Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Within a few weeks, more than 8,000 former officers were serving in the Red ranks, and by the end of 1918, 30,000 of them were employed—not as “officers,” but to spare Bolshevik blushes, as “military specialists” (voenspetsy)—a disproportionate number of them being graduates of the imperial Academy of the General Staff.95 There were, of course, cases of treachery and desertion by voenspetsy (notably when virtually the entire faculty of the Academy of the General Staff itself went over to the enemy on the Volga during the summer of 1918), which fed the fires of opprobrium that leftist party radicals felt for this “treachery” to proletarian principles. Also, Trotsky’s wish—expressed in an article of 31 December 1918 eulogizing “The Military Specialists and the Red Army”—that he was returning to the topic “for the last time, I hope,” was not realized: residual Left Bolshevik resentment at such confounding of revolutionary purity remained widespread (and was voiced with great bitterness at a conference of Bolshevik army delegates in late March 1919).96 Critics of the employment of voenspetsy could point out that it had, after all, been stated, in the Sovnarkom decree of 3 January 1918, which first mentioned the creation of such a force, that “the Red Army of Workers and Peasants will be formed from the most conscious and organized elements of the working masses”—a definition that hardly encompassed the employment of the military elite of tsarist Russia.97 Debates on this issue would become particularly vitriolic and divisive at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1919, where concessions had to be made to Trotsky’s opponents in order to defuse a sizable “military opposition” within the RKP(b). This loosely organized group was demanding that military commissars be afforded a greater role in decision making within the army and that party institutions should assume a larger role in directing a Red Army that was increasingly manned by conscripted peasants.98 Although it was claimed at the time, by Trotsky, that only 5 out of 82 voenspetsy army commanders ever deserted,99 a more recent investigation of materials in the Russian archives has established that some 549 highly valued genshtabisty deserted from the Red Army in the period 1918–1921, and that in total, almost one in three voenspetsy managed to flee to the enemy.100 Yet despite this debilitating and dangerous hemorrhage, and despite the lingering qualms of the Leftists, at least the principle of utilizing officers and experts had been firmly established, and the majority of officers employed in the Red Army (including 613 genshtabisty) remained at their posts.

Left Bolshevik (and Left-SR) irritations were at least partly salved by a second, truly revolutionary aspect of the new army: the appointment of so-called military commissars to all units. Although this office was based on the far-distant precedent of a similarly named institution at the time of the French revolutionary wars, and while the Provisional Government of 1917 had also named its special plenipotentiaries at the front and in the regions “commissars,” the military (or political) commissar of the Red forces was an original phenomenon. It was, in fact, one of the key martial innovations of the Reds during the civil war. According to an order signed by Trotsky on 6 April 1918:

The military commissar is the direct political organ of Soviet power in the army. . . . Commissars are appointed from among irreproachable revolutionaries, capable of remaining under the most difficult circumstances, the embodiment of revolutionary duty. . . . [They] must see to it that the army does not become disassociated from the Soviet system as a whole and that particular military institutions do not become centers of conspiracy or instruments to be used against the workers and peasants. The commissar takes part in all the work of the military leaders, receives reports and dispatches along with them, and counter-signs orders. War Councils will give effect only to such orders as have been signed not only by military leaders but also by at least one military commissar.

He was equally insistent, though, that “the commissar is not responsible for the expediency of purely military, operational, combat orders.”101