When the organization of the Red Army was announced, an editorial in
The workers’ revolution can triumph only on a global scale and for its enduring triumph requires the workers of various countries to offer each other mutual assistance.
And the socialists of that country where power has first passed into the hands of the proletariat may face the task of assisting, arms in hand, their brothers struggling against the bourgeoisie across the border.
“War is father of everything,” said Heraclitus.
There are many other statements, some explicit, others veiled, to the effect that the Red Army’s mission involved intervention abroad, or, as the decree of January 28, 1918, put it, “providing support to the coming socialist revolutions in Europe.”13
All this lay in the future. For the time being, the Bolsheviks had only one reliable military force, the Latvian Rifles, whom we have encountered in connection with the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the security of the Kremlin. The Russian army formed the first separate Latvian units in the summer of 1915. In 1915–16, the Latvian Rifles were an all-volunteer force of 8,000 men, strongly nationalistic and with a sizable Social-Democratic contingent.14 Reinforced with Latvian nationals from the regular Russian units, by the end of 1916 they had eight regiments totaling 30,000 to 35,000 men. This force resembled the Czech Legion, concurrently formed in Russia of prisoners of war, although their destinies were to be quite different.
In the spring of 1917, the Latvian troops reacted favorably to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda, hoping that peace and the principle of “natural self-determination” would allow them to return to their homeland, then under German occupation. Although still more driven by nationalism than socialism, they developed close ties with Bolshevik organizations, adopting their slogans against the Provisional Government. In August 1917, Latvian units distinguished themselves in the defense of Riga.
The Bolsheviks treated the Latvians differently from all the other units of the Russian army, keeping them intact and entrusting to them vital security operations. They gradually turned it into a combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Nazi SS, a force to protect the regime from internal as well as foreign enemies, partly an army, partly a security police. Lenin trusted them much more than Russians.
Early plans to create a Worker-Peasant Red Army came to naught. Those who enlisted did so mainly for the pay, which was soon raised from 50 to 150 rubles a month, and the opportunity to loot. Much of the army was riffraff made up of demobilized soldiers, whom Trotsky would later describe as “hooligans” and a Soviet decree would call “disorganizers, troublemakers, and self-seekers.”15 Contemporary newspapers are filled with stories of violent “expropriations” carried out by the early troops of the Red Army: hungry and ill paid, they sold uniforms and military equipment, and sometimes fought each other. In May 1918, having occupied Smolensk, they demanded that Jews be expelled from Soviet institutions in the name of the slogan “Beat Jews and Save Russia.”16 The situation was so bad that the Soviet authorities occasionally had to request German troops to intervene against mutinous Red Army units.17
Things could not go on like this and Lenin reluctantly began to reconcile himself to the idea of a professional army urged on him by the old General Staff and the French military mission. In February and early March 1918 discussions were held in the party between proponents of a “pure” revolutionary army, composed of workers and democratically structured, and those who favored a more conventional military force. The debate paralleled the one that went on concurrently between advocates of worker control of industry and advocates of professional management. In both instances, considerations of efficiency overruled revolutionary dogma.
