V. December 1905: Mutineers Save the Regime

As November turned into December, the regime’s situation was truly desperate: it had lost control over the peasantry, it was losing control over the urban garrisons and therefore over the cities, and the soviets were operating with near impunity. Mutinous reserves clogged the line through Siberia, many of the Siberian garrisons had mutinied and given revolutionaries the opportunity to seize effective power, and the field army was trapped in Manchuria.

As always in an emergency, the regime called on the cossacks. The Ministry of War had been activating cossack reserve regiments1 for interna* service since late 1904, and by October 1905 seventy-odd cossack regiments, thirty of them manned entirely by reserves, were in action in Europe. On November 1 the Ministry activated ten more cossack reserve regiments. As infantry reserves left the army these extra regiments fell far short of requirements, so a succession of additional mobilization orders went out. By the end of February 1906, twenty-nine reserve regiments and six reserve cossack foot battalions had joined the thirty reserve regiments activated before October.¹ This was, however, considerably fewer regiments than the Ministry had hoped to mobilize, and the cossack reserves called up in November and December were as disaffected and as prone to mutiny as the infantry.

Most cossack regulars and most reserves mobilized early in 1905 were locked into a cycle of violence that impeded the drift toward mutiny, but by October revolution had penetrated cossack villages, and mutinies followed hard on the November mobilization.² Between October 17 and the end of the year, eleven Kuban cossack units, nine Siberian units, five Don units, and one Terek unit mutinied. The Siberian cossack mutinies, a byproduct of the mutinies of the Manchurian reserves and the Siberian garrisons, were in themselves of no special significance. Far more ominous was Don cossack disaffection, which is not adequately reflected by the low incidence of mutiny (two in first-line regiments, one in a second-line regiment mobilized in March 1905, one in a second-line regiment mobilized in November, one in an unidentified unit).³ The behavior of the five (and last available) second-line Don regiments activated after November 1 was so alarming—one regiment stopped the train on which it was being shipped north and plundered the surrounding countryside for two days—and resistance to mobilization in the Don cossack villages so fierce, that the Ministry of War decided not to activate the seventeen third-line regiments (three were finally called up in February 1906).⁴

Worse even than the absence of additional Don regiments was the presence of the Kuban regiments. The Kuban mutinies, involving one of the seven first-line mounted regiments in Europe, one of the first-line plastoon (foot) battalions, six of the nine second-line mounted regiments mobilized before November, and three of the six third-line plastoon battalions mobilized in November (a fourth which did not quite mutiny promised to emulate the sailors of the Potemkin if its needs were not addressed), were especially threatening because they all occurred in the Caucasus.⁵ The stated grievances of the Kuban mutineers centered on the peculiar burdens of their service. Cossacks bore the expense of providing military-grade horses, saddles, uniforms, and other accouterment, and two units demanded the cancellation of all debts incurred during mobilization. However, as the commander of the mutinous 2nd Caucasus Kuban regiment observed, such demands provided no more than the pretext for mutiny:

Their principal demand is to be sent home, because they have no desire to protect the interests of landowners and the rich in general at a time when the cossacks’ own farms are falling into decay and they and their families are enduring hardship.⁶

And in fact, five of the mutinies involved self-demobilization, a type of mutiny unique to the Kuban cossacks: they boarded trains and, with the cooperation of striking railroad workers, set off for home.⁷ Their departure immediately shifted the local balance of power. When two of the three squadrons of the 2nd Urup regiment and then the 17th plastoon battalion pulled out of Novorossiisk in December, they cleared the way for the short-lived “Novorossiisk Republic.” When the three squadrons of the 2nd Urup in Ekaterinodar joined their comrades from Novorossiisk, and when the 15th plastoon battalion left Ekaterinodar as well, they very nearly precipitated the formation of an “Ekaterinodar Republie.”⁸ And as the Kuban cossacks disappeared, there were suddenly no units available to send against the Georgian, Ossetian, and multitudinous other natives who had thrown off the Russian yoke.

By late December, the government had managed to mobilize only fourteen additional cossack regiments and battalions, and of these at least four had mutinied and others were so badly disaffected as to be unusable. By late February another twenty-one cossack regiments had taken the field but in December, the month of greatest need, the regime was bereft of reinforcements. That is not to deny that cossacks were crucial to the regime’s survival: without the 60,000 cossacks in Europe as of October, the regime might well have collapsed. Able to bring substantial numbers of soldiers into battle against workers and peasants only under exceptional circumstances, local authorities discovered, sometimes to their surprise, that a handful of cossacks thrown into the breach could scatter peasants and even flush workers out from behind their barricades. But 60,000 cossacks were too few to turn the tide by themselves.

With the Manchurian army unavailable and reserve cossacks mutinous, the regime’s survival hinged on the behavior of the mutinous garrison army in Europe. At the last possible moment, the European garrisons turned. Mutiny subsided in December as suddenly as it had spread in October and November: from fifteen mutinies in late October, to forty-four in the first half of November, peaking at eighty-six in the second half of November, down to fifty in the first half of December, only sixteen in the last half of that month. The national totals, in fact, understate the abruptness with which the soldiers’ revolution collapsed. Of the fifty mutinies in the first half of December, fifteen were in Manchuria and along the Siberian route of the reserves’ flight to Europe, eleven were in the Caucasus, and most of those in central Russia occurred in the first week of the month. By mid-December, the soldiers’ revolution was over except on the fringes of the empire, and hitherto mutinous units were busily repressing civilians.

There is no simple and elegant explanation for the soldiers’ abrupt about-face, but some possible explanations may be discarded. The soldiers’ revolution did not end, for instance, because mutinies were forcibly suppressed. Force was effectively applied against mutinies in Kronstadt in late October, and in Tashkent, Sevastopol, and Kiev in mid-November. Repression generally served as a local deterrent to further mutiny, but despite extensive publicity provided no object lesson for soldiers elsewhere. Indeed, mutiny was far more widespread after the shooting in Sevastopol and Kiev than it had been before. There was no instance of armed repression of mutiny in late November or early December that might have inspired fear in soldiers. By that point, of course, it was difficult to find units that could be relied upon to suppress mutiny.

The end of the soldiers’ revolution did coincide with the enactment of reforms intended to alleviate many of the hardships of military service. Since the middle of the year the Ministry of War had been planning to reduce the length and change the conditions of service as part of an effort to repair deficiencies disclosed during the Russo-Japanese War, but as the mutinies began in late October the reforms acquired political urgency. The Ministry issued periodic reminders that reforms were in the offing, and they were officially announced to the soldiers on the Tsar’s name day, December 6. Effective immediately, the daily meat ration rose from Vi to ¾ pound, a tea and sugar ration was added, and pay for enlisted personnel rose 2½-to 3-fold (varying by rank). The issue of underwear and boots was to be increased as of January 1, 1906, at which time, too, blankets, bedlinen, field shirts, towels, and handkerchiefs were to be issued for the first time. (The practice of hiring out soldiers for civilian work was proscribed in January 1906, while reduction in the length of service—from 4 to 3 years in the infantry, from 5 to 4 years in cavalry and engineering units, from 7 to 5 years in the navy— was made official in Imperial rescripts issued in March 1906.) These reforms amounted to a complete capitulation to the strictly economic demands advanced by mutinous soldiers. Minister of War Rediger admitted as much, noting that he included handkerchiefs among the items newly issued “in order to show that soldiers were given not only what they demanded, but even a luxury that had not occurred to them.”⁹

Nevertheless, despite the chronological association between the announcement of the reforms and the decline of mutiny, satisfaction of the mutineers’ demands played at best a marginal role in restoring order in the armed forces. In some units, the announcement persuaded soldiers to revert from mutiny to chronic indiscipline of the sort that had preceded mutiny; in others officers nullified the potentially tranquilizing effect of the reforms by attempting to root out sedition.¹⁰ While mutiny and indiscipline receded rapidly after December 6, capitulation by the Ministry of War was unlikely to convince soldiers that they had anything to fear from mutiny, still less that they must unfailingly obey their officers. If anything, the reverse held: just as the success of one mutiny encouraged other units to mutiny, soldiers might have concluded after December 6 that since they had forced the government to demobilize the reserves and augment pay, kit, and rations, they should continue to press their other demands.

The soldiers’ revolution came to an end not because of anything that occurred within the army—either the suppression of or concessions to mutiny—but because of events in civilian society. The regime in late November and early December undertook actions that on the one hand triggered worker insurgency and placed soldiers’ lives in jeopardy, and on the other caused soldiers to reevaluate their post-Manifesto assumptions about the structure of authority in society and army. In all but a few cases, it is impossible to specify which of the many events outside the barracks was the decisive influence on soldier thinking and behavior in December. What is clear is that had mutinous and disaffected soldiers not concluded in December that they must submit to the old disciplinary norms, the Tsarist regime, for all its determination to survive, would have fallen.

Punitive Expeditions on the Periphery

Prime Minister Witte had hoped that the October Manifesto and the related conciliatory gestures that he had urged on the Tsar during the October crisis would restore domestic tranquility. He had anticipated that the October Manifesto would touch off demonstrations, and had not wished to undercut the effect of the promises of civil liberties and a legislative assembly by taking a hard line against public disorders. By the end of November, however, Witte and his cabinet had concluded that the revolution must be brought to an end whatever the cost to the regime’s image.¹¹ This necessarily entailed military repression. Yet if the policy requirement was clear, the government could not plan a systematic campaign against the revolution. For one thing, at the end of November the soldiers’ revolution was at peak strength, reserves were being sent home, and units were being recalled from the villages; there were not enough reliable troops available to put an ambitious policy of repression into effect. For another, the revolution was still metastasizing, and in December the government had to contend with a new set of crises, some the direct result of its changed political tack.

