Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Like most socialists, the Bolsheviks generally despised militarism and regarded the standing army as the chief instrument of state oppression of the working class. For them, especially those consolidating around N. I. Bukharin, A. S. Bubnov, and V. M. Smirnov as the nucleus of the Left Bolsheviks within the party, one of the essential purposes of the revolution was to destroy the army and to replace it with a democratic militia system. As advocates of the untapped potential for revolutionary creativity of the proletariat, the Left further considered that any subsequent conflict, either domestic or international, would be conducted according to quite different principles of organization and strategy—a concept they dubbed “revolutionary war”—in which what would count would not be military training or experience but the unstoppable and incorruptible élan of the workers-in-arms. However, the militia system failed at the first hurdle, during the German invasion of Soviet territory in February 1918 that was occasioned by Sovnarkom’s initial reluctance to accept the peace terms on offer at Brest-Litovsk. It had been expected that at least 300,000 recruits would come forward for this partisan army, but only around 20,000 were mustered (a third of them from Petrograd).92 Consequently, the German advance was virtually unopposed during the “Eleven-Days War,” and the Soviet government had to accept the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

All this had an immediate impact on Trotsky, who resigned as foreign commissar and became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs on 14 March 1918. A dedication to order, routine, hierarchy, and discipline was central to his character and style as a revolutionary, and he soon began to impose those characteristics on the Red military. Within a week of becoming war commissar, he was telling the Moscow Soviet, “Comrades! Our Soviet Socialist Republic needs a well-organized army,” and went on to assert:

While we were fighting with the Kaledinites we could successfully remain content with units which had been put together in haste. Now, however, in order to cope with the creative work of reviving the country . . . , in order to ensure the security of the Soviet Republic under conditions of international counter-revolutionary encirclement, such units are already inadequate. We need a properly and freshly organized army!93

But how was such an army to be organized and led? Certainly Trotsky knew such a task would be beyond his own capabilities and those of the other journalists and activists who led the Bolshevik party. So, in a leap of faith that must be regarded as one of the key moments in the civil wars, Trotsky grasped the nettle and, in address of 28 March 1918 to a Moscow city conference of the party, he focused on what he termed the “sore point” in party discussions, which for him had to be at the heart of the new army:

the question of drawing military specialists, that is, to speak plainly, former officers and generals, into the work of creating and administering the Army. All the fundamental, leading institutions of the Army are now so constructed that they consist of one military specialist and two political commissars. This is the basic pattern of the Army’s leading organs. . . . Given the present regime in the Army—I say this here quite openly—the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree.94