The Creation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army

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Report to the Fifth Congress of Soviets at its session of July 10, 1918

Our opponents and, to an even greater extent, our enemies – though it must be said that in the course of the revolution our opponents are being transformed into enemies – reproach us for having realized only gradually, only belatedly, the need to create an army, and an army built according to solid, planned, scientific principles.

The program of our party, like that of any workers’ socialist party, does not say anything about the destruction and suppression of the army in the present period of struggle, but only about reconstructing it on new, democratic principles, the principles of militia service and armament of the entire people.

I shall speak later about the modification that the principle of universal armament undergoes in the revolutionary conditions of an epoch of civil war. But now, before dealing with that question, I have to ask you this: what caused the disappearance of the old army, which was a regular army constructed, so far as the material and ideological means and resources of the old regime permitted, on the basis of scientific principles?

The main cause of the collapse of the Tsarist army was not the anti-militarism of the revolution, not the fact that the revolution rejected military defense as such, but solely the class structure of the old army itself, the fact that, while consisting mostly, of course, of peasants and workers, it had a ruling apparatus which was constructed, organized and educated so as to ensure that this army automatically served the ruling class of those days, with the monarchy as its summit.

This is something which, naturally, we never forget. And that is why the claim made by some of the military specialists that the army was ruined by politics, and that an army can survive, as a sound organism capable of fighting, only if it be placed outside politics, seems to us to be baseless and childish.

Not long ago, for instance, one of the most outstanding of the old generals, Brusilov [General A.A. Brusilov was commander-in-chief of Russia’s South-Western Front in 1916 and made a famous ‘breakthrough’ which crippled the Austro-Hungarian army and had important effects on the course of World War I. It brought Romania in on the Allied side, saved the Italian army from annihilation, and obliged the Germans to lighten their pressure on the French. Owing to the corruption and incompetence of the Tsarist regime, Brusilov’s success was not followed up. Brusilov remained inactive after the October Revolution until 1920, when he rallied to the Soviet Government in connection with the war against Poland, and became Inspector of Cavalry in the Red Army.], informed the bourgeois press, in connection with Kerensky’s reminiscences, which had been published in pamphlet form, that the disintegration of the old army was a process brought about by the revolution, as such, and that the armed forces could be re-created only provided that the army was isolated from politics. By ‘politics’ is meant in this statement, of course, the interests of the worker and peasant masses, for there has never in history been, and there is not anywhere now, an army that stands ‘outside politics’.

‘War,’ said the famous German theoretician of war, Clausewitz, ‘is the continuation of politics, only by other means’ – that is, the army of a particular country is subordinate to the politics of that country.

From this it is clear that the army of Tsardom was nothing but an armed force adapted to the service of the interests of Tsardom and carrying out precisely the politics of Tsardom. As crowning proof of this I will not recall its external status and the oath of allegiance to the Tsar, the so-called national anthem, which was the anthem of Tsardom, or the commemoration days and parades – all that which created around the army an atmosphere thick with Tsarist politics. I will refer only to the commanding personnel, who were made to serve as an apparatus for subjecting the peasant and worker masses to the requirements of the ruling upper circles of the country.

And if the old army disintegrated, that happened not because of any pernicious slogans but because of what the revolution itself gave rise to, namely, anger on the part of the worker and peasant masses against the propertied classes that had previously held command. The old army merely shared the fate of the old Russia in general. If the revolt of the peasants against the landlords, of the workers against the capitalists, of the whole people against the old reign of the bureaucracy and against the Tsar himself signified the break-up of the old Russia, then the break-up of the army was predetermined precisely by this. It was inherent in the internal mechanics of the revolution, in the dynamics of its class forces.

And when they now hurl at us the charge that the October revolution inflicted an incurable injury upon the army and disintegrated it, I remember very well, comrades, since I was living in Petrograd at the time, I remember, as many of you will, too, how, during September and October, down to the moment of the October revolution, delegates came to see us at the Petrograd Soviet, from regiments, divisions, corps and whole armies, saying: ‘Something terrible is coming to a head in the trenches. The army will not stay in the trenches any longer unless decisive steps are taken towards peace.’

In that period proclamations were being circulated in the trenches which the soldiers themselves had composed, proclamations in which they wrote that we, that is, the soldiers, will stay here until the coming of the first snow, but after that we shall quit the trenches and get away from here.

