The Russian Revolution полностью

Even after taking power, the Bolsheviks continued to dismantle what was left of the old army, depriving the officers of the little authority they still retained. Initially, they ordered that officers be elected, and then abolished military ranks, vesting the power to make command appointments in soldiers’ soviets.⁴ Under the incitement of Bolshevik agitators, soldiers and sailors lynched many officers: in the Black Sea Fleet such lynchings turned into wholesale massacres.

At the same time, Lenin and his lieutenants turned their attention to creating their own armed force. As his first Commissar of War, Lenin chose N. V. Krylenko, a thirty-two-year-old Bolshevik lawyer, who had served in the Imperial Army as a lieutenant in the reserves. In November, Krylenko went to Army Headquarters at Mogilev to replace the Commander in Chief, General N. N. Dukhonin, who had refused to negotiate with the Germans and was barbarously murdered by his troops. He appointed as the new Commander in Chief General M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, a brother of Lenin’s secretary.

Professional officers actually proved to be much more willing to cooperate with the Bolsheviks than the intelligentsia. Brought up in a tradition of strict apoliticism and obedience to those in power, most of them dutifully carried out orders of the new government.⁵ Even though the Soviet authorities have long been reluctant to make known their names, those who promptly recognized Bolshevik authority included some of the highest officers of the Imperial General Staff: A. A. Svechin, V. N. Egorev, S. I. Odintsov, A. A. Samoilo, P. P. Sytin, D. P. Parskii, A. E. Gutov, A. A. Neznamov, A. A. Baltiiskii, P. P. Lebedev, A. M. Zaionchkovskii, and S. S. Kamenev.⁶ Later on, two tsarist ministers of war, Aleksis Polivanov and Dmitrii Shuvaev, also donned uniforms of the Red Army. At the end of November 1917, Lenin’s military adviser, N. I. Podvoiskii, requested the General Staffs opinion whether elements of the old army could serve as the nucleus of a new armed force. The generals recommended that healthy units of the old army be used in this manner and that the army be reduced to its traditional peacetime strength of 1.3 million men. The Bolsheviks rejected this proposal in favor of an entirely new, revolutionary force, modeled on that fielded by France in 1791—that is, a levée en masse, but composed entirely of urban inhabitants, without peasants.⁷

Events, however, would not wait: the front continued to crumble and now it was Lenin’s front—as he liked to say, after October the Bolsheviks had become “defensists.” There was talk of creating an armed force of 300,000 to serve as the foundation of the new Bolshevik army.⁸ Lenin demanded that this force be assembled and made combat-ready in a month and a half to meet the expected German assault. This order was reconfirmed on January 16 in the so-called Declaration of Rights, which provided for the creation of a Red Army to “ensure the full power of the toiling masses and prevent the restoration of exploiters.”⁹ The new Worker-Peasant Red Army (Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia) was to be an all-volunteer force, made up of “tried revolutionaries,” who were to be paid fifty rubles a month and be bound by “mutual guarantees” (krugovaia poruka) by virtue of which every soldier would be personally responsible for the loyalty of his comrades. To command this projected army, the Sovnarkom created on February 3 an All-Russian Collegium of the Red Army, chaired by Krylenko and Podvoiskii.¹⁰

Official government announcements justified the creation of a new, socialist army with the need of Soviet Russia to repulse the assault of the “international bourgeoisie.” But this was only one of its stated missions, and not necessarily the most important. Like the Imperial Army, the Red Army had a dual function: to fight foreign enemies and to preserve internal security. In an address to the Soldiers’ Section of the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, Krylenko declared that the foremost task of the Red Army was to wage “internal war” and ensure “the defense of Soviet authority.”¹¹ In other words, it was primarily to serve the purpose of civil war, which Lenin was determined to unleash.

The Bolsheviks also charged their armies with the mission of spreading civil wars abroad. Lenin believed that the final triumph of socialism required a series of major wars between “socialist” and “bourgeois” countries. In a moment of uncharacteristic candor he said:

The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.¹²