Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/106

 94 Now let us consider fraternisation. Fraternisation with the enemy also did not begin with the Revolution, nor was it specially typical of the Revolution. It certainly showed a great increase after the Revolution, but it was known all through the war. The simple Russian soldiers always attempted to fraternise with the enemy, and artillery officers could tell many stories of how such attempts at fraternisation were stopped by artillery fire. The Slav soldiers of the Austrian regiments especially responded to this tendency to fraternise. There is not the slightest doubt that the enormous number of Slav prisoners in Russia was largely due to fraternisation between the soldiers of the two armies.

Once more in this case, not a word was said about fraternisation before the Revolution, and after the Revolution the fraternisation was attributed to deliberate and malicious treachery on the part of the revolutionary extremists. But as a matter of fact the great increase of fraternisation in the first days of the Revolution was a spontaneous outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm in the soldiers at the front, and the revolutionary democracy at Petrograd certainly could not have influenced it. Only at a later stage did they try to influence it, some sections doing their best to mitigate it, while others encouraged it and tried to give it a definitely political impulse and purpose.

There is a notion, which has been diligently spread, that the idea of fraternisation was given to the soldiers by Lenin on his first return to Russia. But as a matter of fact fraternisation began immediately the news about the Revolution reached the front line trenches. In the first convention of soldiers and officers which took place in Minsk at the end of April, 1917, the delegates from the front line gave a very interesting description of how the fraternisation began and how it was carried out. It was unanimously recognised that it was a spontaneous movement on the part of the soldiers them-