the Provisional Government had been to order the Petrograd garrison to the front, with the object of replacing it with loyal troops. To this order the Petrograd Soviet protested, alleging that it was the intention of the Government to remove from the revolutionary capital the revolutionary troops defending it. The General Staff insisted. Thereupon the Petrograd Soviet .agreed in principle, at the same time stipulating that it be allowed to send a delegation to the front to confer with General-in-Chief Tcheremissov, and agree with him on the troops which were to come to Petrograd. The Petrograd garrison also appointed a delegation ; but an order from the General Staff forbade the committee to leave the city. To the Soviet delegation General Tcheremissov insisted that the .Petrograd garrison should obey his orders without question : .and that the General Staff would send to Petrograd whatever troops it saw fit.

At the same time the Staff in command of the Petrograd District began quietly to act. The Junker artillery was drawn into the Winter Palace. Patrols of Cossacks made their appearance, the first since July, and great heavy armored motor cars mounted with machine-guns began to lumber tap and down the Nevski. ... The military section of the Petrograd Soviet demanded that a Soviet representative be admitted to the meetings of the Staff. Refused. Petrograd Soviet asked that no orders be issued without the approval of the military section. Refused. On the sixteenth the representatives of all the regiments of the Petrograd garrison held a meeting at Smolny, at which they formed the famous Military Revolutionary Committee, and declared formally, “The Petrograd garrison no longer recognizes the Provisional Government. The Soviet is our government. We will obey only the orders of the Petrograd Soviet, through the Military Revolutionary Committee.”

On the twenty-third, the Government announced that it had sufficient force to suppress any attempted rising. That night Kerensky ordered the suppression both of the extreme right papers, “Novaia Rus” and “Jivoe Slovo,” and of the Bolshevik papers, “Rabotchi Poot” and “Saida.” An hour after the Junkers had closed the offices and printing shops, and put the Government seals on the doors, a company of soldiers from one of the Guard regiments broke the seals in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee. At the same time other troops from Smolny seized the printing plant of the “Rousskaia Volia,” a bourgeois paper, and began to print the “Rabotchi Poor.” In trying to prevent this, Mayer, Chief of the Militia, was shot by the Red Guard.

During the night several transports full of Bolshevik sailors came from Kronstadt, with the cruiser “Aurora.” The Government ordered that the bridges over the Nova be raised, so that the regiments across the river and the work-men from the Viborg district could not come to aid the rebels. The Cronstadt sailors made a landing under fire, in which several people were killed, and closed the bridges. In the evening bands of Junkers stationed themselves at street corners near the Winter Palace and began to requisition automobiles ; and after some hours the Bolshevik troops began to do the same.

Working-Class Assumes Power

Tuesday morning, the 24th, the people of Petrograd awoke to find the city plastered with proclamations signed “Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Work-men’s and Soldiers’ Delegates” :

“To the Population of Petrograd. Citizens ! Counter-Revolution has raised its criminal head. The Kornilovtsi are mobilizing their forces in order to crush down the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets and break up the Convention of the Constituent. At the same time the pogromists may attempt to call upon the people of Petrograd for trouble and bloodshed. The Petrograd Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates takes upon itself the guarding of revolutionary order in the city against counter-revolutionary and pogrom attempts.

“The Petrograd garrison will not allow any violence or disorders. The population is invited to arrest hooligans and Black Hundred agitators and take them to the Soviet commissars at the nearest barracks. At the first attempt of the dark forces to make trouble on the streets of Petrograd, whether robbery or fighting, the criminals will be rubbed away from the face of the earth !

“Citizens ! We call upon you to maintain complete quiet and self-possession. The cause of order and Revolution is in strong hands.”

At Smolny that night meeting of the old Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets – its last – to welcome the delegates to the new Convention. Futile resolutions against the demonstration, in favor of complete submission to the Provisional Government. ... At the Council of the Republic, Kerensky thundered that the Government would, suppress all uprisings mercilessly. ... At the Winter Palace heated conferences, expulsion of impotent Colonel Polkovnikov as Commander of Petrograd, appointment of a special committee, headed by Kishkine, to reestablish order. . . Call to the Junkers of Pavlovsk, of Tsarkoe, to come – and replies that they dare not, Bolshevik troops in the way. ... Calls to the Cossacks – who reply that they will not come out unless they are supported by infantry. ...

At midnight members of the Pavlovsk regiment, who have secreted themselves in the meeting-room of the General Staff, overhear the plans that are being made to arrest the Bolshevik leaders, capture the Smolny and disperse the All-Russian convention. Immediately they post guards at all the entrances to the Staff, begin arresting officers and members of the Ministry, take them to Smolny – where no one knows what to do with them. Released with apologies. And then, two hours later, Junkers seizing the principal points of the city, the Military Revolutionary Committee gets into action. Ministers and Staff officers to be arrested, armored cars ordered out to hold the street-corners. Bolshevik troops sent to seize the State Bank, the Telephone Station, drive the Junkers out of the Telegraph Station, and draw a cordon around the Winter Palace. ... But Kerensky has already fled.

The masses are in power. ... And on the morning of October 31, after the defeat of Kerensky’s Cossack army, Lenine and Trotzky sent through me to the revolutionary proletariat of the world this message :

“Comrades ! Greeting from the first proletarian republic of the world. We call you to arms for the international social revolution.”

Notes

1. All dates according to Russian calendar. 0dr dates thirteen days earlier.

2. “So, you have broken the peace ! The Russian revolution was everything to us, too. Everything in Germany was tottering, falling... For months the soldiers of the two armies fraternized, and our officers were powerless to stop it. Then suddenly the Russians fired upon their German comrades ! After that it was easy to convince the Germans that the Russian peace was false. Alas, my poor friends ! Germany will destroy you now, and for us is black despair come again...” – Letter of Rosa Luxembourg to a Russian Socialist, July, 1917.

PART TWO

I.

October 23, 1917.

“I AM a doomed man,” said Alexander Kerensky from the tribune of the Council of the Russian Republic on October 13th, “and it doesn’t matter what happens to me . ...”

Doomed indeed. Tuberculosis of the kidneys, of the lungs, and they say tumor of the stomach. Extremely emotional, strung to an almost hysterical pitch, the awful task of riding the Russian whirlwind is wearing him down visibly.

“Comrades !” he said at the Democratic Assembly, “If I speak to you like this, it is because the cross I. carry, and which forces me to be far from you, is so terribly heavy !”

At the time of this writing, October 23, Kerensky is alone, as perhaps never leader has been alone in all history. In the midst of the class-struggle, which deepens and grows bitterer day by day, his place becomes more and more precarious. Things are moving swiftly to a crisis, to the “lutte finale” between bourgeoisie and proletariat – which Kerensky tried with all his strength to avoid – and the “Moderates” disappear from the stormy scene. Kerensky alone remains, stubborn and solitary, holding his way . ...

The revolutionary democracy says that he has “sold out” to the bourgeoisie and the foreign imperialists. The bourgeoisie and the reactionary foreign influences – with the British Embassy at their head – accuse him of having “sold out” to the Germans. Upon him is concentrated the hatred of both sides, as upon a symbol of Russia torn in half. Kerensky will fall, and his fall will be the signal for civil war.

The familiar vilifications are heaped upon him ; he is everything from “traitor” to “corruptor of children.” A common tale, reprinted weekly in the newspapers, is that of his separation from his wife, and approaching marriage with a well-known variety actress – or even that the actress is living in the Winter Palace. One of the former Ministers, whose apartment was next to Kerensky’s, says that he was kept awake all night by the Premier singing operatic arias – and adds that Kerensky sleeps in the gold and blue bed of the Tsar Alexander III, which is a very wide bed . ... People repeat that Kerensky is surrounding himself with imperial pomp, and I have been told how, while speaking at the Moscow Conference, he kept two. officers standing at salute until they fainted – a myth which has been exploded by every eyewitness. But the most widely-spread accusation is that “he is just trying to make a name for himself in history.” And if that is Kerensky’s fell design, he has succeeded.

In all the multitudes of revolutionary leaders there is not one with Kerensky’s personal magnetism, his dramatic faculty of firing men. I first saw him at the Democratic Assembly, where he marched into the middle of the great Alexandrinsky Theater, in the midst of an immense hostile crowd firmly convinced that he was implicated in the Kornilov affair, and swept them off their feet by his passionate speech. At the opening of the Council of the Russian Republic I again heard him, and twice more, raising himself and his audience to heights of emotion, collapsing utterly afterward, and the last time weeping violently in his seat. A tall, broad-shouldered figure as he stood there, in his utterly plain brown uniform, rather flabby around the middle, with flashing eyes, bristling hair, abrupt gestures, and swift, resonant speech. What did he say ? Nothing very concrete, except once when he bitterly denounced the Bolsheviki for provoking bloodshed. Otherwise vague defenses of himself, generalities about the necessity for disorder in the country to cease, about defending the revolution, about free Russia . . . . A man of moods, nervous, domineering, independent, of fearful capacity for work under frightful physical handicaps, absolutely honest but with no real fixity of purpose – as the leader of the Russian Revolution should have. And sick.

