Trotsky also
assesses the forces the government could put into play. The influence of the
compromisist parties in the soldiers committees and soviets had collapsed. This
left the officers, who had nobody to command, and the junkers, from the
military preparatory schools, as the only reliable troops.
But how reliable
were they? The officers hated Kerensky, but they hated the Bolsheviks more.
Neither had their support made Kornilov’s insurrection a success. The junkers,
most of them, hated the Bolsheviks. But some of them were Bolsheviks, so Smolny knew what was going on in the schools. Moreover,
most of the schools were in workers’ districts or near barracks of the
garrison; they could be kept under surveillance.
The government
would have liked to be able to rely on the garrisons surrounding the capital. But
in the main they, led by the Kronstadt sailors, were also turning left, and in
some cases were solidly Bolshevik.
As for troops
from the front, Baron Budburg, a corps commander on the Northern Front, wrote
in his diary during this time, “There is not a single unit…which would not be
in the control of the Bolsheviks” in the event of an insurrection.
No comments:
Post a Comment