Socialists and soldiers – the Bolsheviks and the Red Army: Francesco Benvenuti: Review
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This is one of those priceless books. Not valuable, just with no price printed anywhere on it. So it is not the sort you are likely to happen upon by chance in Borders or Waterstones. It is rather the sort of worthy academic treatise you will find tucked away in the history or politics section of a university bookshop which, as anyone who has been in one recently will agree, are thankfully free of any students at all. That bloody internet . . .
Enough. What is the book like, what is it about, what does it tell us?
Benvenuti’s study of the political disputes within Bolshevism during the formation of the Red Army is as dry as a Saharan river bed. If you judge the ease with which you can read a book by its anecdotes – and there are many who do – this is no easy read. So, if you are a military buff who enjoys a good yarn, don’t bother. But Benvenuti’s study does contain valuable information about the political arguments within Bolshevism that shaped the Red Army. It also contains the interesting thesis that Trotsky’s success as Commissar for War contributed to his eventual defeat within the Communist Party at the hands of Stalin.
The Red Army saved Soviet Russia and enabled the Bolshevik Revolution to survive through a period when the entire imperialist world was ranged against it. But the question that interests Benvenuti is not how it did this on the battlefield, but how it did it through the political decisions taken by the Bolshevik Party – which by the summer of 1918 was the sole governing party in Russia.
Foremost amongst these decisions was the early agreement to, in effect, replicate the model of an imperialist army. The Tsarist army had disintegrated at the hands of soldiers committees who aligned themselves with the revolution during the course of 1917. These committees embodied distrust in the officers and encouraged a spirit of revolt against orders. They also fought for the political rights of soldiers. All of this met the revolutionary need to break the armed power of the bosses.
But could the same forms of organisation adequately meet the new task of defending revolutionary power? The initial advances of counter-revolution drew a clear answer to this question from the Bolsheviks – no. The militia was not capable of defending the revolution because it was too small, too local and too democratic. Only a centralised army under a centralised command, said the Commissar for War, Trotsky, was able to defend the revolution. And so the organisation of and recruitment to the Red Army commenced, as early as March 1918, on the basis of mass recruitment of workers and peasants and the reintroduction of a bourgeois officer corps as “specialists”, “instructors” and “technicians”.
Given the co-ordinated attacks on Soviet power that were unleashed from the summer of 1918 onwards, the Bolshevik call for a centralised army – in breach of its programme for an armed militia – was absolutely necessary. Indeed, as early as the American War of Independence, the limitations of localised militia had been harshly exposed. They cannot win full-scale wars and only an idealist would say that victory for the Soviet cause lay through pitting such militia against the armed might of the Whites.
The Bolsheviks were quite right to opt for the building of a centralised army, as a temporary measure, in order to win. Furthermore they were quite right to make use of former officers. Without them, conducting a full scale war was a pipe dream. Like it or not the expertise on the battlefield that such officers could bring was decisive to winning battles, and if the Red Army had not won, the consequences for the people of Russia would have been every bit as disastrous as the eventual victory of Stalin was. It was a move worth making in order to buy time for the revolution.
Having said that we need to remember that the Bolsheviks were only improvising, experimenting. And the value of Benvenuti’s book is that it enables us to assess the outcome of their experiments. How could the officers be prevented from organising a counter-revolution from within? One solution may have been to have re-introduced soldiers’ committees. Perhaps the Bolsheviks were wrong to rule this out (regarding it as akin to reintroducing “craftism” in the economy). The method of checking the growth of an independent army they hit upon was to introduce Military Commissars to work alongside, supervise and, in dire circumstances, countermand, the officers.
From the outset the Commissar was defined as “the political organ of Soviet power within the army”. But given the task was both to check the officers and instil a sense of centralised discipline, this meant that this particular organ was not merely an instrument of supervision but also of repression. Commissars were given the power to dissolve soldiers’ committees as well as keep an eye on potentially rebellious officers. In other words they checked dissent – from whatever quarter.
The improvisation was insufficient. Benvenuti traces a shift that took place between the seventh congress of the Bolsheviks in March 1918 and the eighth congress in 1919. The change involved a series of publicly staged debates and the creation of a “Military Opposition” to Trotsky and the War Commissariat within the Bolshevik Party. Whatever tragic mistakes were made, the process narrated by Benvenuti demonstrates that throughout this period the spirit of political independence and criticism within Bolshevism was remarkable and very much alive.
