IV. Revolution in the Army

The October Manifesto failed signally to pacify the Russian empire. Although liberals backed away, and industrialists and gentry fled, from revolution, their absence was scarcely noticed in the up-welling of rebellion after October 17. The number of workers on strike naturally declined after the October peak, but workers continued to down tools in very large numbers, and the workers’ movement acquired far more coherence and organization than it had previously exhibited. There was a burst of union creation, and though most unions were small, there were suddenly hundreds of them. More significant still were the soviets, which gave institutional expression to the politicization of the workers’ movement that had become evident in the October strike; seven soviets emerged in October, fourteen in November, another fourteen in December, and in many other cities and factory settlements standing strike committees functioned as soviets. The early soviets, such as that in Petersburg, grew directly out of the city-wide strike committees formed in October. Revolutionaries organized other soviets, as in Moscow, to wean workers away from strike committees too closely tied to the radical professional unions, and others still were set up under the pressure of workers to whom the revolutionary parties yielded. Though many revolutionaries (including Mensheviks outside Petersburg) viewed the soviets as competitors to their party organizations, most soon realized that the soviets could give revolutionaries leverage over vast numbers of previously unorganized workers. Revolutionaries viewed the soviets as political institutions mobilizing workers for a new assault on the regime; workers looked to soviets to secure economic gains. For both these reasons the soviets were soon arbitrating disputes between management and labor and in many other ways acting as local shadow governments.¹

Less organized and far more frightening was the jacquerie in the rural districts. Under the impact of the general strike, the October Manifesto, and the ensuing turbulence in the cities, the peasant movement surged to a peak in both the incidence and violence of disorders. Railway workers, migrants returning from the cities, and the occasional radical teacher and priest urged peasants to emulate workers and seize the land, and peasants began to apply working class terminology to their own rebellion, occasionally calling the looting of a gentry estate a “strike.” But peasants had no need of direct stimulus from workers or radicals—the October Manifesto and the government’s obvious loss of control over the cities were sufficient to convince peasants that they ought to seize the land. Peasants interpreted the October Manifesto as the Tsar’s long-awaited signal to drive out the gentry: the rumors that had circulated in the villages early in the year were no more than a shadowy anticipation of the peasants’ unshakable post-Manifesto conviction that they could now order rural society as they pleased.² Peasant rebellion was most ferocious in the non-Russian borderlands, particularly in the Caucasus, where armed peasant bands took control of entire provinces, and in the Baltic, where peasants drove the German barons to the cities in terror and in some counties destroyed half the baronial manors.³

Stunned by the enormous and unanticipated threat to the continued existence of the Tsarist regime—in the rural districts, to the continued existence of any governmental authority—the government required the services of the army as never before. After October 17, however, revolution convulsed the army, too; there were 211 mutinies between October 17 and December 31.* Not only did the mutinies severely erode the army’s capacity to suppress worker, peasant, and national revolution, they made of the army itself a threat to the regime.

For the purpose of this study, only those incidents that meet the test for “manifest insurrection” (iavnoe vosstanie), the most serious crime in the Tsarist code of military discipline, have been counted as mutinies. (Tsarist regulations included three lesser crimes that met the contemporaneous Anglo-Saxon definition of mutiny.) Manifest insurrection was defined as collective resistance to orders by eight or more soldiers, and military courts applied this article only to incidents in which collective resistance to orders was “active,” involving the use or threat of force to compel the officer in command to rescind or issue a particular order. That is the article under which charges were preferred against soldiers involved in many of the disturbances, and it is the criterion that I have applied retroactively when there is no record of the article under which charges were, or might have been, preferred.⁴ As a practical matter, every “insurrection” of which there is a record involved all or most of the soldiers in the unit. Yet statistics on mutiny so defined measure only one manifestation of military disaffection. The typical mutiny occurred in a unit in which discipline had already disintegrated, in which prior to mutiny soldiers had collectively ignored or insulted their officers, left the barracks at will, and held impromptu meetings. But indiscipline did not always culminate in mutiny. Outright mutiny—deliberate and collective defiance of orders by an entire unit—often began when officers attempted to restore discipline. If officers ignored the indiscipline of their men, there might be no act of mutiny. In short, the very high incidence of mutiny reflected disaffection in the army as a whole rather than in mutinous units alone.

TABLE IV-1. Strikes, Peasant Disorders, and Mutinies October-December 1905

SOURCES: On workers and peasants, see Table III-1. On mutinies, see Appendix I.

If the figure of 211 mutinies in late 1905 is just one index, rather than an absolute measure, of rebellion in the armed forces, it is also somewhat arbitrary. Some disturbances can be counted as one, two, or more mutinies. That is the case, for example, when two or more regiments in the same garrison mutinied together or within a few days of each other, or when one unit can be said to have mutinied several times in quick succession. My procedure has been to count mutinous events: a single event could involve mutinies in a cluster of units, or a cluster of mutinies in a single unit. The total of 211 “mutinies” is thus conservative; a different but equally reasonable enumeration would increase the total substantially. In any case, the global total does not tell us much except that mutiny was widespread. The individual mutinies ranged in significance from mutinies by entire garrisons or major portions thereof (47 mutinies in late 1905 involved more than one unit), down to mutinies in hospital commands and penal escort detachments.

Grouping the mutinies by region and arms provides a better gauge of their intensity and impact. In the last two and one-half months of 1905, there were mutinies in seventy line and reserve infantry regiments and brigaded reserve battalions in European Russia (including the Caucasus)—more than one-third of the 203 such regiments and battalions then garrisoned in Europe. There were mutinies in only three of the sixteen Guards infantry and rifle regiments, but in eight of the sixteen Grenadier infantry regiments. If all line, reserve, Guards, Grenadier, rifle, and other infantry formations are counted, we still find that there were mutinies in one-third of the infantry units in European Russia.⁵ That is an extraordinarily high incidence of mutiny, especially if it is kept in mind that there were what might be called passive mutinies— widespread indiscipline that did not issue in “manifest insurrection”— in many, possibly a majority, of the remaining infantry regiments.⁶ The incidence of mutiny in the other arms in Europe varied from 75 percent in technical units, down to about 25 percent in artillery brigades, 20 percent in cossack regiments and battalions, and 15 percent in line and Guards cavalry regiments.⁷ Sailors were so thoroughly mutinous that the Ministry of War considered discharging all but a handpicked few and, in effect, temporarily mothballing the navy.⁸

In Siberia, mutinous garrisons and railway committees in late November and through most of December controlled the railroad and the cities and stations along the line from Krasnoiarsk to Harbin and Vladivostok. However, the Siberian mutinies were significant chiefly because of the bearing they had on the availability for use in Europe of units from the army in the field. Because of the number of units in transit, and because so much of the traffic consisted of reserves who took trains in Harbin by storm and were not organized by unit, it is impossible to quantify the Siberian disorders, but their impact was to trap the field army in Manchuria. XIII corps, which began evacuation on October 14, was detained to restore order along the Transsiberian railway. However, the men of XIII corps were so unreliable, and had so demoralizing an influence on other units, that local authorities begged to be rid of them; seven of the eight regiments of XIII corps mutinied before they quit Siberia, and the eighth was thoroughly disaffected. By the middle of December, only a few companies from these mutinous regiments were straggling into central Russia.⁹ Reserves aside, no units other than those of XIII corps left Manchuria for Europe before January. It is not true, as the conventional judgment has it, that by “the end of the year the return of loyal troops from the Far East after the conclusion of the Japanese war restored the upper hand to the government.”¹⁰

Irrespective of their causes and goals, the volume of mutinies requires a reexamination of the army’s place in the revolution, and of the situation of the Tsarist regime in late 1905. The established view is that mutinies were not a salient feature of the revolution, and that the soldiers’ overall dependability determined the outcome of the 1905 Revolution. One of the few Western historians who has felt the mutinies worth a close look concludes that despite “some minor and occasionally troublesome mutinies in the army and navy . . . the soldiers and sailors as a whole never became a truly revolutionary force (though their superiors had some qualms on this score), and they proved a reliable instrument for suppressing the revolution in the winter of 1905-1906.¹¹ The nearly identical Soviet view is that while “Tsarism had reason to fear the possible loss of its military support,” in the end “the overwhelming majority of the peasant army, because of its social composition, remained loyal to Tsarism, and this was one of the reasons for the defeat of the revolution.”¹² In the end, soldiers did suppress revolution, but explanations couched in terms of the soldiers’ reliability and loyalty to the regime do not accord with the fact that a massive military rebellion—in fact, revolution—came close to destroying the army. The soldiers who finally suppressed revolution were for the most part not loyal but mutinous.

