Now for the bomb in readiness at his feet! Raise it, very gradually, from the ground.
Yes, gentlemen, our legislative problems are now a matter of secondary importance. With the present government we cannot lead Russia to victory! (Cries of “True” from the left.) In the past we have agreed that you should not wage war inside the country while you are fighting at the front. Everyone, I think, is now convinced that it is useless trying to argue with them: fear of the people seals their eyes so that their main aim is to end the war as quickly as possible, even if the result is a draw. Just so long as they are relieved of the need to seek popular support.
But at whom should the bomb be aimed? The government had taken flight. Rodzyanko had fled. The Tsar was out of reach, and would not come along to defend himself. But hear me, all Russia!
We say to this government, “We shall fight you …
(A little caution, however, does no harm.)
… by all legal means, until you go away!” (Shouts of approval from the left.)
The Bloc had not authorized him to speak directly of treason, but in preliminary meetings Milyukov had seized on the formula: “Either complete idiots or traitors, take your pick.” Now, in full spate, he flung out the words:
And for practical purposes, does it really make any difference?
The bomb was thrown! It was in the air!
Are we dealing with stupidity or with treason? When the regime consciously prefers chaos and disorganization …
The bombshell had exploded!
… what is that? STUPIDITY or TREASON? (Angry noises, indignant cries on the right. They pound their desks. Jubilation in the center and on the left.)
The bombshell had been thrown not by an irresponsible socialist but by the leader of educated and responsible people, people with the vote! He would not say such things without good reason!
When in conditions of general disquiet the authorities deliberately provoke popular unrest—the involvement of the Police Department in disturbances at factories is well attested …
(Make up your own minds just how well attested—as with all that has gone before: with the Germans outside Riga the Petrograd police are distributing leaflets in munitions factories calling for rebellion simply in order to bring about “peace by provocation”?
… which is it? Stupidity or treason? (Shouts of triumph and of anger.)
(And if in forty years’ time archival records are used to establish what is even now obvious to any simpleton, that it is the Germans above all who need these strikes, that they have the money, they have the agents, they have taken the appropriate steps—that, and not now, will be the time to demote the professor.)
You ask why we have begun the fight in time of war? The answer, gentlemen, is that only in wartime are they dangerous. That is why we are fighting them now, while the war is on, and for the sake of the war. (Cries of “Bravo!” Applause.) Victory over a perfidious government is tantamount to winning the whole campaign!! (Prolonged, stormy applause except from the extreme right.)
Go ahead, then, applaud, while I quietly leave the rostrum and resume my seat. Applaud—but you yourselves do not yet realize the full significance of the speech you have heard today. It will come to be regarded as
the storm signal for revolution!
The newspapers will be forbidden to print it in full, but the country will instinctively fill in the blank spaces. The country will be galvanized by
the electric spark running through it from your speeches in this white chamber. Hitherto Russia has been blindly astray, feeling its way in the darkness. It was losing sight of the objective. It was beginning to tire. The country was beset by phantoms. But now the State Duma has shown the country a ray of light! And already there is a glimmer of hope! The country’s sense of purpose is reborn!
Modesty dictated the words “from your speeches.” Not, however, from the speeches of the rightists. Nor from the prancings of Chkheidze and Kerensky. A process of elimination left one speech only.
Truly, gentlemen, occasions like 14 November do not repeat themselves.
Make a note of the date: 14 November marks the beginning of an era!
And when I say
the country is ready to acknowledge you as its leaders
after the necessary process of elimination you must understand this to mean
acknowledge me as its leader.
As for the government, after its treason we have nothing more to say to it.
So, then, it had been openly proclaimed from the Duma platform that the country’s monarch was a traitor, involved in a conspiracy with its enemy. Whose punitive hand would fall upon the traducer’s head tomorrow?
No one’s.
What storm would break over him?
No storm. They had long ago grown used to public dissatisfaction and the public’s urge to attack, and would consider it bad form to lower themselves by answering.
But if the ground on which the throne rested had been churned to “treacherous” mud, though lightning had not struck, the throne was already tottering.
[66]
Mogilev was like an enormous hotel for officers, with guests continually arriving and departing. Colonels and generals fresh from the front could count on an invitation to lunch or dinner with the Emperor, but had to apply and wait their turn. Vorotyntsev had no intention of doing so. He had seen the Emperor from a distance, outside his residence, inspecting a squadron of Terek Cossacks newly returned from the front, and would content himself with this glimpse.
In the mess at GHQ officers rarely had time to get to know each other. They would arrive for a brief stay, and leave as soon as their business was done. The company changed from breakfast to lunchtime, and from lunch to dinner. From one meal to the next you found new neighbors at your small table. Yet an observer unfamiliar with the ethos of these people would never have guessed that they were not all close acquaintances, comrades of old. Three years of war had intensified the regular officers’ esprit de corps (ensigns were never seen in the place), which showed itself unmistakably in similarity of uniform, of behavior, and even in the way they saluted. The trivial differences which had once existed between the Guards and the army at large, between various arms of the service, between training establishments, and between regiments were now much less marked. Any two officers who had seen front-line service and now found themselves sitting side by side were at once bound together in friendship, fellow feeling, even solicitude, as though they were old regimental comrades—that special kind of friendship which flourishes in the absence of any official relationship. They shared the same bitter experience, and the same expectation: “colonel today, corpse tomorrow.” Whenever there was a chance to advise, explain, help, make life a little easier—every man there would hasten to do so, out of a more than fraternal feeling. Their ranks had been thinned by two-thirds or three-quarters since the war began, and the duties and tasks of those who had gone rested now on the shoulders, on the rectangular epaulets, of those left behind.