We had many appointments to see him at his office in the Winter Palace. Always at the last moment he would suddenly be taken ill, or busy – with meetings of the Government, the War Council, deputations from the front, from the Caucausus, Siberia, visits of the Allied Ambassadors, or a delegation like one we saw – reactionary priests objecting to the separation of Church and State . ...

Finally one day we penetrated as far as the private billiard-room of the Emperor, an immense chamber paneled in rosewood inlaid with brass, where in a corner beside the Gargantuan rosewood billiard table, below the shrouded portraits of the Tsars, was the plain desk at which he worked. The military Commissar for the Russian troops in France and Salonika was striding up and down, biting his nails. It appeared that the Minister-President was closeted with the British Ambassador, hours late for all appointments ...

Then, just as we were about to give up, the door opened and a smiling little spic-and-span naval adjutant beckoned. We entered a great mahogany room, lined with heavy Gothic book-cases, in the center of which a stairway mounted to a balcony above. This was the Tsar’s private library and. reception-room. I had time to notice the works of jack London, in English, on a shelf, when Kerensky came toward us. As he shook hands he looked into each face searchingly for a second, and then led the way swiftly across to a big table with chairs all around.

On his high forehead the short hair bristled straight up like a brush, grey-discolored. His whole face was greyish in color, puffed out unhealthily, with deep pouches under the eyes. He looked at one shrewdly, humorously, squinting as if the light hurt. The long fingers of his hands twisted nervously tight around each other once or twice, and then he laid them on the table, and they were quiet. His whole attitude was quizzically friendly, as if receiving reporters was an amusing relaxation. When he picked up a paper with questions on it, I noticed that he put it within an inch of his eyes, as if he were terribly near-sighted.

“What do you consider your job here ?” I asked him. He laughed as if it tickled him.

“Just to free Russia,” he answered drily, and smiled as if it were a good joke.

“What do you think will be the solution of the present struggle between the extreme radicals and the extreme reactionaries ?”

“That I won’t answer,” he shot back swiftly. “What’s the next ?”

“What have you to say to the democratic masses of the United States ?”

“Well . . .” he rubbed his chin and grinned. “What am I going to say to that ?” His attitude said, do you think I’m God Almighty ? “Let them understand the Russian democracy,” he went on, “and help it to fight reaction – everywhere in the world. Let them understand the soul of Russia, the real spirit of the Russian people. That’s all I have to say to them.”

I then asked, “What lesson do you draw from the Russian Revolution for the revolutionary democratic elements of the world ?”

“Ah-hah.” He turned that over in his mind and gave me a sharp look. “Do you think the Revolution in Russia is over, then ? It would be very shortsighted for me to draw Inv lesson from the Revolution.” He jerked his head in emphasis, and spoke vehemently. “Let the masses of the Russian people in action teach their own lesson. Draw the lesson yourself, comrade – you can see it before your eyes !”

He stopped and then began abruptly :

“This is not a political revolution. It is not like the French revolution. It is an economic revolution, and there will be necessary in Russia a profound revaluation of classes. And it is also a complicated process for the many different nationalities of Russia. Remember that the French revolution took five years, and that France was inhabited by one people, and that France is only the size of three of our provincial districts. No, the Russian revolution is not over – it is just beginning !”

I made way for the Associated Press correspondent, who had the usual Associated Press prejudices against common peasants, soldiers and workingmen who insisted upon calling one tavaristch – comrade.

“Mr. Kerensky,” said the Associated Press man, “in England and France people are disappointed with the Revolution –”

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Kerensky, quizzically. “Abroad it is fashionable to be disappointed with the Revolution !”

“I mean,” went on the Associated Press man, a little disconcerted, “people are disappointed in Russia’s part in the war.”

I remember it was the day after the news reached Petrograd of the great defeat of the Italians on the Carso ; for Kerensky immediately shot back, with a grin, “The young man had better go to Italy !”

The Associated Press man tried again. “What is your explanation of why the Russians have stopped fighting ?”

“That is a foolish question to ask,” Kerensky was annoyed. “Russia started the war first, and for a long time she bore the whole brunt of it. Her losses have been inconceivably greater than any other nation. Russia has now the right to demand of the Allies that they bring to bear a greater force of arms.” He stopped and stared for a moment at his interlocutor. “You are asking why the Russians have stopped fighting, and the Russians are asking where is the British fleet – with the German battleships in the Gulf of Riga ?” Again he ceased suddenly, and as suddenly burst out again. “The Russian Revolution hasn’t failed and the Revolutionary Army hasn’t failed. It is not the Revolution which caused disorganization in the army – that disorganization was accomplished years ago, by the old regime. Why aren’t the Russians fighting ? I will tell you. Because the masses of the people are economically tired – and because they are disillusioned with the Allies !”

The Associated Press man tried a new tack. “Do you think it would be advantageous to bring American troops to Russia ?”

“Good,” remarked the Premier off-hand, “but impossible. Transportation . . .”

“What can America do which would help Russia the most ?” Without hesitation Kerensky answered, “Send us boots, shoes, machinery – and money.”

Abruptly he stood up, shook hands, and before we were out the room he went quickly across to a desk piled high with papers, and began to write . . .

II.

November 25, 1917.

It is just a month since I wrote the first part of this article. Kerensky saw the truth but he could not gauge the excitation of spirit, the deep trouble of the slow-moving Russian masses. He thought the radical democratic program could be worked out slowly, by means of Constituent Assemblies and such-like, after the victorious end of the War which would have made “the world safe for democracy.” The idea of Socialism, or a Proletarian State, subsisting in the imperfect capitalist world of today, was to him inconceivable.

The Bolshevik peace cry had swelled into a chorus which drowned every other sound. It was at this time that a prominent American visiting Russia said to me, “There is only one real party in Russia – the peace party.”

But Kerensky defied the Bolsheviki, and commenced the struggle which ended when he fled, alone and in disguise from the battlefield where he had been defeated.

By that act he lost whatever popularity he had retained among the revolutionary masses . . . He hardly realized this, for after a silence he addressed to Russia an open letter in which he said :

“Be citizens, don’t finish with your own hands the country and the revolution for which you have struggled these eight months ! Leave the fools and traitors ! Return to the people, return to the service of the country and the revolution !

“It is I, Kerensky, who say this.

“Pull yourselves together !”

In that hysterical communication may be discerned all the traits of Kerensky’s character – the incomprehension of the movement, sympathy for the people, absolute and utter disbelief in the revolutionary method nervous bitterness, wounded pride . . . He could not then have grasped – and cannot now – the fact that the masses of poor people he loved and gave his life to help have turned away from him. At the moment he counts actually less in Russia than Bryan does at home.

PART THREE

“THE bearer of this, Johan Reed, known to the Cultural-Publicity office of the Political Department of the Ministry of War as a member of the American Socialist Party, is authorized to proceed to the active army to gather information for the North American Press…

“Observation : To the Commissar belongs the right to recall agitators and propagandists.”

Surely never stranger passport carried correspondent to the front, opened all doors, made the commandant of the Baltic station set aside a separate first-class compartment for the “American Mission,” as he called us. An Orthodox priest, hound on volunteer priestly duty to the trenches, humbly begged the honor of travelling in our company. He was a big, healthy man, with a wide, simple Russian face, a gentle smile, an enormous reddish beard, and an insatiable desire for conversation.

“Eta Vienna ! It’s true !” he said, with the suspicion of a sigh. “The revolution has weakened the hold of the church on the masses of the people. Some say that we served the old regime – that we ‘blessed the gallows’ of the revolutionary martyrs. But I remember in 1905, when thirteen sappers were executed for mutiny, no priest would administer the last rites. How could we speak consoling words to a man about to be murdered ?

“Some have lost all faith, but the great masses are still very religious – even though extreme revolutionaries. On the caps of the reserves used to be a cross and the words, ‘Zaverau, tsaria, i otechestvo’ – ‘For faith, tsar, and fatherland.’ Well, they scratched out the ‘faith’ along with the rest. ...” He shook his head. “In the old text of the church prayers God was referred to as ‘Tsar of Heaven,’ and the Virgin as ‘Tsarina.’ We’ve had to leave that out – the people wouldn’t have God insulted, they say. ...”

We went on to speak of his work in the armies, and his face grew infinitely tender.

“During regimental prayer the priest prays for peace to all nations. Whereupon the soldiers cry out, ‘Add “without annexations or indemnities !”’ Then we pray for all those who are travelling, for the sick and the suffering ; and the soldiers cry, ‘Pray also for the deserters !’ Simple-minded children ! They think that God must grant anything if it is included in a regular prayer by a regularly ordained priest. Woe to the priest who refuses to pray the soldiers’ prayer !” He mused for a moment.

“But the soldiers are not pious when they are not in danger. It is only before an attack that they come crowding to me to confess themselves, often weeping, who beg me to pray the good God for their souls. We Russians have a proverb – ‘The Russian man won’t cross himself until it thunders.’”

