VII “These Words Pleased Us Very Much”: Soldiers and Politics

Mutinies recurred in the army in the summer of 1906 on about the same scale as in late 1905. The available documentation, however, is too heavily dependent on military sources and provides an incomplete picture of the upheaval. In 1906 as in 1905, commanders shirked reporting mutinies because they were subject to court-martial and possible dismissal from service if their units mutinied.¹ They sought to minimize the extent of disorders and as in 1905 acquiesced in the demands of mutineers or to the best of their ability ignored mutiny in the hope that it would go away or could be depicted as a trivial misunderstanding. Reports from unit commanders forwarded to the Ministry of War yield information on only ninety or so mutinies between October 17 and the end of 1905; it is from reports filed by gendarmes (a principal source) and civilian officials, and from carefully sifted newspaper accounts, that we can establish that there were at least 211 mutinies in those two and one-half months. In 1906, reports of 104 mutinies reached the Ministry of War through military channels.² Police sources again provide information on additional mutinies, but in 1906 most mutinies occurred in the summer, when many units were in rural encampments far from the eyes of the watchful gendarmes, and serving under conditions that made it especially easy for commanders to cover up mutiny. Nor was newspaper coverage adequate in 1906: while some papers managed to report on events in local garrisons, there were provinces, particularly in the important Vilna, Warsaw, and Kiev military districts, where censorship kept almost all information on the army out of the press. Newspapers in Petersburg and Moscow carried reports from the provinces, but are poor compensation for the dearth of local sources on the garrisons in the west. There are authoritative if vague references to disturbances in the garrisons in these districts, but only in a few cases has there been enough information to be certain that the disturbances were genuine mutinies and to identify the units involved.³

Still, there is adequate documentation, mostly from official sources, of 202 mutinies (of which forty involved more than one unit) in 1906.* Judging from official reports that list, without date or detail, units in which there were “disturbances,” and about which no other information is available, the number of mutinies in 1906 was probably on the order of 240 to 250.⁴ The figure of 202 mutinies that will be used here is based on the same conservative enumeration of “mutinous events” as was applied to the mutinies of late 1905, and on a reasonably conservative evaluation of the sources. There were, for instance, frequent reports that small detachments had refused to fire at or otherwise disperse worker and peasant mobs. Such incidents are difficult to confirm (newspapers being a particularly suspect source in this case), but twenty-three mutinies of that type can be verified from official sources. Given the volume of newspaper accounts, there were probably twice that many.

Even the set of 202 mutinies yields remarkable rates of incidence. Most mutinies—153 of the 202 (thirty-seven of the forty involving more than one unit)—occurred during the Duma months, April through July. There were mutinies in at least sixty-six (but probably as many as eighty) of the 271 line and reserve infantry regiments (which were garrisoned in Europe), and in eleven of the forty-four Siberian infantry and East Siberian rifle regiments. When all types of infantry are counted (Guards, Grenadier, Finland rifles, and so forth), about 22 percent of all units mutinied. There were mutinies in almost 60 percent of the technical units, better than 25 percent of the cossack regiments, 13 percent of all artillery brigades, and 6 percent of line and Guards cavalry regiments.⁵ Overall, the incidence of mutiny in 1906 was somewhat lower than in late 1905, but still quite high for a year in which revolution is supposed to have been over. And of course, these are not only conservative figures, just as for 1905 they do not measure the full extent of military disaffection. There were at least as many units in 1906 as in 1903 in which discipline disintegrated without formal mutiny occurring, and in contradistinction to 1903 these indisciplined units included the Guards. In 1906, it was more difficult to find a reliable core within the disaffected mass.

The association of the second round of the soldiers’ revolution with the meeting of the Duma is clear. The twelve mutinies in January were the last gasp of the Year 1905, as were the strikes and manor-burnings of that month. Mutinies then trailed off to virtually nothing, though it is only because of the high standards for disorder set in 1905 that fifteen mutinies in three months appear insignificant. Full-scale military rebellion resumed in May and continued through July. The cycle of mutinies corresponded exactly to the cycle of peasant rebellion, as had been true in 1905 as well. What was very different from 1905 was that peasant and soldier rebellion did not rise and fall in the trail of strikes: in 1906, urban disorders did not prompt peasants and soldiers to rebel (nor could that be the explanation, since urban disorders were minimal). It was, rather, the Duma itself that was the focal point of peasant and soldier rebellion, both because of the extended debates on land redistribution, and because of the way the Duma altered soldiers’ and peasants’ perceptions of authority.

TABLE VII-1. Strikes, Peasant Disorders, and Mutinies, 1906

SOURCES: For peasant and worker disorders, Dubrovskii, Krest’iatiskoe dvizhenie p. 42; for mutinies, Appendix II.

Soldiers and the Duma

No sooner had the Tsar delivered a noncommittal salutation to the assembled deputies to the Duma on April 27—with several thousand courtiers, generals, and officials in full regalia gawking at the bearded peasant deputies—than Duma and regime were deadlocked. The Duma adopted overwhelmingly an address to the Tsar setting forth the Kadet program: political amnesty, an end to political persecution, civil liberties, universal suffrage, expropriation of land for distribution to peasants, and a ministry responsible to the Duma. Prime Minister Goremykin delivered the cabinet’s response in person: private property was inviolable, the other elements in the Duma’s address concerned the fundamental laws of the empire and were thus outside the Duma’s purview, and the government would oppose all measures that threatened society and state. The Duma thereupon called for the cabinet’s resignation and replacement by ministers who enjoyed the Duma’s confidence.

After some consideration, the regime decided not to dismiss the Duma but, as Foreign Minister Izvolskii observed, to boycott it.⁶ Though the Duma could adopt legislation only if the government failed for thirty days to respond to a request for a bill, the government presented very few bills, and those trivial: the first submitted, on May 15, concerned the authorization of private schools and appropriations for a laundry and greenhouse at Dorpat University. Goremykin not only refused to have anything to do with the Duma, he did not permit even the Council of Ministers to have a program; he convened the council only three times in May and five in June, and he informed the ministers that whatever their opinions might be he would do nothing without the Tsar’s express command. The Duma filled the void with interpellations (391 in all during its brief life) accusing the regime of lawless acts, and defiantly framed legislation that the regime was pledged to reject. The government’s obvious disdain for the Duma infuriated even those moderates who had hoped to cooperate with the regime, and ministers who appeared before the Duma were met with cries of “Resign! Resign!”⁷

