VI. Preparations for the Second Round

Historians of Russia have not been kind to the year 1906, relegating it to the rank of anonymous, lower-case years falling between the aggressively Upper-Case Years 1905 and 1917. In the Western view, the Revolution of 1905 ground to a halt in the rubble of Moscow’s Presnia district, and no ranting of revolutionaries could restart it. Workers, battered and exhausted from their labors of 1905, had neither the capacity nor the mind to undertake a new insurrection. The workers’ movement (as measured by strikes) trailed off, and isolated peasant disorders posed no threat to the regime. The Duma was radical enough, but when in July it became too obstreperous, the government dispersed it, and the deputies’ appeal for support from the people caused scarcely a ripple in the calm that was settling over the Tsarist empire.¹ Soviet historians do allot the revolution a “second phase,” from January 1906 to June 1907, and point to periodic (if progressively weaker) surges in strikes, a scattering of mutinies, and a second round of peasant rebellion in mid-1906, and the connection between the Duma’s proposals for redistribution of the land and peasant disorders. However, because of their preoccupation with workers and antipathy to the Duma, Soviet historians do not see the events of mid-1906 as constituting a serious crisis akin to the October and December crises of 1905: they conceive of the second phase of the revolution as a slow but steady retreat from the line of farthest advance reached in December 1905. Indeed, a glance at any Soviet monograph on the “Revolution of 1905-1907” reveals that Soviet and Western historians are in fact if not theory at one as to the termination of the revolution in December 1905: the “second phase” is ordinarily compressed into a brief epilogue. Soviet historical convention attaches the honorific “revolution” to this period largely because Lenin insisted until 1907 that the revolution was not over and that another insurrection loomed just over the horizon. Implicit in Soviet treatment of the revolution is that Lenin’s judgment was wrong.²

Not Lenin alone, but most revolutionaries expected the revolution to continue after December 1905. While it is easy to dismiss their prognostications as so much wishful thinking, all the elements that together had made up revolution in 1905 persisted through the first half of 1906. The mood oI the workers in 1906 is indeed problematical, but the workers’ movement did not collapse, and it is difficult to find any but ambiguous hints of its impending disintegration. Peasant rebellion was as intense in the summer of 1906 as it had been in late 1905. The army at mid-year was almost as mutinous and just as disaffected as it had been in November 1905, and revolutionaries were in a far better position to exploit mutiny than they had been in 1905. In fact, the revolutionary parties as organizations were far stronger in 1906 than before. Liberals, though more suspicious of revolutionaries than in 1905, were as unreconciled to the regime as ever and challenged the legitimacy of the government from the rostrum of the Duma. For its part, the regime was uncertain how to respond to the challenge. Many of these strands of revolution came together in the summer of 1906 to produce a serious threat to the regime’s continued existence. Given the behavior of the soldiers, there is no obvious reason why nothing came of the crisis. What is certain is that soldiers were at its center.

Anticipating Upheaval

In the immediate aftermath of the Moscow insurrection, revolutionaries of all persuasions, taking their cue from the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, maintained with near unanimity that the fighting had not been in vain. If the workers of Moscow seemed to have gone down to defeat, the defeat was one of appearance only. Like the “defeat” of the workers who had marched on Bloody Sunday, the suppression of the Moscow insurrection had won new allies for the revolution because of the regime’s indiscriminate use of artillery and summary executions. Some revolutionaries even contended that armed workers in Moscow had shown they could successfully take on a modern army. And at least through January, most revolutionaries believed that the army was becoming progressively more revolutionary, that the wave of mutinies that had begun in October, far from receding, was now reaching into the regime’s supposed mainstay, the cossacks (late reports from the Caucasus and other outlying areas contributed to that belief). There were a few dissonant voices (Plekhanov’s was one) but as the smoke lifted, most revolutionaries detected no essential alteration of the political landscape.³

Such optimistic projections were in part the result of nervous excitement induced by the December fighting, and some revolutionary leaders soon had second thoughts. Many others, however, believed that there was solid reason to expect a quick recurrence of insurrection—the seasonal cycle of peasant labors and therefore, they supposed, of peasant rebellion. Socialist Revolutionaries had argued since October that spring was the best time for insurrection, because the sowing season would provide peasants a natural opportunity to rebel. Thus, the failure of insurrection in December in no way demonstrated that workers seconded by peasants could not overthrow Tsarism. When the SRs held their first party congress (December 29-January 4), the conclusion of the congress’ commission on tactics, as reported out by Viktor Chernov, was that it was “quite possible that a broad, spontaneous [peasant] movement will begin in the spring. . . . The disagreement among the members of the commission is only whether the decision should be made in advance, whether to exhort the peasants to rise.”⁴ Chernov argued that because of the repression following the untimely December insurrections peasant rebellion in the spring was no longer an absolute certainty; SRs should prepare, but they should not themselves incite peasant disorders. On the other hand, some of the most influential delegates (party stalwarts Natanson and Rakitnikov, Rudnev fresh from Moscow) urged that since a spring upheaval was virtually foreordained, SRs must seize the initiative in order to lend peasant rebellion maximum organization and impact. Caution prevailed in the end, as the congress by a vote of 32 to 19 decided not to commit itself to spring insurrection, but the congress did resolve that all party organizations should ready themselves for the likelihood of spring agrarian disorders.⁵

Expectations of spring peasant rebellion remained strong in February and March, and not just among SRs (one of whom wrote in February that the intelligentsia and “laboring people” were in an “ecstacy of anticipation”⁶). Lenin, too, posited a link between spring sowing and insurrection, though like Chernov he was by February no longer certain peasants were about to rebel. Martov, the Menshevik leader, was more optimistic, and warned in February that Social Democrats must prepare for the imminent explosion among peasants and should lay plans for a national proletarian and peasant insurrection.⁷ In February, a conference of SR organizations in the south resolved to prepare for the inevitable spring peasant rising, which would likely set off urban insurrection as well, and in March, Chernov suggested that the government might suppress the Duma shortly after it convened and thereby spark substantial disorders.⁸ In late March, the agent of the Sûreté Générale keeping track of Russian revolutionaries in London reported that recent arrivals were convinced that, because the elections had been rigged, the opening of the Duma would set off an upheaval greater than Russia had ever before experienced, and that this insurrection would have a far greater chance of success than the last because famine was driving peasants to rebellion and intensive revolutionary agitation in the armed forces was winning the support of soldiers and sailors.⁹ Wherever they looked, revolutionaries saw the makings of conflagration.

Revolutionaries were not alone in anticipating a new revolutionary crisis, or in thinking that peasant rebellion would set it off. The governor of Perm Province warned in December that “one must expect major clashes when field work begins in spring”; in January gentry in the south asked Minister of War Rediger to send more troops because peasants “are preparing to seize and plow proprietary land” as soon as the sowing season began; and Prime Minister Witte warned Tsar Nicholas on December 25 and January 10 that peasant disorders surpassing those of late 1905 could be anticipated in the spring.¹⁰ Consequently, the government began preparations for the next campaign even while mopping up the last pockets of resistance in midwinter.

