On the Military Commissars

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The post of military commissar, especially the commissar of a regiment, is one of the most difficult and responsible known to the Soviet Republic. Far from every comrade, however well-developed politically, can cope with the duties of a military commissar. Here what is needed above all is a firm, staunch character, with calm, vigilant courage, free from impetuosity. The commissar who acts without preparation, who turns up in a regiment with a ready-made intention to ‘tighten the screws’, set things right, correct and alter everything, before even knowing how, who or what, will inevitably come up against resistance, obstacles and rebuffs, and will risk becoming transformed into a grumbler-commissar. This is a fairly widespread type, though, fortunately, it accounts for only a small minority in our corps of commissars.

The grumbler-commissar is dissatisfied all the time and with everything: with the senior commissars, with the commanders, with the Revolutionary War Council of the army, with the regulations – in short, with everybody and everything. Actually, this clamorous dissatisfaction has its root in the commissar himself: he is simply incapable of performing his duties, and is soon transformed into a former commissar.

The center of gravity of the problem does not lie at all where bad commissars look for it. The heart of the matter is not the conferring on the commissar of some unrestricted, all-embracing powers. The powers of the commissar are quite adequate. The task is to learn, in practice and through experience, to make use of these powers without disrupting other people’s work, but instead supplementing it and giving it direction.

There have not and do not exist any orders telling the commissar: ‘thou hast no right to interfere in any dispositions whatsoever that are made by the commanders’.

The sphere in which the commissar has fewest ‘rights’ is that of operations, of command. Every sensible person appreciates that there cannot be two commanders at once, and especially not in a battle situation. But nobody has ever forbidden the commissar to express his opinion regarding operational problems, to give advice, to supervise the execution of an operational order, and so on. On the contrary, all this falls within the commissar’s sphere of work, and if he understands what he is doing, he will always exercise a significant degree of influence, even in the sphere of command.

In the organizational, administrative and supply spheres, where the principal problems are solved not in battle situations but in the preparatory period, in the rear, commissars and commanders must work together and, generally speaking, the rights they possess are identical. If, day after day, they disagree on essential questions, this must mean that one or other of them fails to understand the fundamental tasks of constructive work in the military field. In that case, it will be necessary to remove either the commander or the commissar, taking into account which of them, in his work, has departed from the right road. If the disagreement between them relates to some secondary, practical matter, this must be referred up through the usual channels for arbitration. This procedure has, in fact, long since been established in our units, and has been confirmed by appropriate orders and interpretations.

In the sphere of political education it is the commissar who wields the conductor’s baton, just as in the sphere of operational command this will always be wielded by the commander. But that does not mean in the least that the commander has no right to ‘interfere’ in the political work, if this interests him, and a good commander cannot fail to take an interest, since the state of political work has a tremendous influence on the fighting capacity of a unit.

The more the commissar tries to understand the work involved in operations, and the more the commander tries to understand the political work, the closer they will come to that system of one-man authority in which the person placed at the head of a unit combines in himself both commander and commissar, that is, leader in battle and political teacher.

Autumn 1918