There may have been, as Roberta Manning has recently suggested and as many revolutionaries suspected at the time, hope for compromise on most issues—the Kadets who set the tone in the Duma in its first weeks blunted some of their demands, Goremykin indicated a willingness to consider some secondary reforms—but there could be no agreement on land reform, the principal topic on the Duma’s agenda.⁸ The government repeatedly stated its refusal to countenance expropriation, and recommended instead the conversion of communal into private holdings and measures to facilitate peasant land purchases; Prime Minister Goremykin had said before his appointment that if the Duma advocated expropriation it should be dismissed. Yet the sentiment of the Duma was clear: private land must be expropriated. The Kadets called for the expropriation of state and church land and of as much gentry land as required to satisfy peasant needs (basically, the land peasants already rented), with peasants paying for the land they used. Kadets understood that they could not count on popular support for the Duma unless they promised peasants land, but the modesty of their offering cost them the support of the large bloc of peasant deputies, 20 to 25 percent of the Duma, who formed the Trudovik Group (80 percent of whom actually were peasants by origin). Willing to follow the Kadets’ lead on most issues, the Trudoviks denounced the Kadet land program as a poor imitation of the Emancipation, and 104 of them called for the expropriation of all private land above that which a household could farm on its own (the “labor [trudovaia] norm”), with perhaps minimal compensation to be paid by the government; peasants themselves would determine locally the size of allotments and the amount (if any) of compensation gentry were to receive. A minority of thirty-three Trudoviks offered the SR program: abolition of all private property in land and its distribution on an egalitarian basis. To Kadet objections that the complete elimination of gentry estates would destroy the source of culture and civilization in the villages, a peasant deputy responded: “This culture is needed only by gentlemen, who use it to get money from the labor of the poor.”⁹ Messages poured in from the villages reminding the deputies what peasants had sent them to obtain. Kadets could not carry the Duma on the land question, yet the Kadet program was itself unacceptable to the government.¹⁰

Though it would not yield, the regime nevertheless hesitated to take action against the Duma, and indecision provided an opening for revolution. The extended debate on land reform was published, summarized, and commented upon at length in the press, and followed eagerly by peasants. Peasants sent messages and delegations to express support for expropriation, chiefly in the Trudovik version, and Trudovik deputies dispatched letters to their constituents explaining the conflict with the regime; a few Trudoviks even toured the provinces. Peasants asked their deputies to intercede in disputes with gentry, and took action themselves—declaring strikes, forcing their own terms on landlords, using gentry land as their own—in the firm belief that they were doing what the Duma would wish them to do. Given the sentiment in the Duma, peasants scarcely needed to fabricate fictive authorization for land seizures; in the months the Duma met, peasant disorders— especially impressive because they were orderly—reached the same volume as in the frightening fall of 1905 (see Tables IV-1 and VII-1).¹¹

Short of dissolving the Duma, the government did not know how to bring the disorders to an end, and fear of an even greater explosion should the Duma be dismissed was one major reason for the government’s irresolution. The Ministry of Interior ordered police to prevent the public reading of letters from Duma deputies, to intercept peasant telegrams to the Duma, and to stamp out agrarian rebellion at its inception, but to no avail. And it was not just peasants whom the Duma aroused. The anger of the deputies spilled over into the cities, too, and governors informed Minister of Interior Stolypin that the debates in the Duma were regenerating the revolutionary excitement that the December fighting had almost extinguished, and that even provincial officials were becoming rebellious. The regime, reported the governors, was being discredited, everyone looked to the Duma for direction, while the government’s passivity in the face of the onslaught from the Duma paralyzed local authorities.¹² Once again, irresolution had spread from the capital to the provinces.

Like peasants, soldiers invested enormous hope in the Duma, and had done so long before the Duma met. In late October 1905 the mutinous Sveaborg artillerists demanded that peasant deputies to the Duma draw up new military regulations to replace those “compiled and signed by Generals, Colonels, and Captains,” in November the mutinous 1st Transcaspian railway battalion pledged to support the demands of the Duma, and during the November insurrection in Sevastopol the crew of the battleship Panteleimon (née Potemkin) decided not to press their demands but to wait until the Duma met before requiring satisfaction.¹³ Once the Duma gathered, the impatient anticipation that swept the villages mounted in the army, too. As Vorontsov-Dashkov, Imperial Viceroy for the Caucasus, reported, “interest in the historic events transpiring in the empire is so great and has so strong a grip” on the nation that it was impossible to “isolate the troops from the influence of the mood and dominant tendencies” of the civilian population.¹⁴

The Duma debates on land reform transfixed the soldiers, and they followed the debates closely. The secret police reported from Voronezh in June that soldiers

are beginning to reason that they are all peasants and shouldn’t go against their own, they are talking about the possibility of disobeying orders, about refusing to fire.

Moreover, the enlisted men are deeply interested in the debates in the Duma and throw themselves upon newspapers that come into their hands, especially newspapers of an extreme tendency.¹⁵

Vorontsov-Dashkov, too, noted the impact of newspaper reports on soldiers, and commanders everywhere reported that the debates in the Duma were having an “extremely pernicious” effect on their men. A corps commander observed that soldiers in Vladikavkaz were not only fully informed about the programs of the parties in the Duma, they were able to quote “entire tirades by Trudovik speakers, as well as statements by the ministers.”¹⁶

Speeches from the rostrum of the Duma posed a special problem for the authorities, because no matter how subversive they could not be censored. In at least one unit the commander forbade soldiers to read any newspaper other than the government’s Pravitel’skii vestnik, and in another furious officers burned newspapers containing speeches by Duma deputies.¹⁷ These angry gestures eliminated neither the Duma nor the flow of information into the barracks and could only have demonstrated to the soldiers how fearful their officers were. Yet the high command’s more reasoned response—to attempt to refute the arguments for expropriation—was equally futile. Officers were ordered to hold special discussions on the Duma, and officers and the new official newspapers for soldiers explained carefully that the government could not afford to divest itself of all state lands and that the sanctity of private property must be respected. Soldiers were no more impressed by such arguments than were the peasant deputies in the Duma.¹⁸

Far more persuasive than anything their officers had to say were the letters that soldiers received from home. Peasants wrote of the threat of hunger and crop failure, the depredations of cossacks and rural police, and the need to support the Duma. The men of the Preobrazhensk Guards regiment received letters commanding them (as an officer summarized the message) not to go against the people’s “emissaries”: “We have sent them to get land, so you defend them.”¹⁹ The number of reports of soldiers in garrisons all over the empire receiving these instructions is sufficient to warrant the conclusion that the phenomenon was well-nigh universal. Peasants, who had good reason to understand the army’s role in maintaining the existing social order, appear to have rushed spontaneously to protect the Duma by subverting the army. All reports agree that these letters caused a tremendous stir among the soldiers. If they had for any reason forgotten their peasant origins, their parents reminded them of it, and of the duty of solidarity with kith and kin.

The intensity of the soldiers’ support for the Duma not only overwhelmed officers, it had as well a marked impact on the revolutionary military organizations. The military organizations initially sought to dispel the illusions soldiers had about the Duma. Bolshevik and SR military organizations followed the party line in their hostility to the Duma, but Menshevik military organizations were equally hostile and attempted— as did the Menshevik Moscow military organization, with reasoning identical to that of the Bolshevik military organization in Moscow—to persuade soldiers that the Duma was meant only to help the government obtain a loan from European bankers and to assist the regime in repressing the people.²⁰ Denunciations persisted even after the Duma opened. As the SD military organization in Riga observed in mid-May, the Duma had met for three weeks, yet everything remained as before; nothing could be expected of it; soldiers must instead prepare for insurrection.²¹

The military organizations soon discovered that they could not argue away the soldiers’ conviction that the Duma would give peasants land, but that they could exploit the conflict between Duma and regime. The Grodno SD (Bundist) military organization, which was uncompromising in its antagonism to the Duma and devoted an entire meeting (300 soldiers participated) in late June to arguing that the existence of the Duma did not alter the political situation one iota, and that only a constituent assembly could express the will of the people, grudgingly conceded that the government’s attitude toward the Duma was of some use in educating the most backward elements of the population.²² Most military organizations had by late May or early June rather more completely revised their pronouncements on the Duma. The SR military organization in Simferopol, for instance, continued to call for insurrection and a constituent assembly, but pointedly observed that “the Tsar wants to disperse the Duma, only he fears the people: he scorns the people’s elect.”²³ The Bolshevik military organization in Moscow, reversing its earlier position, declared: “If the Duma defends the people’s cause, works to get land and liberty and an improvement in the soldiers’ lot, we will not only not attack it, we will as one man defend it from the traitorous Tsar.”²⁴ That was a major departure from the official Bolshevik position, which did not contemplate defense of the Duma under any circumstances. Though they still maintained that only insurrection would win land for the peasants, the military organizations had gone a long way toward accommodating the sentiment of soldiers and sailors. They had no choice if they were to retain influence in the garrisons, but in linking the fate of the revolution to the Duma, Bolshevik and SR military organizations had strayed from the path marked out by their party leaders.

