Гражданская война 1917-1921 гг. глазами А.Р.Вильямса

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     Приложение № 1

     THROUGH THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 1921

PART II 
THE REVOLUTION AND THE DAYS AFTER AMONG THE WHITES AND THE REDSCHAPTER VI

"ALL POWER TO THE SOVIET"

     Another winter is bearing down upon hungry, heartsick Russia. The last October leaves are falling from the trees, and the last bit of confidence in the government is falling with them.

     Every here recklessness ---and orgies of speculation. Food trains are looted. Floods of paper money pour from the presses. In the newspapers endless columns of hold-ups, murders and suicides. Night life and gambling-halls run full blast with enormous stakes won and lost.

     Reaction is open and arrogant. Kornilov, instead of being tried for high treason, is lauded as the Great Patriot by the bourgeoisie. But with them patriotism is tawdry talk and a sham. They pray for the Germans to come and cut off Petrograd, the Head of the Revolution.

     Rodzianko, ex-President of the Duma, brazenly writes: "Let the Germans take the city. Tho they destroy the fleet they will throttle the Soviets." The big insurance companies announce one-third off in rates after the German occupation. "Winter always was Russia's best friend," say the bourgeoisie. "It may rid us of this cursed Revolution."

     Despair Foments Rebellion.

     Winter, sweeping down out of the North, hailed by the privileged, brings terror to the suffering masses. As the mercury drops toward zero, the prices of food and fuel go soaring up. The bread ration grows shorter. The queues of shivering women standing all night in the icy streets grow longer. Lockouts and strikes add to the millions of workless. The rancor in the hearts of the masses flares out in bitter speeches like this from a Viborg workingman:

     "Patience, patience, they are always counselling us. But what have they done to make us patient? Has Kerensky given us more to eat than the Czar? More words and promises---yes! But not more food. All night long we wait in the lines for shoes and bread and meat, while, like fools, we write 'Liberty' on our banners. The only liberty we have is the same old liberty to slave and starve."

     It is a sorry showing after eight months of pleading and parading thru the streets. All they have got are lame feet, aching arms, and the privilege of starving and freezing in the presence of mocking red banners: "Land to the Peasants!" "Factories to the Workers!" "Peace to all the World!"

     But no longer do they carry their red banners thru the streets. They are done with appealing and beseeching. In a mood born of despair and disillusion they are acting now----reckless, violent, iconoclastic, but---acting.

     In the cities revolting employees are driving mill-owners out of their offices. Managers try to stop it, and are thrown into wheel-barrows and ridden out of the plant. Machinery is put out of gear, materials spoiled, industry brought to a standstill.

     In the army soldiers are throwing down their guns and deserting the front in hundreds of thousands. Emissaries try to stop them with frantic appeals. They may as well appeal to a landslide. "If no decisive steps for peace are taken by November first," the soldiers say, "all the trenches will be emptied. The entire army will rush to the rear." In the fleet is open insubordination.

     In the country, peasants are overrunning the estates. I ask Baron Nolde, "What is it that the peasants want on your estate?"

     "My estate," he answers.

     "How are they going to get it?"

     "They've got it."

     In some places these seizures are accompanied by wanton spoliation. The skies around Tambov are reddened with flames from the burning hay-ricks and manor-houses. Landlords flee for their lives. The infuriated peasants laugh at the orators trying to quiet them. Troops sent down to suppress the outbursts go over to the side of the peasants.

     Russia is plunging headlong towards the abyss

     Over this spectacle of misery and ruin presides a handful of talkers called the Provisional Government. It is almost a corpse, treated to hypodermic injections of threats and promises from the Allies. Before tasks calling for the strength of a giant it is weak as a baby. To all demands of the people it has just one reply, "Wait." First, it was "Wait till the end of the war." Now, "Wait till the Constituent Assembly."

     But the people will wait no longer. Their last shred of faith in the government is gone. They have faith in themselves; faith that they alone can save Russia from going over the precipice to ruin and night; faith alone in the institutions of their own making. They look now to the new authority created out of their own midst. They look to the Soviets.

           "Let the Soviets Be the Government." 

