THE RUSSIAN NAVY AND THE REVOLUTION
By Dimitri Fedotov, ex-Lieutenant Commander, Imperial Russian Navy
"The inveterate habit of insubordination of the seamen of the Western Ports, reduced almost to naughtall the efforts of the Naval Commissioners."—
Najac Lettres de l'Ordonnateur de la Marine, France, 1798.
Introduction
The author of this article, Lieutenant Commander Fedotov, was, in 1914, at the outbreak of the world war, attached to the imperial Russian embassy in Washington, D. C, as assistant naval attaché. He returned to Russia and was assigned to duty in the Baltic fleet, where, at the time of the revolution in March, 1917, he was in command of a destroyer. His ship took part in a number of mine laying expeditions off German ports and was in several engagements with enemy light forces.
In May, 1917, Lieutenant Fedotov was detailed as naval aide to the special diplomatic mission of the United States of America to Russia, headed by Senator Elihu Root. He accompanied the naval member, Rear Admiral James H. Glennon, U. S. N., with his staff, to all the naval ports of Russia, including Archangel, Sevastopol, and Baltic Sea bases.
In November, 191 7, when the Bolsheviki overthrew the provisional government in Russia, Lieutenant Fedotov went to England and was enrolled in the naval reserves with rank of lieutenant. He was given command of a ship and took an active part in the British operations at Archangel, where he was so seriously shell-shocked that he was retired from active service and decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross.
Upon recovering from his wounds, he made his way to Siberia and commanded a battalion of marines in the army of Admiral Kolchak, where his troops engaged in all the operations against the Bolsheviki until the Kolchak government collapsed.
Mr. Fedotov went from Irkutsk to Moscow where he lived under an assumed name until recently, when he managed to leave Russia and came to the United States via England. While in England he arranged for the publication of a series of articles in several British periodicals.
The First Days of the Revolution in the Navy
At the outbreak of the March revolution in 1917, the attitude towards it of all the Russian navy, with the exception of divisions and ships stationed at Kronstadt, was one of cautious expectation. Neither in Reval nor in Helsingfors nor in Sevastopol, was there any organized revolutionary action. In Petrograd the second naval division vigorously resisted the revolutionary units of the Guards Infantry Depots, and at Tsarskoe Selo the naval guards battalion protected the imperial family from the outrages of the revolted soldiers of the Guards Rifles' Depot. It was only at Kronstadt that a bloody insurrection of the shore detachments culminated in the murder of the energetic Admiral Viren, who had distinguished himself at Port Arthur, and of a number of naval officers. In all the other ports the change of authorities took place peacefully, and almost everywhere on the initiative and under the direction of the officers in command, who recognized the provisional government as the lawful power in the country. Admiral Kolchak in Sevastopol and Admiral Nepenin in Helsingfors had succeeded, it seemed, in averting a mutiny.
However, the flame of the seamen's insurrection was rapidly transmitted from Kronstadt to Helsingfors, to which result much was contributed by the wireless messages sent by the leaders of the Kronstadt rebellion. The commander-in-chief and the officers of the squadron stationed at Helsingfors had already recognized the revolutionary government when that cruel and aimless outburst arose on the battleships Emperor Paul and Audrey Pervozvanny, the victims of which were Admirals Nepenin and Nebolsin, and scores of naval officers. This outburst destroyed every chance of preserving discipline in the Baltic fleet, all the more so that the provisional government did not even attempt to punish the murderers, although their victims had been agents of this very government, recognized by them. In Reval there were no tragic events, but what had happened in Kronstadt and Helsingfors could not fail to leave a strong impression on the crews of the ships stationed there—the impunity of the Helsingfors murderers was a fatal blow to discipline, and an abyss that could not be bridged was opened between the officers and the men. In the Black Sea fleet things went on somewhat better, and Admiral Kolchak was able for several months to keep his men within the limits of discipline. But even here relations between officers and men were steadily becoming anomalous and the ship organization was gradually disintegrating.
The outrages committed in the Russian navy in the course of the revolution are widely known, but the causes which led to these outrages on board ships and in the naval barracks after the revolution had been accomplished, and consequently without any political reason, have hardly been investigated. The current explanation is that the massacres came as a result of the alleged cruelty of the officers towards the men, and of the great material hardships under which the crews had had to live.
The author of the present sketch was, at the outbreak of the revolution, commanding officer of a destroyer in Reval, and had in the course of the first few weeks following ample opportunities of conversing with some of the most revolutionary elements among the seamen and of discussing with them the events in Kronstadt and Helsingfors. Besides his personal observations, the author, who was editor of the Navy Review (Morskoy Sbornik) of Petrograd for several months in 1917, has collected numerous letters of officers from Helsingfors and Kronstadt, articles from the seamen's revolutionary press, and accounts of meetings held by naval units in various ports, as well as reports of members of the Duma, who were sent to investigate the situation on the ships of the Baltic fleet in March, 1917.
