A People's Tragedy (123 page)

one of that grey mass' of unwashed soldiers in the Smolny Hall whom Sukhanov had blamed for the Bolshevik triumph. In early 1918, when Trotsky began to build the officer corps of the new Red Army, he turned first to the NCOs, like Os'kin, who had learned their trade in the tsarist army. It was a marriage of convenience between the ambitions of the peasant sons and the military needs of the regime. As Napoleon had once said, every soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a field-marshal: that was the making of an
armee revolutionnaire.

One hundred miles south of Moscow, Tula was the arsenal of the revolution. After the evacuation of Petrograd it became the hub of the Soviet Republic's munitions industry.

At the height of the First World War its factories employed over 60,000 workers, although by the time of Os'kin's arrival, with the general flight to the countryside, only 15,000 were left. The new military commissar took up his office in the Soviet building, housed in the former Peasant Bank, which, as if to symbolize the new social order, was surrounded by metal factories.1

The local Red Guards, which Os'kin had come to reorganize, had been mostly set up by the workers during 1917 to defend their factories against the threat of a 'counterrevolution'. After the Bolshevik seizure of power there had been a great deal of talk about using them to form a new type of 'proletarian army' rather than retaining the remnants of the old (and mainly peasant) one.

The Bolsheviks did not like the idea of a standing army. They thought of the army as a tool of oppression wielded by the old regime against the revolution. A workers' militia would be more egalitarian, and the Red Guards were to be the basis of such a force.

They made up the units of the new Red Army, whose establishment was decreed on 15

January. Apart from their ideological objections to the idea of a standing army, the Bolsheviks also had practical reasons for favouring the volunteer principle at this stage: the disintegration of the old army and the complete absence of any apparatus to carry out conscription left them no choice. The only real troops they could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster during the first months of their regime.

At this time, when the workers were fleeing the cities, the new Red recruits were largely made up of unemployed former soldiers, and all those 'vagabond, unstable elements that', in Trotsky's words, 'were so numerous at the time'. Some of them had no doubt come to like the army way of life, or at least preferred it to post-war civilian hardships.

But most of them had nowhere else to go — the war left them without home or family.

They were stranded in towns like Tula, half-way between the Front and their long-abandoned homes. Many of these migrants signed up with the Red Guards simply to receive a standard-issue coat, or a pair of boots, before running off to sell them and start the whole process over again in some other town. The new Proletarian Militia was a rag-and-bone trade for the down and out.2

Naturally, such an army was virtually useless on the battlefield. The image of the Red Guards as disciplined crack troops is the stuff of Soviet mythology. The Red Guards were irregular detachments, motley-clothed and armed, poorly disciplined and very heavy-drinking. The 'committee spirit' of 1917 lived on in their ranks. Officers were elected and their primitive operational plans were usually voted on by a show of soldiers' hands. The military consequences were disastrous. Attacks were launched without proper scouting, often using no more than a school atlas. The soldiers fought in a wild and undisciplined manner, all too frequently breaking up in panic at the first sight of the enemy. Crushing defeats by the Germans in February and March, followed by the Czechs in May and June, made it clear to Trotsky that such methods would not do. With the Soviet regime on the brink of defeat, the Red Army would have to be reformed on the model of the old imperial army, with regular units replacing the detachments, proper discipline in the ranks, professional officers and a centralized hierarchy of command.

That reformation was to be Os'kin's task in Tula.

One of Trotsky's first measures was to call on the services of ex-tsarist officers. They were called 'military specialists' rather than officers to dissociate them from the old regime (for the same reason soldiers were now called 'Red Army servicemen'). Some 8,000 ex-tsarist officers had volunteered to fight for the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power. The soldiers and their committees, for whom the revolution meant above all the ending of officers' authority, greeted them with much hostility. But the shortage of NCOs, as well as the so-called Red Commanders, whose training had only just begun, ensured that brute military needs won the day over revolutionary zeal. Now Trotsky sought to extend the principle with the mass conscription of the ex-tsarist officers, brushing aside the soldiers' objections by simply abolishing their committees. On 29 July he issued his famous Order Number 228, calling up all officers. By the end of the year, 22,000 ex-tsarist officers had been recruited; and in the course of the civil war the number rose to 75,000, not including doctors, vets and other officials. By the end, three-quarters of the senior commanders in the Red Army were drawn from the tsarist officer corps.3

