The foundation for the successful upbuilding of the Red army was the proper relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry throughout the country. Later, in 1923, a stupid legend was invented to the effect that I “underestimated” the peasantry. As a matter of fact, from 1918 to 1921, I had to deal with the problems of rural life more closely and directly than anyone else, because the army was being raised chiefly from among the peasants, and carried on its work in constant touch with peasant life. The question is too large to be discussed here at length. So I shall confine myself to two or three sufficiently outstanding examples.
On March 22, 1919, I demanded over the direct wire that the Central Committee “decide the question of an official inquiry by the Central Executive Committee in the Volga region, and of the appointment of an authoritative commission from the Central Committee and the Central Executive Committee. The commission’s job should be to strengthen the faith of the Volga peasantry in the central Soviet power, to correct the most conspicuous local illegalities, and punish the guilty representatives of the Soviet power; to gather complaints and materials to be used as the basis of demonstrative decrees in favor of the ‘middle’ peasant.”
It is interesting to note that I held this conversation over the direct wire with no one other than Stalin; and it was to him that I explained the importance of the question of the middle peasant. In the same year Kalinin, at my instigation, was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee as a man who was close to the middle peasants and familiar with their peculiar needs. But more important is the fact that as early as February, 1920, influenced by my own observation of the lives of the Ural peasants, I insistently advocated a change in the new economic policy. In the Central Committee I mustered only four votes against an opposing eleven. At that time Lenin was irreconcilably against abolishing the food levy. Of course Stalin voted against me. The change to the new economic policy went into effect just a year later, unanimously, but to the tune of the rumblings of the Kronstadt rebellion and in an atmosphere of threatening moods in the entire army.
Most of the questions of principle and the difficulties in connection with the constructive work of the Soviets during the years that followed were encountered first of all in the military sphere, and in most concentrated form at that. As a rule, solutions had to be found on the spur of the moment, and mistakes were followed by immediate retribution. Whatever opposition there might be was tested in action, right on the spot. Hence, by and large, the inner logic of the development of the Red army, and the absence of wild leaps from one system to another. If we had had more time for discussion, we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.
And yet there was fighting within the party, often very bitter. Things could not have been otherwise. The work was too new, the difficulties much too great. The old army was still breaking up and sowing hatred of war over the country at the time when we were obliged to raise new regiments. The Czar’s officers were being driven out of the old army, sometimes quite ruthlessly; we had to enroll these very officers as instructors for the Red army. Committees came into existence in the old regiments as the very embodiment of the revolution, at least during its first period. In the new regiments the committee system was not to be tolerated; it stood for disintegration. The curses against the old discipline were still ringing in our ears when we began to introduce the new. In a short time, we had to go from voluntary enlistment to conscription, from detachments of irregulars to a proper military organization. We had continuously to fight the methods of the irregulars — a fight that demanded the utmost persistence and unwillingness to compromise, sometimes even the sternest measures. The chaos of irregular warfare expressed the peasant element that lay beneath the revolution, whereas the struggle against it was also a struggle in favor of the proletarian state organization’s opposed to the elemental, petty-bourgeois anarchy that was undermining it. But the methods and ways of the irregular fighting found an echo in the ranks of the party, as well.
On the military question, the opposition assumed a more or less definite form during the first months of the organizing of the Red army. Its fundamental ideas found expression in a defense of the electoral method and in protests against the enlistment of experts, the introduction of military discipline, the centralizing of the army, and so on. The opposition tried to find some general theoretical formula for their stand. They insisted that a centralized army was characteristic of a capitalist state; revolution had to blot out not only positional war, but a centralized army as well. The very essence of revolution was its ability to move about, to deliver swift attacks, and to carry out maneuvers; its fighting force was embodied in a small, independent detachment made up of various arms; it was not bound to a base; in its operations it relied wholly on the support of a sympathetic populace; it could emerge freely in the enemy’s rear, etc. In short, the tactics of a small war were proclaimed the tactics of revolution. This was all very abstract and was really nothing but an idealization of our weakness. The serious experience of the civil war very soon disproved these prejudices. The superiority of central organization and strategy over local improvisations, military separatism and federalism, revealed itself only too soon and too clearly in the experiences of the struggle.
The Red army had in its service thousands, and, later on, tens of thousands of old officers. In their own words, many of them only two years before had thought of moderate liberals as extreme revolutionaries, while the Bolsheviks, in their eyes, belonged to the fourth dimension. “We should indeed have a low opinion of ourselves and of our party,” I wrote against the opposition at that time, “of the moral force of our idea, of the drawing power of our revolutionary morale, if we thought ourselves incapable of winning over thousands and thousands of ‘specialists,’ including military ones.” We certainly achieved our end, but not without difficulty and friction.
The communists adapted themselves to the military work with some difficulty. Here selection and training were essential. Even when we were before Kazan, in August, 1918, I telegraphed Lenin: “Only communists who know how to obey should be sent here, the ones who are ready to suffer hardships and are prepared to die. Featherweight agitators are not wanted here.” A year later, in the Ukraine, where anarchy was rampant even in the party ranks, I wrote in an order to the fourteenth army: “I give warning that every communist delegated by the party to join the ranks of the army becomes thereby a part of the Red army and has the same rights and duties as every other soldier of the Red army. Communists found guilty of misdemeanors and crimes against the revolutionary military duty will be doubly punished, for offenses that may be condoned in a benighted, uneducated man cannot be condoned in a member of the party that leads the working classes of the world.” Obviously, much friction arose on this score, and there was no dearth of malcontents.
The military oppositionists included, for example, Pyatakov, the present director of the State Bank. He usually joined every opposition, only to wind up as a government official. Three or four years ago, when Pyatakov belonged to the same group as I did, I prophesied in jest that in the event of a Bonapartist coup d’état, Pyatakov would go to the office the next day with his briefcase. Now I can add more earnestly that if this fails to come about, it will be only through lack of a Bonapartist coup d’état, and not through any fault of Pyatakov’s. In the Ukraine, he enjoyed considerable influence, not by accident but because he is a fairly well-educated Marxist, especially in the realm of economics, and is undoubtedly a good administrator, with a reserve of will. In the early years, Pyatakov showed revolutionary energy, but it later changed to a bureaucratic conservatism. In fighting his semi-anarchist views, I resorted to giving him an important post from the very outset, so that he would have to change from words to deeds. This method is not new, but often is very efficacious. His administrative sense soon prompted him to apply the very methods against which he had been waging his war of words. Such changes were common.
All the best elements of the military opposition were soon drawn into the work. At the same time I offered the most implacable an opportunity to organize a few regiments according to their own principles, promising for my part to give them all the necessary resources. Only one district group on the Volga accepted the challenge, and organized a regiment that was in no way different from the rest. The Red army was winning on all the fronts, and the opposition eventually melted away.
Tsaritsin, where the military workers were grouped around Voroshiov, held a special place in the Red army and in the military opposition. There revolutionary detachments were headed chiefly by former non-commissioned officers from among the peasants of the northern Caucasus. The deep antagonism between the Cossacks and the peasants of the southern steppes imparted a vicious ferocity to the civil war in that region; it penetrated far into the villages and led to the wholesale extermination of entire families. This was a peasant war with its roots deep in local soil, and, in its mouzhik ferocity, it far surpassed the revolutionary struggle in all other parts of the country. This war brought forward a good many stalwart irregulars who excelled in local skirmishing but usually failed when they had to undertake military tasks of larger scope.
The life of Voroshilov illustrates the career of a worker-revolutionist, with its leadership in strikes, underground work, imprisonment, and exile. Like many of the other rulers of to-day, Voroshilov was merely a national revolutionary democrat from among the workers, nothing more; this was most apparent in the imperialist Great War, and later on in the February revolution. In the official biographies of Voroshilov, the years 1914-17 are a great blank, as is true of most of the present leaders. The secret of this blank is that during the war most of these men were patriots, and discontinued their revolutionary work. In the February revolution, Voroshilov, like Stalin, supported the government of Guchkov and Miiukoff from the left. They were extreme revolutionary democrats, but in no sense internationalists. As a rule, the Bolsheviks who were patriots during the war were democrats after the February revolution, and are to-day followers of Stalin’s national socialism. Voroshilov is no exception.
Although he was one of the Lugansk workers, from their privileged top section, in his habits and tastes Voroshilov always resembled a small proprietor more than he did a proletarian. After the October revolution, he became the natural centre of the opposition of non-commissioned officers and irregulars against a centralized military organization demanding military knowledge and a wider outlook. Such was the origin of the Tsaritsin opposition.