The study of this extensive material and a comparison with similar facts which took place in the French navy during the great revolution, in the British navy at the close of the eighteenth century, and in the German navy immediately before the armistice—have brought the author to the following conclusions as to the origin of the tragic collisions between the officers and the men of the Baltic fleet. The causes which led to them may be brought under three principal headings:
- Causes originating in the conditions of service in a navy in general, irrespective of its nationality.
- Causes originating in the peculiarities of the regulations and of the organization of service on board and on shore in the Russian navy.
- Causes not depending on the conditions of naval service.
The author has endeavored impartially, sine ira et studio, to investigate the causes belonging to each of these three categories and to ascertain their relative importance in producing among the seamen that state of mind which manifested itself in those fatal days of March, 1917. We are not yet sufficiently removed in time from these events to be able to see them in their true historical perspective. Besides, some degree of subjectivity in the evaluation of one or another of these causes can hardly be avoided. Nevertheless, the author will try to expound his argument so as to enable the reader to form his own opinion of the meaning and the fundamental causes of the outrages committed by Russian crews In the course of the first few weeks of the "bloodless revolution," and to arrive at his own conclusions with a more or less complete knowledge of facts, even if these conclusions will differ from those of the author, who has no axe to grind and is only anxious to discover the truth.
First Category. On board ship, in all navies, officers and men are cooped up in the comparatively narrow spaces between the decks. The seamen have every day the opportunity of observing that the officers are placed in far better material conditions than the enlisted men. Better food, comfortable cabins, the possibility of going on shore in civil dress, etc., all this rouses a feeling of envy among the less favorably placed men. Even insignificant offences are severely punished by the naval regulations. Things that would have remained unpunished on shore, afloat may lead to Imprisonment or limitation of shore-leave. The punished man, even if deservedly punished, thinks that he Is suffering by the fault of the lieutenant of the watch, or any other officer who happened to notice his offence, and by that of the captain or of the court martial (consisting also of officers) by whom the punishment was awarded. Thus a certain number of seamen, especially those whose conduct is not beyond reproach, acquire the habit of contrasting in their minds the officers to the men, as oppressors and oppressed.
As it is impossible to avoid on board ship a constant intercourse between both parties, the recollection of a punishment awarded by the initiative of such and such an officer becomes effaced from the mind of the punished with much more difficulty than in other conditions. Again, officers are recruited among the sons of comparatively well-to-do families of the upper and middle classes, whereas the men are, for the most part, sons of factory workmen or of the poorer rural classes, except those who come from families of fishermen or sailors of the commercial fleet. In our days of class hatred, young men entering the navy often bring from their homes a developed class-consciousness and hatred of the bourgeois, and are prepared to regard the officers as the agents of a hated class. This is especially the case in those navies where recruiting is by conscription, as, for example, in the Russian and German navies, and only in a much smaller degree in those where enlistment is voluntary, as in the navies of the United States and Great Britain.
The material conditions of human existence on board ship are very different from those on shore. The men are heaped together in common dormitories between the decks. They have no privacy. They have no corner they can call their own. They pass the whole day under the eyes of hundreds of other men, and at night they sleep in hammocks. The crews of warships generally receive food which is rich in nitrogenic substances, and at the same time they are often unable to have sufficient exercise. Abundant nourishment with little exercise makes for neurasthenia and general unbalancement of the mind. These causes are especially powerful over those seamen whose specialty demands no expense of physical activity, such as wireless telegraphists, electricians, clerks, etc. Life on board ship is under the constant influence of electric fields. Cats, on some ships, cannot hold out for more than a few weeks: man is less sensitive to the action of electricity, but still its effect must be reckoned with. On board great modem battleships, protected by several belts of armor, part of the crew has to live in spaces never entered by the light of day and where air is introduced by pressure ventilators.
At last, the men have little hope ever to obtain a commission, although in most navies (including the Russian pre-revolutionary navy) this was in theory possible.
All these conditions exist in all navies, but naturally their importance varies according to differences of race, education, organization of service, discipline, food, climate, and to the degree of comfort in which the crews are placed. They are, however, inherent to every navy and contribute to make seamen dissatisfied and unbalanced, especially on long passages or when conditions are such as not to permit frequent shore-leave.
Second Category. Before the war the Russian navy was traversing a period of transition in the organization of ship service and in the training of recruits, a period that began soon after the Japanese war. Most of the innovations were being introduced on the initiative of a group of energetic and comparatively young officers who had taken part in the Japanese war. Admiral N. O. Essen was at the head of the movement. Owing to their efforts, discipline, which had been greatly undermined in the years immediately following the Peace of Portsmouth, had not only recovered, but now attained a standard hitherto unknown in the Russian navy. Unhappily, the sound principles that were being inculcated by these officers had not yet found their way into the naval regulations, and this somewhat unsystematic collection of rules relating to ship-service had not yet been replaced by a new regulation, better answering to modern exigencies. Consequently, most war ships regulated their service on board by various instructions and rules drawn up by their respective captains and commanders. The spirit of such instructions was the same in all the navy, but there was no absolute uniformity, and this favored the impression that the regulations was one thing and service on a modern warship quite another thing, and that the two had little in common. This could not fail to undermine all respect of the regulations, among the younger officers as well as among the more intelligent and forward seamen.