What motivated these officers? Some, like Brusilov, who was to join the Red Army in 1920, were moved by a sense of patriotic duty: the country, for better or worse, had chosen the Reds, or so it seemed to them, and their duty was to serve it. Many were also driven by an inbred sense of military duty: these were 'army men' who would serve that institution regardless of its politics. Perhaps some junior officers were also attracted by the prospect of a more senior command in the new army than they might have expected in the old one. But the most common motivation was the simple need to find a job: it was survival, not self-advancement, which drew the officers to the Soviet cause. Most of them had lost their military pension, often their only means of livelihood, and were thus much worse off than the other ruined classes of Old Russia. Amidst the terror of 1918, moreover, they were well advised to make themselves useful to the regime. For as Trotsky was to put it in a memo to Lenin, by employing the ex-tsarist officers 'we shall lighten the load on the prisons'.* The officers who joined were closely supervised by the commissars, like Os'kin, and warned that any acts of betrayal of the Red Army would lead to the arrest of their families. 'Let the turncoats realize', read Trotsky's special order of 30 September, 'that they are at the same time betraying their own families — their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.'4

There was a storm of opposition to the recruitment of these officers. Many soldiers saw it as a return to the old military order, and as a betrayal of Order Number One. They particularly resented the reintroduction of pay differentials based on rank, of compulsory saluting, and of special badges and uniforms, not to speak of rations and privileges, for the officers. The party workers in the army saw it as a challenge to their power, while the NCOs and the Red

* At that time (October 1918) there were 8,000 officers sitting as 'hostages' in the Cheka prisons
(Revvoensovet Respubliki,
36).

Commanders were jealous of the 'men with golden epaulettes' and feared that they might block their own promotion. Os'kin himself was in two minds about the tsarist officers. As a military man, he could see the desperate need for competent commanders.

Military efficiency had to be placed before revolutionary equality. The antics of the Left SRs and the Anarchists in Tula — teenage fanatics of the militia principle — had caused enough chaos to convince him of the need for Bolshevik discipline and organization (he joined the party in July 1918). And yet, at the same time, as a peasant-NCO and a man of some ambition, he also resented the privileges of the ex-tsarists.

Where he had earned his rank through courage under fire, most of them had gained theirs through birth and education. He felt that their attitudes were unchanged — 'their facial muscles winced whenever they were addressed by the soldiers as "comrade commander" ' — and feared this might lead them to revolt.'"'

The military setbacks of the summer were quickly blamed by Trotsky's critics on the ex-tsarist officers. The loss of Simbirsk to the Komuch in July had indeed been partly brought about by the mutiny of M. A. Murav'ev, a lieutenant-colonel in the tsarist army and the Left SR Commander of the Eastern Front. During the following months a concerted campaign was launched within the party against Trotsky's policies. Two articles in
Pravda
were the catalysts of this conflict. Sorin, a member of the Moscow Party Committee, accused Trotsky of vesting 'too much power' in the ex-tsarist officers, while unfairly making the commissars 'answer with their lives' when the soldiers refused to obey their orders. A commissar named Panteleev had indeed been shot on Trotsky's orders after his detachment had fled from the battle for Kazan. The case became a
cause celebre
for those determined to defend the independence of the party and its commissars against the commanders. Kamensky, a commissar in Voroshilov's army on the Southern Front, claimed in the other
Pravda
article that the ex-tsarist commanders acted like virtual 'autocrats', while the commissars were merely there to

'append a decorative signature' to their orders.6

Kliment Voroshilov, an Old Bolshevik and Red Guard commander, was the leading figure of this Military Opposition, as it soon came to be known. Based in Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov refused to carry out the orders of Trotsky's central command organ, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR) and its Commander on the Southern Front, the ex-tsarist General Sytin based at Kozlov. Stalin backed Voroshilov, although he always denied belonging to the-Military Opposition. This direct challenge to Trotsky's authority from such a senior party comrade was the origin of much of the personal animosity between Trotsky and Stalin in the years to come.

