The Question of War

The Revolution grew directly out of the war, and the latter became the touchstone for all parties and forces of the Revolution. The intellectual leaders had been against the War. Many of them, while the Tsar was still on his throne, considered themselves as belonging to the left wing of the International, and were Zimmerwaldians. But everything changed immediately once they felt themselves to be in ‘responsible’ positions. To pursue a revolutionary socialist policy would have meant in the circumstances a break with their own and the Entente bourgeoisie, but, as we have said, the political impotence of the middle-class intellectuals and semi-intellectuals led them to seek protection in an alliance with bourgeois liberalism. Hence the pitiful and truly disgraceful role of the middle-class leaders in respect of the question of the war. They confined themselves to lamentations and rhetoric, and addressed secret exhortations and entreaties to the Allied governments, while, in practice, they walked the same paths as the liberal bourgeoisie. The soldiers in the trenches were, of course, unable to follow the argument that the war, in which they had fought for three years, had changed its character because certain new personalities, calling themselves Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were taking part in the government at Petrograd. Milyukov had replaced the tchinovnik Pokrovsky, Tereshchenko then succeeded Milyukov – that meant that bureaucratic perfidy was first replaced by militant Cadet imperialism, then by unprincipled nebulousness and political servility; but this did not result in any objective changes, and there seemed no way out of the terrible vicious circle of the war. In this lay the primary cause for the further dissolution of the army. The agitators had been telling the masses of soldiers that the Tsarist government had been driving them to slaughter for no object or sense; but those who replaced the Tsar were able neither to change the character of the war in any way nor to make a fight for peace.

During the first months of the Revolution there had been a mere marking of time. This provoked the impatience of the army and of the Allied governments alike. Hence the offensive of 1st July. It had been demanded by the Allies, who insisted that the old Tsarist bills must be honoured by the Revolution. Frightened at their own impotence and at the growing discontent of the masses, the lower middle-class leaders readily accepted these demands. They, indeed, began to think that an attack by the Russian Army was all that was wanted in order to attain peace. An offensive began to appear to them as a way out of the wilderness, as a means of solving the problem of the situation, as the one hope of salvation. It is difficult to imagine a more monstrous and more criminal illusion. At that time, they spoke of the offensive in exactly the same terms in which the Social-Patriots of all countries had spoken at the beginning of the war: about the necessity of supporting the cause of national defence, of strengthening the sacred unity of the nation, etc. All their Zimmerwaldian internationalism vanished as if by magic.

To us, who were in opposition, it was clear that the offensive was a terribly perilous step, that it might even endanger the whole Revolution. We warned all and sundry that the army, newly awakened and shaken as it was by the thunder of events, which as yet it had only half understood, could not be sent into battle without previously imparting to it new ideas which it could assimilate. We warned, remonstrated, threatened, but the parties in power, bound as they were to the bourgeoisie, had no other way left open to them, and naturally treated us with enmity and implacable hatred.