Besides, the "regulations on discipline and punishments for the breach thereof" in force in the Russian navy were decidedly out of date, and were based on wrong principles. Thus, on a Russian warship, every officer had the right to award summary punishment to every man of the crew. The degree of punishment alone depended on the rank of the officer. This was conducive of inequality in punishments on board the same ship for the same offence, and the men became accustomed to consider the officers' actions as arbitrary. It is, moreover, to be regretted that the captains of some ships delegated their power of awarding punishments to the commander, sometimes even to section commanding officers. Attempts to regulate this anomalous state of affairs were made on the best disciplined ship (e. g., on the cruiser Bogatyr) and took the form of an unofficial modification of the statutory order of awarding punishment, so as to concentrate all the power of awarding summary punishment with the captain, or the commander. The other officers had only the right to establish the fact of an offence and to enter it in the punishment record, but could not themselves award any punishment. Besides, as on board some ships officers remained for fairly long periods of time (six or seven years sometimes) different conditions of service and discipline were gradually developed on different ships. Some ships were very "severe," others were "slack." This was favored by the tendency of the captains to introduce individual features on board the ships they commanded, a tendency strengthened by the superannuated character of the naval regulations and of the regulations on discipline.
All this lack of system in awarding punishment (some of which were rightly felt as degrading, e. g., standing on the quarter deck—others as unnecessarily cruel, e. g., the reiterated forfeiture of shore-leave during a month), tended to irritate the crews, who came to regard the officers as petty tyrants, who punished according to their moods or their personal ideas on discipline, not according to a law common to all the navy. The comparatively infrequent cases of blows being inflicted by officers (this was strictly condemned by the regulations) always became known to all the crews of a squadron and were magnified by rumor.
The crews of the Russian navy were recruited by conscription from the working and peasant classes. The term of service was long—five years; in the infantry it was only three years. The number of re-engaged non-commissioned officers was not sufficient, and they were not always the best element from a moral standpoint. Many of the re-engaged were men who lacked initiative and ability, and did not hope to make their way through life on shore. The re-engaged non-commissioned officers had little authority with the men.
The men entered by conscription were of various descriptions. The recruits differed one from another in their social standing as well as in their intellectual development. Some of them were semi-educated young men of the working class, who had read many books and had ideas on Karl Marx and his theory, others were illiterate peasant boys from the backwoods of Archangel who had never seen a brick house or a railway engine, who had not even suspected the existence of such a thing as the Russian navy, and of course could not understand what it was wanted for. This heterogeneous mass of recruits was incompletely hammered together in the course of a six-months' drill on shore by very primitive methods, which were not out of place only in regard to their least civilized elements. The better educated young men left the depot with the one conviction that all this drilling had been aimless and meaningless.
As a class of commercial sailors as it exists, e. g., in France and England, is practically non-existent in Russia—the great majority of recruits, when once on board, found themselves in completely alien and unfamiliar surroundings. A current Russian phrase about a recruit was that he had been "taken from the plough," i.e., had never seen the sea and was quite a stranger to it. The seamen never felt themselves at home at sea, and only dreamt of returning as soon as possible to their villages.
The officers of the Russian navy were, up to the very last years before the war, taken exclusively from the class of hereditary nobles. Even after this rule was abrogated, although young men of non-noble families were admitted to the Naval Academy, they remained an infinitesimal minority. The Russian peasant was accustomed to think of all nobles as squires, and the ill-feeling he might have developed toward the landlord at home he extended to the officers on board, although the majority of naval officers possessed no land, belonging to families who had served in the navy for generation after generation, poor for the most part, and existing exclusively on their pay.
On most ships the men might receive shore-leave only on Sunday afternoons, for a few hours only, and in rotation, so that only a quarter of the crew were allowed shore-leave at a time, and a seaman came on shore only on an average of once a month for a few hours. This was obviously insufficient, and in the course of the war shore-leave came to be given every day as far as conditions permitted. But until the very outbreak of the revolution, shore-leave was accompanied with difficulties and useless formalities.
On shore seamen were forbidden to smoke in the streets and public places, to enter restaurants and public houses, to go to theaters, except they sat in the gallery. They were also forbidden the entrance of divers public gardens and boulevards (e. g., in Sevastopol) and this could not fail to irritate their sense of dignity.
During the war this feeling of offended dignity was strengthened by the fact that in the army, where the loss in officers was immense, every half-educated soldier could hope to receive a commission after a short term of training in the School of Ensigns—and at the same time non-commissioned officers of the navy, who were perfectly qualified technicians, remained simple men and were obliged to salute their more successful comrades who served in the army; they saw that these had now the same privileges as officers of noble birth while they themselves had no hope of promotion.
