Official history as written in the Soviet Union to-day refuses to admit the part Trotsky played as organizer of the Red Army’s victories, and depicts Stalin as the greatest military leader of the Civil War. In Pepov’s historical work we find:
“The high honour of having organized the victories of the Red Army falls first and foremost to the Party and to its leader, Lenin. Lenin’s best and most loyal helper in the military sphere was Comrade Stalin. It was Comrade Stalin who in the autumn of 1918, played a leading part in the brilliant defence of Tsaritsyn against General Krasnov, who was then the Soviet Government’s most serious opponent. In those days Tsaritsyn served as a wedge between the two main groups of White Guard forces in the south and east.
“In the first months of 1919 it was the forceful work of Comrade Stalin which brought Koichak’s advance in the northern sector of the eastern front to a standstill. Comrade Stalin also displayed great activity on the western and north-western fronts in the first half of 1919. Finally, he was the originator of the plan for the annihilation of Denikin on the southern front in the autumn of 1919.”
This official history keeps silence concerning the part played by Stalin in the Polish Campaign of 1920, but makes the following remarks about Trotsky:
“The Party won its victories in the Civil War over the principal enemies of the Soviet under Lenin’s leadership and against the advice contained in Trotsky’s plans. We cannot deny Trotsky’s part in the Civil War as a propagandist and as an executant of the Central Committee’s decisions, when he chose to execute them, but his strategy and his whole policy were vitiated by many organic defects. Trotsky’s deep-rooted disbelief in the fitness of the proletariat to lead the peasantry and the fitness of the Party to lead the Red Army is characteristic of his strategy and policy. It explains his introduction of exclusively formal discipline and of the methods of compulsion customary in bourgeois armies; in it we may also see the reason of his endeavours to keep the Party as far removed from the army as possible, his boundless confidence in the bourgeois specialists, and his low opinion of the Red Army in comparison with the White Guard Armies. All this reflects the psychology of the former Tsarist officers who obtained staff posts.”
Karl Radek wrote in similar fashion on February 23, 1935, the seventeenth anniversary of the Red Army. He called Stalin“the leader of the proletarian army and the military genius of the Civil War,” but said of Trotsky that he was“the prototype of the petty bourgeois vacillating general who overloaded the front with former Tsarist staff officers, without regard either to their attitude to the Revolution or to their military capabilities, and tried to impress it with his impossible general staff uniforms. But Stalin never cared a brass farthing for officers’ epaulettes.”
Not only do the official histories written to-day deny Trotsky all his deserts as leader of the Red Army; they also refuse to admit his role as leader of the October Revolution in Petrograd. No less a personage than Joseph Stalin himself has written the following words in his pamphlet entitled, On Trotskyism.
“I must say that Trotsky did not and could not play any leading part in the October Revolution. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he merely gave effect to the will of the Party as expressed in its decrees, which guided his every step. He played no particular part either in the Party or in the October Revolution, and indeed could not do so, for he was still a comparatively junior member of our Party in those October days.”
A leading article which appeared in Pravda on November 6, 1918, in commemoration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution, throws a somewhat different light on Trotsky’s activities during those days, for it states:
“All the work and practical organization of the rising was carried out under the immediate leadership of Trotsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. We can state with all certainty that we owe the garrison’s prompt adherence to the Soviet cause and the skilful organization of the work of the Party’s Revolutionary War Committee first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky.”
The writer of this article was Joseph Stalin, who appended to it his full signature.
Larissa Reissner, the Boishevist girl who fought in the ranks of the Red Guard in the October Revolution and then entered the Red Army as a private, took part in 1919 in the Civil War as a commissar attached to the staff of the Baltic Fleet, and won a world-wide reputation in later days by her descriptions of the Civil War, depicts Trotsky at the front in her book October.
The passage I quote deals with the critical days of the Czechoslovak Insurrection, when the Red Army, then only in process of formation, had yet to meet its baptism of fire. Its regiments were retreating in panic before the onslaught of the Czechoslovaks. Kazan was lost, and the remains of the routed Red Army mustered in Sviyazhsk.
“Trotsky arrived at Sviyazhsk on the third or fourth day after the fall of Kazan. His armoured train drew up at the little station, with the evident intention of making a long stay. All Trotsky’s organizational genius was promptly manifested. He contrived to make effective rationing arrangements and brought further batteries and several regiments to Sviyazhsk, despite the obvious breakdown of the railways-in short, he did everything necessary to cope with the impending attack. Moreover, we must not forget the work which had to be done in 1918, when the general demobilization was still exercising its destructive effects, and the appearance of a well-equipped Red Army detachment in the Moscow streets caused so great sensation. Trotsky, in those days, was swimming against the stream, against the weariness of four years of war and against the floodtide of revolution that overflowed the whole land, carrying away with it the wreckage of the old Tsarist discipline and engendering a fierce hatred of everything that recalled memories of officers’ orders, barracks and military life.
“In spite of everything, the rations became obviously better; newspapers, overcoats and boots arrived. And there, in the place where the boots were being served out, we found a genuine, permanent army staff. The army took firm root there and thought no more of flight.