Discipline Shattered

The mutinies grew out of rampant indiscipline, which was in turn a product of the events soldiers witnessed and in which they participated: the general strike, the Imperial capitulation of October 17, and the immediately ensuing collapse of constituted civil authority. News of the October Manifesto brought joyous people into the streets by the thousands in every city in the empire, and after impromptu celebrations and speeches they ordinarily set off to governors’ mansions, police stations, and jails to demand the release of political prisoners. The authorities did not know how to respond: the appearance of the October Manifesto had stunned and disoriented them. When a mob besieged the Governor of Perm Province in his home and demanded that he read the October Manifesto, he complied. When the mob demanded that he free political prisoners, he rushed half-dressed to the jail to satisfy that demand, too. As the governor later reported by way of exculpation, “The Imperial Manifesto, appearing unexpectedly and received first privately via railway telegraph, took the local administration, which had received no forewarning, completely by surprise; the administration did not know what to do with the irrupting manifestations of insolent triumph of the revolutionaries and the disorders that arose in consequence.”¹³ He was not alone. In Ekaterinoslav, Vindava, and Nizhnii Novgorod as well, authorities in panic released political prisoners. In Ufa, the governor congratulated the triumphant citizens of his city on receiving the long-awaited freedoms, distributed copies of the Manifesto, and promised to fire some of the police. Even in Moscow the Governor-General promised a jubilant throng that he would free political prisoners, and a mob 10,000 strong marched to the jails and obtained the prisoners’ immediate release.¹⁴

The dominant chord in the days immediately following publication of the October Manifesto was violence rather than celebration, but most of the violence, too, resulted from the collapse of civil authority. Not that officials were everywhere panic-stricken or complaisant. Troops in Sevastopol opened fire on the crowd at the city jail, killing six and wounding three. In Petersburg, the procession to the jail was turned back without bloodshed, but soldiers fired at demonstrators elsewhere in the city, as they did in Warsaw, Minsk, Riga, Kremenchug, Kiev, Libava, and other cities.¹⁵ The officially inflicted casualties were probably higher in the few days after than in the days before the Manifesto, because so many people were on the streets celebrating what they thought was the dawning of a new era. Unofficially inflicted casualties were even higher, due to the pogroms—150 in all—that burst on cities and towns in the week after October 17. Upwards of 500 died in Odessa (October 18-21), roughly 4,000 died in all. Pogroms were the response of those who saw the apparent triumph of the revolutionaries as a mortal offense to values they cherished. They included peasants, who attacked Jewish property and gentry estates with equal violence, some workers, and above all tradesmen (butchers seem to have been involved in every urban pogrom) and day laborers. Urged on by priests and anti-Semitic rabble rousers, and by local officials who either incited or connived at pogroms, they indulged in any orgy of murder, looting, and blind destruction.¹⁶ However, virulent anti-Semitism was only one of the causes of the pogroms, and Jews were not the only victims of the postManifesto bloodletting. Russians attacked nationalities other than Jews, and there was a rash of murders of and mob attacks on workers, “intelligentsia,” “students,” and others whose physical appearance identified them as likely revolutionaries.¹⁷ This anti-revolutionary, anti-Jewish, anti-elite violence appeared to be in the interests of the authorities, but it represented the collapse of civil authority as much as did the panicky release of prisoners.

By the end of October, the joyful demonstrations and mob violence had swept away the edifice of rules and regulations on public behavior that had buttressed the old regime. Even the most reactionary officials appeared to be helpless to maintain Tsarist law and order, and they certainly did not know any longer what was permitted and what was forbidden. Nor could they have known, since the government in Petersburg was slow to issue new administrative guidelines and itself appeared to be yielding to revolutionary pressure, for example by informing censors on October 19 that they should continue to enforce the old rules on the press but be guided by the spirit of the Manifesto, and by announcing a political amnesty on October 21. As October came to a close, mass political meetings were proceeding without letup, newspapers were appearing uncensored, and the soviets were meeting with little hindrance. Police were demoralized, and in some cities themselves attended political meetings and talked of going on strike. Appropriately, the weeks after the publication of the October Manifesto were later thought of as “the days of freedom.”¹⁸

The collapse of civil authority and the uncontrolled revolutionary demonstrations and anti-revolutionary violence devastated the cohesion and discipline of units already exhausted from their labors during the general strike. In some cities, soldiers shot at the post-Manifesto crowds not because they were ordered to do so but out of panic. In Minsk on October 18, soldiers inside the train station who had just been tossed into the air by a joyful mob of railway workers opened fire when they heard shots in the distance, then took cover and kept firing; more than fifty civilians were killed and roughly one hundred wounded, most of them—as an official report noted—in the back. On a smaller scale, the same happened in other cities: soldiers confronted by large numbers of excited civilians became nervous and opened fire.¹⁹ Soldiers also took part in the pogroms, either as operational units supposedly assigned to restore order, or spontaneously; in Ekaterinoslav, entire regiments poured out of their barracks to beat Jews.²⁰ In Kurgan, soldiers rushed from their barracks to attack a revolutionary demonstration, while in Askhabad soldiers in a patriotic demonstration fought revolutionary demonstrators. In Tiflis, after a few days of exchanging salutes with the celebrating crowds, on October 22 groups of unarmed soldiers accompanying a patriotic demonstration beat up natives who refused to cheer, while other soldiers responded to what they claimed were shots from a newspaper office by killing forty-one civilians.²¹ On October 20, in one of the most gruesome incidents of the post-Manifesto days, a raging mob in Tomsk trapped revolutionaries and unlucky bystanders in the railway offices, set fire to the building, and bludgeoned to death everyone trying to escape. Soldiers on the fringes watched impassively, then shot anyone crawling out on the roof or window ledges to escape the flames. The dead and wounded numbered in the hundreds.²² These were the acts of enraged soldiers lashing out blindly at civilians who appeared to threaten them, not of patriotic defenders of the regime. The soldiers had degenerated into a uniformed mob.

In other garrisons in different circumstances, demoralization took forms less violent and more transparently threatening to the well-being of the regime. In Viazma, Chardzhui, Novyi Margelan, and Blagoveshchensk, soldiers took a leading part in the revolutionary demonstrations that greeted the October Manifesto.²³ In Baku, sailors in the naval barracks beat up a patriotic demonstration, while soldiers who had earlier accompanied patriotic demonstrations were soon looting stores, molesting Moslem women, and brawling with police. In Tiflis, too, soldiers after October 22 beat up both natives and police.²⁴ Everywhere—in cities shaken by civilian and military violence no less than in cities where the authorities had offered no resistance to revolutionary mobs—officers found within a few days of October 17 that they no longer had any control over the behavior of their men on or off the street. Soldiers wandered out of barracks at will, mingled with the crowds that congregated on city streets, attended mass political meetings, themselves met to discuss current events, drank on and off duty, and smoked demonstratively in the presence of and talked back to their officers.²⁵ An order to units in the Vilna military district in early November observed that “the incidence of outrageous behavior by enlisted men outside the barracks, and especially on city streets, has increased to an extreme. In Vilna, for example, in the course of three weeks there have been 20 more or less serious disorders.”²⁶ “Outrageous behavior” seeped into the very heart of the military machine: in an order of 23 November, Minister of War Rediger called attention to the frequent public drunkenness, disrespect for officers, and sloppy dress on the part of enlisted men employed in his ministry.²⁷ These and other orders calling on officers to restore discipline had not the slightest effect, and the cancer of insubordination ate rapidly away at the Tsarist military machine.

Soldiers repeatedly and insistently cited the October Manifesto to justify their indiscipline (or as they themselves said, their freedom), despite the fact that the Manifesto contained not a word about the army. The commander of the 50th reserve infantry brigade in Petersburg noted that “from personally questioning the men in my brigade, and in the depot infantry battalions, I am persuaded that they have an incorrect understanding of the meaning of the Imperial Manifesto of 17 October,” and he instructed officers to explain that “there have been no changes in the order of military service.”²⁸ The regimental chaplain of the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers in Moscow, asked by the men to explain the meaning of the Manifesto, “stated categorically that the Manifesto did not apply to soldiers. The soldiers protested, declaring to the priest that they were citizens like all the rest. One of the soldiers, carried away in the argument, threw a pillow at Father Orlov.”²⁹ In Warsaw, Vladivostok, and Saratov, too, garrison and regimental commanders felt compelled to explain the October Manifesto to the troops, because soldiers believed that the contents of the Manifesto were being kept from them. In other garrisons—the Rembertow artillery camp outside Warsaw, in Askhabad, in Kars, in Krasnovodsk, on the cruiser Rossiia in Vladivostok—soldiers and sailors forced their officers to read the Manifesto to them and insisted that the liberties promised therein applied to soldiers.³⁰ Like the pillow-throwing soldier in Moscow, they refused to believe assurances to the contrary.

The soldiers’ insistence that the October Manifesto legitimated indiscipline reveals the psychological underpinnings of their post-Manifesto behavior: they acted precisely like peasants, which they were by origin and had remained while in service. Soldiers did not simply misunderstand the terms of the Manifesto. While it is conceivable that they may at first have believed that the Manifesto gave them the right to attend and organize meetings, there was only a psychological link between the Manifesto and other aspects of their post-Manifesto behavior: drinking, irregular dress, disrespect for officers, even violence against civilians. Soldiers acted as though the totality of the old rules and regulations had been annulled. Like peasants, they concluded from the obvious fracture of civil authority—general strike, Manifesto, demonstrations, pogroms, “days of freedom”—that the fetters restraining them had also snapped, and that they could seize their own freedom. And like peasants they insisted that the Tsar himself had so ordered. The bonds of discipline were at root psychological, and the October Manifesto and surrounding events had shattered them. Soldiers no longer believed they would be punished for insubordination. Because indiscipline and insubordination were universal, there was nothing officers could do about it.

Indiscipline, no matter how widespread, was not yet mutiny, though the variety of indiscipline that debilitated the armed forces after October 17—refusal to believe that the old code of discipline still applied—led logically to mutiny. The mutiny, or riot, or even insurrection, at the Kronstadt naval base on October 26-27 exemplifies one path from indiscipline to mutiny.³¹ The mutiny itself was atypically violent, yet violence was not uncharacteristic of the behavior of soldiers and sailors in the post-Manifesto days. What was unusual at Kronstadt was that indiscipline and mutiny begat violence rather than the other way around. In any case, the ferment that preceded the Kronstadt mutiny differed little from what was going on in other garrisons, and we can see in it the revolutionary implications of indiscipline. Moreover, because the violence ensured wide publicity, Kronstadt’s mutiny, though not the first after October 17, was the symbolic beginning of the soldiers’ revolution.