The mobilization at the outbreak of the war brought back reservists who had served from 1904 to 1907, men who remembered the old days of loose discipline and were quite unprepared to serve under the new and severer order which had been established by 1914. They were naturally much annoyed by the new conditions, and did not readily submit to discipline. At the outbreak of the war I was commanding a section on board the cruiser Russia. Before the arrival of the reservists the average of summary punishments seldom surpassed three or four per month, with 180 men in the section. After the entry of sixty reservists the number of punishments immediately rose to twenty-five or thirty monthly.
It is, at last, important to remember that the officers of the Russian navy, like all the Russian educated classes, were separated from the people and did not understand their mentality, though perhaps the naval officers stood nearer the man of the people and understood him better than any other class of intelligentsia.
After all this enumeration of the peculiarities of Russian naval life the reader will be, perhaps, at a loss to understand how it was that the Russian navy, and especially the Baltic fleet, showed such efficiency and such fitness to win. This may be explained only by the superior moral and intellectual qualities of the individual officers who worked with complete self-abnegation. Admiral N. O. Essen at their head. They succeeded in obtaining good results, not owing to the surrounding conditions, but in spite of them. Numerous foreign missions (including the American naval mission under Rear Admiral Glennon, U. S. N.), were able to see with their own eyes that since the Japanese war the Russian navy had changed for the better so as to be almost unrecognizable; it was only the revolution that greatly lowered its fighting qualities (Oesel operation, 1917).
Third Category. The Russian navy early became a favorite field of revolutionary propaganda. The guards' naval division was among the most active participators in the Dekabrist rebellion of 1825. A number of pupils of the Naval Academy also took an active part in it, and in consequence Emperor Nicholas I deprived the academy of the appellation of "Emperor's Own," which it had hitherto shared with the Corps des Pages.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) party tried their best to spread their ideas among the officers of the navy and the cadets of the Naval Academy. An association was formed to this end, under the name of Whalers' Society, which tried to attract young men ostensibly for the purpose of forwarding Russia's sea fisheries. Of the revolutionary officers of the navy the greatest notoriety was acquired by Lieutenant Sukhanov, who was subsequently sentenced to death.
In the revolution of 1905, Lieutenant Schmitt, the figurehead of the seamen's rebellion in Sevastopol, and Lieutenant Nikitenko, a member of the terrorist section of the Social Revolutionary party, died by the hand of the executioner. In 191 7 Midshipman Ilyn (Raskolnikov) and Ensign Garfield, both members of the Communist party, played a prominent part in the revolution. Besides these, several naval officers were members of the Social Revolutionary and Social Democrat parties.
But all these instances are not typical of the Russian naval officers' milieu. The overwhelming majority were not at all interested in politics and regarded the revolutionary outbursts in the navy as mere mutinies. Only a small minority were actively reactionary.
But in the last few months of 1916 a change came over the attitude of the naval officers. The murder of Rasputin, the speeches of Purishkevich and Molynkov, compelled most of them to start thinking on the political situation in Russia, and undermined their former conviction that autocracy was the form of government which answered to the cultural and economical level of the Russian people. But from this change of attitude to active sympathy with the revolution the distance was great. A parliamentary monarchy was, to the majority, the extreme limit of aspirations and probabilities.
But among the seamen revolutionary propaganda had been far more successful. The Social Revolutionary party was especially popular, sparing, as it did, no effort to create revolutionary associations on the warships. The Bolshevik party had also their organizations in the navy, but they were far less numerous and influential than those of the Social Revolutionary party.
Ever since 1905 a series of mutinies and rebellions had taken place in the navy; they were purely revolutionary in character, although sometimes, for motives of expediency, their leaders gave them the shape of economical dissatisfaction (dissatisfaction with food, pay, etc.). The best known are: the bloody mutiny of the battleship Prince Potemkin, the Sevastopol rebellion headed by Lieutenant Schmitt, the mutiny on board the cruiser Pamiat Azova in 1906, and the seamen's rebellion in Kronstadt in 1905. Besides these, some disorders would break out nearly every year in the Baltic as well as in the Black Sea fleet, and several ships became notorious for their revolutionary proclivities, while others remained staunchly loyal. The torpedo boats and in general the smaller craft were loyal, while the battleships, especially the new ones, were inclined to mutiny.
The putting down of all these rebellions involved the execution of ringleaders, and the revolutionaries were not slow to spread rumors of executions en masse and of wholesale annihilations of rebellious crews. These rumors had no foundation whatever. The government applied capital punishment only to the leaders and to men guilty of murder. The total number of men executed is nearer a few dozens than many thousands, as it was asserted by the propagandists. In some cases (e.g., the mutiny on the battleship Emperor Paul I) the Emperor substituted penal servitude for capital punishment to all the men sentenced by the court martial. In the years immediately preceding the war, the government succeeded in expelling the revolutionary associations from the ships, and by the autumn of 1914 only wretched remains of the terroristic and fighting associations of the Social Revolutionary party were left here and there.