“Trotsky contrived to endow his new-born army with an iron backbone. He took up his abode in Sviyazhsk with the firm determination not to yield an inch of territory. He contrived to be a wise, adamantine, unruffled leader to this little handful of defenders.”
While the Red Army was preparing to attack Kazan, a large formation of White Guard troops gained the rear of the Soviet lines by night and attacked the railwaystation of Sviyazhsk.
“Then L. D. Trotsky mobilized the whole personnel of the train—the clerks, telegraphists, ambulance men and his own bodyguard—in short, every man who could hold a rifle. The staff offices were emptied in the twinkling of an eye; there was no more ‘base’ for anyone.”
All these improvised forces were hurled at the White Guards, who were then approaching the station.
“The White Guards thought they were fighting a new, well-organized body of troops; they did not guess that all the opposition they had to encounter was a hastily assembled handful of fighters, behind whom there was nobody but Trotsky himself and Slavin, the commander of the 5th Red Army. That night Trotsky’s train remained there without its engine, as usual, while not a single unit of the 5th Army, which was about to take the offensive and had advanced some considerable distance from Sviyazhsk, had its rest disturbed by a recall from the front to aid in the defence of the almost unprotected town. The army and flotilla knew nothing about the night attack until it was all over, and the White Guards had retreated in the firm conviction that they had encountered practically a whole division.
“The next day twenty-seven deserters who had taken refuge on the steamers were court-martialled and shot. They included several Communists.
“Anyone who has lived with the Red Army, who has been born with it and grown up with it in the fighting at Kazan, can confirm the fact that the iron spirit of this army would never have solidified, and that the close contact between the Party and the mass of soldiers and the equally close contact between the ranker and the officer in supreme command would never have come into existence, if on the eve of the storming of Kazan, which was to cost the lives of so many hundreds of soldiers, the Party had not made this demonstration before the eyes of the whole army of men ready to make the supreme sacrifice for the Revolution, if it had not shown them that the rough laws of fraternal discipline were binding on its own members too, and that it had the courage to apply the laws of the Soviet Republic as ruthlessly to them as to other offenders.
“The twenty-seven were shot, and their corpses filled the breach that the Whites had made in the self-reliance and resolution of the 5th Army.
“An army of workers and peasants had to express itself in some way or other; it had to create its own outward aspect and take its own shape, but no one could prophesy in what manner it would accomplish this task. At that time there was naturally no dogmatic programme and no recipe for the growth and development of this mighty organism.
“There was only a premonition in the Party and the masses-a kind of creative conjecture concerning the nature of this hitherto unknown revolutionary military organization which obtained new and genuine characteristics from every day’s fighting. Trotsky’s special merit may be found in the fact that he needed only an instant to sense the slightest reaction in the masses of men who already bore the stamp of this unique organizational formula on their persons.
“Trotsky collected and systematized every little working method that could help besieged Sviyazhsk to simplify, arrange and speed up the war work.
“A man who is an excellent orator, and who has evolved the rational, flawless, plastic form of a new army may nevertheless freeze its spirit or let it dissipate. Such risks can only be eliminated if the man is also a great revolutionary with the creative intuition and hundred-kilowatt-strong inward wireless set, without which no one can approach the masses.”
This initiative faculty Trotsky possessed.
“The soldier, commander and war commissar within him were never able to oust the revolutionary. And when in his superhuman metallic voice he denounced a deserter, he really feared in him the mutineer whose treachery or mean cowardice was so harmful and destructive, not merely to military operations but to the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.”
These are the words of Larissa Reissner. We may add that Trotsky’s great revolutionary ethics enabled him to visualize in the Red Army warriors not only his soldiers of the Civil War but also the builders of the future socialist order of society. When Wrangel’s ‘volunteers’ sang in 1919:
“A steamer is at hand, Against its sides the waves do beat, When the Red Army men try to land, We’ll give them all to the fish to eat,”
the Red Army adapted it for their own purposes by substituting:
“When Wrangel’s volunteers try to land, We’ll give them all to the fish to eat.”
But Trotsky issued an army order forbidding this parody, on the ground that Wrangel’s volunteers were merely men who had been led astray, and that the Proletarian Revolution would find the way to bring them over on to its own side. Such verses, he explained, were merely the products of military brutalization, which the soldiers of the Red Army must shun, because they were the human material with which the Socialist State was to be built up.
One of Trotsky’s great merits as a Red Army organizer was the way in which he applied his theoretical knowledge to the petty practical daily work of building up the army. Shortly after the beginning of the four years of civil war a group of Bolshevist military workers propounded a ‘Special Military Doctrine of the Revolutionary Proletariat,’ which culminated in a ‘Theory of Total Offensive,’ whereupon Trotsky gave them the following reply:
“We must now devote our whole attention to improving our material and making it more efficient rather than to fantastic schemes of re-organization. Every army unit must receive its rations regularly, foodstuffs must not be allowed to rot, and meals must be cooked properly. We must teach our soldiers personal cleanliness and see that they exterminate vermin. They must learn their drill properly and perform it in the open air as much as possible. They must be taught to make their political speeches short and sensible, to clean their rifles and grease their boots. They must learn to shoot, and must help their officers to ensure strict observance of the regulations for keeping in touch with other units in the field, reconnaissance work, reports and sentry duty. They must learn and teach the art of adaptation to local conditions, they must learn to wind their puttees properly so as to prevent sores on their legs, and once again they must learn to grease their boots. That is our programme for next year in general and next spring in particular, and if anyone wants to take advantage of any solemn occasion to describe this practical programme as ‘military doctrine,’ he’s welcome to do so.”
