A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

There was a storm of opposition to the recruitment of these officers. Many soldiers saw it as a return to the old military order, and as a betrayal of Order Number One. They particularly resented the reintroduction of pay differentials based on rank, of compulsory saluting, and of special badges and uniforms, not to speak of rations and privileges, for the officers. The party workers in the army saw it as a challenge to their power, while the NCOs and the Red

* At that time (October 1918) there were 8,000 officers sitting as 'hostages' in the Cheka prisons (Revvoensovet Respubliki, 36).

Commanders were jealous of the 'men with golden epaulettes' and feared that they might block their own promotion. Os'kin himself was in two minds about the tsarist officers. As a military man, he could see the desperate need for competent commanders. Military efficiency had to be placed before revolutionary equality. The antics of the Left SRs and the Anarchists in Tula — teenage fanatics of the militia principle — had caused enough chaos to convince him of the need for Bolshevik discipline and organization (he joined the party in July 1918). And yet, at the same time, as a peasant-NCO and a man of some ambition, he also resented the privileges of the ex-tsarists. Where he had earned his rank through courage under fire, most of them had gained theirs through birth and education. He felt that their attitudes were unchanged — 'their facial muscles winced whenever they were addressed by the soldiers as "comrade commander" ' — and feared this might lead them to revolt.'"'

The military setbacks of the summer were quickly blamed by Trotsky's critics on the ex-tsarist officers. The loss of Simbirsk to the Komuch in July had indeed been partly brought about by the mutiny of M. A. Murav'ev, a lieutenant-colonel in the tsarist army and the Left SR Commander of the Eastern Front. During the following months a concerted campaign was launched within the party against Trotsky's policies. Two articles in Pravda were the catalysts of this conflict. Sorin, a member of the Moscow Party Committee, accused Trotsky of vesting 'too much power' in the ex-tsarist officers, while unfairly making the commissars 'answer with their lives' when the soldiers refused to obey their orders. A commissar named Panteleev had indeed been shot on Trotsky's orders after his detachment had fled from the battle for Kazan. The case became a cause celebre for those determined to defend the independence of the party and its commissars against the commanders. Kamensky, a commissar in Voroshilov's army on the Southern Front, claimed in the other Pravda article that the ex-tsarist commanders acted like virtual 'autocrats', while the commissars were merely there to 'append a decorative signature' to their orders.⁶

Kliment Voroshilov, an Old Bolshevik and Red Guard commander, was the leading figure of this Military Opposition, as it soon came to be known. Based in Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov refused to carry out the orders of Trotsky's central command organ, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR) and its Commander on the Southern Front, the ex-tsarist General Sytin based at Kozlov. Stalin backed Voroshilov, although he always denied belonging to the-Military Opposition. This direct challenge to Trotsky's authority from such a senior party comrade was the origin of much of the personal animosity between Trotsky and Stalin in the years to come.

Trotsky turned the criticisms of his policies into a question of the party's general confidence in himself as Commissar for War. He demanded that the editors of Pravda be censured for publishing the articles by Sorin and

Kamensky. He also demanded Stalin's recall from the Southern Front, where the Georgian was shooting dozens of officials and creating havoc as a special commissar for food supply. This was a dangerous game for Trotsky to play. The sentiments of the Military Opposition, like those of the Left Communists, from which it had in part originated, were widely shared among the rank and file who had joined the party since 1917. As they saw it, the whole purpose of the revolution was to replace the old 'bourgeois specialists' with proletarians loyal to the party. Theirs was a communism of careerists — one that combined an egalitarian rejection of the old authorities with the demand that they, as Communists, should enjoy a similar position of power and privilege within the new regime. In their eyes, comradeship and class were the only necessary qualifications for military advancement. Battles would be won by the 'revolutionary spirit' of the comrades and their men, not by the outmoded science of the tsarist Military Academy.