And if this worn-out and internally defeated army – defeated above all, under Tsardom already, by the terrible blows suffered from without, struck at it by the German army, and then by the baseness and dishonesty of the Tsarist regime, and, finally, by the deception committed by the Compromisers and the bourgeoisie after the February period, when they hurled the army into the offensive of June 18 – if this thrice-defeated army nevertheless, all through November, December and January, despite the terrible ebb-tide from the trenches, continued to hold its positions, it was supported solely by the ideological pressure of the October revolution.

But there was no power capable of keeping this army, as such, in existence, for it had been destroyed internally: it had to be atomised, dispersed – every soldier, be he worker or peasant, had to be demobilized, to go back to his own work-hive, his own economic cell, so that he might then, reborn, proceed thence into a new army, built according to the interests and tasks of the new classes that had come to power, the workers and the peasants who do not exploit the labor of others.

‘But you tried to build the army on the voluntary principle’; so runs the next objection.

I do not know of anyone among us who has ever affirmed that the voluntary principle is a sound principle for organizing a truly popular, democratic army. The principle of voluntary service was adopted by Britain, a predatory power whose chief concern in the matter of armed forces was the organizing of a navy – and a navy does not require a large number of men. The principle of voluntary service was also adopted by the United States, which, until recently, did not wage an imperialist policy of conquest outside America, because American territory itself offered wide scope for the bourgeoisie of the New World.

Apart from America and Britain, in absolutely every bourgeois-democratic country the principle of universal military service was invariable applied, being dictated, there too, by the general conditions prevailing, the regime of political life, and so on.

Neither the Party of the workers and peasants nor the Soviet power, based on these classes, could, in any case, make the question of the country’s defence depend upon the influx of volunteers. They resorted to a temporary application of the voluntary principle only because they were passing through an acute, crucial moment of the revolution, when the old army had broken up and dispersed, and, along with it, the old apparatus of military administration, both at the center and in the localities.

In order to build the new army according to the laws dictated by the interests of the working classes it was necessary, first, that the old army should have finally dispersed, with the soldiers returning to their cells of work and class and becoming transformed into the raw material from which it would later be possible to build a new, socialist army; and, secondly, that an apparatus of military administration should have been previously formed, at the center and in the localities, an apparatus that would be competent to register all the human material available and draw it, in a planned way, into fulfillment of the most important of all civic duties the duty of defending the workers’ and peasants’ Soviet regime and fatherland.

That, comrades, was why, at a time when we had not yet managed to create organs for registering, calling up and training the new cadres, but, at the same time, when it was not possible to suppose that our enemies, internal and external, had gone to sleep, we could only appeal to the people, saying: ‘You, workers, and you, peasants, who see the difficult situation that the Soviet power, our power, is in, will respond, and those of you, from the ranks of the old army, from the factories and from the villages, who want to save the socialist fatherland, will at once take your places under the banner of the Red Army, as volunteers.’

This was not a principle that we fought for and promoted. It was a necessary compromise measure for a particular moment, because there was no other solution available. But if you take all our statements of principle since the October revolution, all our programmatic speeches, you will then be able to establish that we considered the voluntary principle precisely as a temporary measure, a palliative, as a measure which was contrary in principle to the task of building a real workers’ and peasants’ army.

That was why we set ourselves the task, first and foremost, of creating an organ of military administration in the localities, an organ for registration, call-up, formation and training. The local military commissariats are no longer departments of the local Soviets, but are subordinated hierarchically one to another, right up to the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.

This, comrades, is a most important military-administrative reform: without conscientious and precise implementation of this measure in the localities we cannot carry through any serious mobilization, even when the conditions for this improve – and they will improve when the time comes for gathering in the new harvest.

The creation of the new army is affected by the genera! situation in the country, its economic position, the presence of food stocks, transport, and so on. All these difficulties, about which particular People’s Commissars and individual delegates from the localities have spoken here, the disorganized state of affairs and other phenomena, all this finds reflection in the activity of the War Department and hinders the work of creating the army. I do not say this in order to strengthen anyone’s scepticism: on the contrary, I am filled with the same faith which undoubtedly lives in each one of you, faith that we shall cope with all difficulties and dangers, shall overcome them, every one, and create favourable circumstances for consolidating the Soviet Republic.

