The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political. Anton Ivanovich Denikin
Caucasian Front in 1917
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FOREWORD
In the midst of the turmoil and bloodshed in Russia people perish and the real outlines of historical events are obliterated. It is for this reason that I have decided to publish these memoirs, in spite of the difficulties of work in my present condition of a refugee, unable to refer to any archives or documents and deprived of the possibility of discussing events with those who have taken part in them.
The first part of my book deals chiefly with the Russian Army, with which my life has been closely linked up. Political, social and economic questions are discussed only in so far as I have found it necessary to describe their influence upon the course of events.
In 1917 the Army played a decisive part in the fate of Russia. Its participation in the progress of the Revolution, its life, degradation and collapse should serve as a great warning and a lesson to the new builders of Russian life. This applies not only to the struggle against the present tyrants. When Bolshevism is defeated, the Russian people will have to undertake the tremendous task of reviving its moral and material forces, as well as that of preserving its sovereign existence. Never in history has this task been as arduous as it is now, because there are many outside Russia’s borders waiting eagerly for her end. They are waiting in vain. The Russian people will rise in strength and wisdom from the deathbed of blood, horror and poverty, moral and physical.
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The Russian Turmoil
CHAPTER I.
The Foundations of the Old Power: Faith, the Czar and the Mother Country.
The inevitable historical process which culminated in the Revolution of March, 1917, has resulted in the collapse of the Russian State. Philosophers, historians and sociologists, in studying the course of Russian life, may have foreseen the impending catastrophe. But nobody could foresee that the people, rising like a tidal wave, would so rapidly and so easily sweep away all the foundations of their existence: the Supreme Power and the Governing classes which disappeared without a struggle; the intelligencia, gifted but weak, isolated and lacking will-power, which at first, in the midst of a deadly struggle, had only words as a weapon, later submissively bent their necks under the knife of the victors; and last, but not least, an army of ten million, powerful and imbued with historic traditions. That army was destroyed in three or four months.
This last event—the collapse of the army—was not, however, quite unexpected, as the epilogue of the Manchurian war and the subsequent events in Moscow, Kronstadt and Sevastopol were a terrible warning. At the end of November, 1905, I lived for a fortnight in Harbin, and travelled on the Siberian Railway for thirty-one days in December, 1907, through a series of “republics” from Harbin to Petrograd. I thus gained a clear indication of what might be expected from a licentious mob of soldiers utterly devoid of restraining principles. All the meetings, resolutions, soviets—in a word, all the manifestations of a mutiny of the military—were repeated in 1917 with photographic accuracy, but with greater impetus and on a much larger scale.
It should be noted that the possibility of such a rapid psychological transformation was not characteristic of the Russian Army alone. There can be no doubt that war-weariness after three years of bloodshed played an important part in these events, as the armies of the whole world were affected by it and were rendered more accessible to the disintegrating influences of extreme Socialist doctrines. In the autumn of 1918 the German Army Corps that occupied the region of the Don and Little Russia were demoralised in one week, and they repeated to a certain extent the process which we had already lived through of meetings, soviets, committees, of doing away with Commanding Officers, and in some units of the sale of military stores, horses and arms. It was not till then that the Germans understood the tragedy of the Russian officers. More than once our volunteers saw the German officers, formerly so haughty and so frigid, weeping bitterly over their degradation.
“You have done the same to us; you have done it with your own hands,” we said.
“Not we; it was our Government,” was their reply.
In the winter of 1918, as Commander-in-Chief of the Volunteer Army, I received an offer from a group of German officers to join our army as volunteers in the ranks.
The collapse of the army cannot be explained away as the psychological result of defeats and disasters. Even the victors experienced disturbances in the army. There was a certain amount of disaffection among the French troops occupying, in the beginning of 1918, the region of Odessa and Roumania, in the French fleet cruising in the Black Sea, among the British troops in the region of Constantinople and Transcaucasia. The troops did not always obey the orders of their Commanding Officers. Rapid demobilisation and the arrival of fresh, partly volunteer elements, altered the situation.
The Grand Duke Nicholas distributes Crosses of St. George.
What was the condition of the Russian Army at the outbreak of the Revolution? From time immemorial the entire ideology of our soldiers was contained in the well-known formula: “For God, for the Czar and for the Mother Country.” Generation after generation was born and bred on that formula. These ideas, however, did not penetrate deeply enough into the masses of the people and of the army. For many centuries the Russian people had been deeply religious, but their faith was somewhat shaken in the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The Russian people, as the Russian saying goes, was “the bearer of Christ”—a people inwardly disposed towards Universal Brotherhood, great in its simplicity, truthfulness, humility and forgiveness. That people, Christian in the fullest sense of the word, was gradually changing as it came under the influence of material interests, and learnt or was taught to see in the gratifying of those interests the sole purpose of life. The link between the people and its spiritual leaders was gradually weakening as these leaders were detached from the people, entered into the service of the Governing powers, and shared the latter’s deficiencies. The development of this moral transformation of the Russian people is too deep and too complex to fall within the scope of these memoirs. It is undeniable that the youngsters who joined the ranks treated questions of the Faith and of the Church with indifference. In barracks they lost the habits of their homes, and were forcibly removed from a more wholesome and settled atmosphere, with all its creeds and superstitions. They received no spiritual or moral education, which in barracks was considered a matter of minor importance, completely overshadowed by practical and material cares and requirements. A proper spirit could not be created in barracks, where Christian morals, religious discourses, and even the rites of the Church bore an official and sometimes even compulsory character. Commanding Officers know how difficult it was to find a solution of the vexed question of attendance at Church services.
War introduced two new elements into the spiritual life of the army. On the one hand, there was a certain moral coarseness and cruelty; on the other, it seemed as if faith had been deepened by constant danger. I do not wish to accuse the orthodox military clergy as a body. Many of its representatives proved their high valour,