The upheaval of patriotic feeling which accompanied the outbreak of the great war contributed to the establishment of an informal armistice between the government and the revolutionary parties. During the first two and one-half years of the war, there were only two cases of disorder in the navy. The first took place on board the cruiser Rossia in the summer of 1915 and only proved the weakness of the revolutionaries who were backed only by the reservists. The second was on board the battleship Gangut whose captain was Captain M. Kedrov, an officer of outstanding merit, while the commander was another excellent officer—Commander M. Petrov. This outburst was more serious than the preceding one, but it also ended without bloodshed, owing to the energetic measures taken by the senior officers and the obvious lack of sympathy with the rebels of the majority of the men. But in 1917 the men had become weary of the war; especially those whose term of service should have ended in 1914, and who were now eight years away from their homes and families.
The German general staff was interested in the weakening of the Russian Baltic fleet and spared no efforts to foster the discontent of the men on board. Their opportunities were especially favorable in Helsingfors where not only the sympathies of the Finnish bourgeoisie were on their side, but where German agents could find active help from the Finnish groups who were trying to liberate their country from Russian domination and saw in Germany a powerful ally in their struggle for independence. This explains the formation of Finnish volunteer Jagar-battalions who fought on the German side.
No documents have as yet been published in Germany that might throw light on the activity of the agents of the German general staff in Finland and Kronstadt, but there is no doubt that large sums were expended and that an active propaganda was carried on among the sailors.
The crews and the shore units stationed at Kronstadt owing to their composition (large percentage of reservists of old terms, and, in the naval divisions, a considerable number of seamen taken off their ships for bad conduct), as well as to the proximity of Petrograd with its hundreds of thousands of factory workmen, were under the action of Bolshevik propaganda, more than any other part of the navy. The influence of Bolshevism over the minds of the Petrograd workmen was on the increase since the beginning of the war. The Bolsheviks had a strong organization in Kronstadt and it was popular with the seamen.
In combating the revolutionary movement in the navy the government had, previously to the war, arrived at the idea that much would be gained by handing over the whole proposition to the political secret police and the gendarmes' corps. Secret agents were introduced on board and in the barracks and started their secret work, acting independently of the commanding officers and obeying only the orders of their own superiors. Unhappily the agents of the Russian home office were prone to recur to methods known by the name "provocation" and used to support one revolutionary party against another. The Bolsheviks enjoyed their special protection and, consequently, relative immunity. In the winter of 1916-1917 the revolutionaries developed an intense activity among the workmen of Petrograd, preparing an armed insurrection. This activity found an immediate echo in Kronstadt where the revolutionary spirit rapidly grew. Admiral Viren, the commandant of Kronstadt, was known to be a man of strong will and unbending loyalty to the sovereign. The remains of the social revolutionary associations on the ships stationed at Helsingfors (especially the battleships Paul I and Andrey Pervozvanny) also began to stir.
Thus by the end of February, 1917, the attitude of the officers of the navy may be qualified as moderately conservative, with a shade of grumbling against a weak and inefficient government. The more advanced proletarian elements of the men were strongly revolutionary. The contrast between the two attitudes was especially sharp in Kronstadt, which was ruled by the heavy hand of Admiral Viren, and in Helsingfors, where Admiral Nepenin was also not of very soft disposition and was considered a reactionary.
In the Black Sea fleet, remote as it was from the centers of German propaganda as well as from the centers of industry, the men were far more quiet, and the commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Kolchak, was known to be a man of moderately liberal views. The contrast which existed in the Baltic fleet between the political ideas of the commanding officers and those of the more advanced men, was there absent.
The revolt in Kronstadt broke out almost simultaneously with that of the guards' depot in Petrograd. Its first victims were Admiral Viren and Rear Admiral Alexander Butakov. Viren's corpse was soaked in petrol and burned on the Anchor Square. The revolution took its revenge on autocracy in the person of the commandant of Kronstadt and the scum of the seamen's mob triumphed their victory over the stern commander who had upheld a discipline of iron in his command. The other senior officers were all massacred and together with them a few more or less casual victims from among the junior officers. The massacre was carried out according to a list drawn up beforehand, and was not the outcome of personal vengeance on the part of individual seamen. The Bolsheviks from the very beginning succeeded in establishing their authority and until the October revolution made them rulers of all Russia, Kronstadt was their stronghold and their sanctuary, where the agents of the impotent provisional government were afraid of pursuing them.
