revolutionary " policy of the Council, the remaining parties
were unable to agree on any definite and patriotic motion. The
Internationalist delusions of many Socialists were strong enough
to prevent any firm declaration directed against the Germans.
Five motions were made, and all five were rejected one after the
other. Defencists like Plekhanov were powerless against the
Internationalists led by Martov.
The Bolshevist Usurpation. The time of the Bolshevists had
come. In the first days of Nov. 1917 the Soviet under Trot-
sky's leadership formed a military Revolutionary Committee,
and on the 3rd, the authority of that Committee was recog-
nized by the Petrograd garrison. Then steps were openly taken
to form an armed force dependent on the Soviet and independ-
ent of the Provisional Government. By the side of this force,
which was considered not to be entirely trustworthy, the sailors
of the Baltic fleet could be counted upon implicity: they had
long ago thrown in their lot with the advocates of civil war and
terrorism. Kerensky assured his ministers, and proclaimed
loudly to the population that he had taken the necessary meas-
ures to suppress any attempt at a revolt. In reality he had no
troops at his disposal except a couple of battalions of military
cadets and one company of women. The commander-in-chief
of the Russian army relied on speeches against machine-guns,
as the Chinese generals of 1860 had relied on painted dragons
against the rifles of the English and French expeditionary force.
The result was a similar one. On Nov. 7, Bolshevik sailors
surrounded the Winter Palace, and after a brief scrap with the
women arrested the ministers, the premier and commander-in-
chief having disappeared in good time. A lieutenant with some
soldiers drove out the Council of the Republic. The Cadet
battalions were overpowered, and their remnants massacred by
the soldiery and the mob. A small force of Cossacks under
Gen. Krasnov skirmished for a few days against the sailors
and armed workmen on the outskirts of Petrograd, but even-
tually concluded an armistice and withdrew. In Moscow the
struggle was fierce, and Cadets held out for some time in the
Kremlin together with a few loyal battalions. But there, too,
defenders of the Government submitted to superior gun-power,
lack of supplies and the discouraging influence of discussions
and treachery. All along the front the demoralized soldiery
rose against their officers and massacred them in the name of the
Revolution. The commander-in-chief at headquarters, Duk-
honin, was dragged out by a mob of soldiers and murdered.
The first act of the Bolshevik dictators was to satisfy the
craving of the masses corrupted by them: private property was
abolished, with the reservation that the land of the peasants
and Cossacks was not to be confiscated. At the same time the
new Soviet Government addressed to all the belligerent States
the proposal to conclude peace. The Entente Powers were
invited to join in direct negotiations with the Central Empires;
failing this, Soviet Russia would conclude a separate peace.
The advanced Socialists had no scruples as to the " letting
down " of Allies who had been struggling for three years
against the German Junkers: what they were chiefly afraid of
was an Allied victory.
The same contempt for truth, duty and justice, was displayed
in the domain of home politics. The coup d'etat had left one
institution still standing the Constituent Assembly in process
of formation. The Bolsheviks had clamoured for its immediate
convocation, and accused all the parties with the criminal
design of delaying or preventing its meeting. They were now
at the head and could not forthwith stop the elections. These
had been prepared laboriously by idealistic doctrinaires by
staunch believers in universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage.
All citizens of both sexes who had attained the age of 20 were to
take part in it. To make the arrangements absolutely perfect,
the principle of proportionate representation had also been
introduced in a somewhat peculiar form. The various parties
were to present lists containing as many names as there were
seats allotted to the electoral district. The attribution of these
seats to the parties was to be made in proportion to the number
of votes cast in support of each list, the candidates taking
places in the order of their seniority in the parties nomination.
The absurdity of these mechanical devices had been already
demonstrated by the municipal and rural elections, but the
defects of the latter were greatly intensified in the case of the
Constituent Assembly. Ignorant peasants were led off to
record their votes for long lists of men whom they did not know
and in support of platforms they did not understand. The
extreme parties did not shrink from any kind of violence and
fraud to bring in their nominees. Nevertheless, some sort of
elections were actually held, right in the midst of revolutionary
chaos, in the months of Nov. and Dec. The result was that the
Social Revolutionaries got a large majority, thanks to the votes
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323
of the peasantry, while next came the Bolsheviks, who drew their
chief support from the workmen in the towns and from the
soldiers. The Mensheviks and the Cadets came in with negli-
gible numbers, the latter with 15 out of a total of 600.
The Bolsheviks were not satisfied with such results. As soon
as it became clear that they had not won in the gamble for votes,
they began to revile the " parliamentarism " of the Constituent
Assembly and of all national organizations as opposed to class
groups. When the members of the Constituent Assembly
came to Petrograd, and tried to get into the Taurida Palace,
they were met by armed guards and ejected from the building.
Leading members of the Cadet party, Countess S. Panina,
Shingarev and Kokostsev, were arrested as " enemies of the
people " and thrown into the dungeons of the Fortress of St.
Peter and St. Paul. Anorderforthe arrest of Chernov and Avk-
sentiev was also issued, but they could not be found. At last, on
Jan. 1 8 1918 the opening sitting of the Constituent Assembly
was held. Trusty heroes from the Kronstadt fleet, with loaded
rifles, surrounded the deputies from all sides; the galleries were
packed with a howling mob. In spite of this, the election of the
President resulted in a defeat for the Bolsheviks and the Social
Revolutionaries of the Left allied with them. Their candidate,
Marie Spiridonova, received 158 votes against V. Chernov,
who got 244. Nor did the Assembly consent to register all the
decrees handed in by the Bolsheviks and to abdicate its legisla-
tive power in favour of the Soviets. The armed rulers were not
disposed to bow before the recalcitrant Assembly. After sitting
one day, it was dissolved and ejected from the Taurida Palace.
By way of justification for this act of treacherous violence,
it was maintained that the Constituent Assembly did not reflect
the " will of the Revolution," that the " masses " had moved
away from the standpoints represented by the party lists, and
that, altogether, " formal democracy " has no right to decide
in times of Revolution: the leadership ought to belong to the
advanced organizations conscious of their aim and intent on
achieving it. It was not difficult even for " nebulous " Social
Revolutionaries of the Centre and Right to refute these sophisms.
They urged with perfect truth that the will of the Revolution
in this case meant simply the arbitrary sway of a gang of reckless
adventurers, that the Assembly, in spite of all its defects, was
the one authorized institution entitled to speak for Russia, an
institution which had been recognized and made use of by the
Bolsheviks as long as it suited the purposes of their propaganda.
But what force had arguments in the face of rifles? The soldiers
had run away from the front in order to rob and kill in the name
of the Revolution: no one was ready to satisfy and to glorify
them to the same extent as the Bolsheviks. Hence there was
ample "pragmatic" justification for the Bolsheviks' coup d'etat.
Naturally the first acts of the new era were decrees of the
Executive Council proclaiming the abolition of private prop-
erty and the resolve to conclude a democratic peace.
Peace of Brest Litovsk. Two parties were necessary in order
to conclude that honourable peace " without annexations and
indemnities " which the Bolsheviks announced before having
informed themselves of the views of the other party as to the
conditions of such a peace. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and their
colleagues had, however, made up their minds about certain
points, so that the ordinary negotiations were for them only a
formal act, attractive in so far as they enabled their sans culotte
delegation to exchange salutations and to sit at the same table
with the diplomatists and soldiers of powerful empires. The
Bolsheviks had long ago made their choice between the belliger-
ents; they expected and preferred the victory of the Germans,
who had served them and provided them with funds in the hour
of need. Hypocritical invitations to the Allies to follow in their
wake at Brest Litovsk could deceive no one as to their choice.