The first step was to codify the tactics employed in the punitive operations. The thinking of commanders in the field was reflected in a memorandum of December 21 from General Kryzhanovskii, whose 2nd cavalry division was fighting peasants in five provinces. Kryzhanovskii maintained that “pseudo-humanitarian half-measures” not only failed to check peasant unrest, they also undermined both the army’s moral authority and military discipline, since soldiers merely standing around became objects of scorn and themselves lost confidence in their mission. Troops should not be used for routine police functions, asserted Kryzhanovskii, they should be called out only as a last resort, in large units, and should without fail act ruthlessly (e.g., bombarding and burning villages). The Council of Ministers discussed the memorandum on January 10 and endorsed its recommendations.¹¹ Only Minister of War Rediger disapproved. He felt that even the procedures Kryzhanovskii recommended smacked too much of police operations, were bound to demoralize soldiers, and were no way to restore public support for the army after the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War (and with the Duma in the offing, this was one of Rediger’s principal concerns).¹² In a related development, on February 7 new rules on the use of troops to assist civil authorities, under discussion in the State Council since December, were officially announced. Among the provisions was one that, a verbal warning having been given, soldiers were under no circumstances to fire blanks or aim a first volley over the heads of a mob. It was hoped that publication of the new rules would of itself deter antigovernment demonstrations.¹³

Next, impressed by the effectiveness of the punitive expeditions operating along the Transsiberian railway (and other lines), the governmerit institutionalized the punitive train. In January, the Ministry of War ordered the military districts in European Russia to prepare special trains, manned by infantry, cavalry and artillery, to restore movement on the railways in the event of new strikes. Punitive trains were also held in readiness in the Caucasus and Siberia. Though these trains were never used, they were put together just in case; by June they were tying down more than 200 locomotives and 500 pieces of rolling stock.¹⁴

Operational procedures were adjusted without controversy. Not so easily resolved was the question of the army’s overall redeployment, which had been a matter of contention between military and civil authorities since December. In reports to the Tsar on December 17 and 21, Prime Minister Witte complained that neither he nor the Minister of Interior knew where troops were located or what units were available, and argued that “the question of the disposition of troops must be governed by political considerations, as must the relations between the Ministries of Interior and War.” Witte requested, and the Tsar appointed, a special conference to clear up the matter.¹⁵

Meanwhile, generals in command of operations against the peasants were submitting their own recommendations. Both Generals Panteleev and Strukov called for the army to be redeployed to deal with the civilian insurgency; Panteleev suggested that an infantry division and a cavalry brigade be quartered in every restive province. But the Ministry of War, despite the recommendations of its field commanders, was reluctant thus to formalize the army’s role as a domestic police force. By way of an alternative, the Ministry of War in December submitted to the Council of Ministers a proposal for the formation of a territorial militia. Witte at first supported the proposal, but on the representations of the Ministers of Interior and Justice, the Tsar and the Council of Ministers ultimately rejected the plan: it was deemed unwise to trust a militia to take action against fellow villagers. On the other hand, everyone agreed on the desirability of increasing the strength of the rural—especially mounted—police; but development of a strong rural police force was proceeding slowly.¹⁶ There was in fact no alternative to using the army to maintain order within the empire.

Reluctantly, then, Generals Rediger (Minister of War), Polivanov (Chief of the Main Staff), and Palitsyn (Chief of the General Staff) sat down with Witte and Minister of Interior Durnovo on January 28 to consider how the army could best be used against revolution. (Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, in his capacity as Chairman of the Council of State Defense, sat in as an observer.) Discussion centered on the deployment of units and on proper lines of authority when the army was called out. The latter question was easily resolved: when in action, the military would be in charge. The question of deployment was not so amicably settled. Durnovo, supported by Witte, came to the meeting with a list of provinces where spring agrarian disorders were most likely to occur. Durnovo proposed that additional units be brought into these provinces, and that they be distributed uniformly over the territory in question in garrisons “no smaller” than an infantry battalion, cavalry squadron, or artillery battery so that troops would always be at hand. The generals objected that the proposed redeployment would seriously weaken the empire’s western defenses, and that subdividing units, never desirable, would be especially dangerous under present circumstances, when discipline had to be carefully monitored and draftees trained, neither of which was possible in fractional units. At any rate, the generals insisted, redeployment could not get under way before March, when appreciable numbers of units would be returning from Manchuria. Witte immediately countered that, surely, the most important task facing the government at that moment was the prevention of agrarian disorders. The generals reluctantly agreed.

By the time the conference met again on March 1, a compromise had been reached. Still protesting against weakening the western defenses, the Ministry of War agreed to the principle of redeployment; however, units would be maintained in their integrity, not fragmented. The generals stated that under the best of circumstances they would be short 119 battalions of the number required to be in place by spring; the most volatile provinces would have to be served first. The generals also won the point that, considering the state of the troops returning from the Far East, it would be best to allow units to proceed to their permanent quarters for resupply and reorganization before they headed for their new bases. As a matter of fact, the understanding was not adhered to. On March 12, the Tsar approved orders authorizing the deployment of the soldiers in units as small as battalions and individual cavalry squadrons, and parcellization of units and uncertainty about who controlled them remained sources of friction between the Ministries of War and Interior.¹⁷

Peasants did not rebel in the spring of 1906, and by April the sense of imminent crisis had given way to sullen malaise—distemper, really—in all elements of society. Abatement of tension produced within the regime a resumption of the customary feuding among ministers, and between ministers and the Tsar’s intimates. Prime Minister Witte’s authority declined precipitously; the Tsar kept him on only so that negotiations for a badly needed loan from French banks could be brought to completion. Witte busied himself preparing a program of legislation that could be presented to the Duma and thereby involve at least the moderate opposition in the work of government, but at the same time, Witte ensured that the Duma would in no way be able to obstruct the regime: the Duma was given no control over ministers or bureaucracy, it had only a very limited right actually to initiate legislation, the Tsar had an absolute veto, and the Tsar could dismiss the Duma whenever he wished. The Tsar, seconded by most of his advisors, was himself unwilling to entrust substantive decisions to the Duma and simply waited to see how the Duma would behave. Goremykin, who replaced Witte as Prime Minister just before the Duma opened in late April, intended to have as little to do with the Duma as possible and ignored the legislative program that Witte’s ministry had put together.¹⁸