The Kronstadt massacres were a phase in the process of throwing down the old regime, and from the revolutionary point of view they had a political raison d’être, destroying as they did, opponents with whom no compromise was thought possible. The events in Helsingfors were of a totally different nature. Here the revolutionary associations were much weaker, and the moods of Petrograd were much less rapidly and strongly reflected in the minds of the seamen than was the case in Kronstadt. The commander-in-chief, Admiral Nepenin, easily realized that the revolutionaries were going to have the upper hand of the old government.
In order to preserve his fleet for the struggle against Germany, he decided to take the initiative of transferring it to the allegiance of the new revolutionary government and he was backed in his purpose by the council of flag officers and captains. A message was wired to Petrograd containing the recognition by the Baltic fleet of the provisional government that had been formed by the Duma. For several days after this no disorder occurred, except for a few comparatively insignificant breaches of discipline, and the keen interest displayed by the men for what was going on in Petrograd. It seemed reasonable to hope that the revolution in Helsingfors would take a peaceful course and would not be sullied with bloodshed. The facts, however, proved quite different. It must be remembered that from the start a rivalry arose between the Petrograd soviet of workmen's delegates and the provisional government, which manifested itself best of all in the Soviet's tendency to assure their control over the Petrograd garrison. This rivalry found an echo in Helsingfors.
The officers were not fully aware of what was going on in Petrograd. They had a vague idea that all the revolutionaries and all those who had identified themselves with the revolution were united into one common front. Of the divergence between the socialists, whose stronghold was the Petrograd soviet, and the provisional government, who represented the liberal parties of the Duma, they had no suspicion.
Meanwhile, since the outbreak of the revolution, the old social revolutionary associations on board the ships of the Helsingfors squadron were beginning to awake from their torpor and had started an active propaganda among the crews, displaying the greatest energy on the battleships Emperor Paul I and Audrey Pervozvanny and Slava. The members of these fighting associations, bred as they were on the idea that the officers of the navy were the most trustworthy bulwark of black reaction, could not understand Nepenin's motives in recognizing the revolutionary government and did not believe in his sincerity. They suspected that this recognition was only a tactical move to gain time and prepare a counter-revolution. The behavior of Nepenin, whom they knew to be a man of strong will, sharp and stern, was a puzzle to them. These active revolutionaries had always imagined that in case of a revolution, the navy could be gained only by putting down the armed resistance of the officers who had been always loyal to the old government, and many of whom had sacrificed their lives in suppressing mutinies. The peaceful accession of the officers, with the commander-in-chief at their head, to the cause of revolution was incredible and incomprehensible. As most of these revolutionaries were semi-educated men with strong voluntary impulses but without any broad intellectual outlook they had not been able to note the change which came over the officers in connection with the Rasputin affair, with the speeches of even conservative members of the Duma against the government, and with the general state of Russian public opinion in the beginning of 1917. They thought the officers were the same staunch supporters of autocracy as they had been in pre-war times, and expected to meet with their traditional resistance.
Now that the revolution had taken place so peacefully in Helsingfors, the fighting associations found themselves without an enemy to fight. The mine had been prepared for explosion but there was nothing to explode—the enemy had dismantled their own walls. But the destructive tendency of the fighting associations was so powerful that, as the central soviet of Petrograd made no attempt of explaining to the local bodies that they had no more work to do—the inertia of revolution had its way. The signal was given and the blood of numerous victims was shed.
It is certain that German agents who carried on relations with the Russian revolutionary parties (I am affirming this, not of the principal leaders, but of the secondary local agents) did what they could to prevent the peaceful transmission of power to the new government. They sowed mistrust of the officers among the seamen, playing on feelings originating in causes of the second category, i.e., in the shortcomings of the Russian naval organization that were resented by the seamen.
The first outburst took place on the battleship Audrey Pervosvanny. The signalman of the watch made an attempt to light a red light on the fore mast as a signal for the men to rise against the officers, but was shot dead by the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Bubnov. This led to an armed encounter between the officers and the crew of the battleship in the course of which were killed Rear Admiral Nebolsin, Lieutenant Bubnov and several others. The mutiny immediately spread to the ships stationed in the neighborhood, and on the Emperor Paul I several officers were also killed. On the battleships of the first brigade (four dreadnoughts) there was no bloodshed, the crews only demanded of the officers the surrender of their arms. Admiral Bakhirev ordered the officers to deposit their revolvers in his cabin, but refused to hand them over to the crew,
A group of men from the Andrey Pervozvanny and the Paul I went on board the torpedo boats which were stationed in the port and killed several officers of the torpedo division while the crews of the torpedo-boats assisted passively at the massacre.
But on the brigade of new oil-burning torpedo boats (of the Novik class) the crews opposed the rebels and refused to deliver their officers, among whom was the commanding officer, torpedo division, Rear Admiral Kedrov.
