Professional officers actually proved to be much more willing to cooperate with the Bolsheviks than the intelligentsia. Brought up in a tradition of strict apoliticism and obedience to those in power, most of them dutifully carried out orders of the new government.5 Even though the Soviet authorities have long been reluctant to make known their names, those who promptly recognized Bolshevik authority included some of the highest officers of the Imperial General Staff: A. A. Svechin, V. N. Egorev, S. I. Odintsov, A. A. Samoilo, P. P. Sytin, D. P. Parskii, A. E. Gutov, A. A. Neznamov, A. A. Baltiiskii, P. P. Lebedev, A. M. Zaionchkovskii, and S. S. Kamenev.6 Later on, two tsarist ministers of war, Aleksis Polivanov and Dmitrii Shuvaev, also donned uniforms of the Red Army. At the end of November 1917, Lenin’s military adviser, N. I. Podvoiskii, requested the General Staffs opinion whether elements of the old army could serve as the nucleus of a new armed force. The generals recommended that healthy units of the old army be used in this manner and that the army be reduced to its traditional peacetime strength of 1.3 million men. The Bolsheviks rejected this proposal in favor of an entirely new, revolutionary force, modeled on that fielded by France in 1791—that is, a levée en masse, but composed entirely of urban inhabitants, without peasants.7
Events, however, would not wait: the front continued to crumble and now it was Lenin’s front—as he liked to say, after October the Bolsheviks had become “defensists.” There was talk of creating an armed force of 300,000 to serve as the foundation of the new Bolshevik army.8 Lenin demanded that this force be assembled and made combat-ready in a month and a half to meet the expected German assault. This order was reconfirmed on January 16 in the so-called Declaration of Rights, which provided for the creation of a Red Army to “ensure the full power of the toiling masses and prevent the restoration of exploiters.”9 The new Worker-Peasant Red Army (Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia) was to be an all-volunteer force, made up of “tried revolutionaries,” who were to be paid fifty rubles a month and be bound by “mutual guarantees” (krugovaia poruka) by virtue of which every soldier would be personally responsible for the loyalty of his comrades. To command this projected army, the Sovnarkom created on February 3 an All-Russian Collegium of the Red Army, chaired by Krylenko and Podvoiskii.10
Official government announcements justified the creation of a new, socialist army with the need of Soviet Russia to repulse the assault of the “international bourgeoisie.” But this was only one of its stated missions, and not necessarily the most important. Like the Imperial Army, the Red Army had a dual function: to fight foreign enemies and to preserve internal security. In an address to the Soldiers’ Section of the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, Krylenko declared that the foremost task of the Red Army was to wage “internal war” and ensure “the defense of Soviet authority.”11 In other words, it was primarily to serve the purpose of civil war, which Lenin was determined to unleash.
The Bolsheviks also charged their armies with the mission of spreading civil wars abroad. Lenin believed that the final triumph of socialism required a series of major wars between “socialist” and “bourgeois” countries. In a moment of uncharacteristic candor he said:
The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.12
When the organization of the Red Army was announced, an editorial in Izvestiia welcomed it as follows:
The workers’ revolution can triumph only on a global scale and for its enduring triumph requires the workers of various countries to offer each other mutual assistance.
And the socialists of that country where power has first passed into the hands of the proletariat may face the task of assisting, arms in hand, their brothers struggling against the bourgeoisie across the border.
The complete and final triumph of the proletariat is unthinkable without the triumphant conclusion of a series of wars on the external as well as domestic fronts. For this reason, the Revolution cannot manage without its own, socialist army.
“War is father of everything,” said Heraclitus. Through war lies also the road to socialism.*
There are many other statements, some explicit, others veiled, to the effect that the Red Army’s mission involved intervention abroad, or, as the decree of January 28, 1918, put it, “providing support to the coming socialist revolutions in Europe.”13
All this lay in the future. For the time being, the Bolsheviks had only one reliable military force, the Latvian Rifles, whom we have encountered in connection with the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the security of the Kremlin. The Russian army formed the first separate Latvian units in the summer of 1915. In 1915–16, the Latvian Rifles were an all-volunteer force of 8,000 men, strongly nationalistic and with a sizable Social-Democratic contingent.14 Reinforced with Latvian nationals from the regular Russian units, by the end of 1916 they had eight regiments totaling 30,000 to 35,000 men. This force resembled the Czech Legion, concurrently formed in Russia of prisoners of war, although their destinies were to be quite different.
In the spring of 1917, the Latvian troops reacted favorably to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda, hoping that peace and the principle of “natural self-determination” would allow them to return to their homeland, then under German occupation. Although still more driven by nationalism than socialism, they developed close ties with Bolshevik organizations, adopting their slogans against the Provisional Government