We talked of the great Church Congress at Moscow, the first since Peter the Great, with its convocation of the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Athens, Alexandria and Jerusalem, the Metropolitans of the Russian cities, the Arch-bishops from Japan, Persia, Roumania, Turkestan, all in a ferment of democratic revolt ; and of the innumerable Russian sects –Doukhobors, Molochani Baptists, Diendicki or a “Holers,” who must have a hole in the roof of their tabernacle for the Holy Ghost to descend through. Williams, my American companion, told of a Volga peasant, who attributed the ills of Russia to the sinful practise of crossing oneself with three fingers – he being an Old Believer, and using only two. . . . And the priest explained to us how the rites of the Orthodox Church were designed to symbolize different stages in the life and passion of Christ, and how no woman, even a girl-child being baptized, was permitted at the altar.

At every station the train made a long halt to allow the passengers time for many glasses of tea and a great gulping of food, in the cheerful, steamy clatter of crowded waiting rooms. In between times utter strangers, officers and civilians, drifted in, and our converse was of curious matters.

The evening papers announced that Martov and the Mensheviki-Internationalists had formally broken with the Tseretelli-Lieber-Dan group, because of their “hesitating policy of compromise.”

“Tseretelli, Dan, Lieber, Gotz, and Tcheidze are the Girondins of our time,” said one young captain who spoke French. “And they will share the fate of the Gironde. I am with them,” he added.

The priest lived in Tashkent, in the Trans-Caspia, where he had a wife and five children. He told about the singular institution of the Thieves’ Bureau, where persons who had been robbed could go and recover their property by paying its value, less 20 per cent. discount for cash. A thin little school-teacher described the Thieves’ Convention held in Rostov-on-Don this summer with delegates from all over Russia, which dispatched a formal protest to the Government against the rapacity and venality of the police. And a fat polkovnik spoke of the Convention of German and Austrian Prisoners of War, in Moscow, which demanded the eight-hour workday – and got it !

Rumor had it that the armies at the front would leave the trenches and go home for the feast of Pakrov, the first of October – then only four days off. Each one was concerned about this immense threat of dissolution. . . . The priest had been present at two meetings of regimental Soviets, where bitter. resolutions had been passed. Some one had the official newspaper of the Eighth Army soldiers’ committees, with an obscure account of military riots at Gomel. The Lettish troops were also stirred up. What if the millions of Russian soldiers were simply to stop fighting and start for the cities, for the capital, for their villages ? The old polkovnik muttered, “We are lost. Russia is defeated. And besides, life is so uncomfortable now that it is not worth living. Why not finish everything ?” With whom the French-speaking officer, revolutionists by theory, debated hotly but courteously. The priest told a very simple Rabelaisian story about a soldier who seduced a peasant girl by promising that her child would be a general...

It grew late, the lights were dim and intermittent, and there was no heat in the car. The priest shivered. “Well,” he said finally, his teeth chattering, “it is too cold to stay awake !” And with that he lay down just as he was, without any covering but his long skirts, and immediately fell to snoring. ...

Very early in the morning we awoke, stiff and numb. The sun sparkled through the frosty windows. A small boy came through with tea – chocolate candy in place of sugar. The train was poking down across rich Estland, through white birch forests glorious with yellow autumn foliage like bright flame ; sometimes clumps of sombre pines, with the birch leaves breaking through as if the whole woods were on fire ; long, gently-rolling waves of opulent farmland, yellow wheat stubble, emerald green grass still, and the pale blue-green of miles of cabbages ; and immense farm-houses set in the midst of barns, the whole covered with one great thatched roof, on which thick moss was growing. On the slow rises of country, huge gray-stone windmills, weathered and mossy, whirled their agitated sails. Along the track marched a new road-bed, with the ties in place at many points, and piles of rails.

Before the revolution no effort had been made to construct this badly-needed track – since March, however, the Russians had completed twenty-six versts of it ; but the Germans, in the one month since the fall of Riga, had built more than thirty miles.

Soldiers began to thicken, at all stations, in barns and farm-houses far seen ; gigantic bearded men in dun coats, boots, peaked caps or shaggy shapkis, almost always with a touch of red somewhere about them. Patrols of Cossacks rode along the roads deep in black mud. Military trains, all box-cars with masses of men on top and inside, clanked past with broken echoes of mass-singing. The Red Cross flag made its appearance. At Valk an excited sub-officer said we must go up into the town and get passes before proceeding further. The conductor announced that the train would leave in three minutes.

“You will be arrested ! You will be arrested !” cried the sub-officer, shaking his finger at me. But we sat still, and no one ever again spoke of passes.

At Venden, beyond which no trains go, we disembarked in a swirling mob of soldiers going home. A sentry at the door was tired of examining passes and just motioned us wearily through. No one seemed to know where the Staff headquarters was ; finally an officer, after some thought, said he thought the Staff had retired to Valk. “But you don’t want the Staff,” he added, “the Iskosol is in charge of things here.” And he pointed to the town’s chief building, formerly the Convention of Justices of the Peace, where sat the “Iskosol,” or Central Executive Committee of the Soldiers’ Deputies.

In a large bare room on the second floor, amid the clack of busy stenographers and the come-and-go of couriers, deputations, functioned the nerve-center of the Twelfth Army, the spontaneous democratic organization created by the soldiers at the outbreak of the Revolution. A handsome young lieutenant, with Jewish features, stood behind a table, running his hand through his gray-streaked hair worriedly, while a torrent of agitated complaint beat upon him. Four delegations from the regiments in the trenches, mostly soldiers, with a couple of officers mixed in, were appealing to the Iskosol all at once ; one regiment was almost without boots – the Iskosol had promised six hundred pairs and had only delivered sixty ; a very ragged private spokesman for another committee, complained that the artillery had been given their winter fur coats, but the cavalry was still in summer uniform. . . . One sub-officer, a mere boy, kept shouting angrily that the Iskosol buzzed around a good deal, but nothing seemed to be accomplished. . . .

“Da, da !” responded the officer vaguely, “Yes, yes. S chass, s chass. I will write immediately to the Commissariat. . . .”

On a little table were piled heaps of pamphlets and newspapers, among which I noticed ‘Elisee Reclus’ “Anarchy and the Church.” A soldier sat in a broken chair nearby, reading aloud the Isvestia – official organ of the Petrograd Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets – about the formation of the new government ; and as he declaimed the names of the Cadet ministers, the listeners gave vent to laughter and ironical “hoorah’s.” Near the window stood Voitinsky, assistant Commissar of the Twelfth Army, with his semi-military coat buttoned up to his chin – a little man whose blue eyes snapped behind thick glasses, with bristling red hair and beard ; he who was a famous exile in Siberia, and the author of “Snsertsiiki,” a book more terrible than “Seven Who Were Hanged. . . .”

These Commissars are civilians, suggested by the revolutionary Commissars of the French revolutionary government in 1793 ; chief representatives of the Provisional Government at the front, appointed by the Government with the approval of the Soviets.

In precise, short sentences Voitinsky explained that military operations were not his province, unless he was consulted ; but he had just that day come to Venden at the request of a general to decide a question of tactics.

“My job,” he said, “is to build a military machine which will retake Riga. But conditions here are desperate. The army lacks everything – food, clothes, boots, munitions. The roads are awful, and it has been raining steadily for two weeks. The horses of the transport are underfed and worn out, and it is all they can do to haul enough bread to keep us from starving. But the most serious lack at the front, more serious than the lack of food and clothes, is the lack of boots, pamphlets and newspapers. You see, since the revolution the army has absorbed tons of literature, propaganda, and has a gnawing hunger ; and now all that is cut off. We not only permit, but encourage the importation of all kinds of literature in the army – it is necessary in order to keep up the spirits of the troops. Since the Kornilov affair, and especially since the Democratic Congress, the soldiers have been very uneasy. Yes, many have simply laid down their arms and gone home. The Russian army is sick of war. . . .”

Voitinsky had had no sleep for thirty-six hours. Yet he fairly radiated quick energy as he saluted and ran down the steps to his mud-covered automobile-bound on a forty-mile ride through the deep mud, in the shadow of the coming rainstorm, to judge a dispute between officers and soldiers. …

Growling and grumbling the regimental delegations went their way, and the Jewish subaltern, whose name was Tumarkin, led us into another room and passed around cigarettes, while he recounted the history of the Iskosol.

It was the first revolutionary organization of soldiers in active service.

“You see,” said Tumarkin, “the row in Petrograd took us by surprise. Of course we knew that sooner or later . . . but it came all of a sudden, as such things do. There were a crowd of us revolutionists in the army – I myself was a political exile in France when the war broke out.

“Well, in the revolution of 1905 there was established a Soviet of Workmen in Petrograd, and we tried to make one in the army, at various places. But the masses of the soldiers were ignorant of Socialist ideas, and indifferent – so we failed then. Afterward we realized our mistake, and began to work on the army ; but in February, 1917, when. things broke loose in Peter, we were scared. We thought they might send us to suppress the revolution. So we hastily met, about a dozen of us, and started to win over the army. . . .

