About the Victory

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

What is there to be said about the victory? Victories do not require cornmentaries they speak for themselves. Many people think that the victory came unexpectedly. That is not so. Soon after my departure for the Eastern Front I telegraphed to Comrade Lenin that our units would fight magnificently and be victorious, provided only they were ensured a minimum of organisation and competent leadership. From the example of the Fifth Army I was able to follow, day by day, how the young, freshly-knocked-together units were becoming more united and growing in strength. The Communists constituted the soul, in the true sense of that word, of every company and every regiment. Certain detachments of Communists gave examples of incomparable devotion. In my first days at the Fifth Army front I heard complaints about the Bryansk regiment, which had retreated without justification. Throughout the subsequent operations the Bryansk regiment was among the most heroic, and the commander spoke of it with sincere enthusiasm. As soon as our units felt that they were linked together, and each one acquired confidence that there would be no withdrawals either on its right or on its left, that the command was pursuing a definite, thought-out plan, then all the true qualities of a revolutionary army – enthusiasm, elan, heroism showed themselves to the full. We are now forging on the anvil of war an army of first-class quality. It can be said that if the Czechoslovaks had not existed, they would have had to be invented, for under peacetime conditions we should never have succeeded in forming, within a short time, a close-knit, disciplined, heroic army. But now this army is being formed before our eyes. We need reinforcements. These reinforcements must be sent to us from the same localities from which the basic units have come, so that the worker or peasant from Tula may reinforce his own Tula regiments, the men from Vladinir may go to the Vladimir regiment, and so on. Reinforcement, like formation, will with us take place directly under the enemy’s fire. In this way it will prove sounder. Through this feverish activity of formation, carried out amid the actual fires of struggle, more and more capable and vigorous soldiers are emerging and will continue to emerge, and to them we shall be able to entrust positions of command. The elan shown by the revolutionary worker-soldiers and their warlike vigour are making a big impression on many of the old officers, and we are obtaining, in them, commanders who are completely reliable and vitally bound up with the Red Army. After incredible efforts, privations and losses, the Red Army units entered Kazan in perfect order. The White Guards had scared the inhabitants with a prospect of butchery, mass extermination, and so forth. In fact, the arrival of the Red Army men signified the establishment in the city of a regime of strict discipline and suppression of drunkenness and gangsterism. At huge meetings in the city theatre and in the square in front of the theatre the proletarian masses of the population of Kazan greeted with stormy revolutionary enthusiasm the restoration of Soviet power in their city, and promised to support the Red Army by reinforcing it with new regiments from Kazan. Neither was the capture of Simbirsk a matter for surprise. The commander of the First Army, Comrade Tukhachevsky, had undertaken to capture Simbirsk not later than September 12. He honorably fulfilled his obligation. He informed me of the taking of the town in a telegram which read: ‘Order carried out. Simbirsk taken.’

The surest way to develop and complete this victory is not to slacken pressure on the enemy. For this purpose we need reinforcements from within the country, and for that, in turn, we need widespread and intense agitation among the masses of the workers and the village poor. The working people in the most out-of-the-way corners of Soviet Russia must understand that this war is their war, and upon its outcome depends the fate of the working masses of Russia, and, to a significant degree, of the whole world.

September 1918