November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Even now Vorotyntsev couldn’t help blushing, remembering how ashamed he had been.

  “Yes, well, I was a little upset … but there were other considerations too, don’t imagine that … Anyway, I haven’t entirely given up the idea …”

  Svechin’s thick lower lip curled. “In that case you’re an idiot. And there I was, glad that you’d found a good excuse.”

  “Good excuse? It was a disgrace. But then again …”

  Svechin leaned forward across the desk. “But what’s good about this coup they’re planning, Yegor? It’ll all come to nothing … The Guchkov crowd and that so-called Yellow Bloc imagine that the most difficult problem at present is how to topple … them … But you just show me whom and what you’ll put in their place. If it’s something worse, or you just don’t know, it may be better not to do it … let things take their course. Of the house of Romanov—whom would you substitute? The little boy? He would be a plaything in the hands of the regency council. Besides, he’s not strong, and he’s backward—what sort of behavior is that for a twelve-year-old, drenching generals with water? They’re all doing their best to spoil him. Mikhail Aleksandrych? A less than average colonel, very much inferior to you and me. Nikolai Nikolaich? We’ve dealt with him already. One of the Vladimiroviches? One’s a coxcomb, the other’s a drunk. The Konstantinoviches? They’d best stick to poetry. So we’re left with a republic? A Kadet government? You’d have to lose all self-respect to take orders from them. To hand over Russia to their control.”

  It was all true. But it wasn’t for Vorotyntsev to solve all these problems in advance.

  “And would you want Guchkov as regent?” Svechin asked, black eyes ablaze. “Or Prime Minister?”

  “He doesn’t aspire to it. Remember what he said about a Man of Providence …”

  “Said, yes. But how sincere was he? I can’t believe that he’s altogether … Would anybody start a stunt like that if he wasn’t looking for a share of the power? The man who gets mixed up in this sort of thing obviously must ‘aspire’ … Wouldn’t you? Can you see yourself standing aside immediately afterward?”

  Vorotyntsev smiled briefly. He had absolutely no aspirations of his own. Word of honor! He wanted only to act for the salvation of Russia. But when it came to the point you’d have to start reorganizing. That much was true.

  Svechin caught him smiling. “Aha!”

  “No, I …”

  “Tell me—they all accuse the government in chorus of not respecting the rule of law, of trampling on their rights, yet they themselves are plotting a coup d’état … Where does that leave rule of law, eh?”

  Vorotyntsev thought a moment, puffing hard—he was not used to smoking a pipe.

  “Then again, Guchkov has Myasoedov’s death on his conscience. What a nasty business that was. A lot of wild nonsense to blacken the whole imperial government.”

  “Yes,” said Vorotyntsev. “But what exactly was at the bottom of the Myasoedov affair, do you know?”

  “I know exactly. The Warsaw city commandant told me, he was there when the trial took place. Guchkov set out to expose Myasoedov in 1912, but got nowhere. He proved nothing, and there was nothing to prove, it was just demagoguery. But there was a lot of hoo-ha in the papers, and the mud stuck—Myasoedov was a spy. Then in December 1914 a son of a bitch named Kolpakovsky came along to the General Staff—he was a second lieutenant in the 23rd Regiment, taken prisoner in your Samsonov campaign, but got out of it by posing as a Ukrainian separatist, and the Germans hired him to spy for them, or so they thought, but when they slipped him back over the Russian frontier he unmasked himself. He thought he’d make his story more plausible by claiming that the Germans had told him, told the new boy, how highly they thought of their spy Myasoedov, only they didn’t know either his address, which was in the Petersburg directory, or where he now was. This Kolpakovsky had simply remembered what he’d read in the papers. Guchkov’s old lie had worked. Well, a report on Myasoedov was duly sent to the Northwestern Army Group, where he was serving as an interpreter in the 10th Army. Even so, nothing would have come of it, nobody would have treated it seriously, if the 10th Army hadn’t lost a corps in East Prussia just one month later. This sent a shock wave right across Russia. Then there’s that other bastard, Bonch-Bruyevich, you know who I mean.”

  “I should say so!”