Rifts appeared among the revolutionaries, too, as the prospects for immediate insurrection faded and they had to reassess their assumptions and strategy. SRs and Bolsheviks maintained that peasant rebellion had merely been delayed until after the fall harvest, and so insisted that insurrection was still on the agenda.¹⁹ Meanwhile, however, revolutionaries had to decide what attitude to adopt toward the Duma. In the revolutionary euphoria of late 1905 Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had buried their differences and moved toward reunification, but by the time the IV Congress of the RSDRP met in April to put the seal on unity, the debate over the Duma had divided the two factions as badly as ever. Alone of the revolutionary groups, Mensheviks favored participation in the elections, because they believed that—despite limitations on workers’ voting rights, despite the martial law conditions that obstructed a free electoral campaign, despite the Duma’s limited mandate—the Duma would be hostile to the government. To denounce the Duma, they argued, would be to aid the regime; SDs ought instead to use the Duma for revolutionary purposes by seconding conflicts between the Duma liberals and the regime and thus demonstrating that freedom could not be obtained until the Tsarist regime had fallen. All other revolutionary parties—not just Bolsheviks, but also Bundists and Zionist Socialists, Polish Social Democrats and Polish Socialists, Latvian Social Democrats, Ukrainian SDs, and SRs, in fact even some Mensheviks for a while— demanded a boycott or even disruption of elections, because the electoral laws and the conditions under which elections were being held ensured that the Duma would not be truly representative, it could achieve nothing anyway, yet its existence might create the illusion of a constitutional system and thereby distract the masses from the goals of insurrection and constituent assembly. After the bitter struggle over the Duma, the Menshevik-dominated SD Central Committee and the Bolshevik-controlled Petersburg Committee were in a virtual state of war; whatever one did, the other opposed.²⁰

Social Democrats were no more fractious than any other revolutionary party. The SRs, too, split early in 1906. Disputes within the SR Party that had threatened to lead to a schism in the middle of 1905 had been shelved late in the year, but after the December insurrections a Maximalist wing broke away from the body of the party. SR-Maximalists denounced what they thought to be the dictatorial control exercised by the SR Central Committee, rejected the orthodox SR goal of establishing a bourgeois democratic republic after insurrection and called instead for the immediate establishment of a socialist workers’ republic, and rejected the party’s decision to suspend terror while the Duma was in session. The Maximalists made significant inroads into the regular SR organizations, especially in Moscow, where the split virtually paralyzed the party.²¹ When revolution stalled, tactical and ideological differences came to the surface among SDs and SRs both. Unity was easy when revolutionaries rode the crest of popular disorders, difficult to sustain when hard decisions had to be made.

Disputes among the revolutionaries had as their counterpart a perceptible disorientation among workers. The factional bickering of the intelligentsia disgusted workers, who were already dispirited by the failure of the December general strike and insurrections. However, the widely reported apathy of workers early in the year had as much to do with the changing conditions of revolutionary activity as with any loss of commitment to revolution. After 1905, it was impossible to return to meetings in small propaganda circles, but there seemed to be no task to which the thousands of workers who had joined the revolutionary parties in 1905 could be set. Certainly after massive strikes and soviets, anything less seemed pale and unexciting. Yet even as it marked time, the workers’ movement was consolidating: the membership of the Social Democratic and Socialist Revolutionaries Parties rose from around 25,000 in late 1905 to well over 100,000 by October 1906, and there was by that time probably an equally large membership in the Bund, the SDKPiL, the Latvian SDP, the PPS, and the host of revolutionary parties among the other national minorities. Most of these new members must have been workers (and, in far smaller numbers, peasants) who had made contact with revolutionary organizations in late 1905 and signed on formally during 1906. Moreover, if workers in the big mills who had been most militant in 1905 appeared to be apathetic in early 1906, workers from small shops who before had stood on the sidelines were noticeably more aggressive in organizing unions and demanding concessions from their employers. And the political strikes on May 1 were a stunning success in large mills and small.²² Nothing in the behavior of the revolutionary parties’ mass support, or in the behavior of the working class as a whole, indicated that workers were no longer capable of challenging the regime. It is likely, in fact, that while workers were less volatile in early 1906 they were better organized politically, and that the workers’ movement was in terms of organization expanding rather than contracting. Of course, if organization had replaced spontaneity, the behavior of the working class depended far more on decisions made by revolutionaries than had been the case in 1905, and the divided counsels of the revolutionary leadership did not bode well for the future.

Only the liberals had a relatively clear vision of what they wanted and how to go about getting it. Liberals had distanced themselves from the revolutionary movement in late 1905, and the December violence had appalled them, but they blamed the regime more than revolutionaries. They denounced the flagrant violation even of Tsarist law by the punitive expeditions, the imposition of martial and siege law in two-thirds of the empire’s provinces, the arrest of thousands of persons on the flimsiest of excuses in early 1906, the reimposition of press censorship and regulations on meetings, and the evisceration of the Duma. The Kadets (with 100,000 members at the opening of the year) arrived in the Duma—in which they held about 35 percent of the seats, by far the largest organized bloc, because parties to the left had boycotted the elections and because Kadets favored redistribution of land to benefit peasants and thus obtained considerable peasant support at electoral meetings—determined to convert the Duma into a genuine legislature and to overhaul Russia’s social and political institutions. They did not, however, have any clear view of what would happen if the regime refused to acquiesce in their plans. They were torn between confidence that the regime would have to bow to the clearly expressed will of the people, and willingness to contemplate continued revolution should the regime prove obdurate. In any case, Kadets no less than SDs and SRs assumed in early 1906 that the revolution was still incomplete.²³

In fact, by the time the Duma met even revolutionaries who had urged a boycott of the elections were having second thoughts, because it was clear that the goals of the Duma and the government were irreconcilable. Peasants had sent their deputies to the Duma with instructions to obtain land, and were certain that the Duma would do as they commanded. If that belief indicated that peasants were indeed under the illusion that the Duma was a legislature that could express and implement the will of the people, it was also evident that conflict between Duma and government over land redistribution would dispel those illusions, and might persuade peasants to support the overthrow of the regime. Such, at least, was the hope of Bolsheviks and SRs. There was every reason to expect that the sessions of the Duma would stir rather than dampen political emotions. If spring had failed to deliver peasant rebellion, summer had provided in the Duma a wonderful tool for educating the Russian people in the need for insurrection.²⁴

Organizing for Military Revolution

The conviction that upheaval loomed just ahead gave a powerful boost to the revolutionary military organizations. In 1905, they had been inconsequential, little more than a barometer of the revolutionaries’ awareness of disaffection in the armed forces. They had emerged in response to mutiny, and revolutionaries involved in them had for the most part shared the prevailing assumption that rebellious soldiers should come to the support of civilian revolution at a moment civilians deemed appropriate. Even had revolutionaries had a better understanding of what caused soldiers to mutiny, the soldiers’ revolution would have overwhelmed them. In the course of the year, a few of the military organizations had concluded that mutinies were sufficiently important to the success of the revolution to warrant keying insurrection to regionally or nationally coordinated mutinies at a time dictated by the pace of revolution in the army itself, but that notion had made no impression whatsoever on revolutionary leaders, and the fledgling military organizations had themselves been unable to control soldiers in their own garrisons, let alone implement ambitious national schemes.²⁵ It was that thinking, however, that inspired the military organizations in 1906. Those who threw themselves into revolutionizing the army in early 1906 were certain that a new revolutionary crisis impended, and they believed the army could deliver victory to the revolution. Persuaded by the December fighting that urban guerrillas alone could not provide the armed force needed to topple the regime, and by the November mutinies that mutinous soldiers properly handled could, the military organizations set about preparing to use soldiers and sailors as the shock troops of revolution.