What we need to do now, above all and before anything else, is to create an apparatus of military administration in the uyezds, volosts, provinces and districts. I have nothing to say about the volost commissariats. They have been set up in only an insignificant minority of volosts. But uyezd commissariats do not exist everywhere, either, and those that do are not fully organized, they do not have all their departments, and do not always have the establishment that we laid down for them, that it, they are without specialists. Even the province commissariats are lame in one leg, and sometimes in both, and lack an adequate number of competent workers, authoritative and strong commissars. And without all that, comrades, we cannot, of course, create any army at all.

Furthermore, it is necessary that each commissariat keep well in mind its hierarchical dependence on the commissariat that ranks above it: the dependence of the volost commissariat on that of the uyezd, of the uyezd commissariat on the province commissariat, of the province commissariat on that of the district, of the latter on the center – on Moscow. This is a simple mechanism, but it has to be mastered, and this is not always done. Soviet centralism is, in general, still in a rudimentary state, but without it we shall achieve nothing, either in the sphere of food-supply or in any other sphere, and especially not in the military sphere.

By its very essence, an army is a strictly centralized apparatus, closely linked by threads with its center. No centralism, no army.

In this connection you have heard a statement made here that we have no need at all for an army built on scientific principles, but that we do need guerrilla squads. But this is as though they were to tell us: ‘The workers’ and peasants’ government do not need railways – we’ll use animal-drawn transport. Let’s chuck out the steam ploughs, where they exist, and go back to the wooden Andreyevna plough. [The allusion here is to a riddle from Russian folklore. ‘Old Andreyevna bending down, with her nose to the ground and her arms stretched out behind her. What is it? Answer: The plough.’ The choice of the name ‘Andreyevna’ was probably intended to suggest the plough-like appearance of a capital ‘A’ upside down.] In general, let’s return to the regime of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’ For going back to guerrilla units means a leap backward of whole centuries.

Yes, indeed, when we were working in the underground we formed guerrilla units, but we tried to bring into them the maximum degree of centralization and unity of action. However, we did not take power in order to continue hobbling along towards our goal with amateurish methods. Having taken over the whole centralized state apparatus, we want to reconstruct it on new principles, to transform it into an apparatus of the masses who yesterday were oppressed and humiliated. What is involved is a very great historical experiment which you have to carry out, an experiment in building a workers’ and peasants’ state and economy and creating a centralised workers’ and peasants’ army.

For this purpose we need, first and foremost, to introduce the strictest Soviet centralism. Unfortunately, we encounter opposition here and there in the localities, and, I’m afraid, we encounter this even from some of the comrades who are present here. Psychologically, this opposition can be understood: it was engendered by the domination of the old bureaucratic centralism, which stifled all free initiative, all individuality. And now, when we have overthrown this old bureaucratic apparatus, it seems to us that each one of us can act quite independently, that he can and will do everything himself. We have got used to looking on the center as a hindrance and a threat. We apply to the center, comrades, when we need money or armoured cars, and all the volosts now have a great liking for armoured cars, and there is no volost that would not ask for atkasi a dozen of them.

But the centre can give you only what is needed, and when it isneeded, and, moreover, only if you are capable of handling it. We must put an end to the procedure whereby they send delegates from the uyezd to Moscow almost for every foot cloth [Russian soldiers wore, instead of socks, strips of cloth wound round their feet.] they want, supposing that this will be the quickest way to get it. But this procedure gives rise to the greatest dislocation and difficulty. We need, for example, to ensure that, in the sphere of military administration, the Soviets at province level teach their commissars to keep an eye on the uyezd Soviets, to see that all estimates and lists are Sent up through the district office. Only in this way shall we form a military apparatus that will help us to create an army.

This military apparatus is, of course, merely an administrative skeleton. To create an army we need, by means of this apparatus, to draw in the living, creative, human element, the conscious element, for it is this that distinguishes our army from the old one. And we know that the Tsarist army was, in the main, a peasant army, but the peasants were unconscious and ignorant: without reasoning why, they went where they were sent. Discipline did not pass through the individual consciousness of each separate soldier.

People often complain now, in our country, and we too complain, that there is no discipline. We do not want the old discipline, that discipline by which every ignorant peasant and worker was slotted into his regiment, his company and his platoon, and marched off without asking why they were leading him away, why they were making him shed blood. The revolution awakened the human personality in the ignorant peasants and the oppressed worker, and this is the principal and greatest achievement of the revolution.

The revolution gave land to the peasants, the revolution gave power to the workers and the peasants: these were great achievements, but no achievement of the revolution is more important than the awakening of the human personality in every oppressed and humiliated individual.

