Of course, the Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights represented a violent reaction.  Under the old regime the army was a monstrously cruel machine; the soldiers were slaves.  At the first opportunity they had revolted and, as invariably happens, the pendulum had swung too far.  On May 28th the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates issued a declaration in which it was said:  “From now on the soldier-citizen is free from the slavery of saluting, and as an equal, free person will greet whomsoever he chooses....  Discipline in the Revolutionary Army will exist, prompted by popular enthusiasm and the sense of duty toward the free country rather than by a slavish salute.”  If we are tempted to laugh at this naive idealism, we Americans will do well to remember that it was an American statesman-idealist who believed that we could raise an army of a million men overnight, and that a shrewd American capitalist-idealist sent forth a “peace ship” with a motley crew of dreamers and disputers to end the greatest war in history.

IX

Throughout the first half of June, while arrangements for a big military offensive were being made, and were causing Kerensky and the other Socialist Ministers to strain every nerve, Lenine, Trotzky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and other leaders of the Bolsheviki were as strenuously engaged in denouncing the offensive and trying to make it impossible.  Whatever gift or genius these men possessed was devoted wholly to destruction and obstruction.  The student will search in vain among the multitude of records of meetings, conventions, debates, votes, and resolutions for a single instance of participation in any constructive act, one positive service to the soldiers at the front or the workers’ families in need, by any Bolshevik leader.  But they never missed an opportunity to embarrass those who were engaged in such work, and by so doing add to the burden that was already too heavy.

Lenine denounced the offensive against Germany as “an act of treason against the Socialist International” and poured out the vials of his wrath against Kerensky, who was, as we know, simply carrying out the decisions of the Soviet and other working-class organizations.  Thus we had the astonishing and tragic spectacle of one Socialist leader working with titanic energy among the troops who had been betrayed and demoralized by the old regime, seeking to stir them into action against the greatest militarist system in the world, while another Socialist leader worked with might and main to defeat that attempt and to prevent the rehabilitation of the demoralized army.  And all the while the German General Staff gloated at every success of the Bolsheviki.  There was a regular system of communications between the irreconcilable revolutionists and the German General Staff.  In proof of this statement only one illustration need be offered, though many such could be cited:  At the All-Russian Congress of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, on June 22d, Kerensky read, in the presence of Lenine, a long message, signed by the commander-in-chief of the German eastern front, sent by wireless in response to a declaration of certain delegates of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates.