More on World War1 (3)
The second week of March, 1917, found crowds in Petrograd protesting
against the high prices of food and forming in long lines to demand
grain of the government. As day succeeded day, the crowds grew larger
and bolder in their murmurings. Cossacks were sent into the city, but
for some strange reason they did not cause fear as they had in times
past. Their manner was different. Instead of drawing their sabers,
they good naturedly joked with the people as they rode among them to
disperse the mobs, and were actually cheered at times by the populace.
The crowds grew larger and more boisterous. Regiment after regiment of
troops was called in. The police fired upon the people when the latter
refused to go home. Then a strange thing happened. A Cossack, his eyes
flashing fire, rode at full tilt up the street toward a policeman who
was firing on the mob, and shot him dead on the spot. A shout went up
from the people: "The Cossacks are with us!" New regiments of troops
were brought in. The men who composed them knew that they were going
to be ordered to fire upon their own kind of people--their own kin
perhaps, whose only crime was that they were hungry and had dared to
say so. One regiment turned upon its officers, refusing to obey them,
and made them prisoners. Another and another joined the revolting
forces. It was like the scenes in Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. The
people had gathered to protest, and, hardly knowing what they did,
they had turned their protests into a revolution. Regiments loyal to
the Czar were hastily summoned to fire upon their revolting comrades.
They hesitated. Leaders of the mob rushed over to them, pleading with
them not to fire. A few scattering volleys were followed by a lull,
and, then with a shout of joy, the troops last remaining loyal threw
down their arms and rushed across to embrace the revolutionists. At a
great meeting of the mob a group of soldiers and working men was
picked out to call upon the Duma and ask this body to form a temporary
government. Another group was appointed to wait upon Nicholas II and
tell him that henceforth he was not the Czar of all the Russias, but
plain Nicholas Romanoff. Messengers were sent to the fighting fronts
to inform the generals that they were no longer to take orders from
the Czar, but from the representatives of the free people of Russia.
With remarkable calmness, the nation accepted the new situation.
Within two days a new government had been formed, composed of some of
the best men in the great empire. The Czar signed a paper giving up
the throne in behalf of himself and his young son and nominating his
brother Michael to take his place. Michael, however, was too wise. He
notified the people that he would accept the crown only if they should
vote to give it to him; and this the people would not do.
The government, as formed at first, with its ministers of different
departments like the American cabinet, was composed of citizens of the
middle classes--lawyers, professors of the universities, land-owners,
merchants were represented--and at the head of the ministry was a
prince. This arrangement did not satisfy the rabble. The radical
socialists, most of whom owned no property and wanted all wealth
divided up among all the people, were not much happier to be ruled by
the moderately well-to-do than they were to submit to the rule of the
nobles. The council of workingmen and soldiers, meeting in the great
hall which had formerly housed the Duma, began to take upon themselves
the powers of government. Someone proclaimed that now the Russian
people should have peace, and when Prof. Milioukoff, foreign minister
for the new government, assured France and England that Russia would
stick by them to the last, a howling crowd of workingmen threatened to
mob him. "No annexations and no indemnities," was the cry of the
socialists. "Let us go back to conditions as they were before the war.
Let each nation bear the burden of its own losses and let us have
peace." After a stormy session, the new government agreed to include
in its numbers several representatives of the soldiers and workingmen.
Prof. Milioukoff resigned and Alexander Kerensky, a radical young
lawyer, became the real leader of the Russian government.
Germany and Austria, meanwhile, had eagerly seized the advantage
offered by Russia's internal troubles. Their troops were ordered to
make friends with the Russians in the trenches opposite. They played
eagerly upon the new Russian feeling of the brotherhood of man and
freedom and equality, to do away with fighting on the east, thus being
able to transfer to the western front some of their best regiments. As
a result the French and English, after driving the Germans back for
many miles in northern France were at last brought to a standstill.
The burden of carrying the whole war seemed about to fall more heavily
than ever upon the armies in the west. Talk of a separate peace
between Russia and the central powers grew stronger and stronger. The
Russian troops felt that they had been fighting the battles of the
Czar and the grand dukes and they saw no reason why they should go on
shooting their brother workingmen in Germany.
At this point Kerensky, who had been made minister of war, set out to
visit the armies in the field. Arriving at the battle grounds of
eastern Galicia he made rousing speeches to the soldiers and actually
led them in person toward the German trenches. The result was a
vigorous attack all along the line under Generals Brusiloff and
Korniloff which swept the Germans and Austrians back for many miles,
and threatened for a time to recapture Lemberg. German spies, however,
and agents of the peace party were busy among the Russian soldiers.
They soon persuaded a certain division to stop fighting and retreat.
The movement to the rear, begun by these troops, carried others with
it, and for a time it seemed as though the whole Russian army was
going to pieces. Ammunition was not supplied to the soldiers. The
situation was serious and called for a strong hand. Kerensky was made
prime minister and the members of the government and the council of
workingmen and soldiers voted him almost the powers of a Czar. He was
authorized to give orders that any deserters or traitors be shot, if
need be, without trial. Under his rule the Russian army began to
re-form, and the situation improved.
In November, 1917, a faction of the extreme Socialists called the
Bolsheviki (Bol-she-v?'k?) won over the garrisons of Petrograd
and Moscow, seized control of the government, forcing Kerensky
to flee, and threatened to make peace with Germany. These
people are, for the most part, the poor citizens of large cities. They
have few followers outside of the city population, for the average
Russian in the country is a land owner, and he does not take kindly to
the idea of losing his property or dividing it with some landless
beggar from Petrograd.
The revolt of the Bolsheviki, then, simply added to the confusion in
the realm of Russia. That unhappy country was torn apart by the fights
of the different factions. Finland demanded its independence, and
German spies and agents encouraged the Ruthenians living in a great
province called the Ukraine, to do the same. The Cossacks withdrew to
the country to the north of the Crimean peninsula, and the only
Russian armies that kept on fighting were those in Turkey. These
forces had been gathered largely from the states between the Black and
Caspian Seas. Having suffered persecution in the old days, they had
hated the Turks for ages and needed no orders from Petrograd to induce
them to take revenge.
Finally the Bolshevik government agreed to a peace with the central
powers which gave Germany and Austria everything that they wanted. The
Russian armies were disbanded and the Germans and Austrians were free
to turn their fighting men back to the western front. In the meantime,
the Ruthenian republic, now called the Ukraine, was allowed by the
Bolsheviki to make a separate peace with Germany and Austria. The
troops of the Germans and Austrians began joyously to pillage both
Russia and the Ukraine, hunting for the food that was so scarce in the
central empires. However, for a whole year hardly anybody in Russia
had been willing to do a stroke of work. The fields had gone untilled
while the peasants, drunk with their new freedom, and without a care
for the morrow, lived off the grain that had been saved up during the
past years. As a result, whatever grain the enemy found proved spoiled
and mouldy, hardly fit to feed to hogs. As the Germans went about,
taking anything that they wished and as food grew scarce, the unrest
in Russia grew greater.
The Bolshevik government had not set up a democracy--a government
where all the people had equal rights: they had set up a tyranny of
the lower classes. The small land owners, the tradesmen, the middle
classes were not allowed any voice in the government. When the first
National Assembly or Congress was elected and called together, the
Bolsheviki finding that they did not control a majority of its
members, disbanded it by force.
Little by little people began to oppose this rule. They objected to
being robbed of their rights by the rabble just as much as by the
Czar.
When the Russian armies were disbanded, there were some troops that
refused to throw down their arms. Among them were the regiments of
Czecho-Slovaks. These men had been forced, against their will, to
serve in the Austrian army. They were from the northern part of the
Austrian empire, Bohemia and Moravia. They were Slavs, related to the
Russians, speaking a language very much like Russian, hating the
Germans of Austria and anxious to free their country from the empire
of the Hapsburgs. When General Brusiloff made his big attack in June,
1916, these men had deserted the Austrian army and re-enlisted as
Russians. They could not get back to Austria for the Austrians would
shoot them as deserters. Of course, the Austrian and the German
generals would make no peace with them. Therefore, this army, 200,000
strong, kept their own officers and their order and their arms and
refused to have anything to do with the cowardly peace made by the
Bolsheviki. Several thousand of them made their way across Siberia,
across the Pacific Ocean, across America, across the Atlantic to
France and Italy, where they are fighting by the thousands in the
armies of the Entente. The main body of them, however, are still in
Russia (August 1, 1918), holding the great Siberian railway, fully
ready to renew the war against the central powers at any time when the
patriotic Russians will rise and help them. The problem of how to get
aid to the Czechs without angering the Russian people is a big one for
the allied statesmen.