“News from Petrograd was rare and contradictory. Our own staff officers were hostile. We didn’t know if the revolution was winning or not. ... For a week we hurried from place to place, holding soldiers’ meetings, explaining, arguing ; and at every meeting we made the men pass a resolution swearing that they would face death for the revolution.

“On March 9, just eleven days after the outbreak in the capital, we got together a Soviet of the army in Riga – one delegate from each company, battery and squadron – three thousand in all. They elected an Executive Committee of sixty men, which began to establish communications with other revolutionary military organizations. Most of the time we didn’t know even if there were any other bodies like ours, but simply telegraphed to ‘Revolutionary Soldiers, Fourth Army’ – like that. And for signature we made a codeword of the first three syllables of our organization’s name – ‘Is-ko-sol.’ All the other Executive Committees call themselves ‘Armikom.’

“Three days after organizing we began to publish our paper, Russki Front. What a job it was, to educate, to organize ! The officers didn’t understand the revolution – they had been trained to a caste apart ; hut there was no killing of officers in this army. Only expulsions. . . . Before we left Riga the Russki Front had a circulation of 25,000 among the soldiers, and 5,000 in the city ; to support it we proclaimed a Contribution Day for the Soldiers’ Press, and raised 58,000 roubles. . . .”

The Iskosol is only one typical manifestation of the immense fertility of representative organization, a thousand times duplicated, which pervades Russian military and civil life now. It is primarily the organ by which the soldiers of the Twelfth Army take part in the furious new political life of the country ; but in the chaos left by the breakdown of the old regime, it has been forced to assume extraordinary functions. For example : The Iskosol fulfills the duties of commissariat department ; it attempts to reconcile differences between officers and men ; conducts primary and secondary schools among all bodies of troops in repose or reserve ; and in certain cases, like the retreat from Riga, where the commanding staff was utterly demoralized, takes actual command of the troops. Its members are scattered throughout the army, sent from place to place during engagements, encouraging, inspiring, leading. . . .

Beneath it is an intricate system of committees – in each company, regiment, brigade, division, corps – half political, half military, and all elected by the soldiers, with representatives in each higher committee – the whole finally culminating in the Little Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies, one delegate from each regiment, which meets about once a month-and the Big Soviet, five from each regiment, whose sessions are less frequent, and whose Executive Committee, elected every three months, forms the Iskosol. The Iskosol has three delegates in the Central Committee of the All-Russian Soviets at Petrograd, and one man attached to the Army Staff.

But that is not all. The passion for democratic expression and the swiftness of revolutionary events has given birth to other organizations. Three months ago, when the Iskosol was elected, there was very little Bolshevik sentiment in the Twelfth Army ; but since the Kornilov affair the masses of soldiers are largely Bolshevik. Now the Iskosol has no Bolshevik members, and the Iskosol is predominantly abaronetz – in favor of continuing the war to victory. So forty-three regiments have formed a new central body of Bolshevik delegates, called the Left Bloc, which also has representatives in Petrograd.

And then there are the Letts. There are nine Lettish regiments in the army, the most desperate fighters – since they are fighting for their own homes, and the great majority of these are revolutionary social democrats. Although represented in the Iskosol, they have their own central body also, the “Iskolostreel,” or Central Committee of the Lettish “Streelniki” – Sharp-shooters. Over the Iskolostreel is still a higher body, the “Iskolat” – Central Committee of the Lettish Soviet of Soldiers, Workers, and Landless Farm-workers. As all over Russia this district or province Soviet is fed by innumerable small Soviets in every village, town and city, and has its delegates in the All-Russian Central body at Petrograd. The landless farm-laborers, however, who are a real agricultural proletariat, in Estland replace the peasants of the other Russian provinces ; and the Russian Soviet of the district is composed only of soldiers, as there are neither Russian workmen nor Russian peasants in Livonia.

There is still another organization, called the Nationalist Bloc, composed of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Finns and various others of the fifty-seven peoples of Russia whose purpose is to agitate for separation of various degrees. . . .

And it is a characteristic of this extraordinary complex, multiple system of elective organizations, working feverishly and often at cross-purposes, that it throws off among its other forms of expression a prodigious amount of literature. The Iskosol publishes Russki Front, the Soviet another paper called Bulletin of the Soldiers’ Delegates ; from the Left Bloc comes Golos XII Armia ; the Nationalist Bloc has its own organ ; the Iskolostreel runs the daily Latwfu Strehlneeks ; and before the fall of Riga there were besides three papers of as many Social Democrat factions, one of the Socialist Revolutionists, and a fifth of the Populist party-besides all the regular pre-revolutionary journals of Riga ; and most of these have again sprung up in the little Lettish towns among the gun positions. Added to all these are the Petrograd papers, especially Gorky’s Novaia Zhizn and the Bolshevik Soldat and Rabotchi Root, and all the others whose endless names escape me, which are poured into the army zone by the hundreds of millions.

And all this terrible eagerness for self-government and for self-expression is working as much in all the Russian armies, everywhere along a thousand miles of front, among twelve million men suddenly free from tyranny. . . .

Tumarkin was telling us how the Iskosol sent its own delegates to Baku for oil, to the Volga to buy or commandeer wheat, up into Archangelsk Government for timber, and how it ordered guns and ammunition from the big munitions works in Petrograd. Just then the door opened and a frowzled head peeked in, followed by a dirty, bearded face. “I am lost !” groaned Tumarkin. Immediately the room seemed full of sullen-looking soldiers ; spokesmen of delegations began.

“I represent,” said he of the face, “the cooks of the 26th Division. We haven’t any more wood – the soldiers want us to tear down the farmhouses to make fires for cooking their meals.”

The next soldier elbowed his way to the front, spurs clinking. The horses of the cavalry were dying of hunger. No hay. . . . Tears welled up in his eyes ; he had seen his own horse fall down in the road. . . .

“Here !” cried the unhappy Tumarkin, holding out a paper to us. “This is a proclamation we printed in the Soldiers’ Press the day Riga fell. The shells were bursting around the office while we set type. Volunteers pasted it up on the walls and posts all over the city–” And he was swallowed up.

The proclamation was in German.

“The Executive Committee of the Russian Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies of the Twelfth Army to the German Soldiers.

“German Soldiers !

“The Russian soldiers of the Twelfth Army draw your attention to the fact that you are carrying on a war for autocracy against revolution, freedom and justice. The victory of Wilhelm will be death to democracy and freedom. We withdraw from Riga, but we know that the forces of the revolution will ultimately prove themselves more powerful than the force of cannons. We know that in the long run your conscience will overcome everything, and that the German soldiers, with the Russian revolutionary army, will march to the victory of freedom. You are at present stronger than we are, but yours is only the victory of the brute force. The moral force is on our side. History will tell that the German proletarians went against their revolutionary brothers, and they forgot the international working-class solidarity. This crime you can expiate only by one means. You must understand your own and at the same time the universal interests, and strain all your immense power against imperialism, and go hand in hand with us – toward life and freedom !”

Outside it was raining, and the mud of the streets had been tracked on the sidewalks by thousands of boots until it was difficult to walk. The city was darkened against hostile aeroplanes ; only chinks of light gleamed from shutters, and blinds glowed dull red. The narrow street made unexpected turns. In the dark we hurtled incessant passing soldiers, spangled with cigarette-lights. Close by passed a series of great trucks, some army-transport, rushing down in the black gloom with a noise like thunder, and a fan-like spray of ooze. Right before me someone scratched a match, and I saw a soldier pasting a white paper on a wall. Our guide, one of the Iskosol, gave an exclamation and ran up, flashing an electric torch. We read :

“Comrade soldiers !

“The Venden Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies has arranged for Thursday, September 28, at 4 o’clock in the park, a MEETING. Tavaristch Peters, of the Central Committee of the Lettish Social Democratic party, will speak on :

“‘The Democratic Congress and the Crisis of Power.’”

The Iskosol man was sputtering. “That meeting is forbidden,” he cried. “The commandant has forbidden it !” The other man spat. “The commandant is a damn bourgeois,” he remarked. “This Peters is Bolshevik,” argued our friend. “Meetings are not allowed in the zone of war. That is the rule. The Iskosol has forbidden this meeting.” But the soldier only grinned maliciously. “The Iskosol too is bourgeois,” he answered, and turned away. “We want to hear about this democratic Congress.”

At the little hotel the proprietor, half hostile, half greedy-frightened, said that there were no rooms.

“How about that room ?” asked our friend, pointing.

“That is the commandants room,” he replied, gruffly.

“The Iskosol takes it,” said the other. We got it.

It was an old Lettish peasant woman who brought us tea, and peered at us out of her bleary eyes, rubbing her hand and babbling German. “You are foreigners,” she said, “glory to God. These Russians are dirty folk, and they do not pay.” She leaned down and hoarsely whispered : “Oh, if the Germans would only hurry. We respectable folk all want the Germans to come here !”