The government ultimately hit upon punitive expeditions as its weapon of last resort, but the policy of official terror that the punitive expeditions embodied was arrived at incrementally. On October 27, acting Minister of Interior Durnovo suggested to the Tsar that a member of the Imperial suite be sent to take charge of the restoration of order in Chernigov Province, where peasant disorders threatened the complete destruction of gentry estates. The Imperial chancery enlarged on this idea, and informed Witte on October 30 that three members of the Tsar’s suite were being sent to chastise the Russian peasantry: Admiral Dubasov to Chernigov, Kursk, and Poltava Provinces; General Sakharov to Saratov and Penza Provinces; and General Strukov to Tambov and (at Strukov’s request) Voronezh Provinces. The Tsar later dispatched two other plenipotentiaries to deal with the peasants of Kherson and Stavropol Provinces.¹²

The generals did not lead punitive expeditions in the proper sense; they were, rather, just what they were purported to be, imperial plenipotentiaries vested with extensive powers and instructed to “restore order and tranquillity.” They immediately confronted three major obstacles to the accomplishment of their mission: peasant rebellion flared up in an apparently random pattern and so presented no fixed target for repression; the troops available were too few to persuade peasants to desist; and mutiny rendered many of the units at hand unusable. By the time Admiral Dubasov arrived in Chernigov, for instance, the first wave of agrarian violence had subsided. Accompanied by a half squadron of cossacks, some infantry, and local officials, Dubasov went on tour, threatening in the name of the Tsar to level the villages should there be any further incidents and compelling village assemblies to select undesirable elements for resettlement in Siberia. The Admiral then moved on to Kursk Province, still in the grip of peasant disorders. Dubasov had only local units—1,350 infantry and 850 cossacks—to combat the peasants. However, the infantry could not be used because so many of them were reserves from the local population, and because they were on the verge of mutiny; Dubasov’s first act in Kursk was to tour infantry barracks and demobilize reserves. Dubasov was at that point recalled to deal with the crisis in Moscow. When his replacement, General Panteleev, arrived in Kursk he had to contend with a mutiny in an artillery brigade. Meanwhile, a new round of disturbances had broken out in Chernigov Province, where demobilization had reduced the infantry to 400 men. Panteleev concluded, as had Dubasov before him, that the only way to halt peasant rebellion was to shoot peasants. He consolidated his few remaining troops into operational detachments and sent them out to suppress disorders by force of arms. By late November the other plenipotentiaries were doing the same, though to no immediate effect.¹³

The obvious lesson of the operations of the generals in the agricultural center was that no amount of persuasion would bring peasants to heel, and the government in Petersburg took heed. Of course, by early December the crises in the Baltic, the Caucasus, Siberia, and the cities had also come to a head, so forceful action of some sort was mandatory. Nevertheless, the Imperial plenipotentiaries had shown the way. Early in December, the State Council began discussion of new rules for the use of troops against civil disorders that would virtually require soldiers to shoot whenever they faced civilians, on December 13 the Council of Ministers called on the military to give no quarter to revolutionaries, and on December 15 the Ministry of War sent a circular to the military districts outlining the government’s new policy.¹⁴

Though they scarcely needed encouragement, the government communicated its new policy to the plenipotentiaries. Durnovo telegraphed Panteleev on December 19 that “only the most severe measures and merciless treatment of the insurgents, reprisals without trial, can suppress the rebellion,” and he followed that with other telegrams demanding the destruction of villages.¹⁵ Yet even officially sanctioned ferocity did not produce immediate results. A brief hiatus in the disturbances in Chernigov and Kursk Provinces in mid-December was followed by a new outburst at the end of the month. Nevertheless, by late December reinforcements were arriving (from the 42nd division, originally intended for the Far East but not sent because of the termination of the war), and mobile columns of cossacks, dragoons, and some infantry were cutting back and forth across Chernigov, Kursk, and Poltava Provinces (and other provinces not within Panteleev’s purview), beating, whipping, and burning as they went. Even government functionaries admitted that the cossacks acted with unwarranted brutality. Peasants, convinced that unanimity and sheer numbers could overcome the soldiers’ superior firepower, at times attempted to resist. They were massacred (e.g., in the village of Sorochintsy in Poltava Province, an incident made famous by Korolenko) for their innocence. By the end of January, General Panteleev was able to report that order was being restored, at least temporarily, but that it would be necessary to increase the troop presence if the lid were to be kept on peasant discontent.¹⁶ Victory over the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry did not come easily, but during the campaign the regime in its desperation hit upon the only effective tactics, terror pure and simple.

The first punitive expedition—as opposed to punitive general—was sent into the Baltic provinces of Courland, Lifland, and Estland (presentday Latvia and Estonia), where the revolution was more fierce even than in the empire’s heartland. In November, Latvian peasants deposed constituted village and county authorities and elected their own local governments. At the end of the month, insurgents drove a small garrison from the city of Tukkum (in Courland) and beat back the first counterattack, inflicting heavy casualties on the troops. The German barons fled to the larger cities, often convoyed by retreating soldiers, or were murdered. Durnovo, requesting the Tsar to declare martial law in the Baltic, reported that on November 21 rebels had disarmed the soldiers guarding an estate in Lifland and had dragged two barons from the manor and shot them. Martial law was proclaimed, and on November 24 the Tsar established a Provisional Baltic Governor Generalcy, to which General Sollogub was soon appointed.¹⁷

It was one thing to proclaim martial law, quite another to provide the troops to enforce it. Units in the Baltic region were under strength and falling back on the cities, and local authorities, who were inundating Petersburg with requests for reinforcements, complained that the staff of the Vilna military district (which included Courland and Lifland) was pulling units out of the provinces. The district commander reported that he was so short of troops that he had authorized the arming of Old Believers and gentry-financed militias. The Riga garrison was small, wracked by mutiny, and unable to do more than maintain a presence on the streets barely sufficient to keep bands of armed workers from seizing control.¹⁸ Durnovo, taking the initiative on Baltic as on other problems, repeatedly demanded that the Ministry of War send additional units to the Baltic. Petersburg was extremely reluctant to let go of its troops— quite naturally, given the tense situation in the capital. General Raukh, Quartermaster General for the district, noted in his diary on November 30 that he simply had no troops to spare for the Baltic. Nevertheless, on November 30 General Sollogub met with ranking officers in Petersburg to plan the dispatch of punitive expeditions.¹⁹

The punitive expedition to the Baltic provinces was far and away the largest military operation the regime undertook against the revolution. The Warsaw military district, which had been kept near peacetime strength during the war against the hypothetical threat of attack from the west, sent two infantry regiments, six squadrons of cavalry and two artillery batteries into Courland. The Petersburg district provided four infantry battalions, eight cavalry squadrons, and some sappers for Lifland and, no other units being available, four battalions of sailors for Estland. The sailors, under barracks arrest in Kronstadt, were promised remission of punishment for exemplary service; to ensure reliability, there was one officer or petty officer for every four ordinary sailors.²⁰ That the government had to resort to this expedient is a good indication of how tautly its forces were drawn. The troops from Petersburg, on the other hand, were among the best the government had: elite Ulan cavalry, Imperial Kirasirsk cavalry, Guards infantry, even Guards sappers. Finally, companies and squadrons from a number of units in the Vilna district were sent back into the area. In all, three to four infantry regiments, twenty-two artillery pieces and, most importantly, four or five cavalry and cossack regiments were involved.²¹ But the territory they had to cover was large, and the situation required at least that many men.

Once outfitted, the detachments had to fight their way to their assigned areas. Revolutionaries turned back a unit sent by rail to relieve Riga. Other detachments compelled engineers to proceed at gunpoint; to avoid sabotage, the trains moved slowly and with extreme caution. Governor General Sollogub himself arrived in Riga, very circuitously, only on December 14. By the middle of December, too, the railway strike broken, troops began to arrive.²²

This being the period of greatest official ferocity, Tsar Nicholas, Witte, and Durnovo sent one telegram after another demanding ruthlessness. Witte informed Sollogub on December 22 that harsh measures were required because of the paucity of troops at the government’s disposal. At about the same time, Petersburg military headquarters telegraphed General Orlov, commander of the principal detachment in Lifland: “You will not be condemned for excessive severity; sooner the reverse.”²³ Petersburg had no cause for concern on this score. On December 19 General Sollogub informed the commanders of the detachments that in the event villagers were reluctant to hand over or reveal the identities of “instigators” they should destroy houses, using explosives “for greater moral effect.” General Orlov ordered that those who incited disobedience, the overthrow of the government, attacks on property, and so on be shot forthwith. Commanders of the sailor battalions were told that they would not be held accountable for the consequences of their action, even if they made mistakes and shot innocent people. Other detachments operated under similar guidelines. Furthermore, all units were authorized to take what supplies they needed from the local population without payment.²⁴

Given a completely free hand, the military set about terrorizing Latvians and Estonians into submission. Each of the major detachments sent out smaller groups (primarily cavalry and cossacks) to clean up the provinces section by section. The soldiers whipped, hanged, shot, and bombarded the local populace, and levied punitive fines at gunpoint. Typically, a squadron of Ulans from Orlov’s group in the space of five days destroyed property for punitive purposes in four villages. Another detachment found occasion to whip peasants daily. That much officers coolly related in their after-action reports. The information supplied by victims and witnesses is more bloodcurdling. In one town, to take the most gruesome, though not an isolated, example, a cavalry officer, Captain von Sievers, informed that there were no positively identified political criminals available for execution, ordered that forty-two “generally suspect” persons be handed over. Twenty-two were collected from the jail, twenty more seized in their homes, and all were shot. Not surprisingly, this sort of activity utterly demoralized the troops involved. General Orlov reported in January that the cossacks with him were engaged solely in pillage, and the commander of a sailor battalion reported that his men had become excessively bloodthirsty and had to be held in check. By the end of January, the Baltic provinces were under control. Government figures had it that as of June 1906 the Baltic expeditions had executed eighteen persons by hanging and 621 by firing squad, and had killed 320 others in armed combat. A Kadet calculation based on censored press reports was that soldiers killed 749 people in January and February alone.²⁵ Precise totals are of course irrelevant. No one denied that the punitive detachments had acted ruthlessly and, what is to the point, effectively in suppressing national and social revolution in the Baltic.