     Summer and fall have seen the steady growth of the Soviets. They have drawn to themselves the vital forces in each community. They have been schools for the training of the people, giving them confidence. The net-work of local Soviets has been wrought into a wide firmly built organization, a new structure which has risen within the shell of the old. As the old apparatus was going to pieces, the new one was taking over its functions. The Soviets in many ways were already acting as a government. It was necessary only to proclaim them the government. Then the Soviets would be in name what they were already in reality.

     From the depths now lifted up a mighty cry: "All power to the Soviets." The demand of the capital in July became the demand of the country. Like wildfire it swept thru the land. Sailors on the Baltic Fleet flung it out to their comrades on the Black and White and Yellow seas, and from them it came echoing back. Farm and factory, barracks and battlefront joined in the cry, swelling louder, more insistent every hour.

     Petrograd came thundering into the chorus on Sunday, November 4th, in sixty enormous mass meetings. Trotzky having read the Reply of the Baltic Fleet to my Greetings asked me to speak at the People's House.

     Here great waves of human beings dashed against the doors, swirled inside and sluiced along the corridors. They poured into the halls, filling them full, splashing hundreds up on the girders where they hung like garlands of foam. Out of the eddying throngs, a mighty voice rose and fell and broke like surf, thundering on the shore---hundreds of thousands of throats roaring "Down with the Provisional Government." "All Power to the Soviets." Hundreds of thousands of hands were raised in a pledge to fight and die for the Soviets.

     The patience of the poor at an end; the pawns and cannon-fodder in revolt! The dark masses, long inert, but roused at last, refusing longer to be brow-beaten or hypnotized by the word-juggling of statesmen, scorning their threats, laughing at their promises, take the initiative into their own hands, demanding of their "leaders" to move forward into revolution or resign. For the first time the slaves and the exploited, consciously choosing the time of their deliverance, vote for insurrection, investing themselves with the government of one-sixth of the world. A big venture for men unschooled in. state affairs. Are they equal to these tasks? Can they control the currents now being loosed in the city? At any rate these masses show complete control of themselves. From these blood-stirring revolutionary. meetings they pour forth in orderly fashion.

     The poor frightened bourgeoisie are reassured. They see no houses looted, no shops wrecked, no white-collared gentry shot down in the streets. To their minds, therefore, all is well; there will be no insurrection. The true import of this restraint quite escapes them. The people indulge in no sporadic outbursts because they have better use for their energies. They have a Revolution to make, not a riot. And a Revolution requires order, plan, labor---much hard intensive labor.

     The Masses Conducting their Revolution.

     These insurgent masses go home to organize Committees, draw up lists, form Red Cross units, collect rifles. Hands lifted in a vote for Revolution now are holding guns.

     They get ready for the forces of the Counter-Revolution now mobilizing against them. In Smolny sits the Military Revolutionary Committee from which these masses take orders. There is another committee, the Committee of a Hundred Thousand; that is, the masses themselves. There are no bystreets, no barracks, no buildings where this committee does not penetrate. It reaches into the councils of the Black Hundred, the Kerensky Government, the intelligentsia. With porters, waiters, cabmen, conductors, soldiers and sailors, it covers the city like a net. They see everything, hear everything, report everything to headquarters. Thus, forewarned, they can checkmate every move of the enemy. Every attempt to strangle or sidetrack the Revolution they paralyze at once.

     Attempt is made to break the faith of the masses in their leaders by furious assault upon them. Kerensky cries from the tribunal "Lenin, the state criminal, inciting to pillage . . . and the most terrible massacres which will cover with eternal shame the name of free Russia." Immediately the masses reply by bringing Lenin out of hiding with a tremendous ovation and turning Smolny into an arsenal to guard him.

     Attempt is made to drown the Revolution in blood and disorder. The Dark Forces keep calling the people to rise up and slaughter Jews and Socialist leaders. Forthwith the workmen placard the city with posters saying "Citizens! We call upon you to maintain complete quiet and self-possession. The cause of order is in strong hands. At the first instance of robbery and shooting, the criminals will be wiped off the face of the earth."