This process of awakening of the individual personality assumes chaotic form, in the early stages. Whereas yesterday still the peasant did not think of himself as a person, and was ready, at the first order from the Government, to go forth blindly to shed his blood, now he is unwilling to subordinate himself blindly. He asks: where are they telling me to go, and why? And he declares: I’m not going, I don’t want to submit! He says that because awareness of his human dignity, his personality, has been awakened in him for the first time, and this awareness, which is as yet too crude, which is not sufficiently digested, takes anarchical forms when expressed in deeds.

We have to reach the situation when every peasant and every worker is aware of himself as a human personality with a right to respect, but also feels that he is part of the working class of republican Russia and will be prepared unquestioningly to lay down his life for this Soviet Republican Russia.

Whereas formerly the working man did not value himself, now, contrariwise, he does not value the whole. It is necessary to remember the whole, to remember the interests of the whole class of working people, of our workers’ socialist fatherland of labor.

This is the psychological cement by means of which we can create a new army, a real, conscious Soviet army, bound together by a discipline that has passed through the soldiers’ brains, and not just the discipline of the rod. This is the discipline we advocate, and we do not want to know any other.

But for this purpose, I repeat, we need to have a centralized apparatus.

I mentioned when I began that the principle of democracy is the principle of general mobilization, and because we have not introduced it we are in receipt of many attacks from bourgeois newspapers and bourgeois politicians. They demand that we introduce universal military service.

Universal military service is the regime needed for a period of peaceful democratic construction. But we are living in conditions of open civil war of class against class. That is the basic fact from which we start. We are not going to say whether this fact is good or bad. The civil war is not a principle but a fact, prepared by centuries of historical development, centuries of oppression of the working people, who have revolted against this oppression. We cannot but reckon with this fact. Civil war ruthlessly tears apart the fabric, the envelope of the nation. At any moment the propertied classes are ready to stretch out their hands to any foreign aggressor, in order to crush the workers and peasants of their own country. This is also a fact, which has found confirmation in the events in the Ukraine, on the Don, on the Murman coast, and on the banks of the Volga. Every where, the bourgeois classes look with much greater hatred upon the power of the workers and peasants than upon the power of the German or the Anglo-French imperialists, or upon the Czechoslovak hirelings of the French stock-exchange.

Since civil war exists amongst us, we are naturally not interested in arming our class enemies, who are at the same time the allies of all our external enemies. We do not want to arm a bourgeoisie which is ready to place any weapon that may be given it at the service of foreign imperialism.

We rejected the Constituent Assembly because this democratic envelope is merely an empty form when class is confronting class, and the question of power calls for a weapon. And universal military service is at that moment, in those conditions, just such an empty envelope.

The obligation of universal military service would actually find expression for the bourgeoisie in the obligation to run away to Krasnov, to the Urals, to the Czechoslovaks, to join with all our enemies and attack us, while the obligation falling upon us is expressed in smashing the bourgeoisie and our enemies external and internal.

It is that that determines the principle on which we build our army. We include workers and peasants in our army: it is a reflection of the system of Soviets as a whole, a reflection of the All-Russia Congress of Soviets. We can understand why the bourgeois agents – the SRs and Mensheviks – fiercely attack our method of creating an army. Of course our army is hateful to them, since it is a weapon of the Soviet system. Repeating the phrase of the German theoretician I have already quoted, about war and the army being a reflection of general politics, we can say that with Soviet, workers’ and peasants’ politics it is necessary to have a Soviet Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.

But an agitation is being carried on among the peasants and workers, saying that the Soviet power is putting the burden of military service on their shoulders, while relieving the bourgeoisie and landlords of this burden. To this argument you, comrades, should reply: ‘In the epoch in which we live, a rifle is not a burden but a privilege, a monopoly of the ruling class.’

For lack of time and also for lack of a fully-formed military apparatus, we have not as yet managed to draw the bourgeoisie to the work of bearing those burdens which the bourgeois in classes ought not, of course, to be spared. A series of decrees are being got ready in the Council of People’s Commissars, and will, I hope, be issued in the next few days, which will draw the bourgeoisie into the work of bearing these burdens. Levies for work in the rear, teams for laboring and auxiliary tasks, will be formed from among the bourgeoisie.

