It being about the socialist, democratic ethos of the army in the early period of the revolution, followed by its reversion to bourgeois norms as the Stalinist regime arose. The key to this was (1) the militia system, and (2) the abolition of ranks in the army. Its important to understand what both of these meant, and mean.
The militia system, and the regular army, are two very different things. The militia is territorial, it is the armed manifestation of the workers state locally. It depends on the active participation of the mass of the population both in providing dedicated recruits for the militia formation, and more broadly on the population being the social base of the militia – it is the armed wing of the workers movement in that area – it is not separated from the masses. This is the opposite of the regular army system, where the soldiers are not based in a particular locality, and move around rapidly, and are in that sense qualitatively more isolated from the local population. The latter is the preferred method of operation of bourgeois armed forces, as for the ruling class, an army that is close to and socially linked to the mass of the population is a very bad idea. However, the main problem in Russia was the sheer size and technological backwardness of the country, which made this very difficult to achieve.
The second question is about the question of ranks in the army. This is not linked to the role of individuals as commanders. In an army with a revolutionary, democratic ethos, the election of officers is essential. Those elected will hopefully be those who have proven themselves the best military strategists and tacticians, the most competent organisers of military action, the most effective, etc. They have authority by virtue of their capability, but they do not have a privileged social status.
Those are the two issues that are fundamental to these two parts. The rise of a revolutionary army, in the period of the revolution’s ascent. But it did not claim perfection. It was a living social process. As Trotsky remarked:
“It is unnecessary to idealize the standard of the Red Army in organization or operation during the years of the civil war. For the young commanding staff, however, those were years of a great baptism. Rank-and-file soldiers of the tzar’s army, underofficers and corporals, disclosed the talents of organizers and military leaders, and tempered their wills in a struggle of immense scope. … Among the senior officers, about half received a higher military education; the rest a cadet course. Military theory gave them the necessary discipline of thought, but did not destroy the audacity awakened by the dramatic operations of the civil war.”
Really this is about the qualities of the commanders, from “The party, the Communist Youth, the trade unions”:
“They are the natural reservoir of the commanding staff… To measure the scope of this source, it is sufficient to point out that the number of those graduated from the higher educational institutions has now reached 800,000 a year, the number of college and university students exceeds half-a-million, and that the general number of students in all the scholastic institutions is approaching 28,000,000.”
Trotsky dwells considerably on the material advances, and the material shortcomings, of the army:
“In the sphere of economics, and especially industry, the social revolution has provided the enterprise of national defence with advantages of which the old Russia could not dream. Planning methods mean, in the essence of the matter, a continual mobilization of industry in the hands of the government, and make it possible to focus on the interests of defence even in building and equipping new factories. The correlation between the living and mechanical forces of the Red Army may be considered, by and large, as on a level with the best armies of the West.”
And the navy
“In January 1936, Tukhachevsky announced at a session of the Central Executive Committee: “We are creating a powerful navy. We are concentrating our forces primarily upon the development of a submarine fleet.” The Japanese naval staff is well-informed, we may assume, as to the achievements in this sphere. No less attention is now being given to the Baltic…”
And the air forces:
“But the air fleet has advanced mightily. … the Red Army is producing in increasing numbers heavy bombing planes for action on a radius of 1,200 to 1,500 kilometres. In case of a war in the Far East, the political and military centres of Japan would be subject to attack from the Soviet coast.”
But nevertheless:
“As to the quality of the articles of military manufacture, there may be a legitimate doubt. We have noted, however, that instruments of production are better manufactured in the Soviet Union than objects of general use. Where the purchasers are influential groups of the ruling bureaucracy, the quantity of the product rises considerably above the average level, which is still very low. … Military industry remains, however, a part of the whole industry and, although to a lesser degree, reflects its inadequacies.”
In practice, the technically advanced nature of the army, in counterposition to the size and backwardness of the country, gave rise to illusory and utopian perspectives among many of the military cadre. Like the theorists of the ‘offensive’, of the export of revolution by military means, as opposed to providing political leadership to the world working class. To quote Gussev, a military Bolshevik, and later ally of Stalin:
“We are preparing the class army of the proletariat … not only for defence against the bourgeois-landed counter-revolution, but also for revolutionary wars (both defensive and offensive) against the imperialist powers.”
To which Trotsky noted:
“The author of these lines, answering Gussev in the press, called his attention to the fact that foreign military powers fulfil in a revolutionary process, not a fundamental, but an auxiliary role. Only in favourable circumstances can they hasten the denouement and facilitate the victory.”
Or as he directly replied at the time:
“Military intervention is like the forceps of the physician. Applied in season, it can lighten the birth pains; brought into operation prematurely, it can only cause a miscarriage.” (December 5, 1921.)
The point being that the in-practice domination of the ‘revolutionary’ regular army over the militia system, and the ardent trained cadre, gave rise to such illusions. It is worth noting that Bukharin, who later was the great marketiser and leader of the Right Opposition, was in the Civil War one of the theorists of the ‘offensive’, along with Tukhachevsky and Gussev.
“A school of ‘proletarian military doctrine’ to which belonged or adhered Frunze, Tukhachevsky, Gussev, Voroshilov, and others, started from the a priori conviction that, not only in its political aims but in its structure, strategy and tactic, the Red Army could have nothing in common with the national armies of the capitalist countries. The new ruling class must have in all respects a distinct military system; it remained only to create it. During the civil war, the thing was limited, of course…. The principal centre of these moods was Tzaritzyn (now Stalingrad), where Budenny, Voroshilov, and afterward Stalin, began their military work.”
These replaced Trotsky in charge of the Red Army as the factional dispute wore on. But their impetuous adventurism later showed a tendency to evolve into a more opportunist politics.