In Voroshilov’s circles, “specialists,” graduates of the military academy, high staffs, and Moscow were mentioned with hatred. But since the chiefs of the irregulars had no military knowledge of their own, every one had close at hand his own “specialist” who, being naturally of the second order, held tenaciously to his post against the more capable and better informed. The attitude of the Tsaritsin military heads toward the command of the southern military front scarcely differed from their attitude toward the Whites. Their contact with the Moscow centre did not go beyond a constant demand for munitions. Our resources were very slight; everything produced by the factories was immediately sent to the armies. Not one of them, however, absorbed as many rifles or cartridges as the Tsaritsin army. Whenever its demands were refused, Tsaritsin would raise the cry of “treason by the Moscow specialists.” It kept a special representative in Moscow, a sailor named Zhivodyor, to extort supplies for its army. When we tightened up on the discipline, Zhivodyor turned bandit. I believe that later he was caught and shot.
Stalin stayed in Tsaritsin for a few months, shaping his intrigue against me with the aid of the home-bred opposition of Voroshilov and his closest associates; even then it was assuming a very prominent place in his activities. He so conducted himself, however, as to be able to withdraw at any moment.
Every day I would receive from the high command or the front commands such complaints against Tsaritsin as: it is impossible to get executions of an order, it is impossible to find out what is going on there, it is even impossible to get an answer to an inquiry. Lenin watched the conflict develop with alarm. He knew Stalin better than I did, and obviously suspected that the stubbornness of Tsaritsin was being secretly staged by Stalin. The situation became intolerable; I decided to enforce order in Tsaritsin. After a new clash between the high command and Tsaritsin, I obtained Stalin’s recall. It was done through the medium of Svyerdlov, who went in a special train to bring Stalin back. Lenin was anxious to reduce the conflict to its minimum, and in this he of course was right. I, for my part, scarcely ever gave Stalin a thought. In 1917 he flashed before me as a barely perceptible shadow. In the heat of the fight I usually forgot his existence. I thought of the Tsaritsin army because I needed a dependable left flank on the southern front, and I set out for Tsaritsin to arrange it at any cost. On my way there I met Svyerdlov. He inquired cautiously about my intentions, and then suggested that I have a talk with Stalin, who, as it happened, was returning in the same car with Svyerdlov.
“Do you really wish to dismiss them all?” Stalin asked me, in a tone of exaggerated humility. “They are fine boys!”
“Those fine boys will ruin the revolution, which can’t wait for them to grow out of their adolescence,” I answered him. “All I want is to draw Tsaritsin into Soviet Russia.”
A few hours later I met Voroshilov. The staff was in a state of alarm. The rumor was that Trotsky was coming with a big broom and his score of Czarist generals to replace the irregular chiefs, who, I must add, had all hurriedly renamed themselves as commanders of regiments, brigades, and divisions by the time I arrived there. I put the question to Voroshilov: how did he regard the orders from the front and the high command? He opened his heart to me: Tsaritsin thought it necessary to execute only such orders as it considered right. That was too much. I retorted that if he did not undertake to carry out the orders and military tasks exactly and absolutely as they were given to him, I would immediately send him under convoy to Moscow for committal before the revolutionary tribunal. I dismissed no one, satisfied with the formal assurance of obedience. Most of the communists in the Tsaritsin army supported me with utter sincerity, not merely out of fear. I visited all the units and encouraged the irregulars, among whom there were many excellent soldiers who needed only proper leadership. With this, I returned to Moscow.
In all this affair, I had no feeling of personal prejudice or ill will. I think I can rightfully say that in all my political activity personal considerations have never played a part. But in the great struggle that we were carrying on, the stakes were too big to permit me to consider side issues. As a result, I frequently trod on the toes of personal prejudice, friendly favoritism, or vanity. Stalin carefully picked up the men whose toes had been trodden on; he had the time and the personal interest to do it. From that time on, the Tsaritsin ruling circle became one of his chief weapons. As soon as Lenin fell ill, Stalin with the help of his allies had Tsaritsin renamed Stalingrad. The mass of the people had not the ghost of an idea what the name meant. And if Voroshilov is today a member of the Politbureau, the only reason — I see no other — is that in 1918 I forced his submission by the threat of sending him under convoy to Moscow.
I feel that it will be interesting to illustrate the chapter on our military work, or rather on the struggle connected with it with in the party, by a few excerpts from the party correspondence of that time, hitherto unpublished anywhere. On October 4, 1918, I said to Lenin and Svyerdiov over a direct wire from Tambov:
“I insist categorically on Stalin’s recall. The Tsaritsin front is in a bad way, despite the ............