To begin with, though, most of the conscripts continued to be drawn from the cities. Of the fifteen compulsory mobilizations declared between June and August, eleven applied only to urban workers. With hundreds of factories closing every month, there was no great problem in getting workers to enrol for the army: 200,000 did so from Moscow and Petrograd alone. The local party organs also threw in 40,000 of their own members. Semen Kanatchikov, the Bolshevik worker now turned roving commissar, arrived in Tula to oversee the despatch of Communists to the Eastern Front. Os’kin thought him a ‘severe task-master’ and expressed his fears that if the best comrades were called up, there would not be enough left in Tula to defend the revolution there. This was a major problem for the provincial party organizations. Many of their most committed members were lost in battle, so that the worst elements, the self-seekers and the corrupt, took control of local party cells.9
During these first campaigns, when the Red Army was desperate for recruits, ultimate proof of devotion to the party was shown by fighting for it at the Front. The Bolsheviks had always distinguished themselves with a macho and military self-image. They dressed in leather jackets — a military fashion of the First World War — and all carried guns.fn3 Half a million party members joined the Red Army during the civil war. Trotsky, who compared these Communist fighters to the Japanese Samurai, ensured that they were distributed evenly throughout all the army units. Party members, if not appointed commissars, were certainly expected to lead from the front. Many of them fought with a desperate courage, if only for fear of their own capture (and almost certain torture) by the Whites. The bravery of the Communist soldiers became part of the Reds’ civil war mythology. It was what the Bolshevik historian L. N. Kritsman would later call the ‘heroic period’ of the revolution. And from that romantic image — the image of the party as a comradeship in arms unafraid to advance or conquer any fortress — came many of its basic ruling attitudes.
Mass conscription of the peasantry was one fortress still to be conquered. In 1918 the Soviet regime had no real military apparatus in the countryside. Few volost Soviets had a military committee (voenkom), the main organ responsible for carrying out Red Army conscription. Even where there was a military committee its work was usually hampered by the village commune, which alone had a register of peasants eligible for conscription. The first remotely comprehensive military census of the population was not completed until 1919 — which of course meant that until then any conscription was bound in effect to be no more than a voluntary call-up. It was hardly surprising, then, that of the 275,000 peasant recruits anticipated from the first call-up in June, only 40,000 actually appeared.10
There were several reasons why the peasants would resist mobilization into the Red Army. The first harvest of the revolution, which coincided with the call-up, was the most compelling. Peasant recruitments and desertions in all the civil war armies fluctuated in accordance with the farming seasons. Peasants joined up in the winter, only to desert the following summer. In the central agricultural regions the weekly rate of desertion was up to ten times higher in summer than in winter. As the Red Army grew on a national scale, such desertions became more common, topping two million during 1919, because the recruits were more fearful of being sent to units a long way from their farms.11