We are told that this is cruel. To this we reply: if the bourgeois youth show in practice that they are devoted to the peasant and worker class and are ready to live with us, to eat from one fraternal cauldron, ready to fight against our external and internal foes, then, of course, we shall open the gates of the Red Army wide and clear for such youngsters. But those from whom the revolution has not yet shaken out the idea of restoring the power of the landlords and bourgeoisie are in need of thoroughgoing correction. We shall say: ‘Our ancestors, our grandfathers and fathers, served yours, cleaning up dirt and filth, and we will make you do the same.’ Until you recognize that Soviet Russia is a country of equality in labor, of duty to labor, for civil and military purposes – until then we shall subject you to a severe schooling.

But, once again, for the practical solving of this question we need to create military commissariats in the localities – universal registration and control both of the working class for enlistment in the army and of the bourgeoisie for enlistment in teams for work in the rear. The question of universal military training is being solved by us, as I have already said, on the basis of the general principle of the Soviet regime. We are undertaking (and have already undertaken) the military training of all workers and all peasants who do not exploit the labor of others. But these enormous numbers of cadres who have to pass through the training school are still not an army, but only substantial reserves, which can be called up at a moment of crisis. However, we need to have, here and now, the fundamental nucleus of an army that would be capable of giving battle at any moment. This cadre, fit to fight, we have so far formed through volunteering, but we have now had to reject this principle and, in practice, to go over to the method of compulsory military mobilization.

For the time being we have carried out one complete practical experiment only. Here in Moscow we have mobilized two age-groups – those of 1896 and 1897. As always, there was whispering in all the bourgeois holes and corners that our experiment would come to nothing, that not a single worker would turn up. You know, comrades, that we have not had recourse to any measure of coercion, for there was no need for it: the workers all reported themselves, as one man, and we selected from the numbers reporting the thousands whom we needed, and from them we shall form very fine fighting regiments.

The Council of People’s Commissars has instructed the Petrograd Commune to carry out a similar mobilization of those two age-groups, 1896 and 1897. In addition, we are going to mobilize three age-groups of workers belonging to the artillery and engineer branches.

Those who know the proletariat of Petrograd will have no doubt that the mobilization will be carried out there impeccably. By a general decree, which lays down no times for its implementation, mobilization has been proclaimed in fifty uyezds of the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, the Don and the Kuban, but in those parts of the country the military-administrative prerequisites for the practical carrying-out of mobilization do not yet exist.

All these partial experiments of ours are merely preparatory steps towards the promulgation of a law that every citizen of the Soviet Republic between 18 and 40 years of age must report to the colors at any moment when called upon by the Soviet power to defend it.

We shall ask the Congress to give us, in the interests of the Soviet Republic, the right to mobilize two, three or more age groups, depending on the conditions that confront us. When you have granted us this right, you, comrade delegates to the Congress, after dispersing to the localities, will explain at every meeting of workers and peasants that, in order to defend our selves against our enemies, in order not to fall under the oppression of the imperialists, we need to have an armed force.

And here we take the occasion to say to those comrades from the Left SRS who have not left us and who, I hope, will not leave us, but will stay loyal to the Soviet power, those who, as they say, feel with particular acuteness the oppression by German imperialism in the Ukraine (true, they do not feel the pressure of the other imperialism in the same way), those who say: ‘We do not want to be slaves’ – we say to them: ‘We, too, do not want to be slaves, we all want to be free citizens of Soviet Russia: therefore, comrades, don’t get excited, don’t succumb to hysterics, but, in the localities, build companies, battalions and regiments of the workers’ and peasants’ army.’

Comrades, while war and the army are a continuation of politics, politics is, on its part, a reflection of the strength of the army.

The most difficult problem in creating the Red Army is the problem of commanding personnel. The crisis of the old army caused a split between the working masses and the ruling class, and this led to a breach between the mass of the soldiers and the officers. That was inevitable.

Neither the working class nor the peasant masses possess as yet the habit of governing, they lack sufficient of the knowledge that is needed in all spheres of economic, state and military administration. This is an indubitable fact, to which we cannot close our eyes. We have extraordinarily few engineers, doctors, generals and officers who are flesh and blood of the workers and peasants. All the bourgeois specialists were brought up in such educational institutions and in such an atmosphere that there was formed in them the conviction that the working masses are incapable of taking over the apparatus of state power, that only the educated, bourgeois classes can rule. When power passed to us they were mostly in the camp of our enemies, with only a few remaining cautiously neutral, waiting in the wings to see who would win, so as to offer their services to the victor.

