On March 9, 1918, the Sovnarkom appointed a commission to provide in a week a “plan for the establishment of a military center for the reorganization of the army and the creation of a mighty armed force on the basis of a socialist militia and the universal arming of workers and peasants.”18 Krylenko, who had led the opposition to a professional armed force, resigned as Commissar of War and took over the Commissariat of Justice. He was replaced by Trotsky, who had had no military experience, since, like nearly all the Bolshevik leaders, he had dodged the draft. His assignment was to employ as much professional help, foreign and domestic, as required to create an efficient, combat-ready army that would pose no threat to the Bolshevik dictatorship either by defecting to the enemy or by meddling in politics. Concurrently, the government created a Supreme Military Council (Vysshyi Voennyi Soviet), chaired by Trotsky. The council’s staff consisted of officials (the commissars of War and the Navy) and military professionals from the Imperial Army.19 To ensure the complete political reliability of the armed force, the Bolsheviks adopted the institution of “commissars” to supervise military commanders.20
Trotsky continued military negotiations with the Allies. On March 21, he sent General Lavergne of the French military mission the following note:
After a conversation with Captain Sadoul, I have the honor to request, in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, the technical collaboration of the French military mission in the task of reorganizing the army which the government of soviets is undertaking.
There followed a list of thirty-three French specialists in all branches of the military, including aviation, navy, and intelligence, whom the Russians wanted detailed to them.21 Lavergne assigned three officers from his mission as advisers to the Commissar of War: Trotsky allotted them space near his office. The collaboration was handled very discreetly and is not much talked about in Soviet military histories. Later on, according to Joseph Noulens, Trotsky asked for five hundred French army and several hundred British naval officers; he also discussed military assistance with the U.S. and Italian missions.22
Organizing a Red Army from scratch, however, was a slow procedure. In the meantime the Germans were advancing southeast into the Ukraine and adjacent areas. In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks undertook to explore whether the Allies would be prepared to help stop the German advance with their own troops. On March 26, the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs, George Chicherin, handed the French Consul General, Fernand Grenard, a note requesting a statement of Allied intentions in the event Russia turned to Japan to help repel German aggression, or to Germany against Japan.23
The Allied ambassadors, established in Vologda, reacted skeptically to the Bolshevik approaches, which were made through Sadoul. They doubted whether the Bolsheviks really intended to deploy the Red Army against the Germans: as Noulens put it, its more likely use was to serve as a “Praetorian Guard” to solidify their hold on Russia. One can imagine their thoughts as they listened to Sadoul’s impassioned plea on Moscow’s behalf:
The Bolsheviks will form an army, well or badly, but they cannot do it seriously without our assistance. And, inevitably, someday this army will stand up to Imperial Germany, the worst enemy of Russian democracy. On the other hand, because the new army will be disciplined, staffed by professionals and permeated with the military spirit, it will not be an army suited for a civil war. If we direct its formation, as Trotsky has proposed to us, it will become a factor of internal stability and an instrument of national defense at the Allies’ disposal. The de-Bolshevization which we will thus accomplish in the army will have reverberations in the general policies of Russia. Do we not see already the beginnings of this evolution? One must be blinded by prejudice not to see, through the unavoidable brutalities, the rapid adaptation of the Bolsheviks to a realistic policy.24
This plea must be one of the very earliest claims on record that the Bolsheviks were “evolving” toward realism.