Confidence in the potential of military revolution produced a sustained, widespread effort to win support in the army even after mutinies had ceased: military organizers did not intend to be caught unprepared, as they had been in 1905, when soldiers once again rebelled. In late December and January most military organizations were badly disrupted by arrests (or the threat thereof, which drove many revolutionaries underground in distant cities), or collapsed as garrisons were demobilized into temporary nonexistence. But they recovered in strength: no fewer than eighty SD military organizations were active in the first half of 1906, and at least forty-seven (certainly more) SR military organizations operated in the same period. These were without question serious enterprises, involving by mid-year on the order of 1,100 to 1,300 civilians on a full-time basis, an indeterminate but large number of others part-time or temporarily. They churned out a flood of revolutionary leaflets (the SD military organization in Riga ran off 11,000 pieces of literature in the month of May, and that was not atypical of military organization productivity), and in the first half of the year twenty-one SD and nine SR organizations published newspapers for soldiers.²⁶

Appealing to soldiers was not, however, the chief concern of the military organizations in early 1906. They were certain they had a receptive audience. Their principal goal was instead to position themselves to take advantage of the soldiers’ rebellion when it came, and to do this they held conferences to fashion regional and—eventually—national military organizations. In January, a conference of SR military organizations in the Caucasus resolved to initiate an All-Russian Military Union and even set up an organizational bureau to convene a national conference in March. Nothing came of this, though all the SR military organizations in the Caucasus did relabel themselves local branches of the All-Russian Military Union. Early in 1906 the SD military organization in Kharkov (formally Menshevik) attempted to convene a conference of the SD military organizations in the south, and there was a conference of the SD military organizations in Lithuania. An SR-Maximalist Military Union that emerged in Moscow in February relabelled itself “All-Russian” in May; no national organization resulted from this titular inflation, though the Moscow Maximalists may have been in contact with a Maximalist military organization in Vilna.²⁷ Whatever their factional and ideological differences, Bolshevik, Menshevik, SR, and SR-Maximalist military organizations all aspired to fashion national organizations. They took the prospect of insurrection seriously, believed that soldiers would play the crucial role, and insisted that mutinies would have maximum impact if a mechanism for coordinating them were in place when they occurred.

Within the Social Democratic Party, the impetus for creating a national directorate for military revolution came from Moscow, and from the beginning the SD military organizations there—Bolsheviks and Mensheviks each had their own—planned to draw in proletarian combat organizations as equal partners in a military campaign against the regime. SD military organizations in Sevastopol, Rostov, Kiev (all three Menshevik), Kaluga, Riga, and probably elsewhere, also worked in tandem with combat organizations, either through mutual representation in their respective committees, or with a joint leadership group. In Perm SD combat activists initiated work in the garrison.²⁸ This association betrayed the military organizations’ preoccupation with insurrection, for the combat organizations’ sole purpose was to train a “revolutionary army” to do battle with the regime. Many of the SD military organizations’ problems with the rest of the party stemmed from their alliance with the combat organizations, which Menshevik leaders soon repudiated and Bolshevik leaders treated warily. In January the Moscow Bolsheviks set up a Military Technical Bureau (headed by a Menshevik, A. A. Vanovskii, who had led the Kiev military organization in 1905) to assist Social Democrats throughout central Russia in preparing proletarian and military insurrection; activities included training proletarian combatants, manufacturing bombs, reconnaissance, and so on. The local Bolshevik and Menshevik military organizations, both of which anticipated insurrection in the spring, had representatives on the Bureau, and the Bureau sent a questionnaire to SD military organizations in central Russia in order to ascertain the size of garrisons, deployment of units, the soldiers’ principal interests and grievances, and their general mood. The Moscow Bolshevik military organization, led by Emelian Iaroslavskii, used the Technical Bureau to establish contact with other SD military organizations, and in March convened a conference on work in the region’s garrisons. The Bolshevik military organization then dispatched organizers to found or reinforce military organizations in other cities, and it thereafter served as a clearing house for SD military organizations in central Russia, passing on the names of contacts when units transferred from one garrison to another.²⁹

In March, too, the Moscow Bolshevik Military Organization (presumably with the cooperation of the local Menshevik military organization; they were on the verge of complete merger) convened a rump national SD military organization conference. The Muscovites clearly felt a need for haste, because, as they told the Petersburg military organization (then led by the Mensheviks Antonov-Ovseenko and Mikhail Pavlovich), they expected a rising at about the time the Duma convened, i.e., at the end of April. Though such major military organizations as those in Finland, Warsaw, and Sevastopol apparently agreed to send delegates, when the conference opened on March 27 only Moscow, Petersburg, Vilna, and Dvinsk were represented. Additionally, representatives of the battle-hardened Latvian combat organization and the Central Committee (a Bolshevik, Sammer) were present.

The most significant item on the agenda was the proper relationship between the military organizations and the rest of the party. The Moscow Bolshevik military organization offered for consideration its own statutes, which stated that the immediate task was to form military-combat organizations from all revolutionary elements in the army “for a decisive, nationwide insurrection against the autocratic government.” Military organizations were to be autonomous in their own affairs and, during the insurrection, autonomous in their dealings with non-SD military organizations (though they would be guided by the Central Committee’s political directives). The conference took no decision on this or any other matter because all the participants were arrested at the first session (most escaped from jail within a few days), but—also on March 27—the Military Technical Bureau issued a draft resolution on insurrection, for consideration at the party’s upcoming Fourth Congress, that spelled out the implications of the military organizations’ conception of their role during an insurrection: “leadership of the insurrection should pass into the hands of combat councils, appointed in advance and consisting of representatives of the proletarian, military, and combat organizations, with the latter two predominating.”³⁰ That plank would henceforth be at the center of the SD military organizations’ program, and it was supported by both Bolshevik and Menshevik military organizers. To the military organizations, such combat councils were merely an instrument for implementing the party’s goal of overthrowing the regime. To party leaders, they were a major challenge to the existing party structure, and when they became aware of what the military organizations were driving at both Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders categorically rejected the idea. Bolshevik hierarchs were no more willing than Menshevik to abdicate leadership of any sort to military and combat organizers.³¹

More than the dispute over lines of authority bedeviled relations between the Social Democratic Party and its military organizations: party leaders did not believe that organizing soldiers for insurrection was crucial to the outcome of revolution. This became clear at the Fourth Congress of the RSDRP (April 1906), where the army figured frequently in the debates but only to buttress the Bolsheviks’ and Mensheviks’ opposing views on the Duma, liberals, and peasants, and planning for insurrection.³² Mensheviks, now arguing that the Moscow uprising had ended in a decisive defeat, asserted that “victory for the popular uprising is conceivable only in the event that the armed forces are disorganized and that at least a part switch to the people’s side.”³³ They did not conclude that the party must therefore devote more attention to the army: because soldiers were peasants, they would not follow the socialists’ lead. Soldiers would support revolution only if they saw that the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, too, were fighting the government— which in the Menshevik paradigm was an argument for supporting the Duma. Bolsheviks, who as late as March had been confident of the prospects for military revolution but by April were impressed by a dearth of mutinies, countered that the Moscow insurrection had shown that one could not count on the troops switching sides; the most one could hope for was that some units might come over when civilians were on the verge of triumph anyway. Insurrection therefore must be carefully prepared, and Moscow had demonstrated that worker insurgents could take on the army. Recognizing that they were on weak ground, the Bolsheviks equivocated (Moscow had “not disproved” their contention) and cited Kautsky’s positive assessment (“which does mean something”) of the success of urban insurgency.³⁴ Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks viewed military revolution as anything more than a byproduct of civilian revolution.