But from this, comrades, one cannot draw the conclusion which is drawn by naive and superficial people, namely, that we should reject the services of the old commanding personnel and try to manage with our own resources. If we did we should have to resort to guerrilla methods, to military amateurism.

The power of the working class and the peasants does not begin with our driving out the bourgeoisie and the landlords, with cudgel-blows, from the apparatus of state power: it begins with our taking that apparatus into our own hands and making it fulfill the tasks of our own class.

The Tsarist cannon, the Tsarist machine-guns, armoured cars, engineers, generals, specialists of all ranks and branches – we register them all and say: ‘Now, gentlemen, hitherto all this has belonged to the propertied classes and served them, but now be so kind as to serve the working class!’

At that moment we are asked: ‘But what if they betray us?’ There will, of course, be cases of betrayal. Haven’t the railway bigwigs, all sorts of directors, engaged in sabotage and called for strikes? Haven’t there been very shameful cases when they held up the movement of our Red Army men? There have been any number of such cases! What conclusion follows from that? Certainly not that we must do without railways, but rather that we must catch the saboteurs and crush them ruthlessly, while supporting the honest engineers and railway executives. It is just the same where the commanding personnel are concerned.

Among us one hears, it said, in the localities: ‘They are inviting the old generals to come back.’ And many add: ‘They are restoring the old regime.’ But when the situation gets serious they send us a telegram: ‘Send us experienced specialists, military leaders!’ And among the military leaders, the military specialists, there are, I affirm, a whole category of men who are now giving conscientious service to the Soviet regime, because they see that this regime is firm and strong and able to make itself obeyed. Not to take them into our service would be pitiful childishness. On the contrary, all the military specialists who conscientiously carry out our instruction must receive the most vigorous support in the localities. The local soviets and Soviet people must eliminate the prejudice and distrust felt towards these men by the masses, and put it to them like this: ‘You, worker and peasant, now hold in your hands the power of government, you form part of it: that means that the officers and generals are now serving you.’

‘But then,’ they say, ‘what if we don’t manage to keep a close eye on them?’

‘Comrades! If we don’t keep a close eye on them, when we have all power in our grasp, then we are not worth a brass farthing!’

It is possible that, along with honest military specialists, a dozen or two may get in among us who will want to use their position for counter-revolutionary plots. There has been such a case: it happened in the Baltic fleet, and you know what the end of it was.

We do not want an amateur army, constructed on some do-it-yourself principle or other, but a real, centralized army, constructed in accordance with the principles of military science and technique. For that to be the case, the army needs to have adequate cadres of military specialists.

As yet there are no new military specialists drawn from the working class, and so we are enlisting the old ones.

Among the regular officers whose consciousness and experience were formed only during the war and the revolution there are many for whom their experience of events has not gone for nothing. They have understood what a profound organic process the revolution has stimulated, they have understood that the people and the army will emerge from the revolution different from what they were, that the army must be built by other ways and means than before. Among these young officers there are not a few who understand us and march with us.

At the same time we have done everything possible to create a new officer corps of our own, from among workers and peasants who have passed through the school of war and who have the military vocation. We are putting them through instructors’ courses. We shall increase the number of such courses month by month and cover the whole country with them. As I have already reported, there took part in the suppression of the revolt in Moscow our Soviet officers of tomorrow, the students attending the instructors’ courses. They are the most devoted, the finest soldiers of the Soviet power. Appointed to command small military units, platoons and companies, they will be a bulwark of the Soviet regime, a bulwark against which any intrigues in the ranks of the Red Army will break in pieces.

At the same time we have opened the doors of the General Staff Academy, now called the Military Academy, to persons without qualifications. Previously, access to the academy was restricted to military specialists possessing certain educational qualifications. We have said: any soldier who has had a certain experience of command, who has a quick brain and a certain amount of imagination, the ability to combine the tasks of a military commander, may be admitted to the Military Academy. Within two or three months we shall determine whether he is up to the work. If not, he will be transferred to the preparatory courses, and later will again be sent to the Military Academy. We have sent about 150 new pupils there, soldiers devoted to the Soviet power, and our Academy will turn out the first graduation of these General Staff officers during the next ten or twelve months.

While creating a new commanding apparatus drawn from the classes which are now in power, we shall in the meantime make use of all the sound elements of the old commanding apparatus, giving their members extensive opportunities for work.

