Army and People

Front matter

ARMY AND PEOPLE

The Soviet Government and the Corps of Officers

By G. ZINOVIEV

I

Comrades, it stands to reason that we cannot in this one meeting exhaust one tenth of because there are a thousand times more workers and peasants that landed gentry and bourgeois and educated people, if the whole of them came to oppose us. While the Tsar held his position by deceit and by force, he could saddle worker and peasant Russia and pull the reins to the right or to the left. But now since power has passed into the hands of the working class and peasantry, and the hand to hand struggle has begun, and wall is opposed to wall, we may suffer defeat on this or that fromt, we may prolong the war a year or two, but we cannot fall to conquer in the end, because I repeat of the immense majority on our side. And the workers and peasants are apt at learning, they can produce commanders of regiments, brigades and divisions, they can fight and conquer.

Yes, our victory may be delayed by the help of liberal sprinklings of French and English gold, assisted by such traitors as Nekliudov, Koltchak, Yudenitch, Ealachovitch, and the civil war may be protracted; but this war which is ruining Russia, torturing the country. this war is protracted owing to the brutes in human shape who are selling themselves right and left in order to compel Russia to go on fighting, and to those lukewarm ones who, being neither hot nor cold, chew the old stale cud, deal in the old trash, instead of definitely taking their stand on the side of the people, of the workers those burning questions of the day which we are facing; but this is not our last meeting, it is our first. This is why I should consider it preferable to limit myself to general topics. It is Impossible for me to answer all the various notes which lie before me, but I pick out one, which concerns the most painful point and is hardest to answer, because it touches on the most difficult question. One comrade, who does not sign his name, writes: „I beg comrade Zinoviev to give a straight answer“ (doubly underscored) „to the question, why Is it that when anything goes wrong, the scapegoats are invariably the officers? Why are they shot, arrested? What Is the meaning of these arrests, and so-forth? You see, comrades, that the question is indeed an acute one, which many might ask where so many officers are assembled. That is why I select it. Yes—and this I declare quite openly—we frequently have to make arrests on a larger scale than we would wish, and of a more or less random character.

One comrade officer who has spoken here to-night mentioned that he himself, though innocent, had suffered four months imprisonment without being examined, and had grown a long beard during that time. He knows whole groups of such officers, who are even now in confinement, though innocent, and says they should not be shot, but released. This does happen pretty frequently, I admit, and I must say—believe me or not as you will—that we know of nothing so depressing, so painful as these arrests. But anyone of you who will carefully consider the conditions in which we are placed, will understand how such things come to pass.

Just call to mind such cases as that of Yaroslavl; a city on the Volga was snatched from us in a day by a few hundred officers, who killed all our comrades, seized the guns, kept the city in their hands a whole fortnight, and forced us after bringing up a tremendous artillery force to demolish half of it, as the only way to deliver it; remember that, as is now well known, this was only a link in a whole chain of thoroughly planned operations. Since Yaroslavl had to be seized In order to effect a junction with the troops of the Archangelsk group (and Savinkov and the other generals openly admit that this was their handiwork)—this example alone should be sufficient for you to understand in what abnormal conditions this treacherous officer-group placed us, by such performances as the seizure of Yaroslavl.

Nor was this a solitary case.

You have read of the Moscow conspiracy, when, in sundry military schools, the entire pedagogical staff, all the officers whose duty it is to instruct the cadets, in a body, made it their business to serve Denikin, buying up arms, pyroxiline, systematically attempting to blow up bridges and preparing openly to rise to Denikin's assistance.

You know that at Krasnaya Gorke not one or two detached officers, but the entire staff of the fort, with trifling exceptions, perpetrated the black treasonable act, preparing to surrender it.

Once such cases occur, and not solitary ones either, everybody must see on whom falls the blame, and it falls on those Judases who enter our ranks with the definite purpose of surrendering whole cities, military schools, and forts. This is what sometimes compels us to resort to measures which so greatly impede any friendliness between us and honourable officers, whom we so much wish to interest in the Revolution. From the conditions in which we work there is no escape, so long as treason and conspiracy enfold us all around, and they do, this fact cannot be denied!

Wholesale responsibility for that cannot, of course, be cast on the entire officer class, nor do we do so. The way we have been acting for the last two years bears. witness to the fact that we, In principle, do not.

But circumstances frequently oblige us to resort to mass arrests, and it does happen that innocent men stay in prison unexamined for considerable periods. Yes, when trees are felled, chips will fly; there is no way out of it. Still, all that can be done to minimize the evil is being done.

II

You will agree that any sensible representative of the Soviet power would prefer to see an officer fighting against the landlord gentry than sitting idle in prison, a burden to the State. To this most painful question I answer openly. candidly, that this cannot be radically altered at this particular moment, not until a radical mass change takes place in the officer class, until there are tens of thousands of new officers in the ranks of the Red Army. until traitors get to be as rare a phenomenon as white crows, to be pointed at, despised in their own families, by their own fathers, mothers, sisters, sweet-hearts, wives; until then we must make use of such measures as at present.

The conditions just now are those of the most furious, most desperate struggle; here, in this very city, there are hundreds of spies in the pay of the French and English bourgeoisie. Quite lately, a few days ago, a bomb was thrown at Moscow into a gathering of Party workers, who were discussing their Party affairs; several women were killed, some of whom were with child.