By late May, soldiers were sending the Duma instructions (nakazy) and pledges of support. Representative of the spirit of the soldiers’ missives was one from the Vladikavkaz garrison: “Do your work, for which you were sent by our fathers, obtain everything that our fathers bid you— may Providence aid you in this—and we, their sons, will endeavor here not to allow into our weak heads the shameful thoughts the government is developing.”²⁵ All the nakazy demanded that peasants receive all the land, most went to Trudovik deputies (or the small SD group that separated from the Trudoviks in mid-June), most asserted the soldiers’ ardent faith in the deputies. These, clearly, were the work of the soldiers themselves, though some military organizations encouraged soldiers to draw up nakazy and forwarded them to the Duma.²⁶ Soldiers also asked the Duma to intercede on their behalf. Eight soldiers of the 1st Transcaspian railway battalion in Kushka, who had been arrested after their unit sent a telegram of congratulations to the President of the Duma, asked the Georgian Menshevik deputy Zhordania to take up their case. Eight hundred soldiers in Tiflis asked Zhordania to see to it that twenty-seven soldiers of the 16th Mingrelian Grenadiers were not executed for their part in a mutiny in March. Soldiers of the 226th Bobruisk reserve regiment who had been arrested after a November mutiny asked for help from the Trudovik Teslia, and soldiers on trial for mutiny in Vilna asked the Trudovik Aladin to get permission for a civilian lawyer to represent them. Soldiers of the 3rd Siberian division who had lost their belongings at Port Arthur asked assistance from a non-party peasant deputy from Mogilev Province (which must have been home to some of the soldiers).²⁷ When their commanders threatened them with death, violated their rights, or merely failed to appreciate the soldiers’ sense of fairness, soldiers appealed to the Duma and believed it would stand by them.

The fervor that the Duma elicited in the army as a whole approached ecstasy in the garrisons in and around Petersburg, because soldiers there had a chance to meet the deputies personally. The Trudoviks saw to that. When they realized that the regime would never agree to the expropriation of gentry estates, Trudoviks, like their peasant supporters in the villages, set out to win the soldiers’ support. The series of newspapers that they began publishing in the middle of May devoted considerable attention to the injustices that soldiers suffered, for, as a Trudovik “Soldiers’ Well-Wisher” pointed out in an article bluntly entitled “The Duma Should Show Concern for the Troops,” while the government possessed the guns, guns did not shoot of themselves; if soldiers sided with the Duma, the “situation in the country” (such circumlocutions were needed to avert confiscation) would change fundamentally. Furthermore, wrote the well-wisher, many soldiers (i.e., many Trudoviks) wished to change the induction oath so that soldiers swore allegiance to the Duma as well as to the Tsar.²⁸ Trudoviks also contacted soldiers directly, using the services of the SR military organizations. The Trudovik deputies Aladin, Anikin, and Onipko spoke at conspiratorial meetings in the military camps outside the capital. In Kronstadt, they met with small groups of sailors and soldiers whom they asked to compile a list of abuses they suffered, and used the material as the basis for an interpellation to the Minister of War.²⁹ Soldiers sent messages of thanks, and one delegation of sixteen soldiers, at considerable risk to themselves, went personally to the Duma to thank the Trudoviks for watching out for the soldiers’ interests.³⁰

After listening to a Trudovik deputy, an unidentified regiment dispatched a nakaz to the Trudoviks that epitomizes the soldiers’ hopes and expectations in mid-1906:

We soldier peasants salute the Trudovik group for its determined action. We will support it in the moment of need if necessary, if it demands all land in communal tenure without redemption, and all liberty. In our view, the land is God’s, the land should be free, no one should have the right to buy, sell or mortgage it; the right to buy is fine for the rich, but for the poor it is a very, very bad right. . . . We soldiers are poor, we have no money to buy land when we return home from service, and every peasant needs land desperately. . . . The land is God’s, the land is no one’s, the land is free— and on this, God’s free land, should toil God’s free workers, not hired laborers for the gentry and kulaks. These words pleased us very much, we soldiers even learned them by heart. Deputies, if you will demand this then we, for our part, will lay down our lives to support these demands. Further, we most humbly ask your excellencies, respected deputies, immediately to demand of the authorities that they no longer persecute us for reading newspapers—are we really not men, are we little children that they won’t let us know anything. . . . But this is all in vain—we read and will read. Your excellencies, peasant deputies, don’t forget about us, and demand that they give us freedom to read what we want.³¹

Pledges of support were easier to make than to act upon, but there can be no doubt that the soldiers’ desire was to assist the Duma in any way possible, and the pledges themselves were significant enough. The expectations that soldiers had of the Duma were not unique—aside from the massive outpouring of peasant sympathy, everyone’s gaze was fixed on the Duma, and many besides peasants turned to it for assistance— but they powerfully subverted military discipline. In dispatching their nakazy and appeals for help, soldiers not only defied their officers, they acted on the assumption that the Duma really did have the authority to right wrongs and supersede their officers. From their assumption that they had an authority to which to appeal against their officers, it was but a short step to mutiny.

Mutinies Deliberate and Political

The mutinies of 1906 were comparable in number but quite different in origin and character from those of 1905. They were, for one thing, farless conditioned by the disintegration of discipline, far more the result of deliberate choice. In 1905, discipline collapsed catastrophically throughout the army prior to the onset of mutiny, and between October 17 and the middle of November mutiny in individual units most frequently began spontaneously when soldiers resisted their officers’ efforts to enforce their customary prerogatives. Soldiers themselves initiated over half of the mutinies after mid-November, but the choice to mutiny was often nearly spontaneous, as when news of mutiny in one unit immediately prompted mutiny in another. By contrast, soldiers deliberated upon mutiny throughout the second round of their revolution. Of the 114 mutinies from April through July 1906 whose origins can be determined, soldiers began sixty-five after due consideration: in all three mutinies of known origin in April, eleven of twenty in May, thirty-eight of sixty-one in June, fourteen of thirty in July. So far as the available evidence reveals, not one of these mutinies was prompted by news of mutiny elsewhere, though of course by late May soldiers were aware of other mutinies. In some units severe indiscipline did precede a decision to mutiny, but in many others that was not the case at all; shattered discipline was not in 1906 a prerequisite for mutiny. Indiscipline itself was as widespread and presented the same challenge to the integrity of the army in mid-1906 as in late 1905, but was more a parallel to than a precursor of mutiny. Indeed, many units appear to have deliberately chosen not to turn indiscipline into mutiny.