The commander-in-chief. Admiral Nepenin, had his flag on the unarmed yacht Krechet whose crew remained calm and were only afraid of the mutinied battleships opening fire on the defenseless flagship. Nepenin wired to the provisional government reporting the turn events were taking in his fleet and candidly avowing that he considered them as fatal to the fighting efficiency of the fleet. This message became known to the seamen and was used by the leaders of the revolutionary associations as a material for their agitation against the admiral. By this time a soviet of seamen's, soldiers' and workmen's delegates had sprung up in Helsingfors, and Ensign Garfield, a member, as I have said, of the Bolshevik party, was beginning to play a leading part in it. A mob of seamen, mostly from the Andrey Pervozvanny and the Paul I crossed the ice to where the Krechet was stationed and their armed delegates, coming on board, announced to Nepenin that by the will of the revolutionary navy he was under arrest.
On their way from the flagship to the city the seamen informed the admiral that he was sentenced to death and that the sentence would be carried out immediately. Nepenin remained perfectly calm, took out his cigarette case, lit a cigarette, and gave himself the order to fire. Such was the end of the admiral who was the first of naval commanders to recognize the revolutionary government He was put to death by an irresponsible secret association of terrorists and no party ever had the courage to assume the responsibility for this senseless murder. The fate of Nepenin was similar to that of the d' Albert de Rion, senior naval officer at Toulon in 1789. The national assembly made, on that occasion, the following statement: "Acknowledging as justifiable the motives that guided M. d'Albert de Rion and the other officers of the navy, as well as those that guided the members of the municipality and the national guards who took part in this affair, the national assembly declares that there is no ground to blame anyone." (Moniteur, January 1st, 1790.) The national assembly, however, showed more energy than did the provisional government who did not even have the courage to order an official investigation of the Helsingfors events, sanctioning thus the right of seamen to massacre their officers whenever they thought fit.
In several cases the murders were accompanied with tortures and mockery, as, for example. Lieutenant Lange had his fingers cut off. The bodies of the murdered officers were brought to the dispensary of one of the hospitals, but even there they were not left in peace by their torturers. The bodies were propped up along the walls in the pose of saluting, and Admiral Nepenin in the middle of the room with a cigarette thrust in between his teeth, "The commander-in-chief and his staff," the murderers explained to the other men.
Like in Kronstadt the Helsingfors massacres were carried out according to a list previously drawn up. Several officers who were on the list escaped their fate by happening to be on shore and the murderers' not being able to find them. Admiral Kedrov was preserved from Nepenin's fate by mere chance, owing to the fact that he had been summoned to Petrograd by the provisional government who had appointed him under-secretary to Guchkov, the war and naval minister.
Horrible scenes were witnessed in the dispensary—where the widows of the massacred officers were rudely and cynically mocked at by the murderers.
It is important to retain that the massacres were carried out by a very small group of seamen for the most part from the Andrey Perzrozvanny and the Paul I. The majority of seamen were only passive spectators and sometimes even opposed the murderers (e.g., the crews of the oil-burning torpedo boats and of the first brigade of battleships). There were several cases of young seamen going mad after witnessing the horrors of this St. Bartholomew's night.
Nepenin was replaced in the command of the Baltic fleet by Vice-Admiral Maximov, a man of unlimited ambition but with no strong sense of honor, and not very intelligent. He was elected by the seamen and confirmed by the provisional government. With the appointment of this "Red" Admiral, as he was called by the too-officious Petrograd press, began a period of agony for the Russian navy in the Baltic.
We have enumerated the causes that led to these massacres; we will now try to investigate their relative importance in the tragic events of Kronstadt and Helsingfors.
As to the causes of the first two categories they were materially the same in Kronstadt and Helsingfors, as in Reval and in the Gulf of Riga (where the battleship Tsesareznch belonging to the same brigade as the Audrey Pervozvanny and the Paul I was passing the winter). In the Black Sea things were even somewhat more complicated, as Vice-Admiral Kolchak and the officers who came with him (headed by Captain M. Smirnov) had begun in 1916 to introduce the order which existed in the Baltic fleet and the revolution found the Black Sea fleet in a period of transition. Nevertheless, in Reval and in the Gulf of Riga the critical period passed comparatively calmly; there were no cases of naval officers murdered, though several army officers were killed by the soldiers in regiments stationed near Reval. In the Black Sea the transmission of power to the new government was not only peaceful, but was accompanied by the formal expression of complete confidence in their officers on the part of the men. Collisions between the officers and the men began here much later and chiefly under the influence of strangers—propagandists arriving from Kronstadt and Helsingfors. This confrontation of facts proves that the conditions of naval life at Russia were not in themselves sufficient to bring about the massacres which took place in March, 1917.