Outside the Baltic, the only centrally planned punitive operation that was important to the restoration of order was in Siberia. On December 13, Nicholas sent Commander-in-Chief Linevich a telegram ordering that General Rennenkampf, who had earned a reputation for heroism and decisiveness during the Russian intervention against the Boxers in 1900, and who was one of the few Russian commanders to emerge from the Russo-Japanese War with his reputation intact, be empowered to restore order on the Transbaikal and Siberian railroads. By the time the telegram finally reached Linevich on December 25, the Ministry of War had at Witte’s urging decided on December 20 to send as well a punitive detachment under the command of General Meller-Zakomelskii (who had won favor by suppressing the Sevastopol mutiny in mid-November) to open the line from the west. Rennenkampf, who could draw on the entire Manchurian army, had no difficulty manning two trains with three infantry companies, some cavalry, some technical troops, two guns, and four machine guns, and he left Harbin on January 9. Rennenkampf also had at his disposal the 5 th East Siberian rifle division, which was moving ahead of him. Finding troops for Meller’s expedition was more difficult: when he left Moscow on January 1 he had a total of 184 men (including 130 Guards infantry from Warsaw), thirteen officers, two guns, and two machine guns, and it was with this force that he crossed the Urals into Siberia on January 5.²⁶

By the time Meller’s and Rennenkampf’s trains were rolling, the situation in Siberia had stabilized. Meller discovered that the farther east he moved the less disorderly the trains of reserves; he credited this to the fact that cadre troops of IV Siberian corps had restored order on the line. At the Harbin end, the field army had disgorged sufficient numbers of reserves to relieve the pressure from that quarter, trainloads of reserves were being alternated with cadre units, and evacuation was proceeding in good order.²⁷ The arrival of 5th Irkutsk and 6th Enisei Siberian infantry (IV Siberian corps) in Irkutsk in the first week of December had broken the back of the Irkutsk mutiny, while the mutinous 2nd railroad battalion in Krasnoiarsk had surrendered on January 3rd after a day-long battle at the railway depot with 7th Krasnoiarsk Siberian infantry (IV Siberian corps) and some other small units gathered from passing troop trains.²⁸ Of the major cities, only Chita remained in the hands of mutineers and revolutionaries, though strike committees continued to control most of the stations and settlements along the line. Rennenkampf proceeded slowly toward Chita, while Meller, who had much the farther to go, raced to beat Rennenkampf to that goal and reap for himself the glory of reducing it. As they moved toward their goal, both arrested the members of station strike committees and any other suspected revolutionaries who fell into their hands (no one was so foolhardy as to offer resistance) and shot many of them, while Meller perpetrated one unprovoked massacre (approximately fifty died) at Ilansk station when depot workers requested that their comrades be freed. Despite his best efforts, Meller reached Chita only after Rennenkampf had compelled mutineers and revolutionaries to capitulate (January 19-21). Meller thereupon withdrew in a sulk without establishing contact with Rennenkampf, and complained that his rival had shown undue leniency to the rebels.²⁹

The punitive expeditions, and their commanders, achieved great notoriety, but can scarcely be credited with saving the regime. Operations in the Baltic and Siberia were literally peripheral to the outcome of the revolution in 1905. It was in the center that the issue was determined, and a mid-December punitive run by a battalion of the 170th Molodechno infantry did more to preserve the Tsarist order than anything that Rennenkampf or Meller-Zakomelskii accomplished.³⁰ The punitive expeditions also came late: operations in the Baltic and Siberia got underway only toward the end of December and early January. The Baltic campaign became possible only after the regime had broken the back of urban revolution and the railway strike, and the ease with which Meller and Rennenkampf restored order was due in large part to the fact that by January revolutionaries and mutineers in Siberia understood that the tide was running against them. The other punitive operation of note, by the Semenovsk Guards regiment in Moscow, was also, as we shall see, mounted late: the Semenovtsy arrived after the local garrison had confined the insurrection to a single district of the city. Except in the Baltic, the centrally directed punitive expeditions amounted to no more than mopping up operations. Furthermore, even counting the Baltic expedition, the number of men involved was small, because few reliable units could be found, and fewer still spared. Picked units and cossack regulars together could cover only a small part of the vast territory engulfed by revolution.

As military operations the punitive expeditions contributed little to the survival of the regime, but as expressions of policy they were crucial. They reconquered the Baltic provinces and helped consolidate Tsarist authority in Siberia, but those victories would have been insignificant had the regime not been able to hold the Russian center. The Imperial plenipotentiaries achieved success against the peasants in the central agrarian provinces, but only after the regime had already crushed revolution in the cities, and peasant rebellion receded as much because of the collapse of urban revolution as because of cossack attacks. The heart of the revolution was in the Russian cities, and they fell neither to plenipotentiaries nor to punitive expeditions, but to units that had mutinied or were in the process of doing so; there were no other units around. Most of the locally mounted punitive detachments that took the field in late December and early January were also filled out with units that had earlier mutinied. The small size, peripheral location, and belatedness of the punitive operations underscores the fact that the regime’s survival depended upon its regaining control over the mutinous European garrisons. But if they were not important militarily, the punitive operations were quite significant politically. Even before they actually took the field, the policy of violent and merciless repression of which they were a part communicated to soldiers and civilians alike that the regime would do whatever was necessary to survive. That resolve, together with the civilian revolutionaries’ response to it, were the principal reasons for the soldiers’ volte-face. Had the minds of soldiers not been changed—had disaffected units not ceased to mutiny and mutinous units not turned against revolution—the Tsarist regime could not have held on to power in the center or reconquered the borderlands.

Mutineers against Revolution: The Response to Insurrection

In early December, two forces—government measures to restore regime authority, and civilian insurrection—pressed upon the great mass of disaffected soldiers on whose behavior the survival of the regime depended. In broadcasting its resolve to continue to define the social and political rules (more prosaically, to suppress revolution), the regime undercut the soldiers’ post-Manifesto conviction that the old order and their officers’ authority had lapsed. These signals, coming at the peak of the soldiers’ revolution, did not penetrate the barracks immediately, but as they became stronger the soldiers’ perception of the regime’s authority gradually changed. Revolutionaries unwittingly amplified the government’s message by resisting suppression; their decision to defend the freedom of action acquired de facto after October 17 produced a new round of violence and thus placed soldiers in precisely the circumstances that turned them against civilians.

The government’s turn toward repression in late November and early December was embodied not just in the command that generals wreak vengeance upon rebellious peasants, or the decision to dispatch a punitive expedition into the Baltic provinces, but also in measures to suppress public-sector unions, the soviets, and other organizations seeking to direct the rebellions welling up from the depths of Russian society. The leaders of the All-Russian Peasant Union were arrested in Moscow on November 15. Also on November 15, the government ordered the dispersal of a congress of the Union of Postal and Telegraph Employees; the government had previously declared that public employees did not have the right to form unions. When postal and telegraph employees went on strike, the government on November 20 arrested the union leadership, arrested the new leadership on November 25, and then fired striking personnel. On November 26 the chairman of the Petersburg Soviet was arrested. On December 2 the Council of Ministers declared illegal all strikes “in enterprises of importance to society or state” (on November 25, the Council had determined that “in extreme cases” armed force should be used to suppress strikes). On December 3, the Executive Committee of the Petersburg Soviet (260-odd persons, including guests) was arrested. In the meantime, Minister of Interior Durnovo had ordered governors to arrest the leaders of all antigovernment organizations, and in late November and early December the government placed the Baltic provinces, Poland, most of the Caucasus, and many other cities and provinces under martial law.³¹

Even moderates took this turn in government policy to represent the abrogation of the promises contained in the October Manifesto, and Miliukov, the Kadet leader, suspected that the government was bent on provoking insurrection, the better to scourge the cities.³² That does not appear to have been conscious government design. The real question, of course, was whether the regime had the force to implement its policy, be it provocative or not. Arrests were made in Petersburg and Moscow, but in most other cities officials simply ignored Durnovo’s instructions. Unlike the Ministers in Petersburg, they had only mutinous garrisons with which to combat revolution.