The very first mutiny that is an identifiable part of the wave of mutinies that crested in June and July, by the 145th Novocherkassk infantry regiment in Petersburg, was a model of deliberation. On April 11, the 5th and 6th companies, before setting off to guard two factories, informed their officers that while they would take up their posts they would if need be join with rather than act against workers (a “threat of force” that qualified the declaration as mutiny had officers wished, or been able, to treat it as such). The next day the command replaced the 5th and 6th with the 7th and 8th companies, but these adopted an identical resolution. By the middle of May, the men of the 145th still stubbornly adhering to their principles, part of the regiment had been sent to outlying suburbs and to Finland, while the remainder had been confined to barracks with a squadron of Guards Dragoons to watch over them.* Just as deliberate was the mutiny of the 10th Novo-Ingermanland infantry in its camp outside Tule on June 5-8. After a regimental meeting, the soldiers presented their commander a list of demands for changes in the regimental economy, and the commander promised satisfaction. Mutinies virtually identical to that occurred in the 138th Bolkhov infantry outside Riazan, June 6-8, and the 137th Nezhin infantry in Moscow, June 22. The Turkestan and Transcaspian sapper battalions encamped outside Tashkent decided to march to the train station in the city to liberate soldiers being shipped to Siberia for their part in a November mutiny, and did so on July 3; they were ambushed as they approached the station and fled back to camp after an exchange of gunfire.

Perhaps most deliberate of all were mutinies that began when soldiers refused to fire at or take other action against workers and peasants. In seventeen cases (April-July) there is no direct evidence that the soldiers had agreed beforehand that they would not shoot, evidence only that— as was the case with the 12th company of the 82nd Dagestan regiment in Grozny on June 15—soldiers brought to the scene of a disturbance refused to shoot; the secret police reported that before being withdrawn the Dagestanis four times disobeyed the order to ready their rifles. These, surely, were mutinies planned in advance. Prior decisions not to shoot were widely reported, though soldiers did not always have to act on them (as the 145th Novocherkassk did not). The men of the 87th Neishlot infantry, sent from Novgorod to Petersburg, made no secret of the fact that they would refuse to shoot at workers, though they apparently did not announce this formally to their commander and so did not, formally, mutiny (though additional evidence might disclose that their action constituted mutiny); they were nevertheless confined to barracks.³² The secret police reported that the men of the 9th company of the 133rd Simferopol infantry, in camp outside Ekaterinoslav, had decided among themselves that they would not shoot if sent against civilians; the company apparently never had to act on its resolution, and the 113th, though completely indisciplined, did not mutiny.³³ On the other hand, on June 21 the 1st squadron of the 41st Don cossacks refused to leave Taganrog because it did not wish to suppress peasants (this was a decision acted upon before the squadron actually confronted peasants), and the cossacks on the same day informed a workers’ meeting that they would not harm workers, either. Not all units were able to reach such agreements. Before leaving their barracks to break up a demonstration by unemployed workers in Simferopol, a company of the 51st Litovsk infantry met to talk over what they would do. Though they agreed that justice was on the side of the unemployed, the soldiers did not trust each other to act in consort, so they carried out orders and dispersed the demonstration.³⁴ Indeed, had soldiers not been able to agree in advance, the likelihood that a unit would refuse to disperse workers or peasants was quite small, because each soldier would fear that he would stand alone. There must have been units in which some soldiers fired and others did not, but there is no clear trace of them in the record. The degree of planning exhibited by units that decided in advance the circumstances under which they would mutiny, and then unanimously followed through on the decision, has no parallel in the mutinies of 1905.

Other mutinies, too, must have been deliberated beforehand—some of the twelve mutinies (April-July) that began when soldiers refused to execute routine orders, for instance—but many mutinies were spontaneous responses to provocation. The incident that most often triggered mutiny was an attempt to arrest soldiers (twenty-one mutinies began that way), followed by conflicts over food and supplies (eight cases; food riots have not been classified as mutiny unless they developed into more serious disturbances), the imposition of new restrictions on the soldiers’ movements (four), and physical assaults by officers on soldiers (three). As in 1905, such incidents precipitated mutiny out of indiscipline because soldiers had concluded that they could challenge what in the past had been their officers’ normal prerogatives. Almost every mutiny, of course, indicated that soldiers no longer conceded their officers much authority. What is significant is that in 1906 sudden and acute conflicts between officers and men were only a secondary cause of mutiny. Soldiers were quite capable of organizing mutiny themselves, even of preparing contingency plans for mutiny.

During the summer, units not keeping watch over factories and villages removed to rural training camps. Indiscipline immediately assumed ominous proportions as soldiers took advantage of the greater freedom of movement the camps provided to slip away from their officers. In early June, for instance, the men of the 133rd Simferopol and 134th Feodosii infantry encamped outside Ekaterinoslav met “secretly” in groups of up to eighty at a time and discussed presenting formal demands. These meetings could not have gone unnoted by officers, and there were in fact daily altercations between officers and men in these regiments, and in the 278th Berdiansk infantry battalion in the same camp.³⁵ Discipline was so poor and meetings so frequent in the 52nd Vilna infantry on the outskirts of Warsaw that the military district commander called in the 184th Warsaw infantry from Lodz to keep the 52nd Vilna in line. However, in late June the soldiers of the 184th Warsaw declared that they would not serve in Warsaw because they had no intention of suppressing the 52nd Vilna, and that they would not leave camp at all except to return to Lodz. (The 184th thus mutinied, while the 52nd Vilna—judging by the military district commander’s laconic telegram on its behavior—did not.³⁶) In the sapper encampment (1st, 18th, and Guards sapper battalions) near Petersburg, soldiers held meetings, sang revolutionary songs, protested bad food (and destroyed crates of wormy cabbage), and met with workers from a nearby factory. The command placed infantry and cavalry between the sappers and workers, and then in late June transferred the sappers to camps in Novgorod and Vladimir provinces.³⁷ Officers tried desperately to keep their men occupied, provided special entertainments (concerts, slide shows, games) during off-duty hours, and mounted round-the-clock patrols to keep soldiers in camp and civilians out. These measures rarely obstructed gatherings in camp, and soldiers often used the distraction provided by evening entertainments to slip out of camp for meetings.³⁸ In the odd case, restrictions on the soldiers’ movements triggered genuine mutiny, as when the 213th Orovaisk and 216th Insar infantry mutinied outside Penza on June 13 after the camp commandant announced that no one would be allowed more than fifty paces beyond the camp perimeter.