The military organizations themselves scarcely received a hearing at the congress. A few Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates, either associated with or on instructions from local military organizations, attempted to place work in the army on the agenda. The attitude of the congress was summed up by the Menshevik Ramishvili: “In my opinion, there is no need to put this question to the Congress for discussion. The Congress, which must deal with many serious and complex matters, cannot concern itself with such trifles.”³⁵ Iaroslavskii rejoined that “a mass of revolutionary energy in the army is going unused,” and he and a dozen or so others (roughly half of them Mensheviks) who had connections with military work offered a resolution calling for the training of urban guerrillas and the establishment of a council under the Central Committee to centralize the work of combat and military organizations. That resolution was overwhelmingly defeated—by Bolshevik as well as Menshevik votes—though the congress did make one concession to the military organizers. At Iaroslavskii’s urging, the congress instructed the Central Committee to convene a conference of military organizations. The Central Committee, controlled by Mensheviks after the Fourth Congress, ignored the resolution.³⁶

The rapid expansion and increased assertiveness of the military organizations occasioned much less tension within the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In early January, the SR party congress itself called for stepped-up agitation and organization in the armed forces, and, apparently with the encouragement of the leadership, SR activists shifted perceptibly away from preoccupation with urban combat groups and towards military work.³⁷ There were a number of reasons for the SR leadership’s receptiveness to work in the army. The SRs thought of themselves as the heirs to the revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s who had run a centralized military organization, they were unselfconsciously committed to planning for insurrection, and they had years of experience with a centralized terrorist operation. The key consideration in early 1906, however, was their reading of the political situation. As one party official recalled a year and a half later,

the political balance—autocracy on the one hand, the masses, gripped by excitement, on the other—was deemed to be so unstable that it seemed as though it would be enough to throw “the sword of Bren” onto the scales, to revolutionize the army, in order with a free hand to bring the revolution to culmination.³⁸

In consequence, the SR Central Committee made major financial contributions to military work, tolerated a large measure of military organization autonomy, and no later than May established an ambitious central directorate for military work.³⁹

Nevertheless, differences did emerge between the SR party hierarchy and the military organizations. The SR’s national military coordinator, S. E Makhalevich, better known as Jan, was a veteran of the revolutionary movement of the 1880s. He believed that revolutionary soldiers by themselves could destroy the Tsarist regime: in late 1905, he had witnessed first-hand the prolonged mutiny of the Krasnoiarsk garrison that had permitted revolutionaries to hold power in the city for over a month, and the experience had convinced him that soldiers were the key to successful insurrection. Personally supervising the work of the SR military organizations in and around Petersburg, Jan came to share the point of view of the SR military organization in Krondstadt: the Baltic Fleet was destined to play the central role in the revolution, forcing the government to its knees by training the ships’ guns on the capital (this was an idea that went all the way back to the late 1870s, though there is no evidence that the Krondstadt SRs were aware of the link). Jan was impatient to get the insurrection under way, and was certain that once Krondstadt rose all the other pieces would fall into place. The SR Central Committee, on the other hand, did not believe insurrection was an exclusively military enterprise, or that soldiers and sailors should dictate the pace of revolution. The Central Committee maintained that insurrection should be delayed until peasant rebellion was underway, in the fall.⁴⁰ Unlike the Social Democratic leaders, who either questioned the importance or denied the very possibility of winning support in the army, the SR Central Committee wished merely to ensure that mutinous soldiers would not be defeated in isolation. But even differences over the timing of insurrection could have a bearing on revolutionary strategy.

The implications of the dispute between the SR leadership and the military organizations became apparent during a discussion of tactics at a conference of SR military organizations that Jan and the Central Committee convened in late June. Fifteen military organizations were represented, and a large number of civilians from the party’s central institutions also attended (itself a good indication of the importance the SR leadership attached to work in the army).⁴¹ The immediate context for the discussion was provided by mutinies that—to anticipate—were by June once more sweeping through the army. The military organizations did not explicitly challenge the SR axiom that fall was the appropriate time for insurrection, but they claimed they could not long hold their soldier following on a short leash: unless the moment were seized, support for revolution in the army would evaporate. Soldiers were so important to the outcome of insurrection, asserted the military organizers, that if they could not be restrained they should be allowed to initiate insurrection. Indeed, the conference resolved that if a major military insurrection should occur spontaneously SR military organizations would have to assume leadership of it—and that, of course, would force the hand of the Central Committee.

The logic of their insistence on the crucial importance of revolution in the army for the success of the revolution as a whole led the SR military organizations, no less than their SD counterparts, into conflict with their party leaders. The difference, of course, was that the SR leadership was far more willing to concede the importance of military revolution than were the Bolshevik and Menshevik leaderships. Yet military organizations of all revolutionary factions were in far more agreement with each other than with their respective party leaders. All believed that soldiers would support revolution and that the behavior of the army would determine the outcome of revolution. They all believed, by extension, that should revolution break out in the army civilians must follow the soldiers’ lead, and that national coordination of military organization activity, and of mutinies, was essential preparation for that eventuality. Indeed, the number of assumptions that military organizations of all parties and factions held in common was so great that military organizers were able to cooperate with each other far more closely than could the revolutionary leaders. Of course, the harmony among the military organizations, and the disagreements among party leaders, would have been utterly irrelevant had not soldiers been as mutinous in 1906 as in 1905, and had the military organizations not in fact had considerable success mobilizing support for revolution in the army.