The regime’s determination to roll back the revolution forced a decision on revolutionaries at a moment they considered inopportune for insurrection, which they believed to be the only means to topple the regime and thereby secure the freedom promised in the October Manifesto. Workers, the revolutionaries feared, were as yet insufficiently armed and organized. In early November Trotsky, in the name of the Petersburg Soviet’s Executive Committee, urged that a final confrontation be delayed a few months, in mid-November Lenin urged that the workers not give in to provocation, while the SRs insisted throughout that insurrection be postponed until spring, when peasants would be prepared to rise and workers would thus not risk defeat in isolation. As the SR leader Viktor Chernov put it: “The peasantry will be able to move into the fire en masse only in the spring, when work gets under way, and in no case during the autumn quagmire, and not even during the winter dead season.”³³ (In the meantime peasants were rebelling on an unprecedented scale, following the lead of the cities rather than the cycle of the seasons.) According to Chernov, Bolsheviks shared the SRs’ concern about worker isolation, but were carried along by the pressure of the workers and by the radical example of the Menshevik leaders of the Petersburg Soviet.³⁴ Indeed, worker demands for an eight-hour day did impell the leaders of the Petersburg Soviet to support strikes; the revolutionaries feared that failure to act would debilitate the workers’ movement. By the end of November, however, the collapse of the campaign for an eight-hour day had led to a recession of worker radicalism in the capital. On the other hand, the increasing links between the Petersburg Soviet and soviets and revolutionary organizations elsewhere persuaded the Petersburg revolutionaries that, nationally, the revolution was still gathering momentum.³⁵

The great burst of mutinies in late November contributed measurably to the revolutionaries’ conviction that momentum favored them. They had not at first understood the nature or extent of the revolution in the army: they saw in Kronstadt a destructive riot that subsided as rapidly as it had flared up, while the economic demands that mutinous soldiers presented did not seem to bespeak commitment to revolution.³⁶ The Sevastopol and Kiev mutinies in mid-November, and the others that followed in quick succession, convinced revolutionaries that the unrest in the armed forces was substantial and enduring, and their pronouncements on the army became increasingly confident. Only the cossacks and a handful of aristocratic infantry units remained loyal, observed the SRs’ Syn otechestva, and the paper warned that cossacks were liable to be exterminated by soldiers whose villages were suffering from cossack depredations. Though the Guards units in Petersburg remained worrisome, by the end of November revolutionaries were convinced that they could count on the army’s support in the country at large.³⁷

However, if the mutinies gave revolutionaries confidence, their analysis of the relationship between military and civilian revolutions rested on the same inappropriate assumptions as earlier in the year: it was the pressure of civilian revolution that turned soldiers against the regime; the role of military revolution was to support civilian initiatives; if the timing of the mutinies could be subordinated to the pace of civilian revolution, victory was assured for soldiers and civilians alike.³⁸ On December 2, a few days before the Moscow insurrection, a Menshevik restated the revolutionaries’ theory of military revolution in an article entitled “The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ General Strike.” Revolutionaries, this writer asserted, should do their best to restrain soldiers, who risked isolating themselves because their mutinies were running ahead of the workers’ preparedness to support them (many of the military organizations in this period did in fact attempt to restrain soldiers). The decisive showdown with the government would begin with a workers’ general strike, which would trigger a general strike by soldiers and sailors as well.³⁹ This writer ignored, and may not have been aware of, the discrepancy between fact and forecast—on the one hand, the soldiers’ revolution running out of control, on the other revolutionary soldiers waiting patiently for workers to give them their cue. His forecast accurately reflected the collective revolutionary wisdom.

Moscow

Urban revolution culminated in the Moscow insurrection, and in retrospect it appears that the workers’ movement had since January been building toward that sanguinary denouement. Yet what seems from a national perspective a logical progression from demonstrations and strikes, to general strike, to soviets, to insurrection, involved in Moscow itself a sudden, explosive, and largely unanticipated transmutation. Until the end of November, revolutionary leaders were impressed by the weakness and disorganization of the workers’ movement in Moscow as compared to Petersburg and other industrialized cities. Revolutionaries set up the Moscow Soviet only on November 21, when strikes were on the decline locally and the regime had already taken the offensive. The Soviet met infrequently, and its leaders steered it away from confrontation with the authorities: they urged workers to organize rather than strike, and though they expressed sympathy for the telegraph strike (directed from Moscow), they did not suggest that factory workers strike in sympathy.⁴⁰ Revolutionaries spoke frequently of a new general strike and insurrection, but they were not eager to turn words into deed. The behavior of the garrison certainly did not offer a great deal of hope to revolutionaries: discipline had eroded after October 17, but soldiers in Moscow appeared less prone actually to mutiny even than soldiers in Petersburg. After mid-November, revolutionaries in Moscow as elsewhere wrote approving commentary on mutinies, but were noticeably reticent about the Moscow garrison.⁴¹

Between November 25 and December 2, mutinies swept through the garrison and thereby transformed revolutionary politics in Moscow. There is no evident reason why the mutinies should have occurred just when they did. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs all had active military organizations that distributed leaflets, convened meetings of soldiers, and otherwise sought to attract support for revolution, but (with one exception) there is no evidence that revolutionaries themselves had any direct role in provoking mutiny.⁴² Rather, it was the cumulative impact of news of mutiny elsewhere that finally galvanized soldiers in Moscow. That, at least, was the opinion of the city governor, who reported to the military district staff on November 25 that disorders in other garrisons were beginning to have an effect in Moscow.⁴³ Indeed, on November 25 two squadrons of the 1st Don cossack regiment refused to mount patrols and submitted a list of demands. On the 26th, the cossacks demanded to be sent home; they claimed that they were not really disobeying orders, it was just that they were utterly exhausted from their police duties and needed an extended rest. On the 26th, the men of the 3rd and 5th reserve sapper battalions, joined by a neighboring battalion of the 221st Troitse-Sergiev reserve infantry regiment, held a meeting and decided to present demands. The immediate spur to the mutiny was the arrest of a sapper who had made revolutionary speeches; the sappers demanded that their comrade be freed immediately, and took the occasion to make other demands as well. By the 27th the atmosphere in the sapper battalions was charged, and the sappers threatened to strike if their demands were not met within a week. On the 27th the police reported that the mood in the rest of the garrison was alarming and that other units might support the sappers’ demands, and on the 28th the military district staff learned that increasing numbers of soldiers were fraternizing with workers and attending worker meetings, to which they reported that their units sympathized with “the people.”⁴⁴

Other units did not make the sappers’ demands their own, but they took up the sappers’ example. Between November 29 and December 2, mutinies commenced in the Nesvizh, Pernov, Ekaterinoslav, and Rostov Grenadier regiments, and perhaps in the Tauride Grenadier regiment and an artillery brigade as well. All of the mutinies involved the presentation of demands, but neither grenadiers nor sappers were inclined to push their mutinies much beyond that (indeed, the sappers rejected an appeal by the politicized volunteers in the battalions to expell officers and seize control). On the other hand, mutinous soldiers did not believe they had to do more than threaten to strike to obtain what they wanted, because their officers promised to take the soldiers’ case to higher authorities. As they handed in their demands on December 1, the Nesvizh Grenadiers promised that they would postpone a strike until December 6, the date when, their commander promised them, the Tsar would meet their demands. It appeared to the soldiers that they had wrung concessions from their officers. While they waited for formal ratification of their victory, they attempted to spread their mutinies to other units: the Nesvizh and part of the Pernov Grenadier regiments marched with a band to the barracks of the 3rd Sumy dragoons (but failed to persuade the dragoons to join in a meeting), the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers announced when they handed in their service-related demands that they would have some political demands when the entire garrison had agreed on them.⁴⁵

The abrupt disintegration of the garrison heartened revolutionaries, but they were divided over how to take advantage of it. The initial reaction of Moscow’s SD leaders conformed to the prevailing revolutionary opinion that confrontation with the regime should be delayed and that soldiers should subordinate mutiny to the pace of the workers’ movement. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet (apparently without informing the SR members) told a sapper delegation, which on the night of the 27th offered to seize the arsenal and begin an uprising, that the sappers should bide their time. A speaker from the Menshevik military organization set forth the SD position at a meeting of the Presnia-Khamovniki district soviet on December 2: work in the garrison was expanding rapidly, but “despite the efforts of the SD military organization to restrain separate outbursts” until there was greater organizational contact between soldiers and the workers’ movement, “we must reckon with the possibility of an unexpected uprising.” All present at the meeting agreed that the transfer of the army to the people’s side would guarantee victory, and that they did not have long to wait for this outcome.⁴⁶

The SR military organization, on the other hand, sought to foment further disorders with a view toward engaging the garrison in insurrection in mid-December. It is not clear that the SR military organization was acting with the knowledge of the Moscow SR leaders, but the SRs in Moscow emphatically did not share their party leadership’s view that insurrection should await spring. Both the core of future SR Maximalists in the Moscow organization and the more orthodox local leaders were eager for a confrontation with the regime. In any case, on December 1, a meeting of SR soldiers decided that it was time for another regiment to mutiny, and the representative from the Rostov Grenadier regiment volunteered his unit. The Bolshevik military organization, learning what the SRs were up to, attempted to forestall the mutiny.⁴⁷

Conditions in the Rostov regiment were indeed conducive to mutiny. Besides being influenced by the other disturbances, the Rostov soldiers had numerous grievances. In November, they had been angered when their commander withheld money due them from their labor in the civilian economy. There had in addition been considerable discontent when one company from the Rostov regiment had been called out on November 27 for possible action against the sappers; after standing for hours in the cold and becoming increasingly irritated by the lack of hot food, the men were returned to their barracks—which in no way eased their discontent. On December 1, there was a dispute when rations were reduced (because, explained the officers, soldiers were no longer performing extra guard duty). Finally, revolutionary circles had been operating in the regiment since early November (the SRs had the largest following).⁴⁸

The mutiny of the Rostov Grenadiers was by far the most serious in Moscow, for the soldiers unexpectedly found themselves suddenly in complete control, while the local military command was unable to do anything to suppress them.⁴⁹ On the morning of December 2, the SR leader in the Rostov regiment distributed handbills calling soldiers to a 1:00 p.m. meeting. When the commander had him and some other politically suspect soldiers arrested, the regiment mutinied spontaneously. Soldiers drove officers from the barracks (two were temporarily held hostage), elected a committee to run the regiment (with an SD chairman and an SR secretary, though most of the members were conscript NCOs, the soldiers’ natural leaders, rather than conscious revolutionaries), and posted guards to keep out officers from the garrison staff. The committee immediately set to work compiling the regiment’s demands, using the Grodno demands as a model. On this first day of the mutiny, the soldiers were enthusiastic; they expected, and received assurances of, support from other regiments. In the evening, the ranking officers of the Moscow garrison met to discuss the situation; no regimental commander would vouch that his men could be used to suppress the Rostov regiment, and many feared that the attempt would produce more mutinies. They decided to temporize and sent urgent telegrams to Petersburg begging for reinforcements.