     Attempts are made to isolate the different sections of the revolutionists. Telephones are cut off between Soviets and barracks; immediately communications are established by setting up telephonograph apparatus. The Yunkers turn the bridges, cutting off the working-class districts; the Kronstadt sailors close them again. The offices (if the Communist papers are locked and sealed, cutting off the flow of news; the Red Guards break the seals and set the presses running again.

     Attempt is made to suppress the Revolution by force of arms. Kerensky begins calling "dependable" troops into the city; that is, troops that may be depended upon to shoot down the rising workers. Among these are the Zenith Battery and the Cyclists' Battalion. Along the highroads, on which these units are advancing into the city the Revolution posts its forces. They attack the enemy, not with guns but with ideas. They subject these troops to a withering fire of arguments and pleas. Result: these troops that are being rushed to the city to crush the Revolution enter instead to aid and abet it.

     THE RED PEASANT, SOLDIER AND WORKINGMAN (on the left) TO THE COSSACK (center) : COSSACK, WITH WHOM ARE YOU? WITH US OR WITH THEM?---(THE LANDLORDS, GENERALS AND CAPITALISTS).

     To these zealots of the Communist faith, all soldiers succumb, even the Cossacks. "Brother Cossacks!" reads the appeal to them, "You are being incited against us by grafters, parasites, landlords and by our own Cossack generals who wish to crush our Revolution. Comrade Cossacks! Do not fall in with this plan of Cain." And the Cossacks likewise line up under the banner of the Revolution. [12, c. 3-7]

     .

     Приложение №2

     LENIN:The Man and His Work BY ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS 1919

     TEN MONTHS WITH LENIN

     1. Young Disciples of Lenin

     I SAW Lenin first not in the flesh but in the minds and spirits of five young Russian workingmen. They were part of the great tide of exiles flowing back into Petrograd in the summer of 1917.

     Americans were drawn to them by their energy, intelligence and their knowledge of English. They soon informed us that they were Bolsheviks. "They certainly don't look it," said an American. For a time he would not believe it He had seen in the paper the picture of the Bolsheviks as long-bearded, ignorant, indolent ruffians. And these men were clean-shaven, polite, humorous, amiable and alert. They were not afraid of responsibility, no afraid to die, and most marvelous of all in Russia, not afraid to work. And they were Bolsheviks.  

     Woskov hailed from New York, where he had been the organizer of the Carpenters' and Joiners' Union, Number 1008. Yanishev, a mechanic, the son of a village priest, bore on his body the marks of labor in mines and mills all around the world. Niebut, an artizan, always carried a pack of books and was always enthusiastic over his latest find. Volodarsky, working day and night like a galley slave, said to me a few weeks before he was assassinated, "Oh, what of it! Supposing they do get me! I have had more joy working these last six months than any five men ought to have in all their lives." Peters, a foreman, who later appeared in tfie press reports as a bloody" tyrant signing death-warrants until his fingers could no longer hold the pen, was often sighing for his English rose-garden and the poems of  Nekrasov.

     These men quietly assured us that, in brains and character, Lenin led not only all the Bolsheviks, but everybody else in Russia, in Europe and in the entire world.  

     For us who daily read in the papers of Lenin, the German agent, and daily heard the bourgeoisie outlaw him as a scoundrel, a traitor, and an imbecile, this was indeed strange doctrine. It sounded fantastic and fanatical. But these men were neither fools nor sentimentalists. Knocking about the world had hammered all that out of them. Nor were these men hero-worshippers. The Bolshevik movement was elemental and passionate, but it was scientific, realistic, and uncongenial to hero-worship* Yet here was this quintette of Bolsheviks declaring that there was one Russian, great in integrity and in intelligence, and his name was Nikolai Lenin, at that time an outlaw hunted by the Provisional Government . The more we saw of these young zealots the more we desired to see the man they acknowledged as their master. Would they take us to his hiding-place?

     "Wait a little while/' they would reply, laughing, "then you shall see him."

     Impatiently we waited through the summer and into the fall of 1917, watching the Kerensky Government grow weaker and weaker. On November 7 the Bolsheviks pronounced it dead and at the same time proclaimed Russia to be a Republic of Soviets with Lenin as its Premier.