Bidding for the Soldiers’ Loyalty

The Ministry of War was aware of the designs that revolutionaries had on the army and—properly impressed by the extent of the soldiers’ disaffection in late 1905—feared that soldiers might respond to the revolutionaries’ blandishments. The generals understood that revolutionary agitation could not be deflected simply by increasing pay and rations and by reducing the length of service; it was equally important to deny revolutionaries a monopoly in dealing with issues that exercised soldiers. A “Directive to the Commanders of Units in the Warsaw District,” dated 15 November 1905, addressed that problem squarely. Despite pious talk of the moral underpinnings of discipline, observed the “Directive,” fear alone had sustained discipline hitherto; soldiers were not, therefore, innately reliable. Officers had failed miserably to isolate soldiers from revolutionary propaganda, and revolutionaries spoke to issues of vital interest to soldiers. Moreover, soldiers read newspapers eagerly to find out what was going on in the country. If soldiers were to perform reliably in the midst of the tumult around them, officers must win moral influence over their men, and must therefore explain events to them, even if that meant talking frankly about mutinies. The major difficulty, concluded the “Directive,” was that officers were incapable of discussing political questions. But they must learn. In December, the Ministry of War recommended the Warsaw district’s “Directive” to all officers, and in January an article in the official military paper, Russkii invalid, again called on officers to discuss current events, even to discuss (and refute) the demands of the extreme parties.⁴²

Not content with broad hints, the Ministry of War ordered the military districts to see that officers conducted discussions in their units, and the navy set up “Lecture Commissions” in Kronstadt, Libava, and Sevastopol for the same purpose. The Moscow military district periodically issued guidelines for officers. One in January instructed them:

It is necessary to explain the true sense of events, to indicate the role of the leaders of the disorders and to stress with especial insistence the exalted significance of the army and its valorous participation in the cause of pacifying the country, especially in the suppression of the Moscow insurrection. This is one of the clearest proofs of just how honorable and exalted is the soldier’s calling.⁴³

Officers were soon speechifying to their men at the drop of a hat, lecturing on current events and even reading from and responding to revolutionary proclamations being distributed in the army. Though some officers reported that these discussions went well, the reverse was the rule. It was normal, for instance, for officers to lecture soldiers on the evils of the “Jewish press,” which printed false information for profit, or to call on soldiers simply to “extirpate the Jews” and other “domestic enemies.” Though Russian soldiers certainly had a soft spot in their hearts for anti-Semitism, crude right-wing diatribes could not create bonds of trust between officers and men.⁴⁴ The Ministry of War was aware of the political illiteracy of its officers, and in June 1906 ordered the establishment of political courses in officer schools. A commission of generals and social scientists (including such luminaries as Professors Platonov and Sergeevich) was appointed to draw up the curriculum and to recommend likely candidates for teaching positions. The program was to familiarize future officers with the historical and ideological bases of the existing order and with the main points of socialist doctrine, and these lessons were to provide the material for the officers’ subsequent talks with their men.⁴⁵

Talk was complemented by a literary campaign. Until the end of 1905, the only reading matter generally available to soldiers in their barracks were two long-standing literary journals for enlisted men and a series of stories published by the Berezovskii military publishing house. This literature aimed at instilling a few simple lessons: the sanctity of the soldiers’ oath, the good prospects for obtaining decorations for valorous service, the superiority of military to civilian society, and (of course) antiSemitism. The stories had little to do with the army as soldiers experienced it, and they went unread. After October 17, a few pamphlets explaining the October Manifesto and the forthcoming Duma were published especially for soldiers, but these do not seem to have been widely circulated.⁴⁶

This situation changed dramatically in 1906: conservative and monarchist literature inundated the barracks. The Main Staff at the Ministry of War, and then a newly established “Committee on Military Education,” issued lists of recommended pamphlets, and some divisions and army corps established committees of their own to select proper reading matter for soldiers.⁴⁷ The Berezovskii publishing house attached free pamphlets for soldiers to its officers’ journal, Razvedchik, and a cavalry journal, Vestnik russkoi konnitsy, began to append supplements for enlisted men. The output of short unit histories and memorial brochures was stepped up, and the emphasis was now often on the exploits of the unit’s enlisted men in the fight against revolutionaries (some of the brochures were conveniently divided into “discussions”). Units took out subscriptions to right-wing papers, and the Petersburg military district provided subsidies to Zor’ka, a paper for peasants published by the Octobrist Party beginning in February 1906, on condition that the paper include articles for soldiers.⁴⁸ Regimental staffs even began to issue their own proclamations—universally anti-Semitic. The proclamation by the command of the 42nd Yakutsk regiment (Zhitomir), for instance, attributed revolutionary propaganda to “Jews and ill-educated young people. Jews hate Christians, they want to destroy Orthodoxy and introduce their own Jewish empire.”⁴⁹ Nor was the army left to its own devices. Right-wing organizations distributed large amounts of free literature in the barracks.⁵⁰

The most ambitious undertaking was the publication of militarypolitical periodicals for enlisted men by the staffs of the military districts. These began to appear, either in weekly or twice-weekly form, in February. They dealt with topics of current interest, especially the Duma and the land question, both of which were treated from a very conservative and (one scarcely needs add) often anti-Semitic point of view. The military chaplaincy chipped in with its own soldiers’ weekly, Dobroe slovo, which emphasized the terrible sacrilege of all revolutionary acts and the sanctity of the soldiers’ oath, while the chaplains’ own journal, Vestnik voennogo dukhovenstva, printed model anti-revolutionary sermons.⁵¹

The volume of counter-revolutionary propaganda the military churned out—a measure of the generals’ honest fear—was truly impressive, yet its impact was minimal. Even some officers noted that the new policy of officer-led discussions did not remove the basic obstacle to a healthy army: soldiers still had no way to seek redress of grievances (collective complaints were still construed as mutiny), soldiers were still treated as second-class citizens by their officers and in law, and officers were still immured in caste traditions (for example, in May the Ministry of War felt it necessary to order officers to avoid public drunkenness, which undermined their moral authority over soldiers).⁵² Given these circumstances, there could be no common ground between officers and men. Many of the pamphlets written for enlisted men were frankly insulting; one informed soldiers that they did not have the right to attend meetings because they might, unbeknownst to themselves, be seduced into mutiny. At any rate, as one officer noted, “The content of the brochures and leaflets on social and political questions . . . is pale and uninteresting, and people don’t willingly take up this sort of reading.”⁵³

Even assuming that the Ministry of War could have won a war of ideas with revolutionaries, problems in implementing the reforms that had been introduced in December badly undermined ideological indoctrination. For instance, the text of the order announcing the reforms was contradictory: at one point it indicated that blankets and bedlinen were to be issued to all soldiers, at another that these were to be issued only to current conscripts. When it turned out at the annual issue of equipment that only draftees obtained the full benefits, the older soldiers muttered angrily about this new injustice. Not until July 1906 did a new order extend the benefits to all soldiers.⁵⁴ Even the provisions of the order that were not in question were often—perhaps in most cases—honored in the breach. In many units equipment was issued in pre-December quantities either because the necessary stocks were not available or because commanders preferred to lay supplies away for a rainy day. Since soldiers knew what they were entitled to, the supply problems were more than ordinarily aggravating. Even the reduction in length of service was handled badly. The army simply could not discharge immediately all those who had completed three years of service—to do so would have eliminated almost all noncommissioned officers. Instead, the reduction was spread over three years, and did not begin until the fall of 1906. Again, of course, soldiers felt they had been taken in by the authorities.⁵⁵ The soldiers of the 1903 draft (who had served three years) in the 49th Brest infantry—which had led the attack on the rebellious naval barracks in Sevastopol in November—petitioned the Minister of War “as loyal sons and servants of the Tsar father” for assistance in securing discharge. They also requested that they be issued all the equipment that was due them under the December 6 order, and concluded: “If these two demands are not met, we will be compelled to go another route, and then everyone will be behind us, of which we inform your excellency.”⁵⁶