And through the shut wooden blinds, as we settled down to sleep, we could hear the far-off thud-booming of the German cannon hammering on the thin, ill-clad, underfed-Russian lines, torn by doubts, fears, distrust, dying and rotting out there in the rain because they were told that the Revolution would be saved thereby. . . .

[NOTE. – The second part of this article, which will appear next month, carries on the story of this eager and spontaneous self-government, showing it at work in the rank-and-file of the army. We see those “thin, ill-clad, underfed Russian lines,” striving to understand their situation, and trying, in the face of many impossibilities, to save the Revolution.]

PART FOUR

IN the Iskosol automobile, painted war-gray, we slipped down the hill out of Venden, through its German-looking medieval streets, thronged with masses of soldiers, past a long train of bullock-carts coming back empty from the direction of the front. At the edge of the village a regiment was swinging up, headed by its band playing the Russian “Marseillaise,” and a great flag all red, with gold letters, “Peace and Liberty.” The soldiers were coming out of the bloody trenches. They had marched thirty miles through mud. To the great sweep of the revolutionary music they tramped stiffly, arms swinging with the peculiar motion of the Russian infantry, heads thrown up and back, grey, gaunt faces strained and stern. A forest of tall bayonets swayed above them, and they choked the narrow street – a torrent of mud-colored humanity. The coats of several were in rags – some were walking in bare feet. The window in a house wall high-up swung open, and a yellow-haired girl leaned out, laughed and waved. . . .

It rained, as it had rained steadily, monotonously, for days ; as it would probably go on raining for weeks. . . . The Jewish lieutenant who went with us was pouring out scraps, odds and ends of interesting information. He told how the Jews had always been forced to serve in the ranks, but that since the Revolution thousands had become officers although many preferred to stay in the ranks because shoulder-straps are distrusted by the soldiers. Before the Revolution the soldiers only received 65 kopeks (now about thirteen cents), per month – but now they got seven and a half roubles (a dollar and a half), every thirty days ; and out of that they often had to buy food . . . Then there was the question of decorations, the various degrees of the Orders of St. Ann, St. Vladimir, and St. George, the last of which carry with them certain small money payments. Before the Revolution these crosses were bestowed by a council of superior officers, as emanating from the Emperor ; now they were given by acclamation by an assembly of the soldiers. These were only slight details indicating the profound change that had taken place in all the relations of military life.

He also spoke of the retreat from Riga, adding to the sinister story the events he himself had witnessed. “In the rout,” he said, “the army hadn’t the least idea what to do. The staff completely lost its head, as it did at Tarnopol. For three days it disappeared, leaving only general orders to retreat, and scattered along the roads, each officer for himself. It was the Iskosol which decided to defend our main positions, and we set up headquarters here in Venden and organized the military resistance on our own responsibility. It was bad enough before,” he went on, “but since Riga the soldiers refuse to obey any general staff orders unless counter-signed by us. . . . But it works not badly.”

Now we were bumping along the wide, bleak Pskov chaussee, orginaily paved with cobbles, but pitted and torn by the passage of armies, and deep in mud. Straight and powerful it plunged directly southwest, to the lines – and beyond to Riga – over the rolling country. Peasants, mostly kerchiefed women who grinned cheerfully as we passed, were carelessly dumping stones and dirt on the broken places. An endless succession of trucks and wagon-trains went by, cavalry with long lances and rifles slung cross-wise on their hacks, squads of infantry straggling along, single soldiers. One drove a cow, on which he had hung his rifle and a sack of carrots. There were wounded men, with arms tied in bloody rags. Many were barefoot in the cold ooze. Almost all bore upon their uniforms somewhere a spot of red ; and everyone seemed to have a newspaper in his pocket or his hand.

We turned south off the main highway for a few miles over a road built of tree-trunks laid side by side, corduroy, through deep pine forests to the little village where the Stab Corpue has its headquarters. In the datchia of some long-vanished land-owner the officers of the staff welcomed us, but after glancing at our Socialist credentials, they cooled perceptibly, and did not even offer a glass of tea – which is about as near an insult as a Russian can get. However, the twenty-two year old captain who went with us soon began to talk with Russian expansiveness, telling many things he doubtless should not have told.

“Between ourselves,” he said,” “we all think that there was treason in the fall of Riga. Of course we were terribly overweighted by the German heavy artillery and the army was torn by all sorts of bad feeling between men and officers. But even then. . . . You remember at the Moscow Conference when General Kornilov said : ‘Must we lose Riga to awaken the country to a sense of its peril ?’ Well, the retreat from Riga began at the same time as the Kornilov attempt.

“After the first withdrawal of the 186th Division beyond the Dvina, all the army received general orders to retreat – not to any particular point, but simply to retreat. Then the staff disappeared for days. There was a panic. The Iskosol was trying to stop the flight. On the Pskov chausee just north of here I came upon disorganized fragments of the Seventh Division in disorder. An officer showed me the written orders from the staff – simply this – ‘Go north and turn to the left !’”

In the deep woods muddy soldiers were digging pits and building log huts half-underground, covering the roofs with dirt and branches – for winter quarters. All through this back country soldiers swarmed. Each patch of forest was full of artillery-limbers and horses, squadrons of cavalry bivouacked under the trees, and in the sullen downpour thin curls of blue smoke mounted straight up into the cold, quiet air. Again we were speeding along the great Pskov road, through the rich, fertile country of the Estland barons – those powerful German landowners, the most reactionary in all Russia. Great estates extended on both sides of the road, solid miles of fields lately plowed or yellow-green with abandoned crops ; forests, deep green pines or flaming birches ; lakes, pools, rivers ; and the ample farmhouses of rich peasants, or chateaux of the local lords. Occasionally soldiers would be working in the fields. The Association of Zemstovs had plowed and planted all the Baltic provinces so that this year’s harvest would feed the army and leave a million poods over – now almost fallen into German hands.

Whole acres of cabbages were rotting yellow, untouched, and fields of beets and carrots were washed out by the rain. The ostentatious country houses stood roofless, burnt ; the peasant homesteads had their windows smashed, and trails of loot led in all directions. And over the silent country, waste and empty, only immense flocks of rooks wheeled screaming in the rain, the throbbing mutter of far-off battle sounded, and the only human life was the hysterical life of an army in battle. . . .

Off to the right a quarter-mile across the plain, the village of Ziegewald was being bombarded. Unseen, unheralded except by the muffled boom of cannons miles away, the shells came whining down out of the gray sky, and house after house heaved up and burst apart in splinters and black smoke. Our automobile turned in and entered the village. Only a block away some unseen thing roared suddenly and tore a building apart – the air was full of bricks. Down the street some peasants stood at the door of their hut, a bearded man and a woman with a baby in her arms, quietly watching. A few soldiers went nonchalantly across the fields, hands in pockets, more interested in us than the shelling. Almost into it we drove, and then turned off to the left. The captain was laughing. Right behind us, where we had passed, a jagged pit opened in the road. Shrapnel began to burst. . . .

Along a deserted road, only used at night – for it was in sight of the enemy – we crept beside a cedar hedge, while over our heads the hurtling shells went whistling, high up. Half a mile behind, over to the right, a Russian six-inch battery fired methodically at some unseen target, so far away that the explosions were barely audible. Through a farm we went, between a big house and a stone barn, both roofless and peopled with soldiers and field-kitchens ; and along an open field to the wooded heights above the river Aa, where lay the Russian first-line trenches.

Like grotesque, mud-colored monsters the Russian soldiers crawled from their bomb-proofs to look us over – gaunt, drab-faced creatures, dressed in outlandish combinations of odds and ends of military and civilian clothes, their feet wrapped in rags. Since we were with officers they were sullenly suspicious, and demanded papers. Through the trees we could see the opposite bluffs, where the Germans lay hidden – but it was still raining steadily, drearily, and there seemed to be a tacit agreement between both sides not to shoot.

A bearded soldier came up, wearing the red arm-band of the soldiers’ committee.

“Any news from Petrograd ?” he asked the captain, without saluting. All the others crowded around. The captain answered that he himself had not seen the papers. “Huh !” grunted the other, and turned slowly to us. “If these are Americans,” he went on, “ask them why their country refused to endorse the Russian peace terms. Tell them that this is prolonging the war ; that thousands of Russian men are dying because of it.”

Half a mile further along we stood in front of the company commander’s dug-out while he spoke to the captain in low tones of the desperate situation. The soldiers had been saying that soon they would go home ; regiments of four thousand men had been reduced to one thousand ; there was not enough food, clothes, boots ; they had been in the trenches for months, without relief ; they did not trust their officers.

“Tell them in America,” cried a soldier, “that we are not cowards ! We did not run away from Riga without fighting. Three-quarters of us are dead. . . .”

“True ! True !” muttered others, crowding around. A voice shouted, “Riga was betrayed !” There was silence.