Even as they tried to eliminate the opportunity for indiscipline, officers ignored the infractions they witnessed. That was true in the infantry camps outside Ekaterinoslav and Warsaw, in the sapper camp near Petersburg, and in cities as well. In Sevastopol, for instance, soldiers and sailors in June gathered in massive meetings on shore, and officers appear to have made no effort to disperse them.³⁹ Officers ignored indiscipline because they feared their men. As one officer is reported to have said, “Discipline has collapsed completely. Even our own soldiers don’t salute us. And we’re afraid to impose even mild disciplinary penalties, we try any way we can not to notice. Our lives are dearer.”⁴⁰ Indeed, officers bent over backwards to mollify their men. For example, on July 18 one company of the 228th Khvalynsk infantry (Saratov) complained to their captain about the bad meat they had been served. When the captain swore at them, the soldiers threw the meat on the floor. Hastening to the scene, the regimental commander reprimanded the captain and ordered that the soldiers be given money for food.⁴¹

Officers who had spent late 1905 in Europe had learned from bitter experience the danger of attempting to repair discipline that had collapsed; officers who had spent the winter in Manchuria had not. Of the 187 line infantry units that had been in Europe in 1905, only thirty-five (19 percent) are known to have mutinied in 1906. The incidence of mutiny in line infantry that had fought in Manchuria was almost twice as high: thirty-one of eighty-four (37 percent, slightly higher than the incidence of mutiny in the infantry in Europe in late 1905).⁴² The field army had wintered in Manchuria without incident, officers had not there experienced the uncontrollable indiscipline that swept the units in Europe, and they were unprepared to deal with—that is, to ignore or placate—their men when indiscipline struck. There is no reason at all to suppose that the collapse of the soldiers’ revolution in late 1905 had chastened soldiers who had spent the year in Europe. The 133rd Simferopol, 134th Feodosii, 228th Khvalynsk, and 278th Berdiansk had all spent 1905 in Europe, did not mutiny in 1906, but did not fear to defy their officers. It was, rather, officers who had been chastened. Their disinclination to enforce regulations was one reason why officers provoked so few mutinies in 1906, and so a reason as well for the lower incidence of mutiny in 1906. But soldiers who did not mutiny merely because their officers let them do as they pleased were no more likely to prove a reliable force for suppressing civilians than soldiers who did mutiny.

Conditions in the camps often made the borderline between indiscipline and mutiny hazy, and when the unspoken compact by which officers tolerated indiscipline and soldiers refrained from outright mutiny broke down mutiny was likely to go on for some time. The 1st and 3rd artillery brigades from Rostov (Iaroslavskii), thoroughly indisciplined even before they left their winter quarters in late April, began holding small meetings in camp and large meetings in nearby villages as soon as they arrived. Commanders abstained from countermeasures (such as searching the soldiers’ belongings for revolutionary literature) for fear of provoking mutiny. On the night of June 18, however, the artillerists themselves achieved a state of mutiny when they defiantly held a mass meeting in the middle of camp, opposite camp headquarters, to formulate their grievances. They held another meeting there on June 20, and repeatedly ignored orders to disperse. A few companies of infantry were quickly brought in, but they immediately displayed their sympathy for the artillerists. Officers continued thereafter to make only a pretence of enforcing discipline (so the secret police reported), and the governor of Iaroslavl Province complained that the brigade commanders were doing nothing to restore order. In a camp outside Odessa, the 12th sapper battalion approached mutiny on June 12, the day it arrived from the Far East. The sappers held a battalion meeting that day, and at a joint meeting with the 11th sapper battalion on the next resolved not to slaughter their officers but to push for the gradual implementation of their economic demands, to refuse to suppress workers, and to send a message of support to the Trudoviks. These meetings continued for at least another two weeks, the sappers did formally present demands for changes in the regimental economy, and at one meeting with over a thousand participants forced officers to sign up to speak just like everyone else. The three railway battalions encamped outside Baranovichi were in a state of mutiny from May 25, when the brigade commander attempted to use one company to force another to eat supper and the designated punitive detachment ran away, to the end of July. Soldiers won the right to sit on a food commission, marched under arms to Baranovichi to prevent a rumored pogrom, won the release of two arrested soldiers (a battalion commander decided that the soldiers had been arrested by mistake), went to nearby villages to urge peasants not to pay taxes and to seize gentry land, and of course regularly held meetings in and out of camp. At the artillery, sapper, and railway camps, officers could not prevent soldiers from crossing the line that separated endemic indiscipline from mutiny, and mutiny continued until soldiers themselves decided to grant their officers a minimal degree of authority.

While these mutinies were the work of soldiers, a civilian presence can be detected in all of them. The secret police reported that soldiers from the railway battalions met with “Jewish youths” near Baranovichi, that soldiers met with civilians outside the Rostov artillery camp, and that civilians—a woman among them—addressed the large meetings in the sapper camp outside Odessa.⁴³ Civilians hovered in the background of a great many mutinies in 1906, and certainly played a much larger role than they had in late 1905. The summer encampments facilitated not just indiscipline, but the work of the revolutionary military organizations as well. It was almost as easy for civilians to don stolen uniforms, slip into camp, and move about undetected as it was for soldiers to slip out for meetings, because officers could not know the men from all the different units in camp. Other than camps far from major settlements and distant from railway lines (as for instance the sapper camp in Kaluga Province), it is difficult to find any that revolutionaries did not penetrate. Given access to large numbers of soldiers already inclined to ignore their officers and deeply interested in the proceedings of the Duma and the Duma’s conflict with the regime, the military organizations swelled to their greatest size. Revolutionaries—after some hesitation—helped soldiers articulate their political interests, and many of the military organizations encouraged soldiers to present demands to their officers. They did not, however, encourage action more aggressive than that, because they wished to avoid insurrection until workers and peasants were ready.⁴⁴ Soldiers were of course quite capable of mutinying on their own, but the military organizations did contribute to the ferment in the camps.

The mutiny of the Kursk encampment—123rd Kozlov, 203rd Graivoron, and 204th Oboian infantry, and the 68th artillery brigade— exhibited all of the characteristics of the soldiers’ revolution in 1906: soldiers planned and executed the mutiny, mutiny was prolonged, and revolutionaries were involved.⁴⁵ As of early May indiscipline in the 68th artillery was so bad that the brigade commander was planning to transfer 300 artillerists to another camp, and in the city of Kursk itself the behavior of the contingent of Don cossacks was so worrisome that their barracks were searched on the night of May 19. The most disaffected unit was the 123rd Kozlov, which had arrived from Manchuria in January. What upset the Kozlovtsy most was the fact that they had not been given the equipment due them under the terms of the December 6 order, and the retention of the conscripts of the class of 1903. By early May they were muttering angrily that something would happen soon, and on May 20 a group of forty soldiers agreed that they would no longer use their weapons against civilians. On the evening of May 21, between 600 and 800 soldiers of the Kozlov regiment decided that as of the morning of the 22nd they would not perform guard duty until they obtained satisfaction.

On the morning of the 22nd, the entire Kozlov regiment gathered near the camp lock-up to work out and present demands for the discharge of the 1903 draft, money to purchase gear due them, and an end to guard duty in the city. An SR spoke to the meeting and distributed large quantities of SR literature, and the soldiers roughed up an officer who attempted to arrest the civilian. While it seems likely that the SR military organization had a hand in organizing the mutiny, on May 22 the principal SR contribution was, with the aid of soldiers in their organization, to dissuade the regiment from storming the lock-up and freeing all the soldiers within. Officers could find no troops to employ against the mutineers. According to different accounts, either the cossacks (angry because their barracks had been searched), the 203rd Graivoron, or the artillerists, or all of them, refused to move against the Kozlov regiment. The authorities sent for some Kuban cossacks from another city.

The 123rd Kozlov achieved a quick victory and then retreated. On the 23rd there were more meetings and soldiers again prevented the arrest of civilians, and the commander of the regiment began to capitulate: new blankets and shirts were distributed. The division commander arrived from Kharkov on the 23rd, and on the 24th he began interviewing soldiers from the regiment. He rejected their principal demand, for money to equip themselves according to the terms of the December 6 reform (he claimed that the money simply was not available), but he did add to the concessions already granted. With that, mutiny receded. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not soldiers resumed guard duty on the 24th, but on the 24th and over the next few days officers did manage to arrest some Kozlov soldiers, perhaps because cossack reinforcements had arrived, perhaps because the soldiers were overawed by the gold braid, perhaps simply because the division commander had charisma.