The October Manifesto produced the same reaction in Kronstadt as elsewhere, but the garrison, both navy (9,000 men) and army (4,000), was unsettled even before October 17. The dispatch of ships to the Pacific had entailed the transfer of large numbers of naval personnel from port to port, while Kronstadt’s fortress gunners had been sent to Vladivostok and replaced by 2,000 time-expired artillerists from the western borders kept in service until the end of the war. Kronstadt also served as a dumping ground for unruly sailors from other bases, including a contingent of several hundred who had mutinied at Libava in June. In midsummer, Kronstadt experienced in acute form the indiscipline observed in so many garrisons: there were food riots and the destruction of brothels located conveniently opposite the barracks, and fortress infantry had repeatedly to break up mobs of sailors on the streets. News of the October Manifesto precipitated both patriotic and revolutionary demonstrations, sailors and soldiers mingled in the crowds listening to anti-government speeches, and they accompanied the action in the streets with vociferous protests against conditions in the barracks. General Beliaev, the fortress commandant, believing that enlisted personnel had misunderstood the October Manifesto, explained the Manifesto to an assembly of officers and senior NCOs and ordered them to tell the men that the Manifesto did not apply to the armed forces. Beliaev also asked military and civilian clergy to help calm the garrison.

Neither officers, nor priests, nor revolutionaries were able to persuade the Kronstadt garrison to ignore the Manifesto. At an October 23 meeting attended by as many as one thousand sailors, some fortress soldiers, and several thousand civilians, revolutionaries denounced the Manifesto, pointed out that it did nothing to address the needs of enlisted men, and urged their audience to protest barracks abuses. The soldiers and sailors who spoke came prepared with lists of demands. These included a reduction in the length of military service, more pay, better food and uniforms, free disposal of off-duty time, unrestricted access to all public events, removal of notices forbidding soldiers and sailors to walk in parks and gardens (the signs were posted directly beneath notices banning dogs), and the right to consume alcoholic beverages, “since sailors are not children under the care of their parents.”³² The commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral Nikonov, who had hastened to the scene to persuade the sailors to disperse, observed in a report the same day that “enlisted men, with the proclamation of the Imperial Manifesto, wish to know whether the freedoms extend to them, too, and protest against the existing state of affairs.”³³ In fact, sailors insisted that the Manifesto applied to them. A draft petition presented by some sailors on the 23rd included, in addition to service-related demands, the following:

According to the Manifesto, sailors are Russian citizens. As such, they have the right to gather and discuss their affairs . . . Freedom of speech. After all, enlisted men are allowed to say only: “Just so, sir,” “No, sir,” “Yes, sir.” They should have the right to say openly, to their commanders and everywhere, what they want.³⁴

They were already acting as though this demand were an accomplished fact.

On October 24 and 25, Admiral Nikonov toured the barracks to listen to the men’s complaints, and he reported that their demands fell into three categories: those that were “economic,” pertaining to food, uniforms, and barracks conditions; those that could not be satisfied because funds were lacking, e.g., the establishment of libraries for enlisted personnel; and those that touched on changes in the very nature of military service, such as free disposal of off-duty time, elected disciplinary courts, and the like. In one of the barracks a sailor speaking for his unit argued passionately that enlisted men must be allowed to hold meetings to review all existing military regulations. Though they were advancing their claims piecemeal, the sailors were clearly after revolutionary changes in the structure of authority in the Tsarist armed forces.

Almost any incident might have precipitated the riot, but the immediate spark was itself a microcosm of the seething discontent in Kronstadt. Even as Nikonov toured the barracks, sailors and soldiers burned brothels, milled about on the streets, and turned over soup cauldrons, and rumors that an uprising was planned for the 30th (when another mass meeting was scheduled) swept through the garrison. On the morning of the 26th, a fortress infantry company handed their commander a list of demands and set out in an unsuccessful quest for support from sailors. They returned to their barracks “confident,” as a report filed the same day (before the riot commenced and overshadowed the incident) remarked, “that the Imperial Manifesto of October 17 applied, with respect to all the rights granted, to the troops, who thus have an unlimited right to express their desires and state their needs, gathering for this end in open assembly. “³⁵ Since officers did not see things in that light, the entire company (50 men) was arrested and in mid-afternoon loaded on the fortress railway for shipment to one of the outlying forts. When a mob of 700 sailors and artillerists that had been breaking windows and burning drapery in brothels and attempting to loot liquor stores heard about this, they rushed to the railway to free the soldiers. When part of the convoy opened fire, one sailor died, another was seriously wounded, and the enraged sailors ran to their barracks and grabbed their rifles. Word of the clash quickly spread through the garrison, and mobs of sailors were soon storming through the city.

The rioters numbered, at a minimum, between three and four thousand—armed with rifles, more than enough to terrorize the city. Six of the twelve naval barracks remained largely passive through the rest of the afternoon and night, in part because officers locked the gates. Of the other naval units, the torpedo school and four naval barracks rioted almost to a man. Many of the artillerists were on the street, and those who were not obviously sympathized with the rioters. Only the infantry remained under control, but they were too few to do more than defend their own barracks. Though the more politically sophisticated sailors tried to impose some organization on the riot, by and large the mutineers vented elemental passions. Some groups attacked barracks that had not joined, but most pillaged and destroyed liquor and other stores. All through the night they fired their rifles into the air, attacked officers who crossed their path, and destroyed officers’ quarters. On the morning of the 27th, officers (including 21 of the rank of colonel and naval captain or better) and ordinary citizens fled the city. In the afternoon, eight battalions of reinforcements arrived, and the weary rioters formed into columns and drifted back to their barracks. Casualties, sustained mostly during the attacks on neutral barracks, were high: 26 killed (most of them rioting sailors), 107 wounded (including 81 enlisted men). Eleven naval barracks were disarmed on the 28th, 2,000 soldiers and sailors placed under arrest between the 29th and 31st.

Though the sailors were convinced that revolution had triumphed in civilian society, and though they aspired to a radical restructuring of the Tsarist armed forces, indiscriminate violence overwhelmed the revolutionary substructure of the Kronstadt riot. The same was true at the other end of the empire on October 30-31, when soldiers and sailors burned down much of Vladivostok and many Chinese with it. Even so, it was clear that because of the events of mid-October spontaneous military violence no longer played into the hands of the regime. It is also true that there was a poor fit between revolution as sailors and soldiers saw it and revolution as conceived by civilians. Revolutionaries warned the garrison not to give credence to the false promises in the Tsar’s Manifesto, but the Manifesto was the key to the soldiers’ and sailors’ behavior. Through the few conscripts with whom they were in contact, revolutionaries tried, and failed, to lend direction and organization to military discontent. Under interrogation, one politicized sailor wept in anguish that the riot had not at all been what was intended, but sailors who attempted to restrain their fellows on the 26th were cursed and threatened.

The actions of the revolutionary movement after the riot did affect the construction that soldiers throughout the empire put on the Kronstadt events. Despite the fact that peace had been concluded, military authorities first ordered that those arrested in Kronstadt be subject to wartime penalties, including the death penalty. The Petersburg Soviet, which had already shown an interest in extending its influence to the army, decided on November 1 to declare a general strike to prevent execution (and also to protest against reimposition of martial law in Poland). Simultaneously, the Soviet issued a proclamation pointing out that the workers were interceding for soldiers and sailors, and by its action the Soviet did win popularity in the armed forces. Under renewed popular pressure, the government retreated, announcing on November 5 that those arrested would be tried under the peacetime code.³⁶ From the government’s point of view, the consequences were disastrous, for the Soviet’s intervention and the government’s retreat reinforced the impact of the October Manifesto on the army. A Guards officer interviewed by the Paris Temps reported that the events in Kronstadt, and especially the workers’ subsequent intervention, had made a big impression on the soldiers and that all units in Petersburg were restive.³⁷ Indeed, soldiers across the empire began to threaten their officers with “another Kronstadt” should their demands not be met.

Mutiny

The passage from rampant indiscipline to mutiny was easy, and through November it was accomplished by an increasing number of units with every passing week: 15 mutinies from October 18 to the end of the month, 44 in the first half of November, 86 in the second half. The overarching cause of mutiny was the soldiers’ post-October 17 conviction that the old military order had collapsed: soldiers mutinied to implement their own vision of a just military society. Nevertheless, the precise circumstances that precipitated mutiny were as diverse as the soldiers were unruly. There were also important regional variations, and mutiny underwent a significant change in character in mid-November.

The 500,000 reserves in Manchuria and the Far East gave the soldiers’ revolution there a character and dimensions impossible to measure with statistics on discrete mutiny: in effect, all 500,000 of the Manchurian reserves mutinied en masse and for two months. The October strikes severed communication between Europe and the Far East, and when word of the October Manifesto finally arrived (in Vladivostok by private wire on October 20, at army headquarters in Harbin on October 22), it had an explosive impact. The generals who ran Vladivostok (with a garrison of 6,500 sailors and 65,000 soldiers, of whom almost 40,000 were reserves) were as bewildered by the Manifesto as civilian officials to the west, and only on October 26, after receiving elucidation from Petersburg, did they forbid enlisted personnel to attend civilian meetings. That order had no effect other than to anger the soldiers. Both in Vladivostok and in the field, officers generally decided not to read the Manifesto to their men; when soldiers asked, officers told them the Manifesto did not apply to the army. Soldiers concluded that their officers were hiding the truth, and the truth of which they were most convinced was that they should be sent home. Reserves had expected to be demobilized ever since the conclusion of peace, and they were both angered and worried by news from home that the allowances their families had been receiving had been terminated at the end of the war. With little hard information available about events back in Europe, wild rumors circulated among the reserves; the rumor with the most powerful effect was that in their absence peasants were already parceling out the land. But far more important than anything they knew or suspected was the reserves’ absolute conviction that they should now be allowed to return to Russia. They were ungovernable, they expressed their hatred of their officers openly and without fear of retribution, and on October 30-31 the reserves in Vladivostok vented their rage in an orgy of violence beside which even the Kronstadt mutiny seemed pacific.³⁸

