bted that the soldiers would obey the
orders of their officers, and shoot down the crowds on the streets.
When had Russian soldiers ever refused to suppress demonstrations of
the people? "The revolution is on," cried Milukov, "but it will be
drowned in blood!" In this supposition both sides were to prove
greatly mistaken.

The Russian army of March, 1917, was a very different organization
from the Russian army of March, 1914. First of all, it was now
composed of men who three years before had been part of the Russian
people. The regular professional army, the standing establishment,
which had been the support of the autocracy, had been practically
drowned in the vast influx of recruits. Furthermore, the old,
well-trained regiments constituting the regular army had been
decimated in the fierce battles along the Russian front, some of
them being annihilated. They had been eliminated. Of still more
importance there had been a change in the minds of the highest army
leaders themselves. Whatever might have been their attitude toward
the autocracy and the people in the days of old, like their
colleagues, the civilian reactionaries, they had seen the autocracy
and the social organizations contrasted; they were profoundly
patriotic and they realized what Rasputin and his dark forces had
stood for, what Protopopoff stood for; they had personally, most of
them, pleaded with the czar to clean the court of the sinister
pro-German influences--with absolutely no success. They realized
that the country must choose between the autocracy as it was and a
government of the people if Prussianism was to be defeated, and they
did not hesitate in their choice.

Among these army leaders, who had undergone such a change of
psychology, was no less a person than the Grand Duke Nicholas
Nicholaievitch himself, who had been removed from his command of the
armies facing the Austro-Germans and transferred to the minor field of
operations against Turkey, only because he had protested against the
influence of an illiterate Siberian mujik.

With very few exceptions, the army leaders, from the commander in
chief down to the regimental commanders, stood arrayed on the side of
the Duma. So clever an intriguer as Protopopoff should have realized
this.

One of the first regiments to be called out to fire on the people
after the first encounters between the machine-gun squads of the
police and the demonstrators was the famous Volynski Regiment,
notorio