It was five years since Dmitry Os’kin had last been in Tula. Then, in 1913, he had been a simple peasant boy fresh from the countryside to sign up as a soldier of the Tsar. Now, in the spring of 1918, he was returning to the same town, a commissar in Trotsky’s army, to put steel into the revolution.
The years of war and revolution had been kind to Os’kin. He had risen through the ranks, winning four St George’s Crosses on the way, as the old caste of officers was destroyed. During 1917 his fortunes rose as his politics moved to the Left: he rode on the tide of the soldiers’ revolution. His SR credentials won him command of a regiment, followed by election to the Central Committee of the Soldiers’ Soviet on the South-Western Front. In October he went as an SR delegate to the Second Soviet Congress — one of that ‘grey mass’ of unwashed soldiers in the Smolny Hall whom Sukhanov had blamed for the Bolshevik triumph. In early 1918, when Trotsky began to build the officer corps of the new Red Army, he turned first to the NCOs, like Os’kin, who had learned their trade in the tsarist army. It was a marriage of convenience between the ambitions of the peasant sons and the military needs of the regime. As Napoleon had once said, every soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a field-marshal: that was the making of an armée revolutionnaire.
One hundred miles south of Moscow, Tula was the arsenal of the revolution. After the evacuation of Petrograd it became the hub of the Soviet Republic’s munitions industry. At the height of the First World War its factories employed over 60,000 workers, although by the time of Os’kin’s arrival, with the general flight to the countryside, only 15,000 were left. The new military commissar took up his office in the Soviet building, housed in the former Peasant Bank, which, as if to symbolize the new social order, was surrounded by metal factories.1
The local Red Guards, which Os’kin had come to reorganize, had been mostly set up by the workers during 1917 to defend their factories against the threat of a ‘counter-revolution’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power there had been a great deal of talk about using them to form a new type of ‘proletarian army’ rather than retaining the remnants of the old (and mainly peasant) one. The Bolsheviks did not like the idea of a standing army. They thought of the army as a tool of oppression wielded by the old regime against the revolution. A workers’ militia would be more egalitarian, and the Red Guards were to be the basis of such a force. They made up the units of the new Red Army, whose establishment was decreed on 15 January. Apart from their ideological objections to the idea of a standing army, the Bolsheviks also had practical reasons for favouring the volunteer principle at this stage: the disintegration of the old army and the complete absence of any apparatus to carry out conscription left them no choice. The only real troops they could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster during the first months of their regime.
At this time, when the workers were fleeing the cities, the new Red recruits were largely made up of unemployed former soldiers, and all those ‘vagabond, unstable elements that’, in Trotsky’s words, ‘were so numerous at the time’. Some of them had no doubt come to like the army way of life, or at least preferred it to postwar civilian hardships. But most of them had nowhere else to go — the war left them without home or family. They were stranded in towns like Tula, half-way between the Front and their long-abandoned homes. Many of these migrants signed up with the Red Guards simply to receive a standard-issue coat, or a pair of boots, before running off to sell them and start the whole process over again in some other town. The new Proletarian Militia was a rag-and-bone trade for the down and out.2