The debate revolved around the extent to which the need for discipline and the deployment of “specialists” had endangered the revolution. The Military Opposition argued that Trotsky’s pursuit of military perfection had led to the very real danger of allowing the army, now made up of a majority of peasants, becoming a force independent of the revolution and therefore capable of turning against it.
The Military Opposition was a variegated force. It included defenders of the old militia concept alongside nascent Communist bureaucrats, like Stalin and Voroshilov, who regarded Trotsky’s emphasis on “military specialism” and discipline as a threat to the power of the Communist Party and its ability to control the armed forces. Stalin had already clashed sharply with Trotsky in the preceding period over the way in which he had operated in Tsaritsyn in 1918. The clash occurred over Trotsky’s insistence on appointing a specialist, General Sytin, to command the southern front. On 3 October 1918, in a letter to Lenin, Stalin and Voroshilov wrote:
“Accordingly we, as members of the party, categorically declare that we consider the execution of Trotsky’s orders to be criminal, and his threats unworthy. The party Central Committee needs to discuss the behaviour of Trotsky, who abuses very eminent party members to the advantage of traitors among the military specialists and to the detriment of the front and of the revolution.” (p47)
Following on from this, accusations against Trotsky grew in the lead up to the eighth congress. Articles in the press even accused him of unjustly having Communists shot in the name of military discipline.
The issue here is clear, and it highlights the great dilemma of the Bolsheviks in maintaining their revolution until help could arrive from a western spread of the revolution. For Trotsky the victory of the Red Army was the means of buying the time necessary for aid to come to the Russian revolution. To secure this victory he was prepared to compromise on the make up and leadership of the Red Army. His sole criterion was – what was best to win the war.
For Stalin, and many within the Military Opposition, the question was more about how could the party maintain its control of the Red Army. Sections of the opposition justifiably feared the encroachments on the democratic rights of soldiers and the dilution of the class character of the army that Trotsky’s position appeared to imply. But for Stalin it was about party prerogative in the army. Why should the specialists boss the Communists?
When the eighth congress finally came the result was a compromise. The fear of the counter-revolution and the apparent efficacy of Trotsky’s methods persuaded a majority that his position should not be overthrown entirely. But the combined concerns of those who feared a loss of democracy and those (Stalin and Voroshilov) who feared an erosion of party privilege, were enough to produce a compromise.
As so often happened, Trotsky himself played little part in shaping the outcome in the party. He went to the front, missed the whole congress and declared that it did not matter as the disputes were purely of a technical character. This, argues Benvenuti, was yet another example of him isolating himself from the inner life of the party, thereby weakening his position later when those defending party privilege moved against him. Whether this was true or not, however, is beside the point. The main thing to emerge was the strengthening of the Commissars (and the political departments) as agents of the party within the army rather than as agents of Soviet Power.
The compromise did involve certain democratic aspects, such as the increased right of party cells within the army. But the overall thrust of the eighth congress was to strengthen the bureaucratic control of the party over both the specialists and the mass of soldiers. The party strengthened itself at the expense of Soviet power. In the theses adopted (and drafted by Trotsky) it was stated that Commissars could henceforth only be, “bearers of the spirit of our party”. The party interpreted this to mean that only party members could be Commissars. And Stalin was able to point to various counter-revolutionary plots by specialists to bolster his push to strengthen party control in the army.
He was also able to present his campaign for what was to eventually become party autocracy as “democratic” because of Trotsky’s own limited programme at the time. Trotsky had a strategy for victory and that strategy depended upon the use of specialists and a “German” model for army discipline. In other words Trotsky had a primarily technical strategy. By elevating the role of the party – something that in later years evolved into the chilling nostrum of the “leading role of the party” – Stalin appealed to the Bolshevik old guard as a defender of them, of their traditions, of their rights and of their hard won gains.
It’s possible that Benvenuti sees too much of the later struggle between the two men in these earlier battles over military policy. After all, later chapters reveal the overcoming of the differences exposed in the run up to the eighth congress and the happy union of Trotsky with the former Military Opposition. But regardless of this the author does provide plenty of evidence for the way in which slowly but surely the party came to replace the soviet as the decisive organ of power, even before the completion of the bureaucratic counter-revolution.
Trotsky may have got carried away with the importance of the specialists, but he was trying to win a war and preserve a revolution. Others were trying to win a war and preserve a developing position of privilege. Despite being one of the most plodding books on the Red Army around, revealing this historic development in its earliest phase makes it a pretty useful one.
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