     2. First Impression of Lenin

     While a tumultuous, singing throng of peasants and soldiers, flushed with the triumph of their revolution, jammed the great hall at Smolny, while the guns of the Aurora were heralding the death of the old order and the birth of the new, Lenin quietly stepped upon the tribunal and the Chairman announced,"Comrade Lenin will now address the Congress."

     We strained to see whether he would meet our image of him, but from our seats at the reporters' table he was at first invisible. Amidst loud cries, cheers, whistles and stamping of feet he crossed the platform, the demonstration rising to a climax as he stepped upon the speaker's rostrum, not more than thirty feet away. Now we saw him clearly and our hearts fell.

     He was almost the opposite of what we had pictured him. Instead of looming up large and impressive he appeared short and stocky. His beard and hair were rough and unkempt.

     After stilling the tornado of applause he said, "Comrades, we shall now take up the formation of the Socialist State." Then he went into an unimpassioned, matter-of-fact discussion. In his voice there was a harsh, dry note rather than eloquence. Thrusting his thumbs in his vest at the arm-pits, he rocked back and forth on his heels. For an hour we listened, hoping to discern the hidden magnetic qualities which would account for his hold on these free, young, sturdy spirits. But in vain.

     We were disappointed. The Bolsheviks by their sweep and daring had captured our imaginations; we expected their leader to do likewise. We wanted the head of this party to come before us, the embodiment of these qualities, an epitome of the whole movement, a sort of super-Bolshevik. Instead of that, there he was, looking like a Menshevik, and a very small one at that.

     "If he were spruced up a bit you would take him for a bourgeois mayor or banker of a small French city," whispered Julius West, the English correspondent

     "Yes, a rather little man for a rather big job," drawled his companion.

     We knew how heavy the burden that the Bolsheviks had taken up was. Would they be able to carry it? At the outset, their leader did not strike us as a strong man.

     So much for a first impression. Yet, starting from that first adverse estimate, I found myself six months later in the camp of Woskov, Niebut, Peters, Volodarsky and Yanishev, to whom the first man and statesman of Europe was Nikolai Lenin.

     'J. Lenin Injects Iron Discipline into the State Life

     On November pth I desired a pass to accompany the Red Guards then streaming out along all roads to fight the Cossacks and the counter-revolutionists. I presented my credentials bearing the signature of Hillquit and Huysmans. I thought they were a very imposing set of credentials. But Lenin didn't Quite as if they came from the Union League Club, he handed them back with a laconic, "No."

     This was a trivial incident, but indicative of a new, rigorous attitude now appearing in the councils of the proletarians. Hitherto, to their own destruction, the masses had been indulging their excessive amiability and good nature. Lenin set out for discipline. He knew that only strong, stern action could save the Revolution, menaced by hunger, invasion and reaction. So the Bolsheviks drove their measures through without ruts or hesitation, while their enemies ransacked the arsenals of invective for epithets to assail them. To the bourgeoisie Lenin was the high-handed, ironfisted one. At this period they referred to him not as Premier Lenin, but as "the Tyrant Lenin," "Lenin the Dictator." And the Right Socialists said, the old Romanov Tsar, Nicholas II, has given place to the new Tsar, Nikolai Lenin, and in derision shouted, "Long live our new Tsar Nicholas III !"

       They seized with joy upon the humorous incident of the peasant. It was the night when the Soviet of Peasants' Deputies, throwing its support to the new Soviet government, celebrated with a glorified love-feast in the halls of Smolny. The intelligentsia had spoken for the village; there was a demand that the village should speak for itself. An old fellow in peasant's smock came to the platform. His face showed rosy through his white beard ; he had twinkling eyes, and spoke in the village dialect "Tovarishchi, how happy I was tonight as we came here with banners flying and music playing. I didn't come walking on the ground. I came flying through the air. I am one of the dark people, living in a dark village. You gave us the light. But we don't understand it all, so they sent me here to find out But, Tovarishchi, we are all very happy over the wonderful change. In the old days the chinovniki used to be very hard and beat us, but now they are very polite. In the old days we could only look at the outsides of the palaces, now we can walk right inside them. In the old days we only talked about the Tsar, but they tell us now, Tovarishchi, tomorrow I can shake hands with Tsar Lenin himself. God grant him long life!"