“The people are children”

“The people are children” is a political slogan whose meaning shifts from the new commissar’s confidence in persuasion to a broader irony about authority exercised over people treated as subjects rather than participants. Its recurrence connects a failed appeal to mutinous soldiers with revolutionary administration and violent local consequences, setting paternal language against the institutions and actions carried out in the people’s name.

The Commissar’s Principle

When the inexperienced commissar arrives at Meliuzeievo, the army is preparing a new offensive and its morale is to be strengthened by restoring the recently abolished death penalty and instituting revolutionary courts-martial. Local officials expect to surround and disarm deserters, with Cossacks called out for the task. The commissar rejects neither the order nor the danger, but insists that the soldiers are still the people and that their psychology must be understood. He proposes going to their fortified camp for a heart-to-heart conversation, confident that an appeal to their better instincts will send them back to their positions.

The phrase, reported again in conversation about the commissar, becomes a shorthand for his belief that the deserters can be guided by a sensitive approach. Galiullin warns him not to disturb what he compares to a wild beast, while the local authorities favor force. The commissar’s position is therefore not simply opposition to coercion: he leaves the order to summon the Cossacks in place and intends to supplement military pressure with personal persuasion. That unresolved combination of command and solicitude gives the slogan its initial ambiguity.

The Appeal and Its Failure

At the clearing, Cossacks on horseback surround the rebels of the 212th. Gints mounts a pile of timber inside the ring and addresses the men. His appeal to soldierly duty, the fatherland, and other elevated principles meets indifference and hostile boredom. The soldiers are exhausted by war and tired of political phrases after months of competing appeals from Left and Right; Gints’s foreign-sounding name and Baltic accent further distance him from his audience.

As the murmurs rise, Gints abandons the conciliatory register. He invokes the revolutionary courts-martial and threatens the men with death unless they disarm and surrender their leaders, calling them traitors and an irresponsible rabble. The scene turns the idea behind the slogan inside out: the people may be imagined as children who need to be understood, but the soldiers are addressed as an unruly mass to be threatened into obedience. The distance between paternal persuasion and punitive command is not resolved by the speech; it is exposed in the same confrontation.

Administrative Appropriation

The phrase’s political resonance extends beyond the military encounter. At a meeting concerning the conversion of a large house into a district soviet hostel, a speaker announces that the building will be taken over and renamed the Tiverzin Hostel, with residents given a year’s notice to find accommodation unless they qualify for rehousing as working people. When residents protest that they are all workers, one raises the issue of Great-Russian chauvinism and equal nationalities. The speaker dismisses that objection and points to another person who is also being evicted.

The episode does not repeat the slogan verbatim, but it gives its paternal logic an administrative setting. Officials classify inhabitants, announce a collective decision, and answer objections by asserting the reach of the rule. The people are present and speak, yet the terms on which their homes may be taken have already been determined. Read alongside the commissar’s confidence in understanding the soldiers, the meeting shows how claims to act for the people can coexist with procedures that leave little room for their consent.

Coercion, Procedure, and Consequence

Strelnikov’s record supplies a harder counterpart to the commissar’s faith in persuasion. He has dealt with armed resistance to food levies, soldiers who plundered a food convoy, an uprising in Turkatui, and a mutiny at Chirkin Us. In each case, he surprises his opponents, investigates, tries, sentences, and carries out the sentence swiftly and severely. His operations suppress desertion and reorganize recruitment, with Red Army reception centers working at full capacity; as White pressure grows, he receives wider military and strategic responsibilities.

The contrast is not merely between a gentle individual and a harsh one. The commissar’s proposed conversation takes place within a military order that has restored capital punishment; Strelnikov’s efficient procedures make that order operational. Elsewhere, a tale of Veretenniki describes a chain of rumor, accusation, arrest, and flight: Kharlam reports village unrest and proposes a Poor Peasants’ Committee; a court is set up, and a man is accused of evading labor service, murder, and agitation. He escapes from custody, while the village burns and his mother dies by drowning in an ice hole. The account’s repeated insistence that events happened by themselves sharpens the irony of a politics claiming to know and direct the people: official decisions and local opportunism produce consequences that no one openly accepts responsibility for.

The Slogan’s Irony

“The people are children” expresses a hope that political conflict can be addressed through knowledge of ordinary people rather than force alone. Yet the scenes surrounding it repeatedly show how easily that language of understanding becomes a claim of guardianship. Soldiers are threatened when persuasion fails; residents are told their homes will be reassigned; villagers are swept into accusations and violence under overlapping local and official powers.

The slogan’s force lies in that unresolved tension. It distinguishes the commissar’s intended approach from the blunt threats of the crowd scene, but it also places him within the same hierarchy that decides what the people need and how they must be governed. Its recurrence makes paternalism visible not as a single speaker’s eccentricity but as a political idiom tested against mutiny, administrative dispossession, and the unaccountable effects of coercive rule.