The supply problems, at least, were not entirely a matter of the authorities’ clumsiness and ill will. Because of the cost of the Russo-Japanese War, the army was in dire financial straits just when it had to make good an immense shortage of boots, uniforms, and other supplies (stocks were so far depleted that the Ministry of War feared the army could not be mobilized if need arose). Since the government as a whole lacked money, the army could expect little succor. In fact, the government demanded that the army hand over to the treasury monies that units in the Far East had saved from provisions allowances. (Twenty million rubles were involved; Minister of War Rediger disobeyed a cabinet order and saved twelve million for resupply needs.) The units in the worst condition were those returning, often in rags, from Manchuria. It was difficult enough to bring these units back to their prewar supply levels, simply impossible to supply them according to letter of the December 6 order. The soldiers’ resentment on this score was amplified by the fact that returning units were often immediately deployed against workers and peasants. And the soldiers who had been through the war were the most recalcitrant to discipline and the most likely to demand satisfaction. Indeed, soldiers in many units seem to have organized on the return trek, and immediately upon establishment in their quarters they sought out contact with revolutionary parties for the purpose of planning action to win what they felt was due them. The consensus of both generals and revolutionaries was that units back from the war were extremely fertile soil for revolutionary agitation.⁵⁷

The military organizations found it easy to take advantage of conditions in the army, since even officers admitted that revolutionary agitators could play to the soldiers’ genuine grievances. Reasonably typical of the thrust of the military organizations’ appeal is a series of twenty-four hectographed leaflets that the SD (Bundist) military organization in Mariampol distributed, mostly to the 111th Don infantry, between February and June 1906.⁵⁸ They were written in the first person (“our blood-sucking commander is exploiting us”), and though civilians probably composed them they reveal an intimate knowledge of the life of the regiment. A number of the leaflets pointed out that officers were holding back money due the soldiers, that food was bad, that shirts were rotten, and that soldiers had not received the goods due them under the terms of the December 6 reform. These grievances were then cumulated into a petition of demands submitted (anonymously) to the regimental commander and printed up as a leaflet. Another leaflet complained about the work soldiers performed in the regimental garden, the vegetables from which went only to the officers’ mess, and urged soldier gardeners to uproot the cabbage. When soldiers were marched to the rifle range in the rain, that, too, was worth a leaflet.

The Mariampol military organization (like all military organizations) also sought to raise the soldiers’ political consciousness. One leaflet pointed out that the Ministry of War had reduced the term of service to three years only because it had been forced to, and drew the obvious conclusion that if soldiers exerted enough pressure they could get what they wanted. Other leaflets called on soldiers being discharged to spread their revolutionary ideas in their home villages, promised departing soldiers that the work they had begun in the 111th Don would be continued by younger soldiers, and appealed to the 112th Urals to follow the revolutionary example of the 111th Don. The transfer of the 2nd battalion of the 111th Don to Vitebsk elicited a series of leaflets: after appealing to the soldiers to try to resist, and reminding them that part of the 111th had refused to go to Kovna in late 1905, the military organization then begged the 2nd battalion as it was departing not to shame the rest of the regiment by suppressing workers and peasants. Later, the Mariampol military organization exploited the conflict between the regime and the Duma to remind the soldiers of the needs of the peasantry, and to drive home the lesson that the government was the enemy of the people.

There is no reason to doubt that these leaflets made a strong impression on the soldiers. The Mariampol Bundists could not have chronicled the life of the 111th Don so well had soldiers not been willing to provide information. (By the same token, the lack of information on the 112th Urals infantry indicates that the military organization did not carry the entire garrison with it.) Military organizations in the larger garrisons could not trace the life of individual regiments so closely in their leaflets, but they did address specific incidents in specific units. But of course interest in what the military organizations were saying did not mean that soldiers heeded the advice offered. The soldiers of the 2nd battalion of the 111th Don did, after all, proceed to Vitebsk.

A more potent means of agitation than leaflets were the military organization newspapers, which provided soldiers with a forum for expressing their own grievances. Some of the papers devoted a great deal of space to articles explaining the history of the revolutionary movement and outlining in detail the revolutionaries’ position on current political issues; these could not have been particularly popular (the newspapers published by the SD military organizations in Moscow were among the most boring). However, even the papers with the greatest theoretical pretensions did give over considerable space to garrison life and to soldiers’ letters. Some papers amounted to little more than letters from soldiers attacking what they believed to be the brutality and chicanery of individual officers and NCOs. It is difficult to gauge precisely the impact these papers had, but they appear to have been extremely popular among the soldiers, providing them a greater sense than did mere leaflets that a strong organization was speaking for them. Even officers took the papers seriously. Two papers in particular stand out, the Social Democrats’ Soldat (Sevastopol) and the Socialist Revolutionaries’ Voennyi listok (Simferopol, then Sevastopol). The charges that soldiers made in these papers stung officers into defending themselves—officers drew up their men and entered into public debate with the anonymous soldiers who were writing to the paper. The soldiers who in turn reported the officers’ responses understandably gloated over their commanders’ discomfiture, and the military organizations’ prestige rose accordingly.⁵⁹

With prestige went membership. By the middle of 1906, SD and SR military organizations together had in excess of 25,000, probably around 35,000, soldier and sailor members.⁶⁰ These were members, not merely “sympathizers”: the military organizations reported that they had “influence” over or enjoyed the “sympathy” of even larger numbers of soldiers. Total membership was of course small when measured against the million men in the army, and small in most garrisons (though a number of military organizations claimed 500 or more members). But given the risks that membership entailed for soldiers, and given the fact that soldiers lived in barracks isolated from civilians, the figures were impressive. Indeed, proportionately as many soldiers as workers were members of revolutionary organizations, and if worker revoutionaries in some sense stood for the much greater number of politically unorganized workers, the same was true of soldier revolutionaries. The military organizations’ assumption that they could mobilize soldiers for revolution had proved correct.

Rank and file membership was sufficiently large to shape the military organizations to the soldiers’ ideas and interests. Civilian military organizers discovered that soldiers—even those in the military organizations—adamantly rejected party labels and factional polemics. Civilians were willing to disavow explicitly party-line propaganda in the armed forces. As a draft statute drawn up by a conference of SD military organizations in Latvia stated, the military organizations’ purpose was “to organize soldiers for a nationwide armed insurrection,” so membership in the SD military organizations was open to “any revolutionary and politically conscious soldier”—i.e., to any soldier willing to join, whether he professed social democratic beliefs or not.⁶¹ Similarly, the January conference of SR military organizations in the Caucasus opted for avowedly non-party military organizations so as not to fragment the “revolutionary barracks.”⁶² Quite exceptionally, the SR military organizations in the Caucasus required that civilians withdraw from their party positions and become civilian personnel of the non-party military union. No other military organization took factional neutrality so far as that. However, even the commitment not to advocate among soldiers a program that would accentuate differences in revolutionary ideologies elicited reprimands from party leaders, especially SR party leaders. At the June SR military organization conference the SR Central Committee insisted that the military organizations must include in their programs the specifically SR position on land redistribution. When the military organizations passed a resolution for a more general statement on the land question, the Central Committee unilaterally annulled the resolution. The SR leadership continued thereafter to insist on a larger dose of SR ideology than the military organizations were willing to accept. Social Democratic military organizations had fewer problems with their party leaders on this score, because they concealed the extent to which they ignored party doctrine in their work with soldiers.⁶³ Nevertheless, civilians insisted on counting the military organizations as constituent elements in their parties and attempted to maintain at least a nominally party identity for their soldier following.