So frightening was the behavior of the reserves that they got what they wanted. The evacuation schedule adopted in early October had called for XIII corps to be followed by cossack and cavalry divisions (the better to deal with domestic disorder) and by IX corps; no special provisions were made for reserves, who were to return with their units. However, in view of the Vladivostok violence and the mounting chaos in Harbin, and after a flood of entreaties from civil and military authorities in the Far East that they be freed of the reserves, General Linevich telegraphed the War Ministry on November 3 that it was imperative to ship home reserves before cadre units. On November 5 and again on November 10 (two orders, to reassure the reserves while the staff revised the shipping schedule), Linevich announced that reserves would leave first, in the order in which they had been called up; their trains were to be interspersed with those of the remaining elements of XIII corps, now diverted from its return trip and detailed to maintain order along the line, and IV Siberian corps, which was being sent to maintain order in Siberian cities.³⁹

That order merely sanctioned the reserves’ elemental flight home. Ignoring the niceties of the schedule, they mobbed the terminals and took trains by storm, the most aggressive and closest to Harbin getting first claim. To ensure that no obstacles stood in the reserves’ way, Linevich treated with the railroad strike committees that had control over the line running from Harbin to Siberia. Other generals condemned Linevich for consorting with revolutionaries and even tried to incite soldiers against railway workers by blaming delays in evacuation on the intermittent strikes. But railway personnel were fully aware of the mortal danger in which they would stand should they antagonize the reserves, and they gave troop trains top priority and sent the reserves through even during strikes. By December evacuation was proceeding smoothly, the mob at Harbin had thinned, and reserves farther afield were beginning to calm down, though bands of them occasionally marched under arms to the nearest siding and commandeered the first passing train. With the reserves gone, cadre units isolated in Manchurian villages remained calm: in the field armies only two mutinies did not involve reserves.⁴⁰

Evacuation of the reserves spared Harbin, but exposed the Transsiberian Railway to a military pogrom. After they had exhausted the ration money given them when they left Harbin, the reserves plundered station buffets along the line. They refused to abide by the regulation prohibiting entry into first-class buffets, and beat officers who stood in their way. Officers assigned to ride with them fled to passenger trains, but the reserves forced their way onto passenger trains, too, and squeezed into first-class compartments with generals. They refused to let other trains pass, shot up stations, beat up stationmasters who could not provide locomotives, and seized locomotives from switching yards and other trains. In short, the reserves terrorized cities, stations, railway personnel and everyone else who crossed their path from Harbin and Vladivostok all the way across the Urals. General Linevich telegraphed stations along the line to send the rioting troop trains through as quickly as possible. When the reserves finally crossed over into Europe, cadre troops were drawn up at the terminals to maintain order and speed them along.⁴¹ The Ministry of War, unable to communicate with Harbin from mid-November until the end of the year because of telegraph strikes in Siberia (contact was finally reestablished via Shanghai), had no direct information on conditions in the Manchurian armies and saw only, as Rediger recalled, “trainloads of disorderly reserves, drunk and destroying the railroad,” pouring into Europe.⁴² Arrival in Europe was, however, a tonic. Once across the Volga, the reserves joined in revolutionary disturbances in only a few instances, for example pausing briefly to free arrested railway personnel.⁴³ Their overwhelming urge was to get home, where they played a notable role in the peasant rebellion.

Not only did the reserves control Siberian rail traffic into December, their mutiny spread to all of XIII corps, elements of IV Siberian corps, and all the garrisons as far west as Krasnoiarsk. The units of XIII corps, which still had their reserves, were as much a threat to the stations they were supposed to protect as were the reserves rolling through; they demanded to be sent home, and after they mutinied, they were.⁴⁴ Mutiny began in Chita on November 15 when the 3rd reserve railway battalion demanded demobilization of the reserves and grew until it had engulfed two of the regiments of XIII corps (141st Mozhaisk, 144^th Kashira) and the entire local garrison. The Chita SDs (the only substantial group of revolutionaries in the city) organized a soviet of soldier and cossack deputies and the military governor, General Kholshchevnikov, with absolutely no forces at his command, was reduced to ratifying the actions of the soviet (for which he was subsequently courtmartialled and imprisoned). In Krasnoiarsk, formal mutiny began when elements of 2nd Sofia and 141st Mozhaisk regiments (XIII corps), detained on November 16 and 17 to overawe workers and an unruly (but as yet nonmutinous) garrison, refused to leave their trains. On November 24, the 2nd railroad battalion mutinied and was joined by the rest of the garrison, which paraded through town on December 9. Elements of 10th Omsk and 11th Semiplatinsk Siberian infantry regiments (IV Siberian corps) refused to act against the mutineers, and the 2nd railroad battalion refused to leave Krasnoiarsk (an exceptional occurrence) and was the mainstay of a local workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. In Irkutsk, SDs and SRs discovered in November that reserves were so angry about being kept in service that they were conspiring to slaughter their officers, plunder the military stores, and “seek the truth” (or “seek justice,” pravdu iskat’, truth and justice being identical so far as soldiers and peasants were concerned; the expression was common in peasant disturbances) of their demobilization.⁴⁵ The reserves did mutiny on November 26 and were joined by the local cossacks; elements of 144th Kashira refused to suppress this mutiny, too.

The revolt of the Manchurian reserves obtained the demobilization of reserves in Europe as well as their own. The Ministry of War had initially planned to demobilize only the 100 depot battalions (which held fewer than 50,000 men at the end of the war) that had fed replacements to regiments at the front, and only the oldest classes of reserves, men between 36 and 40, in other units. The bulk of the reserves in Europe were to be kept under arms until the return of the Manchurian units, because they were needed to combat revolution. However, on November 12 Minister of War Rediger reacted to the reserves’ discontent just as General Linevich had done out in Manchuria: he reported to the Tsar that “it is impossible to go on like this, because the army is falling apart; to bring the army to order it is necessary to demobilize the dissatisfied element—the reserves.”⁴⁶ The Tsar assented, and Rediger sent out the orders. Military district commanders were given discretion as to the rapidity with which they sent reserves home; there was hope that conditions in some districts might permit the retention of reserves. Most district and local commanders rid themselves of reserves as rapidly as available transportation permitted, and some went beyond official instructions, demobilizing time-expired soldiers who were not covered by the War Ministry order. By mid-December, most reserves in European Russia were home or on their way, cutting the army’s strength by 240,000 men.⁴⁷

It was less the behavior of reserves in Europe than the impact of early-November reports from Vladivostok and Manchuria and, possibly, an exchange of telegrams between the War Ministry and the Caucasus military district, where the 30,000 reserves mobilized in October were causing special problems, that inspired the rush to demobilize.⁴⁸ Rediger had reported to the ministerial conference of October 12 that reserves expected to be demobilized; reserves in Europe did express extreme unhappiness about the termination of allowances to their families (to pacify his garrison, the governor of Kazan ordered the allowances restored); and there is no doubt that, like Rediger, most officers identified reserves as the most unreliable element in the army.⁴⁹ Yet outside Manchuria and Siberia, reserves did not drive the soldiers’ revolution. Reserves inspired only two of the twelve mutinies in European Russia between October 18 and October 31, only nine of the thirty-eight mutinies in Europe in the first fifteen days of November. Certainly reserves were involved in more mutinies than that—perhaps in as many as a third of the 211 mutinies in the last two and one-half months of the year—simply because so many units had filled up with reserves during the war.⁵⁰ But in relatively few cases did reserves either initiate mutiny, or dominate mutiny with their demand for demobilization.

The soldiers’ revolution had deeper roots than the reserves’ desire to go home, which is of course why demobilization had no impact on the incidence of mutiny; indeed, there were far more mutinies after than before demobilization began. Furthermore, if the reserves’ discontent was unique, they acted for the same reasons that cadre soldiers did. Peace had been signed on August 23, and it is unlikely that reserves grasped the distinction between signing and ratification. Even after ratification on October 1, reserves did not act to force demobilization— they did so only after October 17. For reserves as for cadre troops, the October Manifesto eliminated the psychological constraints that had held rebellion in check.

The revolt of the Manchurian reserves aside, through the middle of November the majority of mutinies—22 of the 41 whose origins can be determined*—grew out of incidents that soldiers considered provocations and that galvanized them into mutiny. Given the rampant indiscipline, almost any affront could produce a mutinous reaction. For example, altercations between soldiers and civilians triggered three mutinies, including the Vladivostok riot, which began with soldiers beating up Chinese tradesmen. In Tiflis on November 9, when a patrol brought in two men of the 15th Tiflis Grenadiers for forcing butchers to reduce the price of meat, the regiment grabbed weapons, accused officers of showing favoritism to natives, and demanded (among other things) demobilization of reserves. In Lagodekhi (Tiflis Province) on November 14, when officers attempted to stop the men of the 264th Loriisk reserve infantry from beating merchants at the bazaar, soldiers stoned their officers and handed in a set of demands for changes in the barracks regime. The latter two mutinies were compounded equally of hostility to natives—after October 17, no security against mutiny—and the operation of the regimental economy, which forced the company artel’ to procure provisions on a market in which prices fluctuated wildly because of railroad strikes.

The most common cause of mutiny before November 15 (13 of the set of 41 mutinies) was an attempt by officers to restore discipline by arresting the presumed instigators of insubordination or by dispersing unauthorized soldier meetings. Arrests touched off the Kronstadt riot and mutinies in the 7th Merv reserve battalion in Merv on October 28, a fortress artillery company in Batum on November 2, and the 249th Maikop reserve infantry battalion in Stavropol on November 10. An attempt to arrest a civilian talking to sailors in the barracks triggered mutiny in the 14th naval equipage in Petersburg on November 5, and an attempt to break up a sailors’ meeting in Sevastopol on November 11 touched off full-blown insurrection. Closely related to these were mutinies that began when soldiers disobeyed routine orders (6 of the 41). On November 8, the Aleksandrovskoe local command (Irkutsk Province) refused to clear snow; when an officer tried to arrest a soldier for disobedience, the unit shot up the post. In Kremenchug on November 9, the 272nd Korochansk infantry disobeyed the morning order to begin drill, and then presented demands.