  That asshole! He’d submitted a dissertation to the Academy three times over, failed every time, and been given a job in administration.

  “Well then, it was his idea, he put Ruzsky up to that third thrust into East Prussia. Now Bonch had to find a culprit, so he grabbed this spy and traitor with both hands. They arrested him and court-martialed him in a hurry in the Warsaw Fortress. The main informer, Kolpakovsky, wasn’t even present in court! Nor was there any defense counsel. There was no proof of guilt whatsoever, although a secretary-observer had been attached to Myasoedov for two months previously. Just to make sure, they imposed a second death penalty—for looting: he was supposed to have walked off with some statuettes from a German house. The trial began in the morning, sentence was passed in the evening, they wouldn’t let him send a telegram to the Emperor, wouldn’t let him say goodbye to his mother—she was in Warsaw—they hanged him the same night, five hours later. Covering their tracks?”

  Vorotyntsev could only gasp. In cases like this you couldn’t help imagining yourself wrongly condemned. He remembered Vereshcohagin’s son. “Didn’t anybody try to stop them?”

  “Nikolai Nikolaich confirmed the sentence by telegram. And Bonch afterward became chief of staff of an army, then of a whole Army Group. And Guchkov not only did not back down, he’s been trying lately to revive the whole business—to topple Sukhomlinov.”

  If a close associate of the War Minister was a spy, maybe the minister himself is a spy? Where would that leave the Tsar?

  Well, that was Guchkov. That was how politicians behaved.

  “What are they like, the people around Guchkov nowadays?” Svechin was anxious to know. “A lot worse than he is, I would imagine?”

  “Yes, the Kadets have thrown him off course. Guchkov today isn’t the Guchkov of old.”

  “What about the conspiracy?” Svechin swathed himself in smoke from his big pipe. A shifting bluish haze. “The conspiracy is just a big joke! Anybody he runs into in a restaurant he tells all about it.”

  “Come on—he knew he could depend on us.”

  “But how many times must it have happened before? D’you think nobody knows about this plot of theirs? All Petersburg is talking about the plot Guchkov is hatching. The Police Department must have received a hundred denunciations. What sort of conspirator is he? He’s capable of botching anything. It’s just that our government is too timid, never knows whether to go left or right around a post.”

  “So when it comes to action Guchkov is obviously neither here nor there. It’s just talk. But there may be complications … oh, yes!” Vorotyntsev’s pipe was out, and he put it down. “Anyway, his program seems a bit peculiar. All in all, Russia might be even worse led than she is now …”

  “And where did they get the idea there might be a revolution? I can’t see where it sprang from. These politicians have done so much hollering they’ve ended by scaring themselves. If you listen to them, Russia’s always doomed, in fact it met its doom long ago, its fate was sealed from Rurik on. Of course, His Most August Majesty is more to blame than anyone—he’s the one who gave them their head. He keeps changing his mind, never settles on anything, and he’s never had the courage to curb them. God forbid he should ever directly command so much as a single division. He’d dash around all over the place, and end by leading them into machine-gun fire, just like his great favorites always do. Well, that’s not what he’s there for. He’s been on the throne a long time, and that’s a good thing in itself. Thank God for it.”

  “It isn’t just one division! He’s led the whole army into a trap!” Vorotyntsev said weightily.

  “This is what Ro
mania’s done to you—you’re hallucinating. You’ve spent too long on the front line, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you go and do a bit of fighting?”

  “Why should I? Why don’t you come here instead? It’s ridiculous! Those swine are undermining military discipline in time of war and pretending it’s to ensure victory!”

  Vorotyntsev leaned closer to him across the table. “It isn’t a question of victory, Andreich! Maybe the politicians are trying to scare people, blindly. But those who really know see good reason to be scared. You should go and take a look. You can’t see a thing from this office.”

  Svechin, determined to go nowhere, wedged himself more firmly into his chair. “You’ve got rebellion in your blood. You’re a born rebel. Come on, tell me, what’s your program? Sleep through it all? Is that realistic when the front lines are so close together?”

  Well, no, if you were honest about it you couldn’t just escape into dreamland. He hadn’t been able to come right out with it at Cubat’s … but here … after all that had been said … Very quietly …

  “The thing is … to get out of this war altogether. We got stuck with it for no good reason.”

