Grigory Zinoviev

“ Why is it, however, that the former government in Russia and the bourgeois governments in Europe keep on to this day asserting that the army must stand outside of politics? This is why: because their conscience is not at rest, because they cannot tell the people the truth, because their entire form of government is founded not only on self-delusion, but on deceit. They cannot openly tell the army, composed as it is of working men and peasants, that it is bound to safeguard the interests of the possessing classes, the bourgeoisie, the landed gentry and the bankers ”

“ But even to these White officers I say: Instead of begging and cringing to the French bourgeoisie and its hirelings, and striving for them to despise you like that—deservedly too, for anyone will despise a man who sells his own people, and goes to the French bourgeoisie, begging help to shoot Russian workers and peasants and crawling on his belly before Frenchmen and Englishmen—were it not better, gentlemen, to realize once for all that it is the People who are in power in Russia now, that you can never again see the old-time estates, the old-time palaces ”

“ A military man who is acquainted with the circumstances of warfare, should be the last to accuse us. It is hard to see one's friends, or people one is fond of kept in prison, knowing them to be innocent—desperately hard. I admit the legitimacy of bitter feeling in such cases; but one must make allowance, understand the cause of it. It is easy to complain and to criticize, but by no means easy to arrange things properly under such conditions as we live in now—most difficult, under such conditions, to bring the people and officers in close touch with one another. ”

“ There is nothing like the army to give a character temper, nothing that so trains self-possession, persistent energy, orderliness. Our Red Army, moreover, differs from other armies in that it is fighting for the abolition of war once and for all, that men may never again fly at each other's throats and destroy another. This is why military specialists, in the time of peaceable reconstruction which will soon be inaugurated, will find peaceable accupation, and will in this province also serve as models of discipline. Such are the perspectives which open before every honest man. ”

“ And of course the iron to a certain extent enters into the soul of the worker and the peasant, who are wasting away under the burdens of war, longing for rest. They have swept away the bourgeoisie and could rest, could put an end to the war, were it not for this portion of the officer class, the men who have given their swords, their honour and their conscience into the keeping of the French-English capitalists. ”

“ Only forty odd years have elapsed since then, and here we have a world war, with several tens of millions of people tearing at each other's throats, with Europe continuously flooded with blood for more than four years, all her economic life sacrificed to that war, universal destruction in honour of it. ”

“ The number of honest commanders will increase, that of Judases, calling themselves Nekliudov, Koltchak, Balachovitch, will melt away. The number of men like the late comrade Nicolayev will increase, for men see that we are true, all the world sees it; the labourers and peasants of the world walk in our footsteps. They see that we, unshod, halfclad, struggle for the right, and the right cannot but conquer. ”

“ The army carried out the politics of Stolypin and the land-owners, who, by all sorts of tricks and manipulations, schemed to remain masters of that army—who knew how to make peasants beat other peasants. A monstrous system of lies and violence was created in order to set part of the workers and peasants against the people, to make them act, lay hands on their own fathers and brothers, and beat the people of their own villages. ”

“ It seems to me that the greatest impediment to our army command and our officers as a whole taking up a definite position, is the fact that not many of them realise what is going on and what the revolution we are going through really means.
X. What is this Great Revolution?
And really the answer seems so simple: a revolution is a revolution. Many believe that a revolution means—doing away with a monarch and putting in a president; discarding one Government and calling a new parliament. But that is not a revolution. ”

“ Still, the working class is advancing; it will sometimes fail, but it will rise again; it will carry on the movement it has started. We are in the midst of this movement, waist-deep in snow drifts, jumping obstacles, knocking ourselves black and blue, but still getting head. ”

“ Serfdom meant almost universal illiteracy of the peasantry and indeed of the working city population; it meant that men were traded like cattle, that a small minority of landlords could order irresponsibly the fate of millions. And once Russia suffered such a state of things at home, put up with it, did not rise against it, her army of course could be turned in any direction, like a horse with blinders on its eyes. Such an army was hurled against the revolution in Hungary. ”

“ What is most wanting in our officer class is precisely a clear comprehension of the modern spirit—it should learn to realise what the present revolution means. As soon as it understands that this is not a big plundering job, but a great popular movement, not a string of watchwords, produced from nowhere by some chance Party, but really and truly a great revolution—then it will stop standing at the cross-road, then an immense majority of it will definitively join us. ”

“ No one has such respect for knowledge as the workers. We know perfectly well what it is to be an educated, well-informed man. Every officer, engineer, every sensible educated person who is willing to serve the workers and peasants, we invite to help us; we do everything that is at all possible, in the present state of general improverishment, to create for such men tolerable conditions of life. That this is so difficult is not our fault, just as it is not our fault if there is so much treason, if we have to resort to arrests. ”

“ But so is the world. And the world has split into „Whites“ and „Reds“, not in Russia alone, but everywhere. Comrades, who actually killed of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg? A few officers. They, with their own hands, killed Liebknecht and Luxemburg, And yet in Germany itself, under the heel of Wilhelm, who stifled all that was human in the officers as a class—even there there are „red“ officers. ”

“ Every officer has made a study of something: every officer, as a man of discipline, will be of use to us. In the first place our object is not to deliver Russia alone, but with the assistance of our workers and peasants to deliver the world. The international Red Army will grow. Our Red officers and the former regular officers will live to have the great honour of helping in the struggle not alone of the Russian workers and peasants, but of those of France Germany and other countries. ”