And as they had done more than anyone to corrupt and disband
the Russian army, they knew perfectly well that they had noth-
ing to oppose General Hoffmann, when the latter chose to
" bang his boot on the table " (Trotsky). Some show was made
in their newspapers of strikes in Austria and in Berlin, but it
was clearly a case of discussing terms with an opponent who
had disarmed you and may dispatch you at his pleasure. No
wonder that Baron Kiihlmann, after accepting the formula of an
honourable peace " without indemnities and annexations " on
the basis of the self-determination of peoples, required the rep-
resentatives of the Soviet Republic to cede Poland and Courland
to the Central Empires, to recognize Finland, Esthonia and
Latvia as independent States, to give up the Ukraine on both
shores of the Dnieper, and to pay a contribution of 300 million
rubles. Trotsky tried to get away with a theatrical gesture;
he and his colleagues declared that they could not sign such a
humiliating peace, and they departed in noble style. Even this
little pretence was not vouchsafed to them. General Hoffmann
ordered some German divisions to advance, and the revolution-
ary army was at once on the run. The delegation of Soviets had to
come back crestfallen and to sign a second more dishonourable
edition of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Lenin was in no way
disturbed: he explained to the Third Congress of the Soviets
that the Germans had their knees on Russia's chest and that it
was no use struggling. Breathing space must be had at any
price, in the hope of a further fulfilment of Zimmerwald predic-
tions. The Congress ratified the Brest Litovsk document by a
large majority, and a German envoy, Count Mirbach, was sent
to Moscow to watch over the exact fulfilment of conditions by
the vanquished. Trotsky, who is particularly fond of repeating,
at every turn of his account of these affairs, such phrases as
" we know " or " we expected," may well claim that this degra-
dation had been foreseen and to a great extent brought about by
his party. But the breathing space required by Lenin was
provided, not by the Brest Litovsk peace, which was the opening
move for the complete enslavement of Russia by the Germans,
but by the unexpected fact that the Allies did not succumb, in
spite of the treacherous conduct of the Bolsheviks. The Marx-
ist prognostics of the victory of Germany as the nation best
organized in a technical and economic sense was shown to be
fallacious. The staying power of the Austrian, Bulgarian and
German armies proved to be less than that of the soldiers of
France, Great Britain and the United States. The victory of
the Allies saved Russia from the consequences of Brest Litovsk.
The Rule of the Communists. In spite of the fact that the
elections to the Constituent Assembly had resulted in an over-
whelming majority for the Social Revolutionists, the drastic
way in which Lenin and his companions had satisfied the popular
demands for peace at any price, for land and for proletarian
privileges, ensured to them the more or less fervid support of the
masses. The lower classes enjoyed the defeat and humiliations
of their betters even apart from direct advantages and even at
the cost of some discomfort for themselves. The pent-up resent-
ment and envy of generations found vent in acts of brutal violence
and disorder. It was pleasant to see maids of honour sweeping
the streets, and generals insulted and sometimes murdered by
their soldiers. We are told of cases when the descendants of
serfs dug out the skeletons of their former squires from their
graves and threw them into sewers. It was an act of frenzy on
the part of revolted slaves when the commander-in-chief,
Dukhonin, was torn to pieces at his headquarters and Ensign
Krylenko installed in his place, or when, later, the heroes of the
great war Ruzsky and Radko Dmitriev were massacred in
Piatigorsk because they did not truckle under the threats of the
disbanded soldiery. The officers slaughtered in Helsingfors, in
Kronstadt, in Kiev, in Sevastopol, paid with their blood for the
disaster of Tsushima, the Sukhomlinov misrule, the cruel dis-
cipline of the Old Army. As a result, Bolshevik domination
spread over the land like a forest fire, and all attempts at resist-
ance proved unavailing against its elemental progress. The
cadets of the military schools of Moscow held the Kremlin for
a few days with great gallantry, but they were betrayed by Ihe
head of the Moscow garrison; he surrendered them to the Com-
munists " for the sake of peace." Occasional resistance in other
towns was put down with even greater ease. The personnel of
many administrative institutions went on strike, and attempted
to stalemate the usurpers by refusing to serve under them: the
strikers were reduced to obedience after a couple of months by
324
RUSSIA
the necessity of earning their bread somehow. Countess Panina,
one of the most enlightened and public-spirited Russian women,
had acted as Assistant Minister in Kerensky's last Ministry:
she was thrown into prison for having supported this strike
movement, which the Bolsheviks treated as a " sabotage " of
Government services. She was eventually released, but two
among the most idealistic, most self-sacrificing of the Liberals
who had taken part in the Provisional Government, Shingarev
and Kokoshkin, fell victims to a dastardly gang of murderers
in a hospital where they had been lodged on account of illness.