Events on December 3 unfolded along two sharply diverging lines. Presenting their petition to the regimental commander, the committee running the Rostov regiment said that demands that went beyond the unit’s own immediate grievances would be officially communicated (they had already been published) in consort with the rest of the garrison. The Rostov committee issued an appeal to other units to remove their commanders and elect deputies for a common decision on the soldiers’ needs. On the night of the 3rd, a soldiers’ soviet, with representatives from four Grenadier regiments, three sapper battalions, a cossack regiment and all three civilian military organizations, met for the first and only time. Unit delegates reported that the garrison was in a very revolutionary mood, that it might possibly support a civilian uprising and would certainly not allow itself to be used to repress civilians.

Even as the soldiers’ soviet met, however, sentiment in the Rostov regiment turned sharply against continuation of the mutiny. News of the mutiny had brought a massive influx of civilians hailing the soldiers’ action. The civilian presence first made the soldiers nervous, then provoked hostility. The chairman of the regimental committee had to cut short some of the civilians’ speeches; soldiers rejected outright requests by the striking telegraph workers for assistance in driving telegraph officials from their offices and by worker combat squads for weapons. On the evening of the 3rd, the regimental committee promised that no more civilians would be allowed into the barracks, but the damage had been done, and a consensus developed overnight that the mutiny should be ended. The soldiers had been impressed by the promise of forthcoming reforms (the Tsar’s December 6 concessions) and by a rumor that time-expired soldiers would be demobilized as soon as the mutiny was over (this particularly affected conscript NCOs, the most influential group in the regiment). On the morning of December 4, the regimental committee tried to rally the men, but was met with shouts of “We promised not to fire at the people, why are you demanding that we go openly against the Tsar?” Thereupon, the soldiers arrested their own committee.

The mutiny of the Rostov Grenadiers was of critical importance not because it was in any major way unusual—its origins and demands, the soldiers’ animosity toward civilians and belief that they had won concessions, were quite typical—but because it came at a critical juncture: it was during the Rostov mutiny that revolutionary leaders in Moscow were deciding how (indeed, whether) to respond to government repression, in particular the arrest of the Executive Committee of the Petersburg Soviet on December 3. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks who controlled the Moscow Soviet hesitated to call for a general strike, because they were not confident that the strike would be supported in Petersburg. Indeed, because of the evident demoralization of workers in the capital, the Executive Committee of the Petersburg Soviet itself, at its last session on December 3, had decided only to make contact with revolutionary organizations elsewhere to devise a plan and appoint a date for a new general strike; this was really a decision to continue to delay confrontation by shifting responsibility, but the Petersburg SRs opposed even that. A Bolshevik emissary from Petersburg was unable on December 4 to convince the Moscow Bolsheviks that Petersburg would support a strike, and the delegates to a conference of the railway union meeting in Moscow on December 5 doubted that a new political strike would succeed. Moscow’s Bolsheviks and Mensheviks did finally conclude that they had no choice except to assume the responsibility that had fallen to them, and so called for a strike; in Moscow, only the SRs were genuinely eager to begin a general strike and insurrection (while the SR leader, Viktor Chernov, rushed to Moscow to attempt to persuade the railway union not to approve a strike). With the exception of the SRs, the Moscow revolutionaries found themselves pushed toward action they would rather have avoided.⁵⁰

Revolutionaries resolved on a strike and insurrection not just because they felt they had to do something, but also because of the Moscow mutinies and because of the militancy of the Moscow workers, which was itself fueled by the mutinies. Workers all over the city reported that soldiers were promising support (though one such promise was qualified by the request that workers please not throw any bombs). The mood of the workers was reflected in a November 30 resolution by the printers’ union: we have been reading with joy the daily accounts of regiments joining the people, and this gives the government no hope of suppressing insurrection. Other things than mutiny contributed to the workers’ determination to strike, but mutiny did indeed inspire them, and revolutionary leaders felt that they could not at this point defy the sentiments of their constituency.⁵¹

Revolutionaries were not so optimistic as workers, but they, too, believed a rising would obtain military support. As one Bolshevik later recalled, the revolutionaries convinced each other that soldiers really would join in a rising, because that was what they all hoped for.⁵² Even the collapse of the Rostov mutiny did not occasion reconsideration: civilians blamed the failure on mistakes committed by soldier revolutionaries, not on a lack of congruence between military and civilian revolutions, and they did not believe that the outcome of the Rostov mutiny had altered the garrison’s revolutionary mood. On December 4, the Moscow Soviet asserted that many units in the city were ready to join the people, and called on soldiers to take over their regiments but to wait for the workers to rise before taking to the streets. The Menshevik and Bolshevik military organizations reported to their respective party conferences on December 4 and 5 (these conferences prepared the way for the rising) that though it was not certain how much active support soldiers would provide, the infantry regiments would certainly not oppose a rising. And Viktor Chernov recalled that at the December 5 meeting of the railway union, SR, Bolshevik, and Menshevik representatives all spoke of continued support from the garrison. With all revolutionary organizations in the city agreed, and with the consent of the railway union, the Moscow Soviet on December 6 called for a general strikecum-uprising (the emphasis varied confusingly from one moment to the next) to commence on the 7th, and on the 7th the railway union proclaimed a national strike.⁵³

The apparent collapse of the Moscow garrison was not only of paramount importance in the revolutionaries’ decision to act, it also colored their thinking on the nature of an uprising. The Soviet on the 6th called, as it had on the 4th, for the soldiers to elect their own leaders, but this time asked them to join the people at once. There is every indication that this is what the revolutionaries expected to happen, and that they took this to be the culmination of the uprising; in the first few days of the strike they certainly had no plans for taking the offensive themselves. They subscribed, in short, to the view expounded in “The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ General Strike”: a strike vaster than that in October would trigger a military strike, and this would bring down the government. The revolutionaries’ inactivity gives the impression, as one Soviet historian has observed, that the revolutionaries had temporarily forgotten their call for insurrection.⁵⁴ In fact, they simply used the term loosely.

Faced with a proclaimed though strangely passive insurrection, the authorities in Moscow had to rely on the same garrison that gave the revolutionaries so much hope. It is not entirely clear how large the garrison was on December 7. There had been 17,000 men in the garrison as of November 13, but 11,000 had been in nine infantry regiments, and demobilization had reduced the strength of these regiments dramatically. A Menshevik estimate (probably that of their military organizer) was that the infantry averaged 500 to 600 men per regiment (one-third normal strength) or about 5,000 men in all, but even that may have been high. The garrison commander reported he had only 1,850 infantry to guard barracks, hold government institutions, and operate on the streets. There were probably 2,600 men in other units (principally cavalry and artillery), and 1,800 armed police, but except for the police the rest of the garrison looked to be almost as unreliable as the infantry.⁵⁵ The local command, and Admiral Dubasov after he assumed his new duties as Governor-General of Moscow on December 4, repeatedly appealed to Petersburg for reinforcements, an infantry brigade (two regiments) if possible. Petersburg, reluctant to weaken its own garrison, at first responded that it had no troops to spare and tried to placate Moscow with half of the 16th Ladoga infantry from Poland. But when the railway strike held up the Ladoga regiment, Petersburg finally gave Moscow the Semenovsk Guards infantry, one guards artillery battery, and one troop (a quarter-squadron) of Guards cavalry.⁵⁶

Until December 15, however, the Moscow garrison was on its own. Of the infantry, the authorities could rely completely only on the Astrakhan Grenadiers, whose honorary commander was the Tsar himself and who periodically received presents from members of the imperial family; men from the Astrakhan regiment provided the backbone for mixed companies formed from picked men of all units. Money, much of it donated by private citizens, was quickly found to buy the soldiers’ loyalty (the Astrakhan regiment, according to an official account, was given 500 rubles plus various payments in kind, and it was not alone) and rations (spiked liberally with vodka) were increased. Officers worked overtime spreading rumors of civilian attacks on soldiers.⁵⁷

The troops were at first sympathetic to the strike. On the 7th and 8th they talked with civilian demonstrators and even the cavalry only went through the motions of breaking up crowds; a holiday atmosphere prevailed. On the 8th the Executive Committee of the Soviet instructed workers to talk to soldiers and to avoid clashes if at all possible. (Similar instructions were delivered to partisan squads on the 11th, and one group of partisans threatened instant execution for anyone who violated this rule.) But no regiment was willing to commit itself to the revolution. The men of one regiment, “with tears in their eyes,” told a revolutionary agitator that they just could not come out openly in support of the workers, though as soon as the workers had won soldiers would join them. On December 9, the Menshevik leaders discussed holding a mass march to the barracks to bring the soldiers out; the Executive Committee of the Soviet adopted a resolution to this effect on the 10th, but the plan was abandoned on the 11th.⁵⁸ By then it was clear that soldiers were not to be won over by moral suasion.