Speaking of the difficulties we encounter in creating the new army, I must mention that the biggest of these is constituted by this dreadful localism, local patriotism. Interception, seizure and concealment of military property and institutions of any and every kind is being carried on by the local organs of Soviet power.

Every uyezd, almost every volost, believes that Soviet power can best be defended by concentrating on the territory of the given volost as much as possible of aircraft materiel, radio equipment, rifles and armoured cars, and they all try to conceal this materiel – and not only in the provinces, but even in the centers, even in the district organizations of Petrograd we can still observe this childish conduct.

It is self-evident that, from the point of view of the state as a whole we need to keep account of all our military property. It was dumped during the process of demobilizing the old army, without any plan, in all sorts of places, and wherever it was damped it was absorbed, unpacked, pillaged and sold off. It must be recovered, listed, handed over to the army authorities and concentrated in depots, so as to be at the disposal of the country as a whole.

Is it really not appreciated that any Tsarevo-Kokshaisk uyezd [Trotsky uses Tsarevo-Kokshaisk as an example of an out-of-the-way, backwoods place. Known today as Yoshkar-Ola, and capital of the Mari USSR, it lies between Kazan and Vyatka.], or any volost, will be better protected from external enemies and counter-revolution if the central Soviet power has on record and under its control all the arms and ammunition in the country, instead of letting these military stores remain in the volosts, where they can neither be used nor disposed of? We send telegrams to the Soviets of the provinces complaining about these abuses, but in nine cases out of ten, comrades, we do not meet with sufficiently active support from you in the localities.

We must put an end to this situation. We must wage a most severe struggle against the intercepting, appropriating and concealing of Army property by local Soviets.

There are a whole number of difficulties of a more general kind. Testifying to these are a large number of dispatches which we have received only this day. I am not going to quote them all here: I will select just a few, to serve as examples.

Here is a telegram from Usmansk uyezd, in Tambov province: ‘Organization of the Red Army is proceeding with great difficulty. Very few men have registered for service. The kulaks are carrying on a persistent agitation against the Soviet power: in some volosts they have driven out the Soviets. In general, counter-revolutionary agitation is proceeding intensely.’

The same kulaks who disrupt our procurement organization and conceal grain are also waging a struggle against the Red Army. This means that the Red Army is nothing but a reflection of the Soviet regime as a whole, and it is coming up against the same difficulties and the same foes.

The poorest peasantry have a good attitude to the creation of a new Red Army. A resolution greeting the workers’ and peasants’ Red Army was adopted at a general meeting. The morale of the Red Army men is excellent, but this cannot be said of the railway workers. Counter-revolutionary agitation is being carried on among them. The military commissariat has only just been established.’

Where the railway workers are old cadres of the Black Hundreds, where they are under the thumb of the managers, they revolt against the Soviet power and against the workers’ and peasants’ Soviet army.

From Kaleyevo volost, in Volokolamsk uyezd, Moscow province, I have received a report that the peasants of one village announced that everyone serving in the Red Army must immediately leave it and return to his village by June 30. Whoever failed to obey this decision would be deprived of his peasant status (that is how it is put in the resolution) and would not be allowed back into the village. One of the commissars sends us this report, and says that it has affected the Red Army very badly. Comrades, I make use of this lofty tribune of the All-Russia Congress of Soviets to give a first warning to the kulaks and Black Hundreds of Kaleyevo volost, Volokolamsk uyezd. They have no right to deprive a Red Army man of his peasant status. They themselves will be deprived of any status at all if they dare revolt against the creation of the workers’ and peasants’ army.

In the localities the idea of compulsory military service is meeting in most cases, so say the reports we get from our commissars, with a completely favourable response on the part of the workers and the poor peasants. Thus, I have had a telegram from our district commissar regarding the Yaroslavl province congress. He writes that this congress hails the last decree on universal military service and considers that one of the principal tasks, perhaps the principal task, of the current moment is the formation, technical equipment, and armament in accordance with the last word of military science, of a workers’ and peasants’ Red Army. The congress is firmly convinced that Soviet Russia will succeed in realising its cherished aims and will in future be in a position to resist the entire imperialist world not only ideologically but also with military armed force. This is signed by Nakhimson, representing the Congress.

