Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Army and People (1920).pdf/55

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

— 53 —

is easy to complain and to criticize, but by no means easy to arrange things properly under such conditions as we live in now—most difficult, under such conditions, to bring the people and officers in close touch with one another. It is like Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nekiforovitch—in Gogol's story—quarreling because one called the other a gander, when all the two needed was a gentle shove from behind towards each other, to be reconciled. No, here is no question of „gander“; it is an historical conflict which has been going on scores of years—a dispute about who is to own the land, the gentry or the peasants, and whose the mills and factories are to be; a conflict waged through several generations.

This is what I have to say on this difficult and painful question.

Ill. The Cadet Nabokov and the French Admiral.

I had in mind to tell the officers issued from the working class and perhaps those of other spheres the following additional fact: Some time ago a document was published, taken from some „Cadet“ papers, in which Nabokov, a member of the Central Committee of the „Cadet“ (Constitutional Democrat) Party tells how he visited a French admiral on the Black Sea, from whom, in the name of his party, he requested assistance in money, food, equipment,