The Menshevik military organizer reported a change in the mood of the garrison as early as the 9th, the day the first shots were exchanged between civilians and soldiers. By the 10th, barricades were going up, and artillery was being used to clear the streets in the center of the city. The nature of the rising had changed completely. On December 11, the Soviet editorialized in its Izvestiia that the fighting would so appall the soldiers that they would at last come over. In the familiar pattern, just the reverse was happening: as the first casualties were recorded among the troops (and momentarily exaggerated), soldiers performed an increasing number of bestialities upon civilians. Yet hope died hard; rumors of disturbances in the barracks (one had it that a regiment emerged playing the Marseillaise) greatly influenced the Bolsheviks’ December 12 decision to continue with the uprising.⁵⁹

On the 14th, on the other hand, a Menshevik conference decided to end the uprising because the army had not risen as expected, and the Bolshevik partisan leader called for an end to the uprising for the same reason. A rump session of the Soviet on the 15th would not hear of such defeatism (this obstinacy was fueled by new rumors of disturbances in the barracks), and even the Mensheviks would not openly opppose the apparent will of the masses. But on the night of the 15th, the Mensheviks decided to end the rising even if the Bolsheviks were opposed; the Bolsheviks came to the same decision some hours later, about the same time the SRs decided the game was lost. On the 16th, the Executive Committee of the Soviet proclaimed that the uprising would end as of the 19th.⁶⁰

The behavior of the Moscow garrison had determined the outcome of the insurrection even before the Semenovsk Guards regiment arrived on the 15th. The Semenovsk regiment did not even take the offensive until the 17th, when the rising was already over. At that point, half the regiment, after an artillery barrage, broke through the undefended barricades of the Presnia district and wreaked bloody vengeance there, the other half shot its way up and down the Moscow end of the Moscow-Kazan railway, killing approximately 150 civilians. (In Moscow itself, civilian casualties totalled approximately 700 dead and 2,000 wounded, as against 10 dead and 54 wounded among the troops.)⁶¹ But the punitive expedition was, again, largely irrelevant to the defeat of the insurrection.

That defeat was prefigured in the termination of the Rostov Grenadiers’ mutiny. The Grenadiers had refused outright to involve themselves in civilian revolution, and when civilians became too importunate had ended their mutiny. The greater pressure of insurrection— with the inevitable threat to the soldiers’ lives—turned a mutinous garrison into accomplices in repression. One may presume that the soldiers’ contradictory impulses caused them considerable psychic pain, and that many gladly took the vodka their officers proffered them precisely to stupify the demons within. Whatever their feelings, soldiers who had been thoroughly mutinous on December 2 were shooting civilians a week later. Even as they went down to defeat, revolutionaries continued to misunderstand what had occurred. In a proclamation explaining why the strike and insurrection were being brought to an end, the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet observed that defeat (not labelled as such) had resulted from the failure of the troops to join the rising, but that soldiers would not have the stomach for repression much longer. Therefore, concluded the proclamation, the armed struggle had contributed to the revolutionizing of the troops, had accelerated the indispensable and inevitable transfer of the soldiers’ allegiance.⁶²

The Provinces

Moscow was at the center of the revolution in December, not just because it experienced the heaviest fighting, but also because the appeal of the Moscow Soviet and the railway conference in Moscow for a general strike was taken up in many other cities. The factory inspectorate reported somewhat fewer workers on strike in December (over 430,000) than in October (almost 520,000), but larger numbers engaged in political strikes (about 385,000) than in any other month of 1905.⁶³ Railway workers played the premier role in December as they had in October. They were especially militant in the south, where they pushed for insurrection in the cities and themselves took control of many of the stations along the railway lines. Worker partisan groups fought soldiers in many places—December was the most violent month of the year—and the effect was everywhere the same as in Moscow: hitherto mutinous soldiers submitted to discipline and suppressed revolution.⁶⁴

The most prolonged conflict between workers and troops in European cities occurred in Rostov-on-Don.⁶⁵ The battle was lengthy because government forces were exceptionally weak. On the eve of insurrection, the Rostov garrison had disintegrated. The 196th Zaslavl infantry and the local reserve artillery battery were (as the secret police reported) “so obviously demoralized (enlisted men gathered on the streets near the barracks around revolutionary speakers)” that they were withdrawn from the city and additional cossacks brought in. Cossacks had set off a two-day pogrom in October and had employed arms against workers since, but by December even they were wavering. On December 4 a delegation of six cossacks expressed solidarity with the workers’ soviet, on the 5th the cossack delegates were arrested, and on the 6th the largely cossack garrison in protest refused to march in honor of the Tsar and the reforms officially announced that day. When the general strike began, then, local authorities had at their disposal one artillery battery, one company of infantry, and four cossack squadrons, but none of these units could be trusted. For their part, revolutionaries had a militia of 300 to 400 workers armed mostly with revolvers.

On December 7, the Rostov soviet and the local branch of the railroad union declared a strike in support of Moscow. Local authorities panicked, arresting twelve revolutionary leaders then releasing them on the soviet’s demand. The two highest civilian officials in the city reported sick and fled. Colonel Makeev, commander of the garrison and the only prominent official remaining, proclaimed martial law and began recruiting volunteers at 40 rubles a month from nearby cossack villages. Military operations began on December 10, when troops made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to break up a public meeting. During the next few days, workers mounted patrols at intersections and soldiers left them alone. On the 13th, the workers attacked the train station—that is, they marched in in such numbers that the infantry on duty were overwhelmed. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the workers, the soldiers disobeyed an order to fire and were withdrawn. Colonel Makeev ordered the station retaken, and for the next six days the fighting centered on the station and nearby barricades. On the 13th and 14th the station was subjected to artillery bombardment and retaken. On the 14th, cossacks and infantry attacked the barricades but were driven back. On the 15th, the workers’ militia recaptured the station, driving out a company of infantry and a squadron of cossacks, and the artillery bombardment resumed. As of December 16, hospitals reported 113 wounded and twenty-eight killed, though casualties were certainly much higher. One officer and six enlisted men had been wounded.

In the course of the fighting, the mood of the garrison turned dramatically. Driven from the station on the 13th more by moral suasion than by force of arms, the soldiers were embittered by the few casualties they had subsequently sustained at civilian hands. The secret police reported that “the troops, police, and especially the cossacks are terribly enraged against the revolutionaries.” Cossacks were particularly outraged by bombs (which killed one of their number), and though they shied away from barricades they beat and robbed passers-by and fired at will on open streets. Military operations, suspended on the 17th and 18th because of dense fog, resumed on the 19th. On the 20th, artillery (just reinforced) again shelled the station, railway shops, and barricades; infantry and cossacks then advanced in proper military fashion, recaptured the station and broke through the barricades. As in Moscow, liberal use of artillery and a few squadrons of formerly mutinous but now enraged cossacks had crushed the insurrection.

In a number of other cities—Nizhnii Novgorod, Perm, Novorossiisk— worker uprisings followed much the same pattern as in Rostov. In Nizhnii Novgorod, after the demobilization of reserves from the mutinous 307th Arzamas infantry and the 1st reserve artillery brigade, the garrison amounted to only 100 cossacks and about thirty infantry in excess of those guarding public buildings. The local governor quite naturally panicked, even providing arms for a voluntary right-wing militia (which workers forthwith dispersed). Nevertheless, the 100 cossacks, once given artillery support, broke up the workers’ barricades and put down the rising.⁶⁶ In Novorossiisk, the garrison had literally vanished when the 16th Kuban plastoon battalion and the 2nd Urup Kuban cossack regiment set off homeward. The local commander, with a little more than one cossack squadron left at his command, took refuge in the railway station until a punitive expedition of cossacks and artillery and a battleship appeared simultaneously on December 25. With artillery trained on the city from the surrounding hills, and knowing that the risings elsewhere were over, the workers gave in without a fight.⁶⁷

Garrisons were not everywhere so minuscule, but more units meant more mutinies, and local commanders generally feared to bring their soldiers into action. In Ekaterinoslav, where soldiers had taken enthusiastic part in the October pogrom, mutinies in three infantry regiments and a cossack squadron so shook the confidence of the authorities that they feared to move against the workers (who had set up barricades in their district but did not attempt to extend their control over the rest of the city); indeed, unrest continued in the infantry until mid-December. By the time reinforcements arrived from Sevastopol on December 18, the workers had learned that the Moscow rising had been defeated and had ended the strike on their own.⁶⁸ In Kharkov, elements of four infantry regiments had mutinied and marched through the city on November 23. At a conference of unit commanders following that shattering event, only commanders of the cossacks and of one infantry regiment (which had arrived in town on November 23, making it the fifth) could vouch that their men would fire if the workers rose. Apprised of the revolutionaries’ plans by an informer, the command decided to test the garrison by surrounding the lesser of two groups of worker militia. On December 12, that worker band was trapped in a factory by elements of three infantry and one cossack regiment and subjected to desultory artillery fire. When the larger workers’ militia rushed to their comrades’ aid and charged firing across an open square, the soldiers turned withering fire on the workers, inflicting well over 150 casualties.⁶⁹

The Caucasus

The situation in the Caucasus was comparable to that in the Baltic provinces, with the difference that reliable troops did not pour into the region at the end of the year; the local command had to contend with revolution with the units already at hand—and those among the most mutinous anywhere in the empire. Georgian peasants and mountaineers of many nationalities had been fighting a partisan war against the army since late 1904, and counterinsurgency sweeps organized from Tiflis had failed dismally to pacify the country. After publication of the October Manifesto, the authorities lost control over most of the rural districts. Additionally, twenty-eight of the forty-six infantry regiments and battalions in the Caucasus military district mutinied, as did three of the six cavalry regiments and twelve of the twenty-nine cossack regiments and battalions. The mutineers included three of the four regiments of the 33rd infantry division, originally mobilized for service in the Far East but sent instead to the Caucasus after the end of the war (the 33rd division had arrived by September), and three of the six plastoon battalions called up after the October Manifesto.⁷⁰ In late October and early November, General Vorontsov-Dashkov, Imperial Viceroy for the Caucasus, sent telegram after telegram begging for yet more reinforcements, to which the Ministry of War responded that uncommitted units were not to be had. Indeed, the Ministry ordered Vorontsov-Dashkov to send some of his troops outside the district (Vorontsov refused, pleading mutiny). During the weeks of the Viceroy’s travail (twice he begged to be allowed to resign), the Tsar and his ministers informed him that they expected decisive and ruthless action against revolutionaries.⁷¹

