Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/282

 rary, the ferment was produced by the order. As a matter of fact, it was only yesterday that the soldiers were still obeying orders and today they have ceased to: is it not clear that they have submitted to some new "order," which is recorded in the books as "No. 1"? This general-staff idiocy is at present substituted in the most extensive bourgeois circles for a real historical point of view.

The so-called disintegration of the army found its expression in the Soldiers' disobedience of superiors and a refusal to recognize this war as their war. It was just because of these circumstances that Kerensky hurled in the face of the awakening army his phrase: "risen slaves." If the bourgeoisie believed that it was enough to substitute Guchkovs for Sukhomlinovs, in order to harness the army anew to the chariot of Imperialism, then Kerensky, in his philistine superficiallity and self-complacency, thought it would be sufficient to remove Guchkov in order to make the army once more the obedient tool of the government. In truth these were illusions!

The Revolution, from the standpoint of mass psychology, is an application of the standard of reason to inherited institutions and traditions. All the hardships, sufferings and humilitations, which the war brought in its train to the people, and, more particularly, to the army, were crowned and sanctioned by the will of the Czar. If in Petrograd the Czar himself had been deposed, what was there to prevent the soldiers from shaking off the autocracy of those officers who had been the most zealous and debased of the advocates of the whole system of Czarism? Why should the soldiers not ask themselves the question as to the sense and the object of the war, when the very man on whom formerly had depended the question of peace had been deposed?

The Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates appealed, in a manifesto early in April, to the peoples of Europe, summoning them to the struggle for a democratic peace. This was "Order No. 1" as far as questions of world-policy were concerned. At the time when the manifesto appeared as an answer to the burning, irresistible question: Shall we fight on, and if so, for what?—the imperialists were making believe that, had it not been for this manifesto, this question would never have occurred to the minds of the soldiers, who had been awakened by the thunder of the Revolution.

Milyukov anticipated that revolution would awaken criticism and independence in the army, and would consequently involve a threat to the imperialistic aims of the war. In the Fourth Duma he had therefore come out openly against revolution. And when