officers, who
cannot be blamed for not understanding the temper of the Slavs nor for
rubbing them against the grain. The privates, seeing their superiors
virtually degraded, concluded that they had forfeited their claim to
respect, and treated them accordingly. That gave the death-blow to
discipline. The officers, most of whom were devoted heart and soul to
the cause of the Allies, with which they had fondly identified their
own, lost heart. After various attempts to get themselves reinstated,
their feelings toward the nation, which was nowise to blame for the
excessive zeal of its public servants, underwent a radical change.
Blazing indignation consumed whatever affection they had originally
nurtured for the French, and in many cases also for the other Allies,
and they went home to communicate their animus to their countrymen. The
soldiers, who now began to be taunted and vilipended as Boches, threw
all discipline to the winds and, feeling every hand raised against them,
resolved to raise their hands against every man. These were the
beginnings of the process of "bolshevization."

This anti-Russian spirit grew intenser as time lapsed. Thousands of
Russian soldiers were sent out to work for private employers, not by the
War Ministry, but by the Ministry of Agriculture, under whom they were
placed. They were fed and paid a wage which under normal circumstances
should have contented them, for it was more than they used to receive in
pre-war days in their own country. But the circumstances were not
normal. Side by side with them worked Frenchmen, many of whom were
unable physically to compete with the sturdy peasants from Perm and
Vyatka. And when propagandists pointed out to them that the French
worker was paid 100 per cent. more, they brooded over the inequality and
labeled it as they were told. For overwork, too, the rate of pay was
still more unequal. One result of this differential treatment was the
estrangement of the two races as represented by the two classes of
workmen, and the growth of mutual dislike. But there was another. When
they learned, as they did in time, that the employer was selling the
produce of their labor at a profit of 400 and 500 per cent., they had no
hesitation about repeating the formulas suggested to them by socialist
propagandists: "We are working for bloodsuckers. The bourgeois must be
exterminated." In this way bitterness against the Allies and hatred of
the capitalists were inculcated in