At the end of the year, national and racial passions, which lent the revolution in the Caucasus anarchic fury, had very nearly swept away the imperial administration and thereby created the setting for mutiny, consumed the revolution itself. Native attacks on military patrols had enraged soldiers before October 17, and the soldiers’ animosity toward the native population continued to mount thereafter; even mutinous units would as soon do violence to civilians as not. The liberal governor of Kutais Province reported that the men “burned with impatience to carry out the order” to wreak vengeance upon rebellious natives. Often, in fact, the men did not await orders: between November 27 and 30, small cossack units attacked civilians in four separate incidents in Kutais Province. Men from the unhappy 33rd division, used in the eastern Caucasus principally to restore movement on the railway, were involved in constant, often violent, clashes with passengers and local officials; when quartered in cities, they took whatever they wanted without paying.⁷²

Throughout the Caucasus, garrisons shifted loyalties abruptly. The garrison in Batum mutinied in the middle of November, but on November 28 civilians disarmed a cossack and men from his regiment rushed to the local bazaar and whipped and bayoneted everyone who fell into their hands. Within fifteen minutes, seven civilians were dead, and four subsequently died of their wounds. Civilians thereupon erected barricades, a bomb was tossed at some infantry, and the latter, too, joined the fray, shooting indiscriminately. Civilians dismantled the barricades under threat of bombardment from the fortress, and over the next several days soldiers broke into houses and executed on the spot those found with guns.⁷³ In the city of Kutais, also the scene of a mid-November mutiny, cossacks issued from their barracks at night for plunder and pillage. Such incidents goaded natives into erecting barricades on November 27 and 28, and that together with native attacks on small units in the surrounding districts in early December inflamed the entire garrison.⁷⁴ In Tiflis, where most units (including cavalry) had taken part in mass revolutionary meetings and a mob march in late November, military authorities by playing on racial animosities and natives by attacking isolated soldiers turned the garrison around. Large numbers of troops reconquered the city’s native working class districts in the third week of December.⁷⁵

By the end of the year, most units in the Caucasus were acting as voluntary, if ill-disciplined, counterinsurgency forces, terrorizing civilians in the vicinity of their garrisons. The numerous special punitive expeditions put into operation in the rural districts in late December and early January were no less eager for blood, and they were all authorized to destroy villages at the slightest hint of resistance. Artillery was employed as a matter of course to announce the arrival of a detachment, levies were extracted from villages under threat of bombardment, and cossacks were given free rein for pillage, arson, and rape. Most of these punitive expeditions defy precise description because they were little more than bands of heavily armed men gone officially berserk. The fact that many of the units involved had recently mutinied merely contributed to the fury.⁷⁶

The one exception to this pattern was the well-managed expedition led by Colonel Liakhov in early January against the Ossetians, who in the middle of December had plundered the estates of intruding Russian and Georgian gentry and had destroyed some factories for good measure. Liakhov’s force included two artillery batteries, two companies of the 84th Shirvansk infantry (another part of the regiment had mutinied), three companies of the 18th Kuban plastoons, three companies of the 250th Akhulginsk infantry (which had mutinied), and one squadron each from three Terek cossack regiments (one of which had mutinied). Since all but the cossack units were under strength, the expedition probably totalled 300 infantry, 300 plastoons, and 300 mounted cossacks, plus the artillery. The detachment followed a set ritual: artillery was trained on a village; Liakhov then demanded that arms, stolen property, and brigands be handed over and that an agreement for the immediate payment of fines (of up to 36,000 rubles) be signed; when these demands were not instantly met, a few rounds of artillery induced hysteria and abject capitulation. Official reports claimed that the artillery was not fired directly at the villages, but at Magometanskoe shrapnel wounded sixteen Ossetians, some fatally. There may well have been other such cases; shrapnel was certainly meant to do more than inspire fear. In two weeks, the expedition extorted agreements for the payment by thirteen villages of 234,750 rubles in fines, destroyed dozens of houses, burned one school, formally executed three natives, slaughtered a great many cattle, and arrested up to 1,500 persons (most of whom were soon released because there was no place to detain them). In addition, the detachment collected 1, 112 rubles per day in maintenance from the villages along its line of march. An official order congratulated the soldiers for suppressing the Ossetians “practically without bloodshed.”⁷⁷

As a matter of fact, only prolonged bloodletting maintained Russian hegemony in the Caucasus. One can do no more than guess at total casualties, but the punitive expeditions alone must have produced in the range of three or more thousand. Mopping up operations lasted well into 1906 (punitive forces were still being sent into the hinterland of Kutais Province in March) because of the rugged terrain. As in the Baltic, the forces involved were sizeable, though drawn mostly from the large permanent garrisons and not nearly so well coordinated as in the northwest. For insurance, the 33rd division was held in the Caucasus until the end of 1906.⁷⁸

What one learns from the lengthy chronicle of violence in December 1905 is that the perpetration of violence on a very large scale was the sole reason for the survival of the Tsarist regime: military repression alone preserved Tsarist rule in the Caucasus, in Moscow, Rostov, Kharkov and other Russian cities, as well as in the Baltic provinces, Siberia, and the central agricultural region. The more significant implication of the December events is that escalation of the level of violence delivered to the regime the armed force necessary to make a policy of repression effective. Suppressing ill-armed civilian insurgents required relatively few men: a few thousand in Moscow, a few hundred in Rostov and Nizhnii Novgorod, a thousand or so against the entire Ossetian nation. However, in early December the regime did not have that small force. By late November, the regime, if it were to survive, had no choice except to demand of its servitors the application of brute force. Yet if the ministers in Petersburg were confident, or at least refused to allow themselves to doubt, that repression would work, officials on the spot were very uncertain, as were Dubasov in Moscow and Vorontsov-Dashkov in Tiflis, who reported the utter unreliability of their troops and begged for reinforcements, the commanders in Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav, so shaken that they hesitated to take action against insurgents, and the officials who fled Rostov. It was, indeed, the obvious disintegration of the Tsarist armed forces that gave revolutionaries confidence, or at least hope, that they could turn the regime’s counteroffensive to their own advantage. Revolutionaries—in the Russian heartland, at any rate—understood the need not to provoke soldiers, but once barricades went up casualties were inevitable and the soldiers’ response predictable.

Soldiers themselves were aware of the way in which civilian violence acted on them, and so—as in Moscow—asked workers not to throw bombs. What they were incapable of doing was making allowances for the pressure that drove civilians to do them injury. The men of the 165th Lutsk infantry, which had mutinied twice in Kharkov and, according to an official report, on December 12 fired at workers at the railway shops only with great reluctance (apparently they at first refused), sent a message to the Kharkov Social Democratic Federative Council after the shooting:

Is it true that the workers burned the trunks of the men of the Lutsk regiment at the station, and that they were incited to do this? Was this really an act of revenge? If so, let them know that they have gained in the person of the soldiers the fiercest enemies, and that the soldiers’ vengeance will know no limits. Let the workers absolve themselves, and the soldiers will stand on their side with all their heart.⁷⁹

The mutinous Lutsk regiment did not shun contact with revolutionaries and at least held out the possibility of friendship with workers once the violence had abated. Other mutinous regiments whose behavior conformed more closely to the determined self-isolation of the soldiers’ revolution must have been less reluctant to engage civilians once the first shot had been fired. And it was the psychology and behavior of the 165th and scores of other mutinous and nearly mutinous regiments that determined the fate of the regime: they, and not the few handpicked units in the punitive expeditions operating on the periphery of the empire, suppressed revolution when and where it mattered.

Collapse of the Soldiers’ Revolution: Perceptions of Authority

The December violence, as important as it was in cutting short mutiny and mutinous inclinations, was only a part of the changing environment that brought the soldiers’ revolution to an end. The regime’s determination to repress civilians did not, for instance, ensure that soldiers would leave their barracks and expose themselves to civilian anger. One of the more frequent demands that mutinous units made was that they not be deployed against civilians, and mutineers sought to isolate themselves in their barracks. The 165th Lutsk, when mutinying in November, had refused to send patrols into the city, yet on December 12 it left the barracks, even if with reluctance and even if its companies were interspersed with units in which the authorities placed more trust.⁸⁰ By the time they left the barracks, the men of the 165th Lutsk had ceased to be mutinous, though it was as yet uncertain that they would obey an order to fire. Between November 23, when they had marched with three other regiments through the center of Kharkov, and December 12, something had led them to concede some authority to their officers. There were, moreover, many cities, such as Ekaterinoslav, in which mutinous units were not involved in gunplay at all and nevertheless returned to discipline. Even absent the tonic of violence, in other words, soldiers in December concluded that they must cease to mutiny and must obey their officers.