What all of these incidents had in common was the soldiers’ refusal to acknowledge that their officers had the authority to enforce discipline and the customary military routine. The same attitude underlay the insubordination that swept the army after publication of the October Manifesto, and when officers challenged the soldiers’ perception of the new military dispensation, the men mutinied. Such conflicts were especially likely immediately after October 17, before officers understood how completely their authority had collapsed. But officers learned from experience. Of the 87 mutinies between November 16 and the end of the year the origins of which are known, in only nine (as against 13 of 41 through November 15) did attempts to reestablish proper discipline trigger mutiny. Soldiers were no more submissive than before, but officers had come to accept indiscipline as a fact of life.

Soldiers were so volatile after October 17 that in 18 (of the 41) cases indiscipline reached the flashpoint of mutiny even in the absence of provocation. Most of these self-initiated mutinies were spontaneous, rather than deliberated beforehand, as when the sailors of the 8th naval equipage in Petersburg on October 18 grabbed their rifles and attempted to break out of their barracks to join a passing demonstration (Guards infantry stopped them), or when the sailors of the Caspian flotilla in Baku drove a patriotic demonstration away on October 20. In a few instances, the reserves’ overwhelming urge to go home led directly to mutiny. In the 81st Apsheronsk infantry in Vladikavkaz, appeals for demobilization escalated on October 28 into a strike in support of 45 demands. Reserves in the 160th depot infantry battalion in Gomel, having learned that they were to be transferred to a line regiment, told their commander on November 5 that they would go nowhere but home. Neither in these or in most other self-initiated mutinies did soldiers actually plot mutiny. Rather, indiscipline in excess became mutiny. With so many indisciplined units about, some mutinies of this sort were statistically inevitable.

One way or another, the stew of indiscipline was directly responsible for almost all the mutinies between October 18 and November 15. Nevertheless, there were at least two mutinies—at Sveaborg (October 29-30) and Batum (November 13-14)—that hatched from conspiracy and during the organization and implementation of which soldiers articulated the assumptions that elsewhere went unspoken. The mutiny at the Sveaborg fortress in Helsingfors harbor, engineered by a small group of soldiers who were not in contact with any revolutionary group, illuminates the mix of objective and subjective factors that engendered mutiny after October 17. Conditions in the barracks were bad and petty restrictions on the soldiers’ movements numerous. Exploitation of soldiers as personal servants (up to four per officer) and through graft (soldiers were not issued even the inadequate equipment officially due them and were made to purchase boots through the senior artillery officer) was particularly severe. Many artillerists in the fortress were time-expired and believed they had a right to discharge now that the war was over. Finally, officers suppressed information about the October Manifesto. A group of soldiers in the artillery and engineering units decided to crystallize the soldiers’ discontent by organizing a meeting to discuss demobilization. The summons they sent around on October 29 illustrates the change the Manifesto had wrought in the soldiers’ perception of the social order:

I pray, comrades, that you gather, because the Tsar has granted freedom of speech for soldiers, too, which we must explain to our commanders, and [we have] a right to demand from them immediate satisfaction of our needs. . . . Brothers, comrades, let us unite in one thought, arm in arm and forward. We will show them that the soldier is a human being and that no one should despise him, we shall cast off this yoke and then, believe me, it will be well with those who remain, and they will send us home. We shouldn’t fear them, there are more of us than of them, we have only to shout boldly, and they will make concessions.⁵¹

The fortress commandant attempted to cut the agitation short by promising to petition Petersburg for demobilization and by calling the artillerists to a special church service, at which the chaplain exhorted them to “fear God and honor the Tsar.” (A soldier is reported to have interjected: “We fear God all right, but why do they give us rotten boots?”⁵²) Afterwards, the artillerists were drawn up in front of the church and surrounded by armed infantry, but they boldly shouted their demands and threatened force to attain them. The infantry shouted encouragement. Fearing another Kronstadt, officers told their men to present their grievances. Among the soldiers’ twenty demands (mostly on specific abuses in the barracks) was one that “all regulations compiled and signed by Generals, Colonels and Captains” be replaced by regulations drawn up by peasant deputies to the forthcoming Duma. In Sveaborg as elsewhere, local grievances were merely the point of departure for an assault on the entire structure of military authority. The final Sveaborg demand was: “Soldier meetings are indispensable because we must agree on our needs and express our opinions. Forward, brothers, with God.”⁵³ On November 1, the commandant issued a 33-point order meeting all of the demands within his power to satisfy. For his pains, he was removed from his post.

More typical of the self-initiated mutinies was that of the Grodno artillerists: their mutiny was spontaneous, but it was a response to all of the pressures acting on soldiers inside and outside the barracks. After publication of the October Manifesto, discipline collapsed in Grodno as everywhere else, most rapidly in the artillery. The 12th artillery brigade, manned entirely by reserves, pressed for demobilization and (somewhat illogically) more pay. In the 26th artillery brigade, soldiers talked of better rations and uniforms and fewer beatings. The Kronstadt riot, which they read about in the local press, emboldened the artillerists, and incidents in which officers were threatened with bodily harm and forced to leave the barracks became frequent. On November 4, insubordination grew into mutiny. The reserves of the 12th brigade became so vociferous that they won a promise of demobilization, and the first battery of the 26th brigade refused to leave the barracks for drill and reiterated their complaints. On the 5th, officers attempted to arrest a pair of “instigators” in the 26th brigade, but the soldiers refused to surrender their comrades; when an officer fired two shots in the air, the artillerists drove him from the barracks. The corps commander hastened to the scene. The artillerists again demanded tea and sugar rations, the removal of a brutal Sergeant Major, decent uniforms, and “freedom.” When the artillerists refused to disperse or hand over the soldiers who were to be arrested, two companies of the 102nd Viatka regiment were summoned. The two “instigators” were finally arrested, and the rest forced to return to their barracks.

That night, the men of the 26th brigade met to discuss the situation, with a representative from the local Bund organization in attendance (the Grodno Bundists had set up a military organization early in the year and had contacts in the 26th brigade).⁵⁴ The soldiers compiled a list of thirty-eight grievances, mostly of a local character but with the usual admixture of demands for fundamental change in the structure of authority. The Bund military organization published the demands in a special proclamation the next day. On the 6th, too, the military command, having learned of the meeting on the night of the 5th, surrounded the barracks of the 26th brigade with ten (or six; official accounts vary) companies of the 103rd Petrozavodsk regiment. Some of the artillerists were jailed, the rest were locked in the barracks of the 102nd Viatka regiment.

Repression was only temporarily successful, for in Grodno as in most other garrisons mutinies spread from unit to unit. Within a few days, the infantry was as mutinous as the artillery. On November 7, the Bund military organization distributed a proclamation and convened a meeting of 100 soldiers to protest the arrest of the artillerists. On November 14, the military organization arranged a meeting of representatives from all units in the garrison, excepting only the cossacks. The meeting condemned the arrest of the artillerists, expressed solidarity with their demands, and resolved to continue the struggle until the demands made by the artillerists were met.⁵⁵ Within a few days, nonmutinous disorders hit the 103rd Petrozavodsk regiment: there were protests against a brutal Sergeant Major, there was a food riot, and the commander promised concessions. On November 22 and 23, soldiers in the Petrozavodsk regiment (apparently without civilian assistance) organized meetings of representatives from other infantry units in the city; at one meeting, thirteen men from the Petrozavodsk, 102nd Viatka and 171st Kobrinsk regiments were arrested. On December 4, at a meeting so large and so defiantly in contravention of the military code that it amounted to mutiny, soldiers from the Viatka and 101st Perm infantry were addressed by Bundists, who urged them to influence the 103rd Petrozavodsk, the only regiment that in the Bund’s estimation had not yet sided with the revolution. On December 12, a fortress infantry company refused to disperse civilians, and the 4th sapper battalion may—the information is soft—have struck in support of forty-two demands at about the same time.⁵⁶

The chain of mutinies in Grodno exemplifies the process by which entire garrisons were lost to the government. The Grodno garrison did not rise in armed rebellion, but by early December it had mutinied almost in its entirety. The first mutiny, erupting from acute disaffection and indiscipline, provided grounds for mutinies in other units and—in Grodno, at any rate—afforded revolutionaries an opportunity to step in and organize the soldiers’ discontent. Whether civilian revolutionaries were active in a garrison or not, mutiny in one unit crystallized discontent in others, just as the Kronstadt riot had accelerated the drift toward mutiny in Grodno in the first place.