Trotsky turned the criticisms of his policies into a question of the party's general confidence in himself as Commissar for War. He demanded that the editors of
Pravda
be censured for publishing the articles by Sorin and

Kamensky. He also demanded Stalin's recall from the Southern Front, where the Georgian was shooting dozens of officials and creating havoc as a special commissar for food supply. This was a dangerous game for Trotsky to play. The sentiments of the Military Opposition, like those of the Left Communists, from which it had in part originated, were widely shared among the rank and file who had joined the party since 1917. As they saw it, the whole purpose of the revolution was to replace the old

'bourgeois specialists' with proletarians loyal to the party. Theirs was a communism of careerists — one that combined an egalitarian rejection of the old authorities with the demand that they, as Communists, should enjoy a similar position of power and privilege within the new regime. In their eyes, comradeship and class were the only necessary qualifications for military advancement. Battles would be won by the

'revolutionary spirit' of the comrades and their men, not by the outmoded science of the tsarist Military Academy.

Underlying this mistrust of the officers was an instinctive lower-class resentment of all privilege and a deep anti-intellectualism. These same attitudes were also displayed towards the other so-called 'bourgeois specialists' employed by the Soviet regime in the bureaucracy and industry (i.e. Civil Servants, managers and technicians who had held their posts before 1917). Many intellectuals in the party leadership were themselves targets of this demagogic hostility from the rank and file. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin's three great rivals in the 1920s,* suffered particularly on this score.

Their Jewish looks no doubt had much to do with it. Most of the Military Opposition came from lower-class families and had had no more than a basic education. Voroshilov was the son of a casual labourer on the railways, and had spent only two years at school.

These 'sons of the proletariat' were resentful at having to give way to officers who had enjoyed all the privileges of noble birth and education in the Military Academy. Much of their resentment, as junior commanders, was provoked by what they saw as Trotsky's arrogance and his Bonapartist manners as the head of the Red Army. He always arrived at the Front in his richly furnished train (Trotsky was well known as a gourmet and his train was equipped with its own high-class restaurant). His commissars were always dressed in immaculate uniforms, with expensive leather boots and shiny golden buttons.

Perhaps with a little more sensitivity Trotsky might have neutralized the Military Opposition. But he had never been noted for his tact — Trotsky himself once admitted that he was disliked within the party for his 'aristocratism' — and his pride had

* Stalin's rise to power was partly dependent on the mobilization of this anti-intellectualism against the Old Bolsheviks (those who had joined the party before 1917) among the rank-and-file Communists. Many of his most important allies in the 1920s were former members of the Military Opposition. Voroshilov, for example, joined the Politburo in 1925.

been wounded by the Oppositions challenge to his position and authority. Trotsky chose to strike back where it would hurt most, ridiculing his critics as 'party ignoramuses'. The odd betrayal by the military specialists, he claimed, was not as bad as the loss of 'whole regiments' through the incompetence of 'semi-educated' Communist commanders who

'could not even read a map'.7

The conflict rumbled on through the winter, until March 1919, when, with Kolchak on the Volga, Lenin made an appeal for party unity, and a compromise of sorts was struck at the Eighth Party Congress. Trotsky's employment of the ex-tsarist officers was to be supported on the grounds of military exigency, but the supervisory role of the commissars and the general power of the party in the army were both to be increased, along with the training of Red Commanders for future leadership of the army. This, however, was just to throw a blanket over the dispute. The chain of command in the army became even more confused, with the commanders, the commissars and the local party cells all engaged in a three-cornered struggle for authority.8 Moreover, the conflict between Trotsky and the Military Opposition was to emerge the following summer, when Stalin relaunched a general attack on the leadership of the army.