Consequently, though we do not deny that the shortcomings of discipline and organization existent in the Russian navy had their part in breeding those unfavorable relations between the officers and the men, and thus preparing favorable conditions for revolutionary propaganda, we must recognize that this propaganda, and, to a certain degree, the agents of the German intelligence service, must be held responsible for the blood of so many of the best Russian sailors, shed in Kronstadt and Helsingfors. In Kronstadt, where the influence of the Bolshevik party was from the very beginning predominant, the events were so consequent that hardly any doubt is possible, especially if we remember the methods later adopted by that party, viz., the extraordinary commission for combating counter-revolution, speculation and sabotage, better known by the name of Chrezvychayka or Cheka. The Bolsheviks drew up a list in which they included all the more energetic and active officers whom they believed incapable of compromise and methodically destroyed them, profiting by the favorable moment. Every mob is cruel, but a revolutionary mob, which is not yet sure of its ultimate triumph, is doubly so. It was not very difficult for the Bolsheviks to direct these bloodthirsty instincts in the direction they wanted. The seamen of Kronstadt did for them the work which in later days was done by the Cheka—they decapitated the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie by destroying all their more noble and staunch elements.
The conditions in Helsingfors were different. The revolution had already attained its first objective—the recognition of the provisional government—without the aid of the seamen, by the decision of Admiral Nepenin and the council of flag officers and captains. But the revolutionary fighting associations who had lost the moment for effective action desired to expend their reserves of energy on the head of the "Turk at the Fair" and this part fell to the officers. On the other hand the German general staff was dissatisfied by the peaceful course of events in the strongest squadron of the Baltic. The combined action of these two agents brought about the mutiny of two battleships while the rest remained passive spectators. It is characteristic that the time when on three or four battleships of the second brigade the officers were being massacred, on the fourth (the Tsesarevich) stationed in the Gulf of Riga and isolated from external influences, the crisis passed more or less peacefully, in spite of the fact that there relations between officers and men had always been rather bad. The same may be said of the torpedo division. On the coal-burning torpedo boats stationed at Reval the critical days passed without any disagreeable incident and complete order was preserved, while the fifth flotilla stationed at Helsingfors was completely disorganized by the murder of most of the commanding officers and the senior officers.
The Black Sea fleet which in 1905 had been the scene of bloody outbreaks traversed the critical period quite peacefully, owing to the fact that it was isolated from the influence of revolutionary propaganda from Petrogad, as well as from the activity of German agents. All this has brought us to the conclusion that causes of the first two categories played a comparatively unimportant part in the genesis of the massacres of March, 1917, in the Baltic fleet, and that causes of the third category were the most weighty. The officers of the Baltic fleet were not the victims of a long suppressed wrath of the seamen oppressed and offended in their human dignity, but the objects of the terrorist activity of secret organizations who regarded- them as dangerous to the revolution.
Turning to the historical parallels we see that in the great revolution the officers of the French navy suffered almost exclusively from the persecution of political extremists to whom they were members of the hated aristocracy. Grimoir, Kersaint, and d'Estaing perished, not by the hand of mutinous seamen, but under the knife of the guillotine.
The mutinies of crews of the British navy in the last years of the eighteenth century present a different picture. We may find here, it is true, some traces of political propaganda—the United Irishmen and other Irish revolutionary groups on the one hand, the agents of the French government on the other, took an active part in these mutinies. But their true causes lay in conditions which we have discussed under the first two headings. The mutiny of the crew of the Hermione which led to the death of all her officers, including quite young midshipmen, had no political basis. The cruelty of Captain Piggott and the imperfection of British naval organization in the pre-Jervis period incited the seamen to mutiny. The petitions drawn up by the seamen's delegates at Spithead and on board H. M. S. Sandwich in Nore clearly show that exceedingly hard material conditions and oppression were the only causes of the seamen's unrest. We hear, it is true, of the sloop Shark's going over to the enemy, but on such a small vessel the presence of a few revolutionary Irishmen or of several educated men press-ganged under the ad captandum vulgus act might have been decisive.
Thus we see that the seamen's mutinies which accompanied the revolution in Petrograd occupy an intermediate place between what happened in the French navy under the revolution and the mutinies of the British seamen. In France naval discipline was destroyed exclusively by external political influences, whereas in England the mutinies were the outcome of impossible conditions of service.
To conclude, the author cannot refrain from mentioning a characteristic incident which took place on board the torpedo boat he was commanding, nearly simultaneously with the Helsingfors massacres.
When Nepenin's telegram announcing that he had gone over to the Duma was received in Reval, the division commander assembled all the commanding officers of the torpedo division to discuss the situation. It was decided to follow the example of the commander-in-chief and to announce this decision to the crews. On returning on board his boat the author ordered a parade on the quarter deck. After briefly relating what had happened in Petrograd the author announced the decision of Admiral Nepenin and the council of senior officers. As the speech was received with reserve and the men expressed neither joy nor regret at what had happened, he addressed the men nearest him and asked them what they thought of the revolution. He was much astonished by their answer, "The same as you, your honor." And this was going on only a few dozen miles away and only twenty-four hours before the mutiny of the Andrey Pervozvanny and when blood had already flowed at Kronstadt.
The explanation is that at Reval the seamen were left to themselves. They were beyond influence of revolutionary organizations, nor were the German agents so active as in Finland, where they had made themselves a cozy nest.