Around the middle of November, the character of the soldiers’ revolution began to change: as in Grodno, spontaneity gave way to purposefulness, and as soldiers made a conscious choice for mutiny, the number of mutinies nearly doubled, from forty-four in the first half of November to eighty-six in the second. Though incidents of all kinds, including altercations with civilians, continued to precipitate mutiny out of indiscipline, this was no longer the rule. Of the eighty-seven mutinies between November 16 and December 31 whose origins can be specified, fifty-six were self-initiated; only nine began when officers attempted to restore order, and only nine began when soldiers refused to obey a routine command. And soldiers began their mutinies far more deliberately than they had in late October and early November. Deliberate decisions to mutiny were taken for many reasons, but the pronounced tendency was for soldiers to emulate the action of their fellows. In eleven cases after November 15, news of mutiny elsewhere was the immediate stimulus. The penal escort detachment (konvoinaia komanda) in Samara mutinied on November 20 after reading about mutinies in the day’s paper. The Bobruisk disciplinary battalion mutinied on November 22 after learning of the mutiny in the Voronezh disciplinary battalion (November 18). The 51st artillery brigade in Belgorod mutinied on November 28 after learning of a mutiny in the 36th artillery brigade in nearby Karachev on November 27. In Kazan on November 29 the men of the 229th Sviazhsk reserve infantry battalion (which had gunned down civilians on October 17) read in a local paper about another unit that had demanded the removal of all reenlistees (meaning senior NCOs), then themselves mutinized to obtain the removal of their own NCOs.⁵⁷

Even when soldiers did not find such specific inspiration in another mutiny, what they learned about or could see for themselves certainly encouraged them to mutiny. The men of the 17th Turkestan rifles (Chardzhui) were exceptionally calculating, and delayed mutiny until they could see how other mutinies in the garrison turned out.⁵⁸ Most soldiers simply noted the frequency of mutiny and decided that they should mutiny, too. As they did so, they copied each others demands. The demands of the Grodno artillerists, distributed as a leaflet by the Grodno Bundists and picked up by newspapers all over Russia, were copied either in part or with additions by soldiers in at least nineteen other mutinies, some as late as December. The demands of the 2nd Transcaspian railroad battalion in Samarkand provided a similar model for mutinous units in Central Asia, and other sets of demands had an impact on smaller regions.⁵⁹

As soldiers began to deliberate their mutinies, civilians offered assistance, but to only modest effect. Their interest in the army galvanized by the post-Manifesto mutinies, revolutionaries set up new military organizations (no fewer than 25 by SDs, for a total of 64 SD military organizations after October, and a minimum of 27—no doubt many more—SR military organizations in the same period), and military organizations that had lapsed into inactivity showed new signs of life.⁶⁰ By mid-November the military organizations had penetrated some garrisons and had begun to organize soldiers. While civilians can be given credit for initiating only 1 mutiny (of the 41 whose origin is known) before November 15, they initiated 5 (of 87) after November 15, including the mutiny in Grodno on December 4. The SD military organization in Tiflis organized a series of mass meetings that engulfed most of the Tiflis garrison and led to the presentation of numerous petitions of demands (November 20-26), while SRs organized a mutiny by the 7th reserve cavalry regiment in Tambov on November 30. Revolutionaries were also heavily involved in mutinies in Kiev (SDs, November 16-18), Samara (SRs, November 25-December 3), and a few other garrisons. Other revolutionary military organizations, like that in Grodno in early November, helped mutinous soldiers compile lists of demands once soldiers had mutinied for their own reasons. Nevertheless, the civilian contribution to the soldiers’ revolution was marginal. The soldiers’ willingness to mutiny antedated civilian involvement and it was the collapse of discipline and the inspiration provided by other mutinies that created an opening for civilian intrusion. Moreover, most mutinies did not involve civilians in any capacity, and soldiers frequently rejected civilian offers of assistance.

The mutinies were overwhelmingly nonviolent, and the absence of violence was one of the defining characteristics of the soldiers’ revolution: violence was incompatible with the psychology that was the mainspring of soldiers’ behavior. True enough, soldiers did stone or beat a few officers who triggered mutinies by attempting to reimpose discipline, and in many more cases soldiers demonstratively grabbed their rifles, but in only twelve of the 211 mutinies were shots fired.⁶¹ These included the riots in Kronstadt and Vladivostok in October, disorderly firing by mutineers in the Aleksandrovskoe local detachment in November, a brutal prison riot in the Voronezh disciplinary battalion on November 18, dispersal by force of a peaceful march of sappers in Kiev in November 18, and the armed resistance that mutineers in Krasnoiarsk offered to a punitive detachment that arrived in January (a month and a half after the mutiny had begun). In Europe, the only mutiny that can reasonably be described as an armed insurrection occurred in Sevastopol, where half the Black Sea fleet, some fortress units, and some infantry mutinied between November 11 and November 15, and where on November 15 there was an exchange of fire between mutinous and nonmutinous ships, while sailors on shore resisted the infantry attacking their barracks. However, the Sevastopol insurrection was unintentional. It began when officers ordered a shore patrol to fire on a sailor meeting and one of the sailors in the patrol shot the officers instead. Once mutiny had commenced, the Black Sea sailors had the organizational and political experience needed to risk resisting a determined government effort to subdue them. Sevastopol was the exception. In most cases violence was a product of disorganization rather than organization, and few mutinous units no matter how well organized were prepared to offer armed resistance to loyalist units—but then, mutinous soldiers were rarely put to that test.

Most mutinies—at least 135 of the 211 after October 17—revolved around the presentation of a set of demands and nonviolent action (meetings, refusal to perform duties, marches) in support of the demands. These petitions spelled out the soldiers’ view of the new military dispensation, and will be discussed shortly. Irrespective of their content, there was a logical connection between the presentation of petitions and the lack of violence. The mutinies were nonviolent because after October 17 soldiers believed that the old military order had collapsed; hence, violence was unnecessary. When officers goaded them into mutiny by challenging their post-Manifesto perceptions, or when mutinies elsewhere inspired them, soldiers articulated their view of the just military order. Had soldiers believed that the old disciplinary code, with its severe sanctions against mutiny, still applied, had they believed force were required to overturn the old military order, they would not have mutinied in the first place. They had not mutinied before October 17, though every one of the conditions whose elimination they later demanded had been present. Mutinies occurred after, not before, officers lost control of their units—no force was needed to accomplish that—and after soldiers had concluded that their officers’ customary authority had lapsed.

Once the psychological obstacles vanished, the principal requirement for mutiny was the establishment among soldiers of a consensus on the shape of a new military order. Consensus could crystallize instantaneously during an angry confrontation with officers, but even then indiscipline and the airing of grievances preceded and made possible the mutinous response. Elsewhere, indiscipline and angry talk gradually cohered into a set of demands that soldiers then presented to their officers. Almost without exception, the demands were presented collectively, not by a group of soldiers in a company, battalion, or regiment, but by the entire unit. Furthermore, leadership in the ordinary sense was virtually nonexistent: soldiers made up their minds to mutiny all together or not at all. Only rarely (in at most 15 percent of the mutinies, and probably in no more than 10 percent) is it possible to establish that any group of militant soldiers (affiliated with a revolutionary organization or, as at Sveaborg, not) or any individual revolutionary conscript played a key role in fomenting mutiny.⁶² There were surely some soldiers more forward, or whose opinion carried more weight, than others in every unit that mutinied, but it required the common consent of all for mutiny. This consensus was achieved much as it was in peasant villages, through a mass meeting at which soldiers voiced their complaints and argued back and forth on the proper course of action, until holdouts had given in.⁶³

The operation of community consensus made for quantum rather than incremental differences in unit behavior: any substantial dissent prevented mutiny. While some battalions or companies might mutiny to a man, other battalions or companies from the same regiment might, again to a man, sit on the sidelines. Who mutinied often depended upon the arrangement of barracks: individual barracks rarely split, but a regiment strung out over a city could easily fragment during a mutiny. On the other hand, elements of mutinous units occasionally marched considerable distances to join their comrades. Or a group of units quartered in close proximity might mutiny together, while elements of the same units elsewhere did not. Once mutinies were underway, soldiers immediately appealed to (or, as in Kronstadt, tried to force) other units to join them in common action. There was, of course, strength in numbers. But the deeper motivation was the need soldiers felt to establish universal affirmation—and thus the legitimacy—of their acts. Like the peasants they were, soldiers instinctively sought to present a united front to the world beyond their community.

Once consensus had been established, it was often reinforced by symbolic action, frequently a march. Units marched to a meeting, or to present their demands formally to the unit or garrison commander. In at least sixteen mutinies, soldiers marched through town, bands playing— sometime two or three bands playing. Soldiers marched under arms in proper military order, dressed by NCOs or by some other soldiers who enjoyed authority in the unit. (Marches required and brought to the surface soldier leadership, and though the evidence is far from voluminous, it appears from the marches and a few other mutinies that NCOs—either those Sergeants Major who were not odious to the men or conscript NCOs—functioned as leaders by virtue of their position and authority prior to mutiny.⁶⁴) In Kiev on November 18, two companies from two pontoon battalions marched to nearby barracks and were joined by elements of three other sapper and pontoon battalions and two bands (one an infantry band compelled to join, the body of the infantry regiment being locked in its barracks), then set off for the center of town expecting to pick up more units; the testimony of one GSO on the scene is that had a loyal infantry regiment not dispersed the march with fire (this was the only march to end in bloodshed), the mutiny would have gathered in most of the garrison.⁶⁵ On November 23, an infantry regiment in Kharkov marched with its band from barracks to barracks, was joined by elements of three other regiments and another band (an artillery brigade refused to join), then headed for the center of the city, where the division commander humbly accepted a set of demands. These and other marches traumatized the authorities, because they bore dramatic and unambiguous witness to the officers’ powerlessness to control soldiers. But the marching soldiers did not have aggressive intent. Soldiers meant instead to demonstrate their unanimity and firmness of purpose, both to their commanders and to themselves.

The mutinous soldiers’ perceptions—that their officers’ authority had lapsed, that the establishment of consensus sufficed to effect change— were self-verifying, because so long as they were widely shared the authorities could not cope with mutiny. And, in mutiny after mutiny— in sixty of the 137 mutinies whose resolution can be determined— soldiers did win concessions, or promises thereof, whereas in only thirty-seven cases did force or the threat of force bring mutinies to an end. In most other mutinies, officers simply ignored what their men were doing, in the hope that mutiny would go away.* So long as soldiers had no reason to believe that the old military order, or the social order in which it was embedded, was legitimate, so long as events did not falsify their post-Manifesto belief that the old social and military order had collapsed, there was nothing officers could do to reestablish their authority, and each mutiny made the next easier.