The only serious attempt to oppose armed resistance to the
bandits was offered by Gen. Alexeiev and the indefatigable
Kornilov. They collected a few thousands of devoted men,
most of them officers, formed them into improvised units, and
took the field against the Bolsheviks in a far-off corner of the
empire in Northern Caucasus. Kornilov fell in the unequal
struggle, but his comrades succeeded in building up gradually a
' Volunteer Army " which held its own in the Kuban territory.
It was too weak to advance because the Cossacks, instead of
joining it with all their forces, wavered and negotiated. Hetman
Kaledin, a brilliant general who had won conspicuous distinction
in Brusilov's campaign of 1916, was so grievously affected by
this lack of patriotism that he committed suicide; and his suc-
cessor, Krasnov, preferred to enter into an agreement with the
Germans, who were spreading their tentacles from the Ukraine
to the Donets and to the Volga.
The rise of the revolutionary tide was, however, not a con- 1
slant and unbroken process. The shattered forces of the past j
did not give way without repeated attempts to reassert their
vitality. The Orthodox Church that had grown up with the
Russian people in its hard struggle for existence could not be
reconciled with the rule of aggressive materialists. Everywhere
the clergy exerted its influence publicly and secretly against the
anti-Christian rulers. Tikhon, the newly appointed Patriarch
of Moscow, whose chair had been set up again by a national
Council of the Orthodox Church after an interval of 200 years
of Babylonian bondage to lay bureaucracy, denounced and
anathematized the Communists. Everywhere processions and
ceremonies recalled to the popular mind the ancient traditions
of creed and ritual, and even the most hardened among the
rioters and deserters responded at times to these emotional
appeals. The Bolsheviks turned sanctuaries into public halls,
desecrated revered shrines, tortured priests and shot bishops,
but these persecutions strengthened the moral hold of the
Church on the flock, purified the sunken priesthood by a new
baptism of blood. Among the Intellectuals themselves, religion
regained many adherents, and men like Eugene Trubetskoy or
Bulgakov, who had stood up for Christian ideals in the days
when it was considered ridiculous for an educated man to do so,
found themselves at the head of a powerful movement.
The Liberals also did not give up the struggle. A number of
more or less secret associations sprang up. The Press was being
gradually gagged by the Bolsheviks, but these associations
continued their underground existence in spite of the espionage
and arrests. The most influential were the Radical League of
Reconstruction (Soyuz Vozrojdenia) led by Avksentiev and
Argunov, the " Centre," composed of Cadets and Left Octo-
brists with N. Astrov and N. Shtchpkin at their head, and a un-
ion of the Rights whose principal leaders were Krivoshein and
Gourko. The question of yielding to the Germans and crushing
the Communists with their help was eagerly discussed in con-
nexion with the plan of a monarchical restoration. The idea
found favour among the Rights and was supported among the
Cadets by P. Milyukov, who had fled to Kiev, and considered
that the game was definitely lost by the western Allies and that
it was wiser to accept defeat from the Germans than from the
Bolsheviks. This view was, however, decisively rejected by the
Liberals and the Radicals, who remained staunch in their
allegiance to the Entente and could not bear to think of German
domination. The chastisement for this independence of mind
followed closely upon the offence: the Cadets had held a confer-
ence in Moscow on the political situation on May 13, 14 and 15,
and had endorsed the policy of their leaders to remain faithful
to the Entente: on May 17 their various centres were raided
and many representatives arrested. Others fled south and
east, but Moscow was still the nucleus of a " National Centre."
Policy of the Allies. How did the Entente Powers react
against the disruption of their alliance with Russia? Their
ambassadors, having watched with anxiety the decay of the
monarchy, offered ineffectual advice, and informed their Govern-
ments of the precariousness of the situation without being able
to suggest any effective course of policy. When the blow fell,
the Entente Powers accepted the verdict of the Revolution as a
necessary consequence of Tsarist misrule, and the President of
the United States actually felt more free to join the western
coalition, since the danger of a victorious advance of Tsarism
had been removed. The device of a double diplomacy was
adopted: while Sir George Buchanan and M. Noulens continued
officially to represent Great Britain and France, special envoys
were dispatched to Petrograd as emissaries of various groups of
Socialists faithful to national traditions. Arthur Henderson for
Great Britain and M. Albert Thomas for France were even
entrusted with official missions. The main object was to steer
the Russian Revolution into a warlike course, to keep up the
eastern front, and to provoke a resumption of the Russian offen-
sive. The results of this unusual diplomacy were very hetero-
geneous. While Albert Thomas eagerly supported Kerensky in
his patriotic appeals to the army, as well as in his attempts to
arrange a coalition with the Soviets, Arthur Henderson became
convinced of the urgent need of peace and favoured a meeting
of Labour delegates in Stockholm.