Yet if indiscipline had sunk below the critical level it did not go away, and began to spread to other units. Officers of the Graivoron and Oboian regiments attempted to isolate their men from the Kozlov regiment, but pickets posted around the Kozlov camp permitted soldiers to come and go unhindered. Officers patrolled the road into town, but civilians—SDs as well as SRs—continued to visit the camp at the soldiers’ invitation. When officers tried to break up meetings, soldiers threatened unpleasantness, and by early June officers were permitting meetings in camp on condition that politics not be discussed. Politics— expressions of support for the Duma above all—were by now a principal topic of the meetings, and the soldiers also stated categorically that they would not take any action against peasants. The men of the Graivoron regiment demanded, apparently in this interval, the removal of their commander, the artillerists met in large numbers, and the Kuban cossacks in the city sent the Ministry of War a telegram asking to be demobilized because their farms were going to ruin.

The second peak of this long-running mutiny came on June 18, when a mob of civilians and soldiers held a political meeting outside Kursk. Civilians called on soldiers to stand by the people, soldiers rose to say that they now understood who their friends were and that they would not shoot civilians. Cossacks sent to break up the meeting instead declared their complete sympathy, announced they would not disperse the crowd or allow the police to do so, and cursed the police for sending them on a pointless mission. On June 26, a meeting in camp adopted a resolution, to be sent to the SD group in the Duma, calling for changes in military service (487 voted in favor, 16 against, and 2 abstained.) By this point, every unit in camp and city except the 204th Oboian infantry had mutinied (and the men of the 204th freely attended meetings), and political concerns overshadowed the economic issues that had provided the original grounds for mutiny.

Utterly unable to control the Kursk camp, the military district command decided as a last resort to shift regiments around, transferring the Kozlov regiment to Kharkov (where the garrison was already unstable) and bringing in two new regiments. In late June and early July, too, officers distributed large numbers of reactionary proclamations. After the Kozlov regiment left, indiscipline sank below the critical level, reverting from mutiny to mere widespread discontent and grumbling. There was no assurance, however, that soldiers would not again regroup for mutiny.

Mutinous soldiers in 1906 rarely engaged in violence and frequently presented lists of demands, and as was the case in late 1905 those two facets of the soldiers’ behavior were closely connected. From April through the dissolution of the Duma on July 9, mutineers exchanged fire with other troops only two times, shot off artillery once, and fired their rifles in the air twice. Four times they did violence to officers or officer quarters, once they beat up police, and four times they burned or wrecked their own barracks or equipment. Officers feared violence, mutineers frequently threatened violence, and it is possible, given the sketchiness of the evidence on many mutinies, that the lesser forms of violence occurred more frequently than presently appears to have been the case. But only after the dissolution of the Duma—within two weeks of which there were five military insurrections—did violence become a characteristic of mutiny.

When soldiers believed mutiny did not entail violence, they confidently presented their demands: in at least fifty-three of 151 mutinies (35 percent) between April and July 8, in only five of thirty-two mutinies (16 percent) between July 9 and the end of the month. The contents of one set of demands are unknown, but forty-six others touched only on the life of the unit and ordinarily included implementation of the December 6 reforms, the discharge of soldiers who had served three years, freedom to meet, election of food commissions by soldiers, and removal of abusive NCOs and officers. (Details are so often lacking that it is impossible to order the demands by frequency.) In short, the demands were of the same sort soldiers had made in 1905, and if implemented would have altered the regimental economy and the structure of military authority. During eleven mutinies soldiers presented political demands as well. That is a somewhat higher proportion than in 1905, and there is no evidence that soldiers in 1906 adopted political demands to humor civilians. Nevertheless, when soldiers presented demands they preferred to stick to grievances their commanders could satisfy.

Yet if the demands were comparable to those of 1905, soldiers made them much less frequently. No doubt soldiers presented more than fifty-eight sets of demands between April and July, but it is most unlikely that any amount of additional evidence would bring the ratio of demands to mutinies close to the two out of three achieved in late 1905. Evidently, many soldiers chose not to make demands as they mutinied. For instance, the mutinies in which soldiers at the instant of contact with workers and peasants refused to act were never (so far as the evidence reveals) accompanied by demands. Soldiers who mutinied when already drawn up on the street certainly had the capacity to make demands, but they did not have the interest.

It was, it appears, the soldiers’ enormously increased interest in political questions that depressed the incidence of demands. Certainly soldiers exhibited far more interest in political issues than they had in 1905. Only eleven sets of demands touched on politics, but in other cases soldiers accompanied their demands with separate political statements. The Odessa sappers, for instance, handed in a set of military demands and also dispatched a message to the Trudoviks in the Duma, while the 9th Tobolsk Siberian infantry (which mutinied in camp outside Tiumen, June 21-26), after formulating military demands, declared: “We present these demands, hoping that the State Duma will support them.”⁴⁶ The Duma itself figured in five sets of demands, one of which was accompanied by a nakaz to the Duma, and nakazy were sent to the Duma during at least seven other mutinies (most nakazy were not sent in the context of mutiny). In all, the Duma figured in at least twenty-nine mutinies, either in demands, nakazy, expressions of support during meetings, or as the immediate cause of mutiny or insurrection. At least fourteen other mutinies featured political statements or political demonstrations (some of which probably involved the Duma, though that is not clear from the available evidence). Thus, soldiers articulated their political sentiments during at least forty-three of 153 mutinies between April and July.

Other mutinies had unmistakable political motives that the soldiers did not—again, judging from the evidence at hand—articulate. The formal declaration by the men of the 145th Novocherkassk infantry that they would join with rather than act against workers was a statement of political preference, and the sixteen mutinies in which soldiers did nothing more than disobey orders to disperse workers or peasants were equally political. Likewise, the four mutinies in which soldiers took part in workers’ strikes or refused to replace striking workers were political gestures. In all, from April through July there were at least twenty-six mutinies that had clear political overtones without known articulation of political motive, for a total of seventy of 153 mutinies (46 percent) that were at least in part politically motivated. The proportion of mutinies with a known political element held relatively constant: one of four in April, ten of twenty-four in May, thirty-nine of eighty-four in June, nineteen of forty-one in July.

The high proportion of politically engaged mutinies accords completely with the soldiers’ intense interest in the Duma, and with the growth of the revolutionary military organizations. But soldiers who mutinied with politics in mind knew that their officers could not give them satisfaction. Soldiers who refused to replace striking workers, or to disperse worker demonstrations, did not feel impelled to present demands. Indeed, they did not feel it necessary to prolong their mutinies: there is no known case in which a unit that had refused to fire did not then resume its customary duties. In the summer of 1906, a great many soldiers were prepared to wait for the Duma to act, and refused to perform only those duties that violated their sense of political propriety.