Now the rain had at last ceased, in the western sky the towering clouds moved and broke through to blue gold. The rich green land steamed. Birds sang. A group of soldiers stood looking up to heaven with haggard and apprehensive faces ; for with good weather the firing begins. Indeed, almost immediately came the faint high drone of an aeroplane, like a wasp, and we saw it slowly circling up above the trees. All around us the soldiers began scattering to their trenches. Rifles cracked. Behind us the Russian batteries gave tongue, and on the pale sunny sky flowered shrapnel.

“Useless !” The captain shrugged. “We have no anti-aircraft guns, no aeroplanes. The Twelfth Army is blind.”

Overhead the thing soared low, running along the lines, and on its painted armor the sun glanced dully. Guns roared now all over the country ; shells burst before and behind it, but it glided on lightly, contemptuously. From the woods they shouted hoarse insults and fired.

“Come on,” said the captain. “Let’s get out of here. They are going to shell this place. . . .”

We had got up the hill behind the gutted farmhouse when it began – the far thud-thud-thud of German three-inch guns, followed by sharp explosions in groups of three, over the place where we had stood. Rifle fire began pricking along the nervous miles. Batteries far and near, concealed in copses, behind old walls, spoke to each other and replied. Invisible missiles wove in the sky a tapestry of deadly sound. The aeroplane swooped and circled alone, humming.

Behind us as we went, all the west turned swiftly golden-red, pouring sunset up the sky, and the clouds piled up in ruins like a city on fire. In the clear yellow-green between a star began to burn, and below it a sausage-shaped German observation balloon crawled slowly up and hung there, sinister, like an eye. . . . Night fell. The fire freshened, pricking and crashing everywhere. Birds sang sleepy songs. A flock of rooks wheeled around a windmill wrecked by artillery. From far-off came the feverish stutter of a machine-gun.

Back through Ziegewald, in the quiet dusk filled again with vague human shapes which moved among the ruins, and along the Pskov road through the blasted country, so empty and yet so full of unnatural life. The stars were out. It was cold. Behind us the battle fell away. Fires twinkled over the plain, in the woods-fires of soldiers, fires of refugees who camped there, many of them without blankets, because the towns were crowded. Echoes of great choruses floated to us, of songs about home, and love, and peace, and harvest –and Revolution. Our headlights picked out details of the miserable interminable procession – the homeless, the wounded, the weary, those with naked feet, patrols, reliefs. . . .

The captain was giving concise details about the state of things. Every regiment had lost at least 6o per cent of its strength. Companies normally of 250 men had now less than too. Battalion commanders now were at the head of regiments ; regimental commanders of divisions ; he himself, nominally the captain of a company, now commanded a battalion. He had been gravely wounded four times.

As for politics, the captain laughingly protested that he had none. He was just an amused onlooker, he said. “What will come will come. To me, a philosopher, life is always the same. Nitchevo. After all, external events do not matter . . . .”

* * * *

Back in Venden . . . . The day before we had seen a notice of a Bolshevik meeting. Tavaristch Peters was to speak. The commandant had forbidden it. But we learned that it had taken place after all. The Iskosol sent word that it must not be held, but the Iskosol was disregarded. The commandant of the town sent dragoons – but the dragoons stayed to the meeting.

The open market-place was thronged with soldiers, and with the few peasants who still remained in the surrounding country. The peasants had cabbages, apples, cheese and some rare belts of homemade cloth to sell ; and the soldiers had loot-chiefly worn silver watches such as the peasants carry, with here and there a ring. The wide cobbled place was thick with moving masses of dun-colored soldiers, often in rags, sometimes without boots. Bits of leather capable of being made into a shoe-sole brought fifty roubles ; aluminum shaving dishes were highly prized, and accordions. I saw a broken suspender hid in for ten roubles.
The “Death March”

A squadron of Cossacks, rifles on backs, rode up the street with their peaked caps over one ear, and their ‘love-locks’ very prominent. The leader was playing an accordion ; every few minutes all the voices crashed together in a chorus. Then a Lettish regiment came marching along down, swinging their arms and singing the slow Lettish Death March, so solemn and courageous. As they went along comrades ran out from the sidewalk to kiss them farewell. They were bound for the line of fire.

In the town-hall sat the Refugee Committee, almost swamped by the thousands of people who had fled before the advance of the Germans or the retreat of the Russians – homeless, helpless. The committee had originally been created by the Imperial government, but since the revolution all members are elected by the refugees themselves. The secretary took us down into the foul, flooded cellar where every day were fed seven hundred women, children and old men.
Loot

“Why did the Russian soldiers loot ?” he repeated, thoughtfully. He himself was a Lett. “Well, there were the criminal elements that every army has, and then there were hungry men. Considering the general disorganization it is remarkable they looted so little. Then you must understand that the Russian soldiers have always been taught that on a retreat it is a patriotic duty to drive out the civilian population and destroy everything to prevent it falling into the enemy’s hands. But the most important reason is that the Russians were suspicious of the Lettish population, which they thought were Germanophile, and the reactionary officers encouraged this resentment. Hideous things have been done by counter-revolutionary provocateurs.”
War As Class Issue

The Russian soldiers really consider the Baltic provinces alien territory and do not see why they should defend it. And they have looted, robbed. But in spite of all, it is only the German overlords who want the Germans to come in, and the bourgeoisie which depends upon them ; the rest of the population has had a belly-full of German civilization, and the workers, soldiers and landless laborers have long been Social-Democrats, thoroughly in sympathy with the Revolution. That is why the war against Germany was so universally popular in Livonia – it was a class issue.
A Working Class Army

This was corroborated at the office of the Iskolostreel – the Executive Committee of the Lettish Sharp-shooters, of which nine regiments, some 15,ooo men, belonged to the Twelfth Army. The Letts are almost all Bolsheviks and relied almost altogether upon their own organization, a really revolutionary crowd of fine young fighters. Originally a volunteer corps of the bourgeoisie, the sharp-shooters had finally been reorganized to include all the Letts drafted into the Russian Army, until it was overwhelmingly a working-class body.
Visitors

Word had gone about that Americans were in town – the first within the memory of local mankind – and we had visitors. First was a school-teacher, who spoke French, a little man with a carefully-trimmed beard and gold-rimmed glasses, who declared he was a member of the Intelligentsia and approved of revolutions, but not of the class struggle. He averred the he had been deputed by the peasants of his village to come and ask us how to end the war . . . Then there was a fat German-American baker by the name of Witt, who had an American passport and had lived in Cincinnati. He professed himself to be a great admirer of President Wilson, had a very hazy idea of the Russian revolution, and came for advice as to where to emigrate ; was the bakery business very profitable in Siberia ? Finally a sleek, oily prosperous-looking peasant, who represented the Lettish Independence Movement, and deluged us with bad history and shady statistics to prove the yearning desire of every Lett that Livonia should be an independent country – a desire which we already knew was almost non-existent.
The Iskolostreel Investigates

Bright and early next morning thundered at our door Dodparouchik Peterson, secretary of the Iskolostreel. The soldiers’ committee of the Second Lettish Brigade had sent in a complaint about the inefficiency of sixteen officers ; a delegate of the Iskosol and the Iskolostreel was going down to the lines to see about it ; did we want to come along ?

This time it was an ambulance which carried us, together with Dr. Nahumsen, the delegate army surgeon, holder of several German university degrees, veteran revolutionist and prominent member of the Bolshevik faction. We had aboard also about half a ton of Bolshevik papers – Soldat and Rabotchie Poot – to distribute along the front. No passes were necessary, for nobody dared stop such a powerful personage.

“The condition of the army ?” the doctor shrugged his shoulders and smiled unpleasantly. “What do you want ? Our French, English and American comrades do not send us the supplies they promised. Is it possible that they are trying to starve the Revolution ?”
The Death Penalty

We asked about the death penalty in the army, over which such a bitter controversy was raging between the radicals and reactionaries.

“Consider,” he replied, “what the death penalty in this army signified. Today I will show you regiments, entirely Bolshevik, who have been reduced from four thousand men to seven – this last month’s fighting. In all the Twelfth Army there have only been sixty men officially proclaimed deserters since the fall of Riga. No, my friend, Mr. Kerensky’s death penalty has not been applied to cowards, deserters and mutineers. The death penalty in the Russian Army is for Bolsheviks, for ‘agitators’, who can be shot down without trial by the revolver of an officer. Luckily they have not tried it here – they do not dare…”

Whenever we passed a group of soldiers, Peterson threw out a bundle of papers ; he held a pile on his lap, and doled them out one by one to passersby. Thousands of papers with the reactionary program of the new coalition government – suppression of the Soviets, iron discipline in the army, war to the uttermost . . .
Reactionary Officers

Brigade staff headquarters were in a brick farm-house, on a little hill amid wooded meadows. In the living room the officers sat at a long table, a polkovnik, his lieutenant-colonel and a group of smart youths wearing the cords of staff duty, eating stchi, mountains of meat, and drinking interminable tea in a cloud of cigarette smoke. They welcomed us with great cordiality and a torrent of Moscow French – which is very like that of Stratford ; and in fifteen minutes Dr. Nahumsen and the Colonel were bitterly disputing politics.