Thus, the captain, the lieutenant colonel, and the heavy-headed colonel of engineers who sat down to lunch at Vorotyntsev’s table had never met before, but they knew each other well. They had not yet exchanged names, or mentioned units, but from the moment they sat down they behaved like old acquaintances and good friends.
Vorotyntsev happily adopted this tone, which after his brief excursion full of strange encounters made him feel that he was home again, back with the army, his regiment, and the familiar routine of the front. He promptly joined in the desultory conversation. The lieutenant colonel and the captain were grumbling about the mess, the setup at GHQ, its location, the accommodation for officers—but all this was just in fun, extolling by contrast the superior attractions of life in the trenches. It sounded particularly amusing and lighthearted from the lieutenant colonel with one gold tooth showing between his sardonic lips. He insisted that if he survived he would find it impossible to live in a town and would make himself a bunker somewhere o
n the outskirts, with a good field of view, and would sometimes climb a tree to reconnoiter further.
How strange it was, Vorotyntsev reflected, that on his travels around the two capitals he had never once been able to relax and laugh. What a salutary human trait it was that the worse things became, the readier people were to laugh. It was no laughing matter—but you couldn’t help it.
The conversation turned to the Mogilev ladies, locals and refugees, and the lieutenant colonel with the gold tooth and the yellowish-white mustache said jestingly, “I was in the hussars as a young man, but I was never as successful as these zemstvo hussars are now. The ladies are more calculating than they used to be. These fellows won’t get killed, they have big salaries, and their khaki uniform looks almost military—they wear broader shoulder straps and sword belts than we do. The moment Milyukov is made Minister of War we’ll all be cashiered and replaced by an army of Whigs.”
The engineer refused to fall in with the facetious tone of the younger men and shook his head gloomily. “It’s an orgy for scroungers at the state’s expense. They arrive here with warrants by the thousand, worm their way into the confidence of front-line commands, and go around telling everybody that the government is utterly useless. And this in time of war! Leftists almost to a man, and Jews, many of them. And the way they throw their weight around in rural areas and in district capitals! Putting the local authorities out of business!”
“Just draft dodgers,” the captain opined. “Strutting around, fit as a fiddle—if they love Russia and victory so much, why don’t they pay the blood tax?”
“Yes, and then there’s the Red Cross! A neutral power! All those private hospitals they’ve set up everywhere, just to demoralize the army. They mollycoddle the men, dress them up in good linen, feed them delicacies, fine ladies fuss over them and sometimes plant political pamphlets on them. And after all that it’s: What, me go back and fight? No, thanks!”
“There’s a Red Cross flag on practically every fourth house in Moscow,” Vorotyntsev recalled, “thousands of little private hospitals, civilian doctors, no army supervision at all.”
Whatever subject you touched on, so many problems had accumulated in three years of war that it was difficult to see any way out. Great skill would be called for.
“And what about these refugee committees all over Russia? Also staffed with people of call-up age. Now there’s a good place to make a start with equal rights for women!”
“There you are again,” said Gold Tooth. “Suppose the government had taken charge of refugees, and suppose one little girl had died, the whole press would be screaming its head off, all the papers would be full of half-page or full-page pictures of the girl on her deathbed, and earlier with her mama and her brothers. As it is, the refugees are the responsibility of unofficial committees, and if two thousand die the papers and the public will say, ‘That’s not many! Considering there are three million refugees!’”
The conversation became more general. Loud voices were heard from the next table but one, and they all turned around to look. The officers concerned obviously did not mind attracting attention. A lieutenant colonel in the supply service, with pince-nez and a rather nasal voice, was retailing with relish his telephone conversation with Petrograd an hour earlier. The newspapers, it seemed, had appeared with blank spaces, and you could only guess at what had been omitted from reports of Duma proceedings by trying to supply missing links in the argument. But everyone present in the Duma gallery yesterday had been shaken by the speeches, especially that of Milyukov.
“Not one of the four Dumas to date has ever heard a speech of such historical importance! What he said was quite unprecedented! He tore off all the veils!”
Veils? What veils? Vorotyntsev could not imagine. But it left him deeply uneasy. “Tore off all the veils!”
God help us! Here we all are, doing heaven knows what, while back there things are happening fast!
“Don’t worry, Zemgor will exert itself, all those typewriters and duplicators will get to work, and we’ll have all the forbidden speeches here in the army, probably in the form of lithographed leaflets.”
Those sitting farther off asked each other what it was all about, and the news sped from table to table. Someone called out loudly, determined to be heard above the hubbub, “It’s comforting to know that there is in Russia a forum in which someone can speak for you!”