Social Revolution

The most common feature of the post-Manifesto mutinies—135 of 211 cases—was the presentation of a set of demands, often running to twenty, thirty, forty or more points.* Soldiers presented demands most frequently, in seventy of eighty-six mutinies (81 percent) in the second half of November, when their revolution was most deliberated; elaboration of a set of demands was itself evidence of the greater purposefulness of mutinous soldiers after mid-November. However, there was little difference between the earlier and later demands. Whether mutiny resulted from officer provocation, or erupted from indiscipline, or was decided upon at a meeting, the soldiers’ conception of a just military society was the same. The only difference was whether or not the circumstances of mutiny afforded the soldiers an opportunity to articulate their views.

Even when committed to paper, the soldiers’ program was not stated systematically, but must be extracted from the jumble of specific points. The demands of the Grodno artillerists, which enjoyed so much resonance in the army, were typical. The artillerists demanded, in no coherent order, shorter service, more pay, and free mailing, travel, and newspaper subscriptions; they demanded, too, that their underwear be washed at army expense. They demanded that soldiers be addressed “as befits human beings” (i.e., in the polite rather than the familiar). They demanded that they be allowed to go to theaters and libraries, and that their mail not be opened. They demanded in great detail improvements in food, uniforms, and kit (including bedlinen, pillows, and blankets). They demanded unrestricted leave from the barracks, and freedom to meet and discuss their needs. They demanded that the officer who had fired shots in the air be removed, and the removal of all reenlisted NCOs. And they demanded an end to searches in the barracks, the elimination of severe punishments for disciplinary infractions, improved medical services, and the demobilization of reserves.⁶⁶ Although the Grodno demands were written down by a member of the Bund, the language and spirit were the soldiers’ own, and they capture the atmosphere of the meeting at which they were compiled: a packed room of exuberant soldiers shouting out demands as they came to mind, each grievance reminding them of others, the civilian scribe struggling to keep pace and put the demands in some sort of order.

The Grodno demands and the many other sets of demands were revolutionary, but it was easy to miss that point because they were not obviously political and because they were not presented systematically. Revolutionaries of the time classified the soldiers’ demands as either “economic” (i.e., having to do with life in the army) or “political.” They considered political demands—for a Constituent Assembly, abolition of the standing army, institution of the eight-hour day, land redistribution—manifestations of a truly revolutionary spirit, economic demands as at best useful grounds for agitation. Few revolutionaries appreciated that the soldiers’ demands, if met, would have overturned military society. Officers, though acutely aware of the decomposition of the army, were also inclined to minimize the significance of the soldiers’ demands. One who did not was the liberal General Grulev, who observed:

If in that time of chaos “economic” demands flared up, that was only because questions of a material character were more accessible to the understanding of the masses than the subtleties of legal relations; but dissatisfaction was rooted in the latter. That was why increasing the soldiers’ rations [and similar reforms] missed the mark. . . .⁶⁷

Lurking beneath the mass of bewildering and often trivial detail was the soldiers’ determination to change the two features of military society that most affected them, the operation of the regimental economy and the web of controls over their movements and activity. Of the eighty-four sets of demands analyzed by the Soviet historian V. A. Petrov, seventy-three—the highest incidence of any category of demands— called for changes in the operation of the regimental economy: improvements in pay, food, uniforms, and kit, elimination of labor in the civilian economy, and so forth. These were directed not just against the material hardship soldiers suffered while in service, but also the requirement that soldiers provide for themselves, out of their own pocket or through contract labor, much of their own equipment. Forty-nine sets of demands (almost 60 percent of Petrov’s sample, the second highest incidence) called for civil and political rights for soldiers: freedom to meet in the barracks and attend meetings outside the barracks, freedom to go to theaters and other public entertainments, inviolability of correspondence, and the like. These demands posed an even more fundamental challenge to the functioning of the army than did the economic demands, and they derived immediately from the revolutionary environment of late 1905: soldiers sought to transfer the new freedoms and the elimination of social restraints evident in civilian society to military society. Soldiers demanded demobilization of reserves or time-expired soldiers in forty-six petitions, the third highest incidence, but one indicating that pressure from the reserves was not the mainspring of the soldiers’ revolution.⁶⁸

Demands for improvements in kit and for freedom of movement implicitly challenged the structure of authority in the regiments, but soldiers also challenged that structure directly, counterposing the company artel’ (or a vaguer regimental equivalent) to officers. A total of forty-one sets of demands (almost 50 percent of Petrov’s sample) either called for the institution of the electoral principle in some area of military society (e.g., in 15 cases, or 18 percent, there was a demand that elected soldier committees supervise provision and supply) or specified that soldiers should have the right to initiate changes in military practices. In twenty-one (25 percent) of the petitions there was a point on the removal of NCOs, at times generalized to apply to all reenlistees. In five instances, soldiers demanded that NCOs be elected.⁶⁹ Soldiers sought in one way or another to invest the company artel or the regimental soldier community with the power to control the unit economy and determine the rules governing soldier behavior, and to exclude from their community those, such as NCO lifers, who did not properly belong. Of course, every time soldiers handed over a petition of demands they were acting on the assumption that they had the right to determine the conditions of service, but they did not always make this an explicit part of their program.

Soldiers intended to prevent officers from intruding on soldier society by establishing soldier committees and by giving soldiers the right to initiate change, but their hostility toward officers derived less from the desire to restructure authority than from the polarization between peasant and European Russias. Soldiers did not seek to eliminate officers (and only three sets of demands called for elected officers) any more than they sought to abolish the standing army. When they thought about officers, soldiers focused on officers’ social attitudes. The most frequent demand soldiers made of their officers (31 cases, 37 percent of the sample) was that officers address them as equals, in the polite rather than the familiar. In seventeen sets of demands (20 percent), soldiers called for the removal of specific officers, and in some cases generalized this to include the removal of “all rude commanders.”⁷⁰ Officers were a part of the army, the existence of which soldiers did not question, but soldiers would no longer accept the inferior social status that officers and educated Russians in general assigned to them.

That the soldiers’ antagonism was founded more on what officers represented than how officers behaved comes through clearly in the inability of liberal officers to achieve rapport with their men. Many officers—not a majority, but a perceptible minority—welcomed the October Manifesto and were caught up in the heady atmosphere of the post-Manifesto days of freedom. There were even officers who established “unions” to support political reform and press for military change as well. These liberal officer groups hoped to reestablish moral authority over their men, and were for that reason tolerated by some commanders. But soldiers would have nothing to do with officers, no matter how liberal they might be or how sincere their protestations of having the soldiers’ interests at heart.⁷¹ In Chita, soldiers maintained an aloof distance from an officers’ union that seconded their mutiny. Members of the Samara Union of Officers who met with soldiers found the soldiers reluctant to speak and positively insulting once the ice was broken: the soldiers declared that officers’ pay should be reduced and the money given to enlisted men, that officers did not need horses, that soldiers did not intend to bargain but to present demands, and that the only reason officers now deigned to talk with their men was fear. Deeply offended, some of the officers walked out of the meeting. Liberal and conservative officers everywhere were suddenly conscious of the depth of the soldiers’ animosity, and were profoundly demoralized by the unexpected rejection of paternal solicitude.⁷²

The sense of social distance that informed the soldiers’ revolution, that militated against soldiers reaching an accommodation even with those officers willing to support their demands, also prevented soldiers from linking their revolution to the other revolutions around them. Soldiers understood that their actions had an important bearing on the revolution in civilian society, and their demand (30 cases, or 36 percent of Petrov’s sample) that they not be used in a police capacity was at least partly motivated by political considerations, or at least by a sense of identity with peasants: the soldiers’ most frequent explicit recognition of the revolution outside their barracks was their insistence that they not be deployed against peasants. The men of the 231st Kotelnich reserve infantry battalion in Viatka declared they would not act against hungry and impoverished peasants “who are no enemy of the soldier,” and reserves in the 160th depot infantry battalion in Gomel stated their unwillingness “to defend the gentry from our peasant brother.” Likewise, soldiers showed a great deal of interest in reports on peasant disorders and collected newspapers and leaflets to take home to their villages. But only in the most exceptional circumstances—as when prisoners broke out of the Voronezh disciplinary battalion—did they become involved in agrarian disturbances themselves.⁷³

Beyond specific sympathy with peasants and a general interest in events around them soldiers did not go. In only eighteen cases (21 percent of the sample) did soldiers make demands touching on civilian society (redistribution of the land, the eight-hour day, a Constituent Assembly), and these were ordinarily included at the urging of civilian revolutionaries who helped print up the demands. When soldiers adopted political demands, it was more to humor civilians than because they felt such demands to be of immediate concern to themselves. It was not uncommon for soldiers to shout down proposed political demands, and civilian badgering of soldiers was likely to turn soldiers away from revolution. Moreover, when soldiers expelled officers from the barracks, they frequently also refused admission to civilians. During their demonstrations and meetings, soldiers as often as not refused to permit civilians to address them or march with them. Civilians were told that soldiers could take care of their own affairs. And in no more than six mutinies did soldiers hand over any weapons to civilians.⁷⁴ Soldiers were not opposed to civilian revolution, but civilian demands did not speak to their own desire to overturn the command and social hierarchies in the army. Yet soldiers were no less radical for having limited political vision.