  All the time he had been traveling this thought had been on the tip of his tongue, but he had never succeeded in expressing it. It was not at all easy for an officer to say such a thing. And now that he had—it was probably too late and in the wrong place.

  Svechin goggled, looked as if he was about to yell. Instead, he said quietly, with his head close to his companion’s, “You mean … in spite of everything … a separate peace?”

  “What else is there? If you’re ruptured right across your belly, can you go on pulling? I’m telling you—they’ve knocked the stuffing out of us. We missed our chance to opt for neutrality in 1914—let’s do it now.”

  “And let them chop off a chunk of our territory?”

  “Not one little bit. The Germans will be only too glad of a respite. What little of our land they have, they’ll evacuate. Including Poland, you ask? We have to liberate Poland anyway—let the Germans sort it out. As for the polenta eaters, we’ll be glad to get away from them.”

  Instead of bellowing about oath breaking and treason, Svechin said, “Look, you’re a soldier. Just think! Sit in my chair a bit and you’ll see things more clearly. Except for that Romanian shithouse of yours we haven’t retreated anywhere for nearly two years now. What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you aware of it? That’s Zemgor’s line, making out that the war is lost. It shouldn’t be yours …”

  “Not the war! I’ve been trying to tell you that we’ve lost our people!”

  “We’re holding on to Riga, we’ve got bridgeheads beyond the Dvina! Dvinsk, Minsk, and that whole area as far as Pinsk is in our hands! Arms and equipment? We’re better off than in any month since 1914. This is for your ears only: right now we have as many three-inch shells in stock as we have expended all through the war! Machine guns? The Tula plant used to produce seven hundred a year, now it’s a thousand a month! Artillery fuses—it used to be fifty thousand a month, now it’s seventy thousand a day! Have you heard of SPHA?”

  “No, but the number of units produced still doesn’t prove …”

  “Special-Purpose Heavy Artillery. We’re bursting at the seams with it. And it already has its reserve supply of ammunition. The Artillery Directorate is getting it ready for a breakthrough next spring. We’ve never been able to put on such a show of strength before. The Germans will be flabbergasted. This is all secret! The spring offensive will be a tremendous affair! With the Baltic Fleet—we’ve got Nepenin, he’s a fighter. No other country in Europe has young admirals like him and Kolchak. Kolchak wants to make a landing in the Turkish straits in the spring of 1917.” His hand skimmed lightly over the rough wall map beside him, as far as the Black Sea. The wrong bait for Vorotyntsev: those mad enough to want the Bosphorus could have it!

  “And even if we had nothing, even if we really did fold our paws and doze off, we would still win the war. The Americans have an election this month. Then the president will have a free hand and before you know it he’ll be joining in the war, and it won’t be on Germany’s side. What sort of idiot would go for a separate peace when Germany’s already caught a cold?”

  Vorotyntsev dismissed all this with a wave or two of his hand. “An American victory is not a victory for us. They never gave us any money to carry on the war. What sort of victory are we looking for? We don’t need any more land. We do need to save our people.”

  Well, of course, the view from the Supreme Commander’s HQ was more cheering, indeed entirely positive. Anyone sitting there might succumb to such arguments. But once back in your trench you’ll find the load heavier than ever.

  All the talk Vorotyntsev had heard in those three weeks, and all the talking he had done himself, had made things no clearer. We make our own idiosyncratic patterns of today’s events, our own predictions for tomorrow, but there is only one sure way for things to go and none of us can see it clearly.

  “Yegor, Yegor! How many times have I told you—if you want to make history you mustn’t kick out wildly, you mustn’t try to struggle out of harness. You’re too restive for your own good. Pull the load you’re harnessed to! Let history take its course.”

  Vorotyntsev studied his rock-solid friend. The shiny metal of the telephone receiver. The dead ash in his half-smoked pipe. He drummed on the arm of his chair.

  Sighed.

  It had ripened in him in the trenches. Out walking. Out riding.

  And had never ceased to nag at him in these last three weeks.

  But his question had still not been answered.

  “Who will be appointed then?”

