Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

97. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957–2009), 1: 356–57; cf. Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army: A Study of the Growth of Soviet Imperialism (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1973), 365 (app. 1, “The Scheme for a Socialist Army”).

98. The oppositionists’ ire that Sovnarkom seemed intent on reducing commissars to the status of functionaries, despite their rapidly expanding command experience—most eloquently distilled in a speech to the Eighth Congress of 20 March 1919 by V. M. Smirnov—was salved by the replacement, on 18 April 1919, of the somewhat haphazardly functioning All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (Vsebiurvoenkom, created by the People’s Commissariat for War on 8 April 1918) with the more robust and active Political Administration of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (Politicheskoe upravlenie RVS Respubliki). The latter, generally known as PUR, was chaired by the Leftist I. T. Smilga. See Francesco Benvenuti, I bolscevichi e l’armata rossa, 1918–1922 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1982), 135–82; and Francesco Benvenuti, “La ‘Questione militaire’ al’VIII Congresso della RKP(b),” Studi Storici 35, no. 4 (1994): 1095–1121. Also, for the stenographic records, see “Deiatel′nost Tsentral′nogo Komiteta partii v dokumentakh (sobytiia i fakty): Mart 1919g. VIII s″ezd RKP(b): Stenogramma zasedenii voennoi sektsii s″ezda 20 i 21 marta 1919 goda i zakrytogo zasedenii s″ezda 21 marta 1919 goda,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS 1 (1989), much of which is summarized in V. P. Bokarev, VIII s″ezd RKP(b) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 53–77. On Smilga and PUR, see Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 67–181.

99. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918, 199–210.

100. A. V. Ganin, “Workers and Peasants Red Army ‘General Staff Personalities’ Defecting to the Enemy Side in 1918–1921,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 26, no. 2 (2013): 259–309. In this article, Ganin also offers numerous interesting suggestions as to why some officers deserted and some did not. On officers’ decisions to join the Reds, see also the superb article by David R. Jones, “The Officers and the October Revolution,” Soviet Studies 28, no. 2 (1976): 207–23.

101. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918, 557–58.

102. The key figure in the institution was its director, the former tsarist officer Major-General M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, who was Trotsky’s closely trusted aide.

103. Like most voenspetsy, Bonch-Bruevich regarded the Western Front (euphemistically termed a “screen” as long as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was in place), against Germany, as the priority and had somewhat neglected the emerging Eastern Front, on the Volga, which was to become the crucible of the civil wars in 1918.

104. Movchin, Komplektovanie Krasnoi armii, 52–53. In Russian military terminology, “front” implies an army group rather than a geographical region.

105. For an appreciation of this inheritance, see N. E. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas′ revoliutsiia, 1917–21 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), 1:135.

106. For the decree “On the Formation of the Council of Defence,” see Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, 4:92–94.

107. Thomas H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76, 84.

108. M. A. Molodtsygin, Krasnaia Armiia: rozhdenie i stanovlenie, 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow: RAN, 1997), 134.

109. Landis, “Who Were the ‘Greens’?,” 31.

110. Orlando Figes, “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920,” Past and Present, no. 129 (1990): 168–211.

111. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, 2:541–44. See Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 45.

112. Very important here was the creation by VTsIK, in late December 1918, of a Central Anti-Desertion Commission. M. A. Molodtsygin, Raboche-krest′ianskii soiuz, 1918–1920 (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 138.

113. Sanborn, Drafting the Nation, 50.