With this definition of the tasks before it, Trotsky gave the Red Army the lever it then needed to raise the general standard of its efficiency.
Since we have already quoted Radek’s 1935 opinion of the part played by Trotsky in the evolution of the Red Army, it would not be amiss to make further quotations from the article entitled Leo Trotsky, Organizer of Victory, which he wrote in 1923:
“Our State machinery is creaking and rumbling. But our real great success is the Red Army. Its creator and will-centre is Comrade L. D. Trotsky. The history of the Proletarian Revolution has proved that pens( ‘Pen’ was Trotsky’s pseudonym before the Revolution) can be turned into swords. Trotsky is one of the best of writers on international socialism, but his literary gifts have not prevented him from becoming the first leader and the first organizer of the proletariat’s first army.
“Trotsky’s organizational genius was expressed in the courageous attitude he adopted to the idea of employing military specialists to build up the army. Only Trotsky’s fiery faith in our social power, his faith in our ability to realize the best means of deriving profit from the knowledge of these military experts while refusing to allow them to Dictate to us in political matters, his faith in the power of the vigilance of progressive workers to triumph over the counter-revolutionary intrigues of former Tsarist officers could break down the suspicions of our military workers and teach them to use the abilities of these officers. We could only find a successful practical solution of this problem by discovering an army chief with a will of iron who would not merely enjoy the Party’s complete confidence but could also use his iron will to dominate the foremen whom he compelled to serve our cause. Not only did Comrade Trotsky find a way to subjugate these former officers of the old army to his will by virtue of the energy he displayed; he went still further, for he contrived to win the confidence of the best elements among the experts and convert them from enemies of Soviet Russia into convinced adherents of our cause.
“In this case the Russian Revolution has worked through the brain, heart and nerve system of its great representative. When we ventured upon the ordeal of battle for the first time, the Party and L. D. Trotsky showed us how to apply the principles of a political campaign to the conflict of arms in which we had to use arguments of steel. We concentrated all our material forces on war. Our whole party understands the necessity of doing so, but this necessity found its greatest expression in the steel determination of Trotsky.
“After our victory over Denikin in March 1920, Trotsky said to the Party Congress: ‘We plundered all Russia in order to conquer the Whites!’ In these few words he expressed the whole vast concentration of will which we needed for victory. We needed a man who could incarnate our call to battle, who could become a tocsin which summoned us to arms and to obedience to that will which demanded first and foremost unconditional subordination to the great and terrible necessity of war. Only a man who worked as Trotsky did, only a man who knew how to speak to soldiers as Trotsky spoke to them, only such a man could become the standard-bearer of armed workers.
“He was everything in one single person. He weighed the strategical advice of his experts in his brain and found the way to apply it to the greatest advantage under the social conditions as he saw them. He knew how to combine the impulses emanating from fourteen fronts and ten thousand Communists which told him at the centre what he might expect from the army, how best to work with it and what form to give it; he knew how to weld all these things into a strategical plan and an organizational scheme. And with all this magnificent work that he accomplished, he understood, as no one else did, the way to apply his knowledge of the significance of moral factors in war.
“Our army was a peasant army. In it the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the command of this army by workers and representatives of the working classes, was brought about in the persons of Trotsky and the comrades who co-operated with him. It was accomplished, above all, by the way in which Trotsky drew upon the help of our whole Party machinery to inspire this war-weary army of peasants with the profound conviction that they were fighting for their own interests.
“Trotsky worked with our whole Party at the task of creating a Red Army. He could not have carried out this task without the Party’s co-operation. But the creation of the Red Army and its victories would have demanded far greater sacrifices if he had not been there. If our Party is to be the first Party of the Proletariat which has succeeded in building up a great army; this glorious page in the history of the Russian Revolution must be coupled for ever with the name of Leo Davidovitch Trotsky, the man whose work and deeds will be matters not only of love, but also of study for the future generations of workers who set about the conquest of the whole world.”
This was the judgement passed by Karl Radek on Trotsky’s role as creator, organizer and leader of the Red Army in February 1923, when Lenin still lived and he was under Lenin’s control.
In his reminiscences of Lenin (Vladimir Lenin) Maxim Gorky has related a conversation he had with him. When in the course of it he mentioned the hostility shown by certain Boishevists to Trotsky, Lenin banged his fist upon the table and said:
“Show me another man who could have practically created a model army in a year and won the respect of the military specialists as well. We have got such a man! We have got everything!”