The travails of the SR military organization in Moscow demonstrate the peril of bringing a party spirit into the barracks. Early in 1906 the Bolshevik military organization approached the SR military organization with a proposal for a joint SR-SD platform for propaganda among officers and enlisted men. The SR’s were agreeable to non-party propaganda among officers, but rejected a common platform for enlisted men. Unfortunately for the regular SR’s, early in 1906 SR-Maximalists in Moscow set up a military union with an adamantly non-party program; all the soldiers in the SR military organization deserted to the Maximalists, whereupon most of the SR military organizers followed suit and the regular SR military organization disappeared. The Moscow Bolsheviks maintained a soldiers’ organization (capped, as was the Maximalists’ military union, by a garrison soviet) of their own but had an observer in the military union. Needless to say, the Bolshevik military organization carefully avoided propaganda in a party spirit.⁶⁴ The soldiers’ determination that partiinost’ be left at the barracks gates was not something to be trifled with, even if they enrolled in a military organization that bore an SD or SR label.

Not only did soldiers in the military organizations shape the revolutionary program they supported, they also occasionally seized control of the military organizations from civilians. The structure of the military organizations ensured that soldiers would have a major voice in decisions. Almost all military organizations consisted of a hierarchy of unit committees, capped by a garrison soviet; the only important exceptions were organizations in very large garrisons where a full-fledged soviet of unit representatives was virtually ruled out by security considerations.⁶⁵ This organizational structure was dictated by the structure of the army itself and by the physical barriers between civilians and soldiers, but the fact that the majority of garrison bodies labelled themselves soviets—and not, say, committees—indicates the impact the workers’ soviets of 1905 had on the Russian political imagination; at the time, soviets were by definition non-party institutions. Given the fact that both SDs and SRs had military organizations in most of the larger garrisons, it seemed to the soldiers to make sense to merge the parallel committees and soviets. SD and SR military organizers were in fact anxious to coordinate their activities in the garrisons; in most cities they had some sort of regular contact, often institutionalized (as in Moscow). By and large, however, civilians opposed the complete merger of their military organizations, but could not always resist rank-and-file pressure.

In Kronstadt, for example, by April both SDs and SRs had smoothly functioning military organizations with large followings that longed for the day when they could rise against their officers and autocracy. Soldiers and sailors took this goal so seriously that they decided to unite for better planning, so they arranged a meeting of military and civilian representatives of the two organizations. All of the civilians with the exception of one SD opposed a merger, but at a meeting on April 23 sailor and soldier unit representatives decided to set up a provisional technical bureau, of three enlisted men from each organization, to draw up plans for insurrection and to devise methods for joint SD-SR work in the garrison. A few days later, a meeting of the rank and file decided— again in opposition to the civilians—to make this arrangement permanent, with a bureau of six elected military representatives and four civilians (two delegated from each party) answerable to a garrison council; to eliminate even the potential of civilian domination, the civilian members were to be changed frequently. SD civilians insisted on treating this as no more than a contact commission, but the soldiers and sailors henceforth considered themselves members of a single organization.⁶⁶

Much the same thing occurred in Sevastopol, though with SR connivance (the Sevastopol SRs were late in gaining a foothold in the garrison and believed that a merger would increase their influence), and that was logical enough—the Sevastopol and Kronstadt garrisons had long traditions of revolutionary organization, and revolutionary soldiers and sailors there thus had the self-confidence required to assert themselves organizationally.⁶⁷ But if Kronstadt and Sevastopol were extreme cases, the potential for conflict was built into all military organizations: soldiers could desert to an organization more to their liking, as in Moscow, or they could assert their will through the garrison soviets. The civilians in the military organizations had to respond to their military constituency if they wished to retain influence in the garrisons—which was, after all, the military organizations’ raison d’etre.

However, civilians were answerable to more than soldiers; they were responsible as well to their larger party organizations. Soldiers and sailors in Kronstadt engineered the merger of the SD and SR organizations partly because they wished to do more than just talk about insurrection. This sentiment gratified civilian military organizers, but it was precisely decisions such as those involved in setting dates and coordinating plans for insurrection that civilians were reluctant to permit soldiers to make. SDs in Kronstadt complained that the garrison council had in effect arrogated to itself the right to make decisions that properly belonged to the revolutionary parties (surely one of the few times a Social Democrat defended, even by implication, the prerogatives of the SR Central Committee). To which some sailors replied in disgust: “We want to lay down our lives for the people and our country, and we’re forbidden to have an opinion on the matter. “⁶⁸

Tensions within the military organizations were a mark of their success: only because civilians had enlisted large numbers of soldiers and sailors in support of revolution was the issue of control so touchy. Tension arose, however, less from the allocation of authority between civilians and soldiers than from the uneasy juncture that the military organizations had effected between the two societies that coexisted in Russia. Soldiers and sailors were hostile to the ideological disputes that were so important to revolutionaries from polite society, and they resented the pretensions of civilian revolutionaries to guide them. The attitude of the Kronstadt militants resembled that of the revolutionary sailors on the Potemkin, who had also wished “to go all the way for the common weal,” had ignored the analysis of the revolutionary process offered by their civilian mentors, and had planned and executed mutiny on their own. Even those civilian revolutionaries who were most enthusiastic about the prospects for military revolution considered soldiers’ insurrections to be only a part of a larger revolutionary equation. To soldiers and sailors, revolution was far more immediate: like the mutineers of late 1905, revolutionary soldiers believed that once they had achieved unity of purpose, they should act.

The military organizations worked hard to summon forth this revolutionary spirit in the armed forces, but it was the construction that soldiers and sailors put on their efforts rather than the substance of their message that drew most soldiers to them. By early summer of 1906, a legend was circulating among the sailors in the Baltic Fleet that there was an all-powerful secret committee bent on avenging the abuses heaped upon the people. According to a sailor who was well aware that it was naive, the legend of the revolutionary committee had replaced faith in the Tsar, even in God.⁶⁹ Given the manner in which revolutionaries operated in Kronstadt and elsewhere, the legend was in some respects congruent with reality, but the mythical secret committee was larger than life—it was an authority that legitimated rebellion. To soldiers and sailors, precisely what the military organizations said was irrelevant, though of course the military organizations were saying what soldiers wanted to hear. Such myths did not arise in a vacuum. It was the conflict between Duma and regime that provided an opening for the myth of the revolutionary committee, gave the military organizations the opportunity to win adherents, and inspired soldiers to mutiny once again.