“ But money the foreign bourgeoisie can give, tanks they can send, that our traitors may make mincemeat of Russian workers and peasants, plunder Russia, ruin the farms, try to throttle the Soviet Government. ”

“ The bourgeoisie never for one second admitted this honestly, but administered a pill to the ignorant people in order the better to deceive them, as the workers are fooled by the Non-Partisan. The Non-Partisans do not say to the worker „Go join a bourgeois Party“, because they know that no worker will do it. But they do say to him, „Be of no party“, and with that hook they angle for the people. Just so with the army. ”

“ In this struggle for our Soviet Russia such a man should be respected, should be placed so he can work, give full play to his capacities and not feel himself surrounded on every side by hostile glances every step he takes; to meet the Red Army half way should be appreciated. It should be borne in mind that a great deal depends on our army command.
An army command must be created of workers and peasants, or else under conditions in which honest officers, not of the landlord class, can comfortably, candidly, work together with us. ”

“ But it is put like this: „Stand aside from politics; politics do not concern you; officers must not take any interest in politics; the army must keep out of politics“. This sounds rather well, and on this hook a fish may be caught here and there.
It goes without saying that an individual group may take no active part in politics. There are learned men, interested in some particular specialty, who love military science as such, for itself, and give their work to it from sheer abstract love of the subject. Such men as individuals do stay out of politics, take no active part in them. ”

“ Why, comrades, had our people even thrice erred, had they committed the greatest follies, they would still be our people, the masses of our workers and peasants. To go against them with French speculators, Rumanian landlords, Finnish White Guards, with Wilhelm, the Japanese and anybody at all, is that not the greatest crime? And yet this crime is continually being committed. Now Yudenitch and Koltchak do not consider it a shame to make known how much they have received from the English, nay, they boast of it. They say, We are preparing to march on Petersburg. ”

“ That which has happened for the last five years has been so unusual, so unheard-of, turning upside down all relations between men and things, changing all conditions of existence, that it has forced people to revise all their estimates of things, to think them over anew. ”

“ One of the first revolutionary outbreaks at all in the nature of a mass movement, in favour of a republic as against a monarchy, came from the officer class. I refer to the December rising of ninety-five years ago. We have never forgotten or will forget that, side by side with the reactionary crimes which the officer class has committed against its own people in the past, and is committing at present in the „White Guard“ ranks, stand the names of those great men who a hundred years ago headed the December insurrection. ”

“ The world is divided. The officer not of the landlord class just now most of all needs an historical comprehension of the spirit of our time. He must not heed externalities, trifles,—possibly vexatious, offensive trifles—but concentrate his attention on essentials. ”

“ The darker is our revolution, the brighter burn the stars of such names as Ossinsky, Kovalik, Sukhanov, Mikhailov and other officers, who issued from the ranks of the higher command and passed over to the side of the people nearly forty years ago. ”

“ Returning to my starting point I again assert that any unprejudiced person must acknowledge the fact that the Soviet Government offered peaceful occupation and tolerable conditions of existence to the officers as a class, stipulating merely that they should not dream of the land being returned to the landlords, the crown to the Tsar, in the guise of the Constituant Assembly or any other guise, and the factories and mills to private owners. ”

“ Comrades, it stands to reason that we cannot in this one meeting exhaust one tenth of because there are a thousand times more workers and peasants that landed gentry and bourgeois and educated people, if the whole of them came to oppose us. While the Tsar held his position by deceit and by force, he could saddle worker and peasant Russia and pull the reins to the right or to the left. ”

“ It is not only in 1919 that Hungary played an important part in Europe. Seventy years ago that country also drew the attention of the civilzed world. At the time of the revolution of 1848, when the landlords were unable to cope with the insurgent people, the Hungarian Government turned for assistance to the Russian Tsar.
And seventy years ago the Russian Tsar was powerful enough to respond to this appeal. He equipped the serf-peasants, placed at their head a host of Russian officers of the landlord class, and sent this army to Hungary to crush the revolt of the Hungarian people. ”

“ He is a fine engineer, a gifted man. And when he saw that what had happened was a serious thing, an historical revolution, not a tempest in a teapot, he agreed to devote his knowledge and his sklll to the service of Soviet' Russia. He was immediately released by us, and now he is working in Moscow, applying his knowledge for the good of the workers and peasants.
There is no petty vindictiveness among us, for the class of the oppressed, which suffered oppression for hundreds of years, cannot while liberating itself and the world, indulge in petty vengeance. ”

“ But since we are examining general questions, we say: every mature, intelligent man must understand that ever since the history of cultured people has existed, no army ever stood or could stand outside of politics. ”

“ Every little war has brought most important social changes. And what you have just seen, that was no little war, but something never before known in history. All Europe one vast burying ground. and all the nations facing the spectre of famine! ”

“ Not Russia alone, but all Europe. In Vienna the tramways stop working, in Germany the mills stand idle, in England and in France the coal question is growing more and more acute, as it is here with us. ”

“ But to every conscious, honest, talented officer, whose breast holds, not clock-work, but a heart, who possesses knowledge, an active mind, we say that he has a chance of utilising his faculties on a wide arena in Workers' and Peasants' Russia. ”