The mutinies of 1906 were more deliberate, more organized, and far more political than they had been in 1905. They also tended to last longer, as soldiers sometimes fluctuated between mutiny and severe indiscipline for a month or more. Above all other differences, however, one looms largest: there was no general strike, no Imperial Manifesto, no shattering collapse of the civil order from which soldiers could conclude that the old military order, too, had lapsed and that they had the opportunity—even Imperial authorization—to refashion the army to their liking. The principal source of instability in mid-1906 was the Duma, to which soldiers looked to transform Russian society and to cover their aspirations for the army with its own authority. But soldiers also knew that the Duma’s authority was not secure, and so they pledged their support for its struggle against the regime. Soldiers eager to bring nearer the day of social revolution initiated mutiny, and they expressed their political will either during their mutinies or in the very form the mutinies took. Soldiers in 1906 mutinied in anticipation of social transformation, not on the assumption that the transformation had already been accomplished. The regime’s determination to survive, no matter how well advertised, could not in 1906 deter soldiers from mutiny. If the mutinies were to end, soldiers would have to lose all hope that the authority of the Duma could triumph over the authority of the regime.

Impact

The soldiers’ revolution did not pose so immediate a threat to the survival of the regime in mid-1906 as it had in late 1905, because as it reached its peak workers and revolutionaries were not threatening to seize power in the cities. Furthermore, because many of the mutinies occurred in the summer encampments, they did not so dramatically undercut the credibility of the regime’s military deterrent to insurrection. Nevertheless, the mutinies severely impaired the regime’s ability to contain peasant rebellion. And though their reverberations in the cities were muted, they did begin to clear the way for successful revolutionary action—especially because the soldiers’ revolution itself was highly politicized.

The mutinies increased geometrically in the first six weeks after the Duma convened, just as they had in the first six weeks after the publication of the October Manifesto: seven mutinies in the first half of May, seventeen in the second half of the month, forty-two in the first half of June. Each new mutiny must have encouraged others, and the soldiers’ political sensitivity must also have increased as the sessions of the Duma continued. The incidence of mutiny held steady at forty-two in the second half of June, though at least nine mutinies that had begun earlier were still under way, including one that had begun in the first half, and two that had begun in the second half, of May.

Moreover, the mutinies were cumulative. Units that had once mutinied were of doubtful reliability even after mutiny ended, because mutineers were only rarely punished. Of the seventy-three mutinies from April through June whose outcomes are known, ten ended when the units involved were transferred (which could scarcely have been interpreted as punishment; in one other case mutiny continued even after transfer). Seventeen ended with outright concessions to the mutineers. For instance, when on May 27 the commander of a company of the 2nd Transcaspian railway battalion in Novy Margelan ignored his men’s demand that their Sergeant Major be removed, the company declared a strike; the garrison commander court-martialled the Sergeant Major and locked the captain up for three days. Five other mutinies ended with promises of concessions followed some time later by arrests. Twenty mutinies subsided on their own, with commanders ignoring the illegal actions of their men (in two of these cases, soldiers were arrested some time after the mutiny ended). In all, mutinies ended on the soldiers’ terms or without immediate incident to them in fifty of seventy-three mutinies through June. The rest were brought to an end by arrests (in nine cases reliable units were drawn up against the mutineers). Through the first half of June, in fact, soldiers did even better, mutinying with impunity in thirty-nine of fifty cases whose outcome is known. Officers suffered mutineers to go unpunished because they feared to provoke their men, and because with mutiny and indiscipline so widespread it was often impossible to find reliable troops with which to suppress mutiny. Given the impunity with which they mutinied, soldiers had no reason to conclude that mutiny held great peril for them.

Nevertheless, the level of mutinies did stabilize in late June. It is possible, though not likely, that the greater resolve that officers then exhibited had an impact. In the last two weeks of June, arrests terminated twelve of the twenty-three mutinies whose endings are known (and in July, when the situation in the country was rather different, arrests or repression terminated fifteen of the twenty-eight mutinies with a known outcome). Yet there was in late June no well-publicized repression of a major mutiny, and it is unlikely that word about arrests spread fast enough to dissuade other soldiers from mutinying. Quite likely, the arrests had little impact on the course of the soldiers’ revolution in June and soldiers were for their own reasons—to be taken up in the next chapter—choosing not to mutiny.

In any case, the mutinies were sufficiently high in the second half of June—at least forty-two in two weeks—to constitute a continuation if not an escalation of the soldiers’ revolution, and they ate away at the regime’s ability to deal with agrarian rebellion. In early June the governor of Kaluga Province requested reinforcements because he anticipated civil disorders; by the time he was told he would get no more troops, all five of the infantry battalions and both cossack squadrons in the province had mutinied.⁴⁷ On June 13, the governor of Tambov Province asked for more cavalry, because an infantry company had refused to disperse a peasant mob and in general “the mood of the infantry in the province is unreliable.”⁴⁸ On June 18, the governor learned that no additional cavalry was available; on the same day, one of the two cavalry regiments in the province mutinied. A few weeks later, one of the two infantry regiments mutinied.⁴⁹ In Penza Province, half of the six cossack squadrons were on leave, and there were mutinies in all three of the infantry regiments in June and July.⁵⁰ The situation was no better in Kursk Province, or for that matter anywhere else in central Russia.

Not only were line units fast deserting the regime, but those units that had proved most reliable in 1905—the Guards and cossacks (other than those mobilized at the end of the year)—threatened to do so as well. The Guards encampment at Krasnoe Selo resembled all the other encampments of 1906. The soldiers held meetings in and out of camp, listened eagerly to revolutionaries and Trudoviks, and dispatched nakazy to the Duma. When no speakers were at hand, the Guards read the revolutionary leaflets that circulated in camp and met in groups outside the camp perimeter. Rumors circulated in May that the entire Krasnoe Selo camp would rise, and Minister of War Rediger admitted that there was a certain amount of ferment in all the Guards regiments.⁵¹

Rather ominously for the regime, discontent in the Guards peaked at the Imperial residence at Peterhof, in the 1st battalion of the Preobrazhensk infantry, a battalion of which the Tsar himself was nominal commander.⁵² Like the other Guards regiments, the Preobrazhensk had in 1905 faithfully dispersed revolutionary demonstrations, but in 1906 the mood in the regiment was no different than in the humble line infantry. As an NCO related during the investigation of the mutiny, soldiers in the Preobrazhensk regiment “constantly get letters from the villages on the land question; they are reproached for the fact that soldiers fire at the people during disturbances, which ends them and prevents the peasants from getting land.”⁵³ The Preobrazhentsy shared the general enthusiasm for the Trudoviks and eagerly read the revolutionary leaflets that came their way. In May, searches of their belongings and the arrest of some soldiers for possession of subversive literature pushed the regiment close to mutiny.

The incident that finally impelled the 1st battalion to mutiny was trivial, but the mutiny was not. Angered because they had had to march—rather than take the train—from Krasnoe Selo to Peterhof for their tour of guard duty at the palace, the men of the 1st battalion met on June 9 to discuss their grievances. On the 10th, they presented their demands: they wanted the full issue of bedlinen, money to buy gear, the release of the soldiers who had been arrested, freedom to discuss their needs, and so forth. And they added: “We express our solidarity (agreement) with the demands of the Duma deputies on allotting land to the peasants.” The commander of the 1st Guards division, shaken by the mutiny and worried about the consequences for his own career, accepted the demands, promised the soldiers they would not be punished, and instructed the regiment’s officers to act as though nothing had happened. However, higher authorities (including Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, Commander of the Guards corps and the Petersburg military district) ruled otherwise. On the 12th, two soldiers suspected of instigating the mutiny were arrested, the mutiny collapsed, the 1st battalion was deprived of its Guards status, and it was shipped under guard to a camp in Novgorod Province that had formerly held Japanese POWs.