The evolution of Russia was not much affected by these con-
tradictory views of the Entente emissaries. The offensive was
tried with disastrous results. The Russian army dissolved under
the influence of the " peace at any price " movement. Disap-
pointment with the conduct of revolutionary Russia was reflected
in the sympathy on the part of certain circles in England for
Kornilov's attempt, a sympathy which did not help but rather
hampered him. The advent of the Bolsheviks drove the western
Powers into an attitude of absolute helplessness. They could
do nothing to counteract the Brest Litovsk negotiations, and,
at the same time, they were not in a position to break off all
relations with the Communist Government for fear of its taking
sides with the Germans. Even the shooting of the British naval
attache by Bolsheviks did not rouse them from their torpor.
The Brest Litovsk peace, the occupation of southern Russia
by German troops, the intervention of the Germans in Finland,
obliged them, however, to adopt a decision. The embassies
were gradually withdrawn, the semi-commercial and semi-dip-
lomatic mission of Mr. Lockhart did not lead to any favourable
results, and in the summer of 1918 all official relations with the
Government of the Soviets were broken off. A state of more or
less active hostility set in when the anti-Bolshevik troops were
being reorganized on an extensive scale in various parts of
Russia. The White forces received support from the Allies
in the shape of military supph'es, occasional expeditions, and a
blockade of the ports controlled by the Soviets. Concurrently
with this intermittent support of Russian national armies, the
Allies encouraged and protected all the nationalities of the
Empire which were striving for a separation from Russia:
Poland and Rumania came to be looked upon by the French as
the bulwarks of Western civilization against Russian barbarism
and German militarism. The Baltic States (Latvia, Esthonia,
Lithuania) and the Caucasian formations (Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan) were backed in their separatist aspirations by
Great Britain. This tendency to dismemberment of the Russian
Empire could not be harmonized with the ideals and efforts of
Russian patriots, but the Entente Powers did not pause to
reflect on the inadvisability of destroying with one hand what
they were helping to build up with the other. Psychologically,
their centrifugal policy was connected with old antagonism to
the Russian Empire, with dreams of national self-determination,
restricted somehow by the vital interests of the " Big Four,"
and after the victory over the Central Powers with the
RUSSIA
325
Versailles delusions of overwhelming power over the world.
The incoherence and vacillations of Entente policy might not
have been so pernicious if Russian patriots had been able to
muster an overwhelming array of anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia
itself. Unfortunately this was not the case.
Anti-Bolshevik Governments. During the first months of the
Soviet regime, while the power of the proletarian dictators was
still shaky and unorganized, several concentrations opposing
them were formed in the East. First, Colonel Semenov, a
leader of Transbaikalian Cossacks, had started a guerrilla war-
fare on the borders of Mongolia and Manchuria, advancing in
the direction of Chita when luck favoured him and retreating
across the Chinese frontier when he met superior forces of the
Bolsheviks, together with the Magyar, Austrian and German
prisoners of war mobilized by the latter. In May 1918, he
succeeded in forming a provisional government in Chita. Soon
afterwards, Admiral Kolchak, a brilliant naval officer, who had
distinguished himself in the Japanese War, organized another
Provisional Government in Novo Nikolayevsk at the junction
of the Siberian railway with the Maritime province line. The
Japanese, who had landed a detachment in Vladivostok, sup-
ported him in a general way.
About the same time, in the spring and early summer of 1918,
there occurred another startling event. Czech detachments
which had been formed to fight for Russia from among prisoners
of war, and who had fought gallantly against the Central Coali-
tion in the last campaign, demanded to withdraw after the
debdde of the Russian army and the advent of the Bolsheviks.
They were allowed to do so by the Soviet authorities, but they