In the autumn of 1915, thirty-eight socialists from eleven countries gathered in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald. The adopted manifesto demanded peace without annexations and reparations and declared war to be a matter of governments, not peoples. The left wing of the conference - Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek - went further: to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, considering the defeat of their own government as the lesser evil.

For the Russian command, these formulas became the embodiment of betrayal. By the end of 1915, the army had experienced the Great Retreat, shell hunger, and the loss of Poland. Irritation grew in the reserve battalions and factories, which the headquarters were more willing to explain as agitation rather than their own miscalculations. Reports from military censorship and gendarmerie offices diligently recorded proclamations, 'German money', and suspicious individuals among the reinforcements. The term 'Zimmerwaldist' turned into a curse in officer circles - a designation for those who shoot the front in the back.

The real scale of influence was more modest than in these reports. Until February 1917, the émigré theses reached the trenches in fragments, while fatigue, losses, and the chasm between officers and soldiers worked more powerfully than any leaflets. However, the language developed in Zimmerwald was in demand immediately: the appeal of the Petrograd Soviet 'To the Peoples of the World' in March 1917 almost verbatim repeated the formula for peace without annexations and reparations. At that time, yesterday's émigrés returned to Russia and received a platform they could not have dreamed of in Switzerland.

It was this connection - the breakdown of discipline after Order No. 1 and the familiar rhetoric from Switzerland - that solidified in the minds of the generals the simple link: the Zimmerwaldists destroyed the army. This link was convenient because it removed the question of what had been destroying the army before their return.