The Colonel was a frank reactionary – out to crush Germany, still loyal to Nicholas the Second, convinced that the country was ruined by the Revolution, and utterly opposed to the soldiers’ committees.

“The trouble with the army,” he said, “is that it is concerned about politics. Soldiers have no business to think.”

All the rest followed their superior’s lead. The podpolkovnik, a round, merry person with twinkling eyes, informed me confidentially that “no officer of any character or dignity would have any dealings with the soldiers’ committees.”

“Are there no officers who work with the committees ?” I asked.

He shrugged disdainfully. “A few. But we call them the ‘demagogue’ officers, and naturally don’t associate with them.”
Pity the Officer !

The others volunteered further interesting information. In the first place, according to them, there were no Bolsheviks in the army – except the committees. The Lettish troops are ignorant and illiterate. The committees interfere seriously with military operations. And the masses of soldiers are bitterly jealous of the workmen in the towns, who get phenomenal wages and only work eight hours, while “we are on duty here twenty-four hours a day.”

By this time we had sat at the table two long hours, drinking tea and smoking, during which time the entire staff did absolutely nothing but talk. One tall boy, with a smell of brilliantine floating around his shining hair, went over to the piano and began idly fingering waltzes. Occasionally two bent and aged peasants, man and woman, she with bare feet, crept through the room to the tiny closet they had been allowed to keep for themselves. . . . An hour later, when we left to go to the soldiers’ committee, the staff of the Second Lettish Brigade was still “working twenty-four hours a day,” and expressing its honest resentment against the factory workers of Moscow and Petrograd. . . .
Fraternization

The way to the Committee led down across a little brook, up a winding path through a wood all blazoned yellow and red, and out upon lush meadows where the view plunged westward forever across the rich, rolling country. A gaunt, silent youth on horseback led the way, and as we got further and further away from the staff he began to smile, and offered his horse to ride. And he talked, telling of the May days when the Russian troops fraternized with the Germans all along this front.

“The Germans sent spies,” he said, “but then, so did our officers. There is always somebody around to betray the people, no matter what nation you belong to. Many times they tried to make us attack our German comrades, but we refused. And they also refused ; I know of one regiment, where I had many friends, which was condemned for mutiny, reorganized, and twelve men were shot. And still they would not fight the Russians. So they were sent to the Western front. As it was, they finally had to tell us lies to make us advance.”
A Soviet Committee

It was about half a mile to where the low, wide, thatch-covered farm house and its great barn stood baldly on a little rise of ground. Artillery limbers stood parked there, horses were being led to water, there were little cook-fires, and many soldiers. A huge brick stove divided the interior of the house. On one side lived the peasant and his wife and children, all their belongings heaped in the corners ; the other half was bare except for two homemade benches and a rough table, heaped high with papers, reports, pamphlets – among which I noticed Lenine’s “Imperialism As a New Stage in Capitalism.” Around this sat six men, one of them a non-commissioned officer, the rest privates – the presidium of the Soviet of the Second Lettish Brigade. Without any place to sleep except the hay-loft, without winter clothes or enough to eat, the committee sat permanently, and had been sitting for a month, doing the work the staff should have done.

This is no unsupported assertion on my part. One had only to ask any soldier where he got his food, his clothing – what he did get – who found and assigned his quarters, represented him politically, defended his interests ; he would always say, “The Committee.” If the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies gave an order for the Second Lettish Brigade to attack, or to retreat, not a single man would move without the endorsement of the Committee. This resulted from two fears ; one that they would be sent to Petrograd to suppress the Revolution, the other that they would be tricked into an offensive as they were tricked in June.

They welcomed us with great friendliness, wiping off the bench where we were to sit, fetching cigarettes, taking our coats ; other soldiers crowded in and stood about the door, silently watching.
“Good Training”

A youth with a bright, happy face and towsled hair was the chairman. He told us how the Lettish regiments had been in the front ranks for six months without rest, and they had sent word to the Ministry of War in Petrograd that if they were not relieved by October first, they would simply leave the trenches. One regiment had been reduced from four thousand men to seven, and all were without adequate food or clothing.

“How can the men stand it ?” I asked.

“The officers say it is good training,” he answered, and everybody laughed. A soldier near the door cried, “You don’t see many officers going barefoot !” And again they laughed.

The Committee seemed highly amused at the officers’ accusations.

“They say we are jealous of the workmen in the cities. But we are ourselves workmen, and we will share the short hours and high wages they have won for us, when we return to the cities after the war. Most of us are union men . . . There are no Bolsheviks in the army ? Well, this committee was only elected last month, and every member of every committee in this brigade is Bolshevik . . . We are not illiterate ; on the contrary, less than two per cent. cannot read and write. The Letts all go to school. As for interfering with military matters, we have nothing to do with them whatever, except in the case of mass movement of troops, which are always arranged beforehand.”
Revolutionary Tribunals

There had been no killing of reactionary officers in this Brigade, even in the Kornilov days – although Colonel Kruskin went around at that time openly praying for the success of the counter-revolution. Several brutal officers had, however, been forced to retire, and one was brought before a revolutionary tribunal for beating a soldier ; but he died in battle before the judgment.

Courts martial in the Twelfth Army had been replaced by revolutionary military courts. Each company had a petty court of five elected members – soldiers or officers ; above that was the full regimental court, composed of 28 soldiers and 14 officers, elected by the full regiment ; and a presidium of six chosen by this assembly sat permanently for the trial of minor offenses – such as stealing. If the soldiers were dissatisfied with their officers, they appealed first to the Commissar of the Army, and if he did nothing, to the Central Executive Army Committee.

“We know,” said the chairman, “which officers are for us and which are against us. We know that Riga was betrayed. On the first of August we had aeroplanes, heavy artillery ; but when the Germans attacked, all those things had been sent away.” He shrugged. “But what can we do ? We must defend the Revolution, and Petrograd. We must watch them, and make them fight. . . .”

They showed us copies of all orders of the staff, kept carefully on file here ; the chart of location of all troops of the brigade, which had been quartered by the committee ; requisitions and purchases of food, clothing, shells, guns ; and the record of the political transactions of the soldier party – groups with the Soviets and with the Government. “We’re the Ministry of War !” said one member, jocularly.

“The Ministry of War ? We’re the whole government !. . . .”
“Nobody Left in Siberia”

In the loft of the barn outside were quartered several batteries of light artillery, part of a Siberian regiment which had just arrived from Irkutsk. With their enormous grey wool shapkis, boots made from wild beast hides with the fur outside, new blouses and ruddy faces, they looked like another race. They complained bitterly about their food. My companion picked out a boy who looked about thirteen.

“Aren’t you too young to be a soldier ? Why, you’re only just big enough to have a girl.”

“If I’m old enough to be in love, I’m old enough to fight,” answered the boy. “When the war broke out, I was only fifteen, but now I’m a man.”

“Aren’t you afraid somebody will steal your girl while you are away ?”

The boy shrugged. “There’s nobody left in Siberia to steal her,” he said simply.

Russia’s losses in the war are already more than seven millions at the front – twice that in the rear. Four years. Children have grown up to manhood, put on uniform, gone to the trenches. . . . “There is nobody left in Siberia. . . .

* * * *
A Market for Loot

Sunday in Venden. A gusty heaven overhead, thin clouds opening in a washed blue sky, with a watery sun riding there. Underfoot, black mud, trampled by thousands of boots, townspeople and peasants, who had driven in for miles around, thronging the Lutheran church, with mingled Russian soldiers, very curious but respectful. In the open market place the bartering of odds and ends of loot was going full blast. Immensely high above the town an aeroplane drifted southwest, and all about it the firmament was splotched with white and black smoke-bursts. The sound of explosions and the hum of the motor came faintly. People looked up carelessly and said, “Niemessy !” (German.)

Along about midday tables appeared in two corners of the square. Then the banners – the revolutionary banners, in every shade of red, with gold, silver and white letters on them, moving bright and splendid through the great crowd. Speakers mounted the tables. It was a double mass-meeting, Russian in one corner, Lettish in another, forbidden by the Commandant and frowned upon by the Iskosol. All the town had turned out for it, and most of the fifteen thousand troops. And there was no doubt of the sentiments of that audience – from the great flags behind the tables, one inscribed, “Power to the People ! Long live Peace !” and the other, “Bread, Peace and Freedom !” to the thunderous roars that met the hot words of the speakers, denouncing the government for not forcing the peace conference, daring it to suppress the Soviets, and dwelling much upon the Imperialistic designs of the Allies in the war.
A Peace Meeting

Surely never since history began has a fighting army held such a peace meeting in the midst of battle. The Russian soldiers have won freedom from the tsar, they do not believe that there is any reason for continuing a war which they consider to have been imperialistic from the first, they are strongly impregnated with international Socialism –and yet they fight on. …

Under the wintry sun the banners moved in a little wind, alive and glittering, and in thousands the dun-colored soldier-masses stood listening, motionless, to any man who wanted to speak. The chairman of the Iskolostreel managed the meeting with a tiny white flag. Overhead always the aeroplanes passed and passed, sometimes circling nearby. From far rumbled the thunder of heavy artillery – it was good weather for battle. A flock of rooks wheeled in hoarse agitation around the church spire. And past the end of the square went unceasingly long trains of trucks and wagons.

