It was the Czechoslovak rebellion that finally forced the Bolsheviks to tackle the formation of an army in earnest. The ex-tsarist generals on the Supreme Military Council had been urging them all along to give up the idea of an all-volunteer force composed exclusively of “proletarian” elements and go over to general conscription. Given Russia’s population structure, in a conscript army peasants would constitute the overwhelming majority. Lacking any realistic alternatives, Lenin and Trotsky now overcame their aversion to a regular army with a professional officer corps and a mass of peasant conscripts. On April 22 the government ordered all male citizens aged eighteen to forty to undergo an eight-week course of military training. The ruling applied to workers, students, and peasants not engaged in “exploitation”—i.e., not employing hired labor.72 This was the first step. On May 29 Moscow ordered general mobilization to be carried out in phases. First to be called to colors would be workers from Moscow, Don, and Kuban, born in 1896 and 1897; they were to be followed by workers from Petrograd; then the turn would come for railroad workers and white-collar employees. They were to serve six months. Peasants were as yet unaffected. In June, soldiers’ pay was raised from 150 to 250 rubles a month, and the first attempt was made to outfit them with standard uniforms.73 At the same time, the government began the voluntary registration of ex-officers of the Imperial Army and opened a General Staff Academy.74 Finally, on July 29, Moscow issued two further decrees, which laid the foundations of the Red Army, as it has been known since. One introduced compulsory military service for all males aged eighteen to forty.75 Under the provisions of this decree, over half a million men were to be conscripted.76 The second ordered the registration of all officers of the old army (born in the years 1892 to 1897 inclusive) in designated areas, under threat of punishment by Revolutionary Tribunals.77
Such was the origin of the Red Army. Organized with the assistance of professional officers, and soon commanded almost exclusively by them, in structure and discipline it not unnaturally modeled itself on the Imperial Army.78 Its only innovation was the introduction of political “commissars,” posts entrusted to dependable Bolshevik
The Red Army quickly became the pampered child of the new regime. As early as May 1918, soldiers were receiving higher pay and bread rations than industrial workers, who loudly protested.80 Trotsky reintroduced spit and polish along with traditional military discipline. The first parade of the Red Army, held on May 1 at Moscow’s Khodynka Field, was a dispirited affair, dominated by Latvians. But in 1919 and the years that followed, Trotsky staged on Red Square meticulously organized and ever more elaborate parades that brought tears to the eyes of the old generals.
The Czechoslovak revolt presented the Bolsheviks with not only a military challenge but also a political one. The cities of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia were crowded with liberal and socialist intellectuals who lacked the courage to stand up to the Bolsheviks but were prepared to exploit any opportunity provided by others. They concentrated in Samara and the Siberian city of Omsk. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly some seventy SR deputies traveled to Samara to proclaim themselves Russia’s rightful government. Omsk was the headquarters of more centrist elements, led by the Kadets: the politicians here were content to isolate Siberia from Bolshevism and the Civil War. As soon as the Czech Legion had cleared the Bolsheviks out of the principal towns along the central Volga and in Siberia, these intellectuals began to stir.