The disjunction between the military and civilian revolutions corresponded to the differences between the psychology of peasant revolution and the psychology of the liberal and revolutionary movements in polite society—which was only natural, since soldiers were peasants. Civilian denunciation of abuses by officers and conditions in the barracks was fine, and civilian agitators might be permitted to attack “autocracy” as the root of all evil, but attacks on the Tsar merely angered soldiers. One of the Samara soldiers told the liberal Samara officers that he “had nothing against the Tsar, and that if the soldiers’ complaints don’t reach him that is because he is cut off by a thick wall of commanders.”⁷⁵ Since in the soldiers’ view it was the Tsar’s Manifesto of October 17 that had authorized their revolution, this attitude is not surprising. Soldiers also occasionally protested their loyalty even as they mutinied. This was the case, for instance, in the 252nd Anapa reserve infantry battalion in Ekaterinodar, which mutinied on November 16, marched under arms to present demands to their commander, and while presenting their demands to the corps commander on the 18th insisted that they would not violate their oath. The 1st Don Cossack regiment in Moscow, as it handed in its demands on November 26, stressed repeatedly that this was not mutiny (bunt).⁷⁶ The bands that accompanied mutinous soldiers as they marched invariably played “God Save the Tsar,” and the Ekaterinogradskaia disciplinary battalion carried a portrait of the Tsar as it marched on December 4.⁷⁷ This, too, accorded with the soldiers’ understanding of the situation in the army after October 17: since the old military order was no longer legitimate, since the Tsar had authorized freedom for soldiers as well as civilians, then demanding fundamental alterations in military society was not mutiny. Of course, soldiers must also have hoped that by employing patriotic symbols they might deflect the ire of the authorities. Yet if, again, soldiers had believed their commanders had the authority to uphold the old order, they would not have mutinied.

Sentiments such as these suggest that the soldiers were engaged not in revolution but in rebellion against authorities—their officers—whose actions offended against what soldiers believed to be the legitimate and established order of things. They rebelled against officers in the name of the Tsar, as peasants rebelled against nobles and officials in the name of the Tsar. And the soldiers’ social and political values were traditional, just as traditional values underpinned peasant rebellion. Yet the changes soldiers wished to make in the army had nothing to do with an idealized past. They aimed, in what Chalmers Johnson contends distinguishes revolution from rebellion, at “the recasting of the social division of labor according to a pattern which is self-consciously unprecedented in the context of a particular social system.”⁷⁸ Mutinous soldiers did not claim that the new structure of authority they sought was really an old command structure freed of corruption, they understood that the “freedoms” they claimed were new. The soldiers were, perhaps, revolutionaries in spite of themselves, but they were revolutionaries—if only within military society—nonetheless.

Impact

Whether revolution or rebellion, the mutinies sweeping through the army gravely weakened the government. Indeed, by late November the soldiers’ revolution posed the single greatest threat to the continued existence of the Tsarist regime. Not only was the army shot through with disaffection, the troops theoretically at the disposal of the government were far fewer than a month earlier. Demobilization had not stopped mutiny, but had reduced the garrisons in Europe by 240,000 men. After demobilization, company strength in the Baltic provinces fell from 100 to between twenty and forty men. The average strength of infantry companies in rebellious Chernigov, Poltava and Kursk provinces fell to thirty-five men. In the Caucasus, too, companies were reduced to twenty-five or thirty men. Everywhere garrisons experienced a sudden and severe loss of manpower. The garrison in Revel, a city of 90,000 in the troubled Baltic area, had but 300 effectives. Revolutionaries seized de facto control of Pinsk, Gomel, and Sochi after demobilization cut garrison strength to a few hundred men.⁷⁹ The authorities in many other small and medium cities were almost as helpless, and the situation in the rural districts was even more desperate. Even before demobilization, over half the troops outside Manchuria and Siberia had been concentrated in the Warsaw, Vilna, and Causasus military districts, leaving the vast interior of the empire virtually uncovered.⁸⁰ As the Governor of Tambov Province, the scene of some of the most serious agrarian disorders in Russia, reported:

In view of the order on the demobilization of the reserves of the Bobrov and Pronsk regiments, an order that came out of the clear blue sky, my basic forces are significantly weaker, and the four infantry companies that have come from Moscow make it possible only to cover the loss; this long-awaited, indispensable reinforcement has lost all significance, and with it all hope of the possibility of a more rapid cessation of the insurrection has collapsed.⁸¹

At that, the governor was lucky to get reinforcements. Despairing appeals for troops poured into the ministries in Petersburg, but as Minister of War Rediger later recalled, “I could only forward them to district commanders, knowing in advance that they would scarcely be able to help.”⁸² Units that could be sent as reinforcements were so small that they were sometimes not recognized for what they were. Prime Minister Witte recalled that a company sent to one city numbered twelve soldiers, and that local authorities failed to realize that this was the unit they had been waiting for. Desperate officials hijacked soldiers passing through their bailiwicks: officials in Poltava detained without authorization half of a relief force on its way to Kharkov.⁸³

Short of men, the government had no choice but to yield territory to the revolution. Units scattered about the rural districts were, after demobilization, so small that they could not defend themselves, and in late November and early December insurgents captured a number of them.⁸⁴ General Rediger had recognized that demobilizing the reserves would make isolated units vulnerable, had so informed both the Tsar and Minister of Interior Durnovo on November 12, and had added that he would have to order small units to fall back on the cities. On November 23, the Ministry of War did order the military district staffs to pull back to the cities and regroup “the detachments and units dispersed in various places,” and explained: “the service of the army in aid of civil authorities for the purpose of maintaining order in the empire cannot continue at the same level of intensity as has been the case up to now.”⁸⁵ In the most volatile regions, the Caucasus and the Baltic, soldiers had to fight their way back to their bases. Guerrillas repeatedly ambushed a column of infantry and cossacks during its four-day retreat to the Latvian city of Venden. Those and other retreating units in the Baltic suffered casualties, though partisans permitted some units to withdraw without incident under locally arranged cease-fires.⁸⁶ In the Baltic, in the Caucasus, and in the Russian heartland, the army had by early December surrendered the rural districts to the peasants.

Urban garrisons offered security against peasants but not against mutiny, and in late November and early December, mutinies effectively deprived civil authorities of control over ten of the nineteen cities in the Russian empire with a population over 100,000. In Moscow, between November 25 and December 2, four Grenadier infantry regiments, one line infantry regiment, two sapper battalions, and a cossack regiment mutinied. In Ekaterinoslav, there were mutinies in all three infantry regiments and in a cossack regiment. In Kharkov, two mutinous regiments and elements of two others marched triumphantly through the center of the city on November 23. In Tiflis, two Grenadier infantry regiments, one rifle battalion, one cavalry regiment, two sapper battalions, one railroad battalion, and assorted smaller units (including the bodyguard of the Viceroy) mutinied, and in late November soldiers from all units met several thousand at a time with complete impunity. In Baku, three infantry regiments, a cossack regiment, and an artillery brigade mutinied. Mutinies struck two infantry regiments in Riga, an infantry regiment in Lodz, an infantry battalion in Kazan, and an infantry regiment in Saratov; in these cities, there were nonmutinous disorders—protests over food, meetings, expressions of hostility to the “black hundreds”—in almost all other units. The one infantry regiment in Rostov-on-Don was judged so sympathetic to the workers that in late November it was withdrawn from the city; the cossacks and artillery that remained refused to parade on December 6, the Tsar’s name day.⁸⁷

Elsewhere, the authorities remained in control but had reason to be uneasy. In Vilna, for instance, one infantry regiment mutinied and there was widespread indiscipline in other units. In Kiev, five sapper and pontoon battalions had marched on November 18, an artillery division had mutinied in sympathy, and an infantry regiment had been ready to join. The Odessa garrison was somewhat more stable, though a depot infantry battalion and part of an artillery brigade mutinied, and soldiers from various units met at the university. The government was likewise in command in Tashkent, where the suppression of a mid-November insurrection by the fortress infantry battalion had sobered restive soldiers in other units. Soldiers posed no threat to civil authority in Astrakhan and Tula because there were only a handful of soldiers in those cities. In Warsaw and Petersburg, the few mutinous regiments were outweighed by large concentrations of relatively disciplined troops (though two Guards regiments and a Guards artillery brigade mutinied in Warsaw in late November).⁸⁸ Of the large cities with sizeable garrisons, only Kishinev appears to have been wholly free of mutiny.

Not only was the number of mutinies in late November large and increasing, the soldiers’ revolution had a cumulative impact: once they had mutinied, regiments remained unreliable even after mutiny had formally ended. Most mutinies were brought to an end, after all, by allowing soldiers to have their own way, and in the aftermath of mutiny soldiers in effect determined how their units would be employed. Nor, given the momentum of the soldiers’ revolution in late November, was it likely that units that had not mutinied would long refrain from doing so; several score were so indisciplined that it could not be long before they, too, reached a consensus for mutiny. Even those units that had proved relatively immune to disaffection, the Guards and the cavalry, could not be expected to hold out much longer. In the Petersburg Guards regiments, where psychological bonds to the throne were especially strong, there was considerable ferment in late November and early December.⁸⁹ Of this the most difficult period in his tenure as Minister of War, General Rediger recalled without the slightest hyperbole: “Dozens of reports on disorders in various units were received daily! It was obvious that the time was approaching when it would prove impossible to rely even on the army, and desolation would set in!”⁹⁰

* The mutinies are listed in Appendix I. Unless otherwise noted, sources for the mutinies mentioned in this chapter are listed in Appendix I by date, city, and unit.

* Characteristics of the mutinies are identified in Appendix I.

* Most of the 74 mutinies with an unknown termination probably ended with real or tacit concessions, or in a standoff. Officers were more likely to report mutinies they had repressed than those they could do nothing about, and mutinies that ended when reliable troops surrounded mutineers were likely to attract public notice, and be reported in the press.

* These demands were written down by soldiers, or by officers as soldiers shouted them out. The 135 cases do not include mutinies in which soldiers made only one or two demands. In some of these 135 mutinies, two or more sets of demands were presented, for instance by different units.