  “Give up, do you?” Svechin said with a smirk. “Can’t guess?” He rubbed his big hands together, enjoying every moment. “No one would ever guess. It’s one more thing that goes to show we can’t possibly lose the war.” Then, almost shouting: “It’s Gurku!”

  At first Vorotyntsev did not recognize the name, long forgotten in this facetiously modified form. He stared at his friend, stupefied. Then he asked, “You mean Gurko? Vasili Osipich? Gurochka? It can’t be true!” It lifted him from his chair and he rushed around the office, striking his chest with one hand, then the other. “How on earth did that come about? How, how …?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Svechin said, beaming. “Mikhail Vasilich insisted. Just imagine that! I take back half of what I’ve ever said against the old man. The Emperor, of course, wasn’t at all eager to take such a boor, such a barbarian—not one of us, quite wrong. He’ll be telling us home truths. But the old man was in bed with a hundred-degree temperature, and the Emperor gave in to him. The order isn’t signed yet, but everything points that way.”

  This was indeed a departure from the Emperor’s usual anemic style of leadership. He was not appointing some blockhead of a guardsman, or some grand duke, he had bypassed all the sycophants and self-seekers, all the doggie dancing masters, tellers of funny stories and court favorites, all the puffed-up adjutant generals, and arrogant hoary ancients, passed over all the Army Group commanders, disregarded all claims to seniority, and given control of the Russian army to a desperado, a genuine fighting soldier, a clever, indefatigable, uncompromising general at the peak of his powers. And—what was more—in days long gone the leader of the Young Turks!

  Svechin read his thoughts and pulled him up sharply. “Don’t get too excited! You’re back on your hobbyhorse, aren’t you? If it’s that infantile Young Turk game, say goodbye to it, forget it, drop it. But you haven’t heard yet what a brave show he put up at Vladimir Volynsk. He’s in excellent form. With a general like him we can …! And you will be back here again!”

  A Chief of Staff like Gurko, with a Supreme Commander like the present one—yes, please! They would add up to one authoritative Supreme Commander! Such a meteoric rise could not fail to make any true officer’s heart beat faster! This had always been how truly great war leaders rose to the top! O
nly thus could he emerge—the new Suvorov for whom Russia had longed ever since the war began. If he had been slower about it he would have been no Suvorov!

  Could it change the whole course of the war?

  Had the change already begun?

  It meant … Once Gurko was in place it meant that to all intents and purposes the coup had already been carried out. No better choice could be made. Whatever happened.

  Power, then, is almost in our hands?

  * * *

  I HAD FARTHER TO GO

  BUT THE HORSES WERE SLOW.

  * * *

  [67]

  In the meantime he had to pay for this summons to GHQ by putting in a few hours’ work in the Intelligence Department, supplementing their information.

  He got busy but was so thrilled with the news that his mind kept returning to Gurko. Could they really appoint him? Over the heads of so many others? If only they would! It would change everything, put right so much that was wrong!

  At first he had been taken aback by the unexpectedness of it. Yet, when you thought about it, was Gurko’s appointment really so unforeseeable? Once upon a time, in Stolypin’s best years, Vasili Gurko had supplied Guchkov and his Military Commission of the Duma with military consultants, and it was in Gurko’s apartment that they had met the politicians to help coordinate their views on legislative proposals. Alekseev himself had been one of the earliest of these advisers. Always circumspect, he had later distanced himself and avoided the disparaging label “Young Turk.” But now (perhaps Svechin and I should not have spoken ill of him?), mindful of the past and free from envy—had he listened to his conscience and refused to overlook merit and talent? Gurko had been promoted to corps commander after his swoop on Allenstein and successful withdrawal with a single cavalry division: it had come too late for Samsonov (and had shown Rennenkampf up: he and the rest of them should have acted quickly), but in itself it was a daring and faultlessly executed raid. Since then he had marked time until last year Alekseev had promoted him, a mere lieutenant general, to command an army, with full generals under him, and given him, temporarily, the Northern Army Group, then the Guards Army. Now Alekseev apparently saw Gurko as the only possible successor to himself, and had summoned him for that reason. Noble Alekseev!