There was too much noise. The speakers could not be heard. And every time a German aeroplane came near, here was an uneasy craning of necks – for the village had been bombed three times, and many people killed. The chairman of the two meetings signaled with their little flags, the speakers leaped down, tables rose upon shoulders, the great red banners dipped and moved. … First went the Letts, headed by a band of women singing the mournful, stark revolutionary songs of the country ; then the banners with Lettish inscriptions ; then the Russian banners, and after them all the thousands and thousands, pouring like a muddy river in flood along the narrow street. In at a great gate we went, and past the baronial manor of the Sievers family, liege-lords of Venden. Here on a spur of rock rose the tremendous ruins of the medieval castle of the Teutonic Knights, and below the ground fell steeply down, through ancient trees all yellow and crimson with autumn leaves, to a pond with lilies. From the window of the high keep one could see miles across the fertile, smiling country, woods, lakes, chateaux, fields all chocolate brown or vivid green, foliage all shades from gold to blood-red, gorgeous.

Rushing down torrent-like through the trees the Lettish banners moved with wailing song to the hill under the castle, while the Russians paused midway down a steep slope and set their table under a great oak tree. Around the two tribunes the people packed themselves, hung in the trees, heaped on the roofs of some old sheds. . . . Speaker followed speaker, all through the long afternoon. Five hours the immense crowd stood there, intent, listening with all its ears, with all its soul. Like a glacier, patient, slow-moving, a mass of dun caps and brown faces carpeting the steep hill-side. Spontaneous roars of applause, scattered angry cries burst from it. Almost all the speakers were Bolsheviks, and their unbroken refrain was, “All the power to the Soviets, land for the peasants, an immediate democratic peace.”. . .

Toward the last, someone undertook to deliver an old-fashioned “patriotic” oration – but the fierce blasts of disapproval quickly drove him from the platform. Then a little professor with gold-rimmed spectacles tried to deliver on the Lettish national movement ; but no one paid the least attention to him. . . .
A Relic of the Dead Past

On a knoll over the water was a black marble tomb, lettered as follows :

“Dedicated to the memory of the creator of this park, Count Carl Sievers, by his tenderly-loving and high-regarding son, Oberhofmeister Senator Count Emanuel Sievers, this memorial is erected on this little hill, which was named Carlsberg after his own name Carl. On this spot he, at that time the last-surviving lord of Castle-Wenden, together with the Duckernschen Peasants’ Council and their wives, ate lunch, while the peasants’ children danced on the nearby flat place.

“Thereby had he, with his own artistic sense, with his own creative talents, an idea to dig a large pit in the midst of a stream from the rich springs of Duckernschen, and to place here a great pool, by himself beautifully imagined, in which the noble ruins of the old Ordens-Schloss could reflect themselves” . . .

A couple of soldiers came lounging up. One slowly spelled out the first words.

“Graf ! Count !” he exclaimed, and spat. “Well, he’s dead, like so many comrades. He was probably a good guy.” . . .

Around the monument, the “great pool,” across the rustic bridges and in and out of the artificial grottoes of the aristocratic old park, roamed hundreds of gaunt men in filthy uniforms. The ancient turf was torn to mud. Rags, papers, cigarette stubs littered the ground. Up the hillsides were banked the masses of the proletariat, under red banners of the social revolution. Surely in all its stirring history the Ordens-Schloss never looked down on any scene as strange as this !

Beyond the park music was going down the road toward the little Lutheran cemetery. They were burying three Lettish sharp-shooters, killed in action yesterday. First came two carts, each with a soldier who strewed the road with evergreen boughs. At the gate of the cemetery one of the soldiers brushed off his hands, heaved a sigh, took out a cigarette and lighted it, and began to weep. The whole town was now streaming down along the road, peasant women in their Sunday kerchiefs, old men in rusty black, soldiers. In their midst moved the military band, slowly playing that extraordinary Lettish death-march, which has such a triumphant, happy note. Then the white coffins, with aluminum plaques saying : “Eternal Peace.”

Peace, peace – how many times you hear that word at the front. The Revolution means peace, popular government means peace, and last of all, bitterly, death means peace. No funeral has the poignant solemnity of a funeral at the front. Almost all these men and women have lost some men in the war ; they know what it means, death. And these hundreds of soldiers, with stiff, drawn faces ; they knew these three dead – perhaps some of them even spoke with them, heard them laugh, joke, before the unseen whining shell fell out of the sky and tore them to bloody pieces. They realize well that perhaps next time it will be their turn.

To the quiet deepness of the pastor’s voice and muffled sobbing everywhere, the coffins are lowered down, and thud, thud, drops the heavy wet earth, with a sound like cannon far away. The chairman of the Iskolostreel is making a revolutionary speech over the graves. The band plays, and a quavering hymn goes up. Nine times the rifles of the firing squad crash on the still air. . . .

Overhead is the venomous buzz of an aeroplane. From the woods comes a faint roar of applause. Here death – there life. And as we slowly disperse comes a committee to get the band, excited and eager. . . . In the park they are still speaking, and the temporary chairman asks, “Is there anyone here who wants to say anything against the Bolsheviks ?” Silence. There appears to be no one. The hand will be here in a minute” – a great shout – “and then we’ll make a demonstration through the town !”’
One People – For a Moment

And now the hand is coming down through the trees, still playing the death march. On the flat place near the pool it forms, strikes up suddenly the Marseillaise. All the dun-colored thousands are singing now, a thunderous great chorus that shakes the trees. The banners are coming together in front. The chairman waves his white flag. We start – at first slowly, feet rustling over the fallen leaves, then gathering volume, pouring swifter and swifter up through the trees, a wild flood roaring up, unstoppable. . . . The band tries to play – there are snatches and rags of music, confused singing. Everybody is exalted ; faces are alight – arm and arm we go. . . . It is like what the first days of the Revolution must have been. It is the Revolution horn again, as it is without ceasing born again, braver, wiser after much suffering. . . . Through all the streets and alleys of the town we rush impetuous, and the town is people again for the moment, as Russia will again be people – for a moment. …

But only for the moment. It is Monday, and the Little Soviet is in closed session. When the doors are closed, lights are thrown into the faces of the crowds and outsiders expelled, protesting. One by one the delegates add to the gloomy picture of disaster. The scouts are in open revolt because their bread allowance has been cut ; in another regiment the officers insist on carrying the full amount of their baggage, and had to leave the field telephones behind ; in another part of the front the men refuse to build winter quarters, saying it is easier to seize the peasants’ houses ; the Soviet of the Fifth Division has passed a resolution favoring peace at any cost ; here the soldiers have become apathetic, and even indifferent to politics ; there they say, “Why should we defend the country ? The country has forgotten us !”

* * * *

As we sat on the platform waiting for the Petrograd train, it occurred to Williams that we might as well give away our superfluous cigarettes. Accordingly he sat down on a trunk and held out a big box, making generous sounds. There must have been several hundred soldiers around. A few came hesitantly and helped themselves, but the rest held aloof, and soon Williams sat alone in the midst of an ever-widening circle. The soldiers were gathered in groups, talking in low tones.

Suddenly he saw coming toward him a committee of three privates, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, and looking dangerous. “Who are you ?” the leader asked. “Why are you giving away cigarettes ? Are you a German spy, trying to bribe the Russian revolutionary army ?”

All over the platform the crowd followed, slowly packing itself around Williams and the committee, muttering angrily – ready to tear him to pieces.

* * * *

We were packed into the train too tight to move. In compartments meant for six people twelve were jammed, and there was such a crowd in the aisles that no one could pass. On the roof of the car a hundred soldiers stamped their feet and sang shrill songs in the freezing night air. Inside all the windows were shut, everybody smoked, there was universal conversation.
Meanwhile Life Goes on As Usual

At Valk some gay Red Cross nurses and young officers climbed in at the windows, with candy, bottles of vodka, cheese, sausages, and all the materials for a feast. By some miracle they wedged themselves among us and began to make merry. They grew amorous, kissing and fondling each other. In our compartment two couples fell to embracing, half lying upon the seats. Somebody pulled the black shade over the lights ; another shut the door. It was a debauch, with the rest of us looking on. . . .

In the upper birth lay a young captain, coughing incessantly and terribly. Every little while he lifted his wasted face and spat blood into a handkerchief. And over and over he cried : “The Russians are animals !”

Above the roaring of the train, coughing, bacchic cries, quarrels, all through the night one could hear the feet of ragged soldiers pounding on the roof, rhythmically, and their nasal singing. ...