Minister of War Rediger later wrote that the Preobrazhensk mutiny brought the Guards to their senses, but that was not at all the case. Hearing of the Preobrazhensk mutiny, the Semenov Guards, scourge of revolution in December 1905, expressed their support (but did not mutiny), while the Guards sapper batallion did mutiny by adopting the Preobrazhensk demands as its own. In the second half of June there were minor mutinies in both the Horse Guards and the Guards Cuirassiers, and openly expressed discontent in other Guards regiments. The SR military organization in Petersburg reported in late June that the revolutionary mood at Krasnoe Selo was fading, but the gendarmes reported that 4,000 Guards met in camp on July 4th.⁵⁴ The Guards were almost as restive after the Preobrazhensk mutiny as they had been before.

As for the cossacks, while the press continued to chronicle their brutality there were in midsummer an equal number of reports on mutinies and other signs of cossack dissaffection. Many of the reports cannot be verified, but cossacks were involved in at least twenty mutinies from May through July, five more in August, and two later in the year. Unidentified Don, Kuban, and Orenburg cossacks were involved in three mutinies. Of the identifiable mutinous units, eleven were Don cossack regiments (two of eighteen first-line regiments, nine of nineteen second-and third-line regiments), and four were second-line Kuban regiments (out of eighteen first-and second-line regiments). Among Orenburg and Urals cossacks, unswervingly faithful to the regime in 1905, four of fifteen regiments are known to have mutinied.⁵⁵ At least seven of the mutinous regiments sent nakazy to the Duma (not always during mutiny) demanding the demobilization of the second and third lines, and so did at least nine cossack regiments that did not mutiny; the 7th Urals regiment sent two, one from the squadrons in Penza, the other from the squadrons in Kazan. There were likely many more nakazy, since one of the cossack deputies reported to the Duma that he received letters and telegrams from cossack regiments every day begging the Duma for demobilization.⁵⁶ The serving cossacks merely reflected the sentiment in their villages: more than fifty Don cossack villages dispatched delegations to appeal directly to the Duma for demobilization.⁵⁷

Cossacks complained both about the hardship they suffered and the shame of their role as police. Money promised to cossack reserves to meet the expenses of equipping themselves for service and supporting their families was either not delivered at all or proved insufficient (for which reason the wives of cossacks submitted hardship petitions and even demonstratively set out to accompany their men), and when the cossack deputies in the Duma demanded an interpellation to the Minister of War questioning the legality of the mobilization of the second and third lines they painted a bleak picture of the collapse of the cossack farms and the desperate longing of wives and parents for the return of their men. As one nakaz from a cossack unit put it:

Esteemed electors from the whole of Christ’s world, we beg of you as of our fathers. We cossacks have abandoned our fathers and mothers in their declining years, and our wives with young children, and our households have crumbled into dust, and the Lord did not give us sinners a harvest, so that our families will die of hunger.⁵⁸

The same cossack nakaz also instructed the Duma: “You must satisfy our Russian people. This is what we demand—give the peasants land.” It was not at all uncommon for cossacks to mingle, and identify their own interests, with the peasants they were supposed to suppress. In Tambov province, an official reported, the cossacks were “sluggish” and told peasants to go ahead and cart grain away from gentry estates. Indeed, many of the cossack mutinies and cossack nakazy centered on the refusal to suppress peasants. As one of the nakazy from the 7th Urals cossacks said, “We won’t protect the gentry any more.”⁵⁹ The government attempted to have village atamans organize loyal petitions to the Duma to counteract all the others, but to no effect: when pressed, Orenburg and Don cossack villages instead passed resolutions of support for the cossack deputies and their demands. Reports in June that the Ministry of War planned to mobilize three additional Don regiments triggered angry protests, demonstrations, and resolutions expressing vehement opposition. The Ministry hastily denied that it had any such plans.⁶⁰ The regime did need reinforcements, but they were not to be had from the Don, or from any other cossack territory. Cossacks in their villages were as restive as any peasants, cossacks in the regiments as mutinous as the infantry.

There was little the Ministry of War could do to check the disintegration of the army. Orders that officers be polite, avoid drunkenness, and see that their men got what was coming to them obviously failed to do the trick.⁶¹ Once again, then, the generals’ thoughts turned toward appeasement. By the second half of May military district commanders were under orders to visit the scene of the disturbances and report on their causes, in June a conference of senior army and navy commanders met to consider the evidence, and a commission was established within the Ministry of War for the same purpose. The commission, to its credit, rejected the easy explanation that the mutinies were the product of criminal agitation and concluded instead that the soldiers’ material deprivation was largely responsible. That was a superficial judgment but the soldiers’ demands did point in that direction and the Ministry at least had the power to eliminate material sources of discontent. Military sources reported in early July that the government was leaning toward new concessions to soldiers on the pattern of the December 6 reforms: another increase in pay, further augmentation of the gear issued.⁶²

The Ministry of War understood, of course, that soldiers were also affected by the revolutionary sentiment around them, and so attempted to quarantine the troops. On June 20, Minister of War Rediger ordered his military district commanders to reduce to the absolute minimum the number of troops used to aid civil authority, because otherwise there was danger of “the total disintegration of the army and the loss of it as an organized military force.”⁶³ On June 23, the Ministry of War, over the heated objections of the Ministry of Transportation, ordered the gradual reduction of the detachments posted at major railway stations, and on June 28 ordered units bivouacked in areas swept by agrarian disorders to return to their urban barracks. Units in Saratov, Samara, Chernigov, and Kharkov Provinces were to decamp immediately.⁶⁴ These were precisely the provinces most in need of troops. As peasant disorders and mutinies crested simultaneously in late June, the Ministry of War reenacted the retreat of November 1905.

Official statistics on the number of units sent to aid civil authorities reveal how complete the retreat was. The number of infantry companies deployed against civilians dropped from 25,283 in 1905 to 3,142 in 1906, cavalry and cossack squadrons from 5,354 to 1,058. This represented a reduction from approximately 2,800,000 men in 1905 to about 400,000 in 1906. While the need for troops may not have been so great in 1906 as in 1905, it had not declined so dramatically as that. Indeed, the number of troops used to aid civil authorities in 1907, when revolution had passed, was about the same as in 1906.⁶⁵ Fear for the reliability of the army was not the only reason the generals resisted placing units at the disposal of civil authorities. They had always resented the use of the army for police purposes, and never more than in 1906, when the army badly needed to regroup after its defeat in Manchuria.⁶⁶ Yet it is clear that in the summer of 1906 the generals feared—and had ample reason to fear—that military rebellion threatened the integrity of the army and that the only way to forestall complete collapse was to prevent any sort of contact between soldiers and civilians, and to let civil authorities fend for themselves. Their calculations were shortsighted at best. If the army could be saved only by withdrawing from the fight against revolution, the Tsarist order would collapse. And in any case soldiers could not be isolated from the influence of the Duma, which was in 1906 the mainspring of their revolution.

* Statistics on mutiny in this chapter are based on the data in Appendix II.

* Unless otherwise noted, sources for this and other mutinies will be found in Appendix II, which lists the mutinies of 1906 by order of commencement.