John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

THE day the United States entered the war, though the situation in Europe was so obscured by censorship and propaganda no one in Washington knew exactly what it was, the fortunes of the Allies were approaching their lowest ebb.

Brusilov’s great offensives had worn out the Russian armies. They had no striking power left. During the winter the progressive breakdown of the Romanoff regime kept easing the military pressure against Germany from the east.

Russians of all classes were crying out against the incompetence, the corruption and the callous brutality of the management of the war. The Russian soldiery had reached the point where men felt they had a better chance to save their lives by fighting their own government than by fighting the Germans.

The outbreak began with a printer’s strike in Petrograd on the January anniversary of the abortive revolution which resulted from Russian failures in the war against Japan. Incapable of making up his own mind, the Czar turned to almost anybody for advice. First he was induced to assemble the Duma, which was little more than a consultative assembly of notables, in the hope of regaining some popular support. From the Duma there arose an immediate clamor for the elimination of traitors and embezzlers from the imperial court. Spontaneous strikes paralyzed Petrograd. The imperial household was thrown into a panic and the Duma was promptly dissolved.

All the Czar’s advisers could think of now was to induce him to call in the same General Ivanov, by this time a flabby and peevish old man, who had put down the popular uprising in 1905. As a result regiments of the imperial guard rose in revolt. Troops recalled from the front, even the everfaithful Cossacks, joined the insurrection. The Czar’s authority melted with the snows under the spring sun.

The striking workingmen elected a soviet, or general council, to represent them. The Baltic fleet took up the revolutionary cry. Singing the “Marseillaise” in memory of the Bastille, sailors led in the storming of the prison fortress of Peter and Paul. Jails were opened, political prisoners freed, exiles called home. Soviets sprang up in factories, in provincial towns, in Moscow. Russia became a vast debating society. In the country districts peasants were busy staking out their landlords’ fields. Whole army divisions disbanded, arrested their officers and trooped into the cities.

By the middle of March the Czar had abdicated. The imperial family was confined in their summer palace. What central government survived was in the hands of a provisional committee of the dissolved Duma, with an oratorical young lawyer named Kerensky as Minister of Justice.

The revolution started to the tune of the “Marseillaise.” Liberty, equality, fraternity. Russia would pattern itself on the western democracies.

The liberal press in France and Great Britain and the United States greeted these February events with enthusiasm. The one flaw in the theory upon which democratic propaganda was based, that the Allied and Associated nations were fighting for selfgovernment and the rights of man against the Kaiser’s military autocracy, was that their Russian ally represented the most brutal and backward of all autocracies. With parliamentary government triumphing in Russia the war could be carried on with a clear conscience.

The German authorities were even more pleased. For them the revolution was the climax of the corruption and decay of the Czar’s regime which had served them so well at the front. It meant that they could transfer muchneeded troops to the west, where for all their superior techniques and superior positions the Kaiser’s divisions were being worn thin by the war of attrition. They needed to make sure that the disorganization of the Russian military machine should be immediate and complete.

Free Switzerland had for years furnished a haven where the planners of the new society, which was to eliminate want and injustice from the world, developed their programs of mass subversion and mass leadership. The Russian exiles who offered the most drastic program for the destruction of existing institutions were grouped around a newspaper named The Social Democrat , published in Zurich by V. I. Ulianov and his wife. They represented the segment of the socalled majority wing of the old Russian Social Democratic Party which had been driven into exile after the revolutionary failure in 1905. These “Bolsheviks” had split off from the “Mensheviks” in one of the numerous embittered splinterings that characterized the international socialist movement. Ulianov’s articles were of a trenchant clarity; he was considered by the powers that were one of the most dangerous of revolutionaries. He signed his articles by the code name he used in the party’s underground manoeuvring: Lenin.

From January on Lenin was in a fever to get back to Russia. When the Allies refused him a visa to some Scandinavian country, he accepted the offer a German agent made him to cross the Fatherland in what was for ever after described as “a sealed train.” True to their doctrine of military frightfulness the German authorities wanted the social overturn in Russia to be as thorough as possible. As they would turn firebugs loose on their enemies’ wheatfields, they turned a batch of revolutionists loose on the collapsing Romanoff empire. To make sure that there would be plenty of discord they sent in an opposition group under the Menshevik, Martov, a month later.

On April 3 (according to the old Russian calendar), a thickset trim-bearded man with high cheekbones under large gray eyes, set far apart in a very large head, stepped from an incoming train at the Finland station in Petrograd. He was met by a crowd of delegates from the various revolutionary committees that filled every block of Peter the Great’s old capital with wrangling voices. An incongruous bouquet of flowers was thrust into his arms and he was led into the gaudy salon which a short month before had served as waiting room for members of the imperial family.

He hardly listened to the speeches of welcome; his eyes were on the crowds he saw through the windows.

He replied in the formalized phraseology of socialist oratory. He greeted the Russian revolution as the beginning of the rise of the international proletariat against its exploiters and its butchers. He denied any Russian patriotism, or interest in any war except the class war, and he hailed “the world wide socialist revolution.”

The raw air off the Neva tasted sweet in Lenin’s nostrils as he looked about at the cheering soldiers and sailors and the students and factory workers and the convoy of armored cars they had brought to protect him. This was the moment he had been training for all his life. He would see to it that the “Marseillaise” would give place to the “Internationale.” Immediately he set to work to seize power.

In France and England the year 1917 began in a spirit of optimism. Lloyd George, the proponent of the knockout blow, hurried from the winter meeting of Allied political leaders in Paris, to a meeting in Rome, and back to London again. Lloyd George was sanguine. At last the French had found a commander with a plan for a breakthrough on the western front.

Robert Georges Nivelle, the hero of the recapture of the forts at Verdun, was a dapper man with slit eyes and a slender mustache. He was brought to Lloyd George’s compartment to be introduced as his train crossed France. The British Prime Minister approved of the glib general at first sight. Nivelle was a Protestant and his mother was English. He hardly seemed a foreigner at all. He was fluent in both languages. “At last a general whose plan I can understand,” said Lloyd George.