Nakhimson was our district commissar. He was killed at Yaroslavl during the White-Guard revolt. He was one of the most dedicated workers for the Soviet regime, one of the best of our commissars. We shall accomplish the idea which he set forth in that statement, we shall create a workers’ and peasants’ army excellently trained and technically equipped according to the most up-to-date military science.

In conclusion I must say that all those who previously were doubtful about this are coming round to it. In the Party Committee of the North-Western region there were comrades who reacted with some distrust and criticism to our endeavour to build an army on the basis of rational military science, with enlistment of the necessary number of specialists. I have received from that quarter, from those very comrades, a telegram which calls for establishment of the strictest discipline, recruitment of the necessary number of old military specialists, compulsory enlistment for military service on special conditions, of all those officers who are scattered among various other commissariats and engaged in various other kinds of work, and formation of new cadres of military leaders from the ranks of our own Soviet people.

I may mention here the name of one of the finest workers for the Soviet power, Comrade Myasnikov [A.F. Myasnikov (Myasnikian), a Bolshevik since 1906, served on the Volga front in 1918, and became Commissar for Military Affairs in Soviet Lithuania and Byelorussia in 1919], whose previous attitude towards our methods of creating a workers’ and peasants’ army was one, if not of mistrust then of hesitation. I don’t know if he is present: he wanted to speak on this question. As a result of experience he has now come to the same conclusions as we have, and he wanted to make a public statement to this effect at the Congress.

We hear more and more often that those Soviet executives who, sometimes openly and sometimes on the sly, grumbled at us for creating a real army and not a toy or amateur one, not some sort of militia detachments, are now in favour of our view on this matter. Those who protest against this have not yet understood that the worker and peasant class is in power, and for that very reason everything we do is not home-made and amateurish but built on solid, scientific principles.

We must stop this grumbling! Some people try to frighten us by saying: ‘We are inviting back the old generals, and the Red Army men hear this and think that we are inviting them back so as to restore the old regime.’ But we say: ‘Haven’t you taken power, worker and peasant? Don’t you want to consolidate this power? That we can do, but we need to create conditions in which we can work successfully. For this purpose we need to bring in specialists. In order to create an army of the workers and peasants we need generals, and if mistakes and failures occur in this sphere of work, if we see that some general engages in counter-revolutionary activity, we shall arrest him.’

We must examine each case individually, and not throw out all the specialists without adequate reason. Fortunately, the workers and peasants understand that we cannot succeed in creating something on new principles without employing specialists. If a bourgeois engineer, invited to serve in a factory, were to think of being guided in his work by the idea that industry is going to revert to capitalism, then the workers’ administration would, of course, show him that this is not so. And we have shown and shall show this likewise to every military specialist. Our task is to create the mechanism of a new order. This task is not so simple.

If the Tsarist regime succeeded in creating an army, and succeeded in creating discipline in that army which served not the people but the enemies of the people, we, in creating an army to defend the people’s interests, do not doubt that we shall succeed in creating discipline that is ten times as firm. We have only to overcome the infantile disease, the malady of growth, the slackness and weakness which are a heritage from the accursed war and the Tsarist regime.

But the question of whether or not we shall manage to do this is the question of the survival of our power. If we do not, it means that the working class must put its neck under the old yoke. But we reject that notion. We know that the working class will overcome all difficulties and will be able to hold out through these most difficult few weeks when our enemies are straining every effort, resorting to rebellion and mutiny, holding up the movement of food supplies, delaying trains, striving to bring about disorder everywhere: when, essentially speaking, all parties have disappeared, merging into one, which sets itself the task of overthrowing the workers’ and peasants’ power: when every means is being brought into play – calumny, sabotage, and the summoning of foreign bayonets.

We are sure that you here, having acquired fresh energy, fresh will to power, will take with you from this Congress back to the localities confidence that no force can crush us, because we are closely bound together. A new, still closer bond will be our workers’ and peasants’ army, which will grow and become stronger and firmer. Within six weeks we shall be over the pass, we shall be getting in the new harvest, and that will enable us to create the basis for organizing our army. We shall become able to give our Red Army men not three-quarters of a pound but one-and-a-half, perhaps two pounds of bread, which a healthy young fellow needs if he is going to undergo military training for six hours a day and then spend three hours on his political development.

We shall form more and more cadres from the workers and peasants, and you will support us in the localities, stamping out all localism, understanding that Soviet Russia is one entire organism, that the army is one of the parts of this organism, that we need firm discipline and a firm, consistent policy for strengthening the workers’ and peasants’ socialist order.