Cities in which soldiers were not influenced even by a potential of violence were not numerous, but Piatigorsk in the Caucasus was one, and the behavior of the 250th Akhulginsk reserve battalion presents as pure a case as can be found of how soldiers reacted to information that bore on the authority of the regime and of their officers. The Akhulginsk battalion, which provided the bulk of the Piatigorsk garrison (there were also two artillery batteries and a half squadron of cossacks in the city), mutinied on November 17, apparently under the influence of mutinies in other garrisons in the region and in response to civilian invitation to attend a mass meeting. The battalion marched twice through Piatigorsk, elected two sergeants as battalion and garrison commanders, freed some soldiers from the guardhouse, presented a petition of thirty-two demands, refused to have any contact with officers until their demands were met, and drew up a “Provisional Disciplinary Code” for the duration of the mutiny. Except for the code, the mutiny of the Akhulginsk battalion, which spread to the local artillerists, was typical of mutinies in the second half of November. Typically, too, on November 28 the corps commander met a number of the Akhulginsk demands.⁸¹

By early December, the Akhulginsk battalion was no longer formally in a state of mutiny; soldiers had resumed drill and had returned to their posts at the local bank. But the battalion was of no use to the authorities. In December, telegraph and railroad strikes isolated Piatigorsk from the outside world, and local authorities lost control of the city to a revolutionary Committee of Self-Defense. The soldiers kept to themselves, assisting neither revolutionaries nor the authorities. The only good word that the regional gendarme chief had for the Akhulgintsy in a report written on December 21 was that they had not yet handed over any weapons to civilians. On December 22, cossack villagers recruited by officials for a counterinsurgency detachment went to the Akhulginsk barracks to obtain weapons, but the soldiers refused to provide any, and fired on the cossacks when it appeared that they were about to attack. At that point the Akhulginsk battalion considered providing weapons to the Committee of Self-Defense, but in the end decided not to. Throughout the weeks of Piatigorsk’s isolation, the Akhulgintsy behaved as though through mutiny they had acquired the right to make the key decisions affecting the disposition of the unit. Again, this was typical of soldier behavior in the aftermath of mutiny, as was the battalion’s disinclination to become directly involved in civil conflict. What was unusual was the duration of Akhulginsk self-rule, and that was a result of Piatigorsk’s isolation and the absence of information that could undercut the soldiers’ belief in their right to order their own affairs. The soldiers’ self-assurance collapsed only when the first newspapers from the outside arrived on December 24 and they learned that the government was everywhere mopping up the revolution. Acting under no local compulsion but anticipating that the old order would eventually be restored in Piatigorsk as well, on December 26 the Akhulgintsy confiscated weapons from civilians. On December 28, they marched with a band to greet a cossack detachment arriving at the train station. Within a few days, the Akhulginsk battalion was taking part in Colonel Liakhov’s march through Ossetia.⁸²

In Piatigorsk, the soldiers’ revolution ended abruptly on December 24 because its basic premise had been invalidated. The soldiers’ assumption that the old social and military fabric had been rent irreparably on October 17, an assumption apparently confirmed by the success of the November mutiny and acted on through most of December, was shown to be badly in error. Of course, for soldiers in Piatigorsk to end their revolution on December 24 was a matter of prudence and common sense. Nevertheless, the behavior of the Akhulginsk battalion establishes how soldiers responded to clear evidence of government authority when no other factors were involved. Had government action not convinced the 250th Akhulginsk and other mutinous regiments of the continued vitality of the Tsarist regime, the soldiers’ revolution might have persisted indefinitely.

Outside of Piatigorsk, it is difficult to identify precisely what information was decisive in influencing soldier behavior, or to disentangle the impact on soldiers of signals about government authority on the one hand from the threat of civilian violence on the other, especially because the reassertion of regime authority prompted civilian insurrection. Nevertheless, it can be said that the decline of mutiny—from eighty-six instances in the second half of November to fifty in the first half of December to a mere sixteen in the second half of December—coincided with the development of the regime’s counteroffensive: from the suppression of public sector unions, to the arrest of the chairman and then the executive committee of the Petersburg Soviet, to the proclamation of martial law, to the demand that rebellious peasants and insurgent workers be destroyed, to the destruction itself. The accumulating evidence of regime authority, to the extent that soldiers were aware of it, must cumulatively have had the same effect that the news arriving in Piatigorsk on December 24 had on the 250th Akhulginsk. Not just violence, but the regime’s commitment to violence sobered mutinous and indisciplined units. As the regime regained control over more units, commitment turned to deed, and news of repression accelerated the restoration of discipline.

TABLE V-1. Biweekly Totals of Mutinies, October 18-December 31, 1905, by Region

One gets a clearer view of the impact on soldiers of signals about regime authority by tracing the decline of the soldiers’ revolution regionally, because the harder regime policy did not become effective everywhere at the same time. The virtual absence of mutinies in Central Asia after mid-November was a preview of the effect that unambiguous determination to suppress revolution had on the soldiers’ behavior. A mutiny at the Tashkent fortress in mid-November was repressed by force, and after that the Turkestan military district command used the troops at hand to send small punitive detachments to restore order in cities whose garrisons were mutinous or otherwise unusable.⁸³ In and around Petersburg, in the Russian heartland, in Poland, and in the Baltic provinces, the soldiers’ revolution was over by the first week in December. These were all areas in which the government’s policy of repression had by then been put into effect or where its intent was well known. The precipitous decline of mutinies around the capital and in central Russia coincided with the well-advertised events in Petersburg and with operations against the Russian peasantry. In Poland, where martial law was in effect between October 29 and November 17, and where the very large body of troops was freely (if not successfully) deployed to maintain order, there was only one mutiny through November 15. When martial law was lifted and troops kept a lower profile, there was a surge of civilian disorders and, simultaneously, of disaffection in the Polish garrisons. Renewed application of military force at the very end of November cut short the soldiers’ revolution in Poland.⁸⁴ In the Baltic, where martial law was also proclaimed in late November, reconquest of the provinces had to await the arrival of reinforcements from Petersburg. While soldiers may have been impressed by the authorities’ stern proclamations, their passivity in early December is more likely attributable to the fact that by then they were effectively under siege.

The soldiers’ revolution persisted precisely where the least information about government policy was available and where local authorities were themselves unable to take any action to restore civil order. In the Ukraine and Belorussia, the authorities were generally indecisive because they were unable to mount punitive operations—the number of reliable troops was quite small—while the December railroad and telegraph strikes prevented soldiers from obtaining a clear view of what was happening elsewhere; judging from what they could see around themselves in the first half of December, soldiers had good reason to conclude that civil authority was still in a state of disarray, and so their revolution continued unabated. By the middle of December, reports arriving from the rest of Russia produced the usual effect on soldiers.⁸⁵ In Siberia, the soldiers’ revolution spread from the large to the small garrisons in early December, but began to end after mid-month because communications had been partially restored and the evacuation of the field army from Manchuria was at last proceeding smoothly. In the Caucasus, the number of new mutinies fell somewhat in the first half of December, but as in Piatigorsk many units that had mutinied in late November remained indisciplined into December, and the complete isolation of much of the Caucasus until late December meant that many soldiers had no reason to conclude that the authority of the regime had been restored. In the Caucasus, those units that reverted to discipline before late December generally did so because of the conflicts with natives.

The overarching reason for the end of the soldiers’ revolution was that the government’s determination to restore civil order altered the soldiers’ perception of the regime’s authority. The message got through at different times in different places, but when it did the soldiers’ reaction was everywhere the same: mutinies ceased abruptly, and soldiers joined in the extirpation of civilian revolution. Armed conflict between soldiers and civilians had in some garrisons a more immediate impact than did the signals the regime was broadcasting, but the fighting itself became one more piece of information for soldiers to consider. As the annual report of the Petersburg military district for 1905 observed complacently, “Resolute action was reflected well in the morale and spirit of the troops—it destroyed all hesitation among them and eliminated any thought that it was possible to violate their oath and not do their duty.”⁸⁶

If the behavior of any one regiment is considered in isolation, it does not seem particularly remarkable that evidence of the regime’s continuing authority should have brought soldiers to heel. Soldiers risked their lives if they miscalculated the power their officers had over them. It had taken evidence of an extraordinary collapse of the social order to free soldiers from their fear of punishment. It only required uncertainty about the extent of their officers’ authority for soldiers to conclude that they must submit to discipline, at least until the outcome of the revolution was clear. No doubt it was that uncertainty that carried the men of the 165th Lutsk infantry onto the streets of Kharkov on December 12, as it was trepidation that kept the previously mutinous Grenadier regiments in their barracks during the first days of the Moscow insurrection.

But mutinous regiments were not acting alone: they knew about other mutinies in their own garrisons and in garrisons across the empire, and they knew that soldiers everywhere had the same vision of an equitable military order as they. Soldiers did not conclude from this knowledge, as they could have, that they had the power to get what they wanted. They had mutinied in the first place when they convinced themselves they had authorization to implement their own conception of a just military society; they ceased to mutiny when they saw a resurgence of traditional authority. In both cases, their behavior betrayed their dependence upon external authority. Had soldiers not been so sensitive to what government action implied about the structure of authority in society and army, had they continued mutinous in the face of the regime’s commitment to repression, the Tsarist regime could not have survived.

The psychological underpinning of mutiny was thus extraordinarily fragile, but the eruption of indiscipline and mutiny after October 17 was evidence of a gross and enduring disparity between what soldiers had normally to endure and their notion of justice. By the same token, so sweeping a rejection of the structure of military society indicates how deeply repressed were the soldiers’ instinctive desires under ordinary circumstances. The thoroughness with which the soldiers’ desires were repressed—by those who controlled them, of course, but more importantly by themselves—accounts for the explosive collapse of discipline once the psychological constraints on mutiny had been removed. So long as the tension between reality and desire (even unconscious desire) was not relieved, there was potential for another explosion. The collapse of the soldiers’ revolution in December 1905 was no guarantee that if circumstances once again gave soldiers the psychological space for mutiny they might not once more threaten the existence of the Tsarist regime.

* That is, regiments of the second and third lines. Formally, these were not reserves but units of cossacks on extended leave.