In a red hot atmosphere like this the innocent, naturally, sometimes have to suffer. And a military man, who knows what war is like, should be the last to complain of that, and he should patiently put up with such extra unpleasantness as falls to his share outside of the open war with the White Guards. A military man who is acquainted with the circumstances of warfare, should be the last to accuse us. It is hard to see one's friends, or people one is fond of kept in prison, knowing them to be innocent—desperately hard. I admit the legitimacy of bitter feeling in such cases; but one must make allowance, understand the cause of it. It is easy to complain and to criticize, but by no means easy to arrange things properly under such conditions as we live in now—most difficult, under such conditions, to bring the people and officers in close touch with one another. It is like Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nekiforovitch—in Gogol's story—quarreling because one called the other a gander, when all the two needed was a gentle shove from behind towards each other, to be reconciled. No, here is no question of „gander“; it is an historical conflict which has been going on scores of years—a dispute about who is to own the land, the gentry or the peasants, and whose the mills and factories are to be; a conflict waged through several generations.

This is what I have to say on this difficult and painful question.

Ill.

I had in mind to tell the officers issued from the working class and perhaps those of other spheres the following additional fact: Some time ago a document was published, taken from some „Cadet“ papers, in which Nabokov, a member of the Central Committee of the „Cadet“ (Constitutional Democrat) Party tells how he visited a French admiral on the Black Sea, from whom, in the name of his party, he requested assistance in money, food, equipment, etc., for Denikin's so-called „Volunteer„ Army, Nabokov describes how the admiral treated him with the utmost contempt—and him an aristocrat and representative of the C. D. Party—insulted him so that on leaving the ship he seriously contemplated drowning himself. You see, comrades, to what extent French generals, hirelings of the French bourgeoisie, despise those Russian White officers—even though nobles, who sell themselves to them.

But even to these White officers I say: Instead of begging and cringing to the French bourgeoisie and its hirelings, and striving for them to despise you like that—deservedly too, for anyone will despise a man who sells his own people, and goes to the French bourgeoisie, begging help to shoot Russian workers and peasants and crawling on his belly before Frenchmen and Englishmen—were it not better, gentlemen, to realize once for all that it is the People who are in power in Russia now, that you can never again see the old-time estates, the old-time palaces; so you had better go on your knees to your own people and beg their forgiveness of your many sins against them, (Applause, Cries of „Bravo! Bravo“),

IV

To every such officer the Soviet government will say, „there shall be more joy over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine righteous persons“.

Nor are these empty words on our part. When Kerensky was minister there was an engineer Paltchinsky, former Governor-general of this city and province. He lived in the Winter Palace and shot at us to the last days, instituted the state of seige, and was the best fighter under that Government. We imprisoned him. He is a fine engineer, a gifted man. And when he saw that what had happened was a serious thing, an historical revolution, not a tempest in a teapot, he agreed to devote his knowledge and his sklll to the service of Soviet' Russia. He was immediately released by us, and now he is working in Moscow, applying his knowledge for the good of the workers and peasants.

There is no petty vindictiveness among us, for the class of the oppressed, which suffered oppression for hundreds of years, cannot while liberating itself and the world, indulge in petty vengeance. When Gutchkov and Miliukov were ministers, Paltchinsky was what comrade Trotsky is now. Let us imagine for a moment that the Whites had defeated us, would they have released Trotsky? Never. But we released Paltchinsky, we appreciated his knowledge and talents, and gave him an opportunity to apply them usefully.

No one has such respect for knowledge as the workers. We know perfectly well what it is to be an educated, well-informed man. Every officer, engineer, every sensible educated person who is willing to serve the workers and peasants, we invite to help us; we do everything that is at all possible, in the present state of general improverishment, to create for such men tolerable conditions of life. That this is so difficult is not our fault, just as it is not our fault if there is so much treason, if we have to resort to arrests. But to every conscious, honest, talented officer, whose breast holds, not clock-work, but a heart, who possesses knowledge, an active mind, we say that he has a chance of utilising his faculties on a wide arena in Workers' and Peasants' Russia. It all amounts to this; and the men of scientific knowledge and the military men should once for all comprehend this.

Military men sometimes object, „Well, and when the war is ended what are you going to do with us then?“ Some even jest about it: „I suppose all military specialists will be collected and drowned“. What narrow-minded people. From the point of view of their particular specialty it might even seem that they would be interested in having the war last as long as possible, since the Soviet government would have no need of them once it was ended. That is too childish a view. Every officer has made a study of something: every officer, as a man of discipline, will be of use to us. In the first place our object is not to deliver Russia alone, but with the assistance of our workers and peasants to deliver the world. The international Red Army will grow. Our Red officers and the former regular officers will live to have the great honour of helping in the struggle not alone of the Russian workers and peasants, but of those of France Germany and other countries. (Applause)

There can be no greater honour than that. And does not the French and English bourgeoisie send its sons to Taganrog, Novotcherkask, Odessa, to instruct the Russian wild beasts in the art of fighting Russian workers and peasants? Well, we with far better right will send our best men, that they may show the French and English workers how to build a Red Army, how to overthrow the bourgeoisie and take the power in their hands.

And when war on an international scale will be ended, army men will find a field of work for their hands in economic construction. There is nothing like the army to give a character temper, nothing that so trains self-possession, persistent energy, orderliness. Our Red Army, moreover, differs from other armies in that it is fighting for the abolition of war once and for all, that men may never again fly at each other's throats and destroy another. This is why military specialists, in the time of peaceable reconstruction which will soon be inaugurated, will find peaceable accupation, and will in this province also serve as models of discipline. Such are the perspectives which open before every honest man.

You cannot deny that these are high ideals, for which it pays to work, and to give not one life only, but ten lives, if one had them.

This is the work to which we call you, this the road you must travel.

(Long continued applause).

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8. | The Third International to the Workers of all Countries. (Concerning the Polish question).

9. | The Food Policy of the Soviet Government. By A.

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