Uncertainty about what Milyukov had actually said encouraged the most varied conjectures.
“Did Shingarev speak, do you know?” Vorotyntsev impulsively asked the unprepossessing supply officer. He had begun to regard Shingarev as an ally.
“What’s going to happen now?” people asked. “Will they dissolve the Duma?”
“Nobody will do any dissolving. The government will shrug it off and stay just where it is.”
The engineer colonel had paid little attention to this commotion. Hunched over the table, he muttered almost to himself, “I don’t know, gentlemen, why you think it matters who lets out a fart in the Duma, whether it’s Milyukov or Rodichev. Just ask yourself: Is there one single thing they really know about? I’m not talking about the engineer branch, say, or the artillery, but more generally—industry, say? Or the mines? Or agriculture? So what business have they got trying to foist themselves on us as a ‘responsible government’?”
Those at the next table overheard him and were indignant.
“They aren’t foisting themselves on anybody! They’re expressing the free opinion of Russia!”
Others joined in, all speaking at once. But supporters of the Duma seemed to be louder and more numerous. The engineer made a despairing gesture.
“The ministers we have now are a lot of turds, but they can do their job, they’d trained to it. Those characters in the Duma are good at jabbering and that’s all. Put them in charge of Russia tomorrow and it will never get out of the shit.”
Lunch over, they went their different ways. The dining room rang with the jingle of spurs.
Outside, the day was dull, but warm.
On the roof of the Quartermaster General’s Department there was a machine gun under wraps, for use against enemy aircraft. A sentry stood by it.
Vorotyntsev went over to the Operations Section, up to the second floor, to visit Svechin. Since arriving he had seen him only in passing.
Svechin had an office to himself with maps on the walls, stacks of files everywhere, and three telephones on his desk.
“Hm-m-m,” said Vorotyntsev, looking around, “not like our office at Baranowicze: three desks in one room of a hovel, and one field telephone for us all.”
“We’re growing, getting more important,” Svechin said, lolling back in his semicircular padded desk chair. Here in his own office he was no longer the devil-may-care swashbuckler he had been for a few hours in a Petrograd restaurant. “Anyway, that fooling around in peasant huts and railroad trucks at Baranowicze was all Danilov’s idea. We might just as well have lived quietly in tents.”
There was another comfortable chair for a visitor, and Vorotyntsev seated himself.
“And who’s going to be in charge of all this? How’s Golovin getting on?”
“He’s finished, our Golovin. His stock’s worthless.”
“Ruzsky, then?”
“Ever hopeful. But it won’t happen.”
“So who?”
Svechin bared strong, very large teeth in one of his rare smiles.
“Well, to tell the truth, His Majesty would like to make do with Pustovoitenko. Who could ask for more in a general? Polite, efficient, never contradicts, won’t get any big ideas. What about operational orders? I hear you asking. Before he leaves, Alekseev will write out enough to last him three months. Ah, but His Majesty often has to go to Tsarskoye Selo—does that mean Pustovoitenko will deputize as Supreme Commander? Doesn’t seem quite right, somehow.”
The dim light from outside was augmented by a desk lamp under a green glass shade. Svechin, relaxing, filled a pipe and o
ffered Vorotyntsev another.
“Fill up, it’s good stuff.”
“So who’s it going to be?” Vorotyntsev asked, taking the pipe.
“You’ll never guess,” said the idol, with a flash of his black eyes. “I’ll give you three guesses. Try one of those nobody would even think of.”
“You!” Vorotyntsev blurted out.
“Or you!” Svechin retorted. “The Emperor did say, ‘Once I had a colonel named Vorotyntsev, he almost won Samsonov’s battle for him, perhaps I ought to appoint him!’ ‘Well, Your Majesty, he’s still alive,’ I said. ‘Really? Where?’ ‘Near Moscow somewhere, the postmark is illegible.’ Well, I couldn’t very easily send for you, could I?”
The last time they had met, a spark of something like anger had leapt between them. Now things were as they always used to be.
“Just as long as it isn’t Nikolai Nikolaevich. He’s on his way, you know.”
“On his way here? Is this the first time since he was dismissed?”
“Uh-huh. A historic moment. He wanted to be here for the 6th—his birthday, and the anniversary of the Tsarskoye Selo Hussars. Uncle once commanded that regiment, Nephew also served in it, and they both love fancy uniforms. What Uncle really wanted was to make his peace, or talk to the Tsar face to face, without Alix around. But he was refused permission. His orders are to come the day after the anniversary.”
“Anyway,” Vorotyntsev said, shaking his head, “what does Uncle amount to? He’s just an old windbag, Uncle is. All spit and polish.”
Svechin had said as much before him. He repeated his earlier demand. “No, come on, think of something impossible! Something stupid if you like—but just make a guess!”
He gave Vorotyntsev a meaningful look.
Vorotyntsev in a flash of inspiration blurted out, “Krymov?!”
Svechin bared his big teeth and wagged one large finger meaningfully. “Still haven’t forgotten, still haven’t put it behind you? I’d begun thinking you’d finally come to your senses and wouldn’t put your foot in it again.”
November 1916 Page 135