Regarding the origins of the Red Army, Trotsky writes:
“The Red Army was built anew from the first brick. A twin of the Soviet regime, it shared its fate in great things and small. It owed its incomparable superiority over the tzar’s army wholly to the great social revolution. It has not stood aside, however, from the processes of degeneration of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, these have found their most finished expression in the army. Before attempting to describe the possible role of the Red Army in a future military cataclysm, it is necessary to dwell a moment upon the evolution of its guiding ideas and structures.”
There is the question of the character of the army. According to the party programme, the army should have:
“…an overtly class character – that is, to be composed exclusively of the proletariat and the semi-proletarian layers of the peasantry close to it. Only in connection with the abolition of classes will such a class army convert itself into a national socialist militia.”
The problem being the practicalities, as mentioned before:
“A militia, however, no matter how well corresponding to the nature of the socialist society, requires a high economic basis. Special circumstances are built up for a regular army. A territorial army, therefore, much more directly reflects the real condition of the country. The lower the level of culture and the sharper the distinction between village and city, the more imperfect and heterogeneous the militia. A lack of railroads, highways, and water routes, together with an absence of roads and a scarcity of automobiles, condemns the territorial army in the first critical weeks and months of war to extreme slowness of movement. In order to ensure a defence of the boundaries during mobilization, strategic transfers and concentrations, it is necessary, along with the territorial detachments, to have regular troops. The Red Army was created from the very beginning as a necessary compromise between the two systems, with the emphasis on the regular troops.”
And he quotes the basis for this contradiction from the head of the War Department in 1924, which was no doubt Trotsky himself:
“We must always have before our eyes two circumstances: If the very possibility of going over to the militia system was first created by the establishment of a Soviet structure, still the tempo of the change is determined by the general conditions of the culture of the country – technique, means of communications, literacy, etc. The political premises for a militia are firmly established with us, whereas the economic and cultural are extremely backward.”
This is because:
“Nature and history have provided the Soviet state with open frontiers 10,000 kilometres apart, with a sparse population, and bad roads”
Therefore:
“In the next few years, the creation of a militia must of necessity have a preparatory character. Each successive step must follow from the carefully verified success of the preceding steps.”
Unfortunately, the isolation of the revolution, and the rise of Stalinism, threw such sensitive developments into reverse. But first, the illusion of ‘socialism in one country’ actually began to seemingly flower …
“But with 1925 a new era began. The advocates of the former proletarian military doctrine came to power. In its essence, the territorial army was deeply contradictory to that ideal of “offensivism” and “maneuverism” with which this school had opened its career. But they had now begun to forget about the world revolution. The new leaders hoped to avoid wars by ‘neutralizing’ the bourgeoisie. In the course of the next few years, 74 per cent of the army was reorganized on a militia basis!”
As long as they thought ‘peace’ was on the agenda, that is. This was a false sense of security, which was punctured by Hitler’s rise to power.
“The prospect of a peaceful cohabitation with capitalism faded at once. The swift approach of military danger impelled the Soviet government, besides bringing up the numbers of the armed forces to 1,300,000, to change radically the structure of the Red Army. At the present time, it contains 77 per cent of regular, or so-called “kadrovy” divisions, and only 23 per cent of territorials! This shattering of the territorial divisions looks too much like a renunciation of the militia system – unless you forgot that an army is needed not for times of peace, but exactly for the moments of military danger. Thus, historic experience, starting from that sphere which is least of all tolerant of jokes, has ruthlessly revealed that only so much has been gained “finally and irrevocably” as is guaranteed by the productive foundation of society.”
And then the retreat became a rout. The motivation was clear:
“The divisions of a militia through their very character come into direct dependence upon the population. This is the chief advantage of the system from a socialist point of view. But this also is its danger from the point of view of the Kremlin … The keen discontent in the Red Army during the first five-year plan undoubtedly supplied a serious motive for the subsequent abolition of the territorial divisions.”
And to crown it all:
“A still more deadly blow to the principles of the October revolution was struck by the decree restoring the officers’ corps in all its bourgeois magnificence. … In September 1935, civilized humanity, friends and enemies alike, learned with surprise that the Red Army would now be crowned with an officers’ hierarchy, beginning with lieutenant and ending with marshal.”
Justified by Tukhashevsky thus:
“…the introduction by the government of military titles will create a more stable basis for the development of commanding and technical cadres.”
Contradicted by Trotsky on the basis on which the original Red Army was founded:
“Engineers and physicians have no rank, but society finds the means of putting each in his needful place. The right to a commanding position is guaranteed by study, endowment, character, experience, which need continual and moreover individual appraisal. The rank of major adds nothing to the commander of a battalion. The elevation of the five senior commanders of the Red Army to the title of marshal, gives them neither new talents nor supplementary powers. It is not the army that really thus receives a “stable basis”, but the officers’ corps, and that at the price of aloofness from the army. The reform pursues a purely political aim: to give a new social weight to the officers.”
And of course, it has its basis in the wider degeneration of the revolution:
“No army, however, can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it. The source of bureaucratism, with its routine and swank, is not the special needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling stratum.”
And the bourgeois press abroad took note of the real content of all this:
“This external transformation is one of the signs of a deep change which is now taking place through the Soviet Union. The regime, now definitely consolidated, is gradually becoming stabilized. Revolutionary habits and customs are giving place within the Soviet family and Soviet society to the feelings and customs which continue to prevail within the so-called capitalist countries. The Soviets are becoming bourgeoized.” (Le Temps, September 25, 1935)
It is only necessary to add that the weakness and backsliding of Tukhachevsky et all did not mean they were the finished article of the degeneration. The destruction of the military cadre including Tukhachevsky by Stalin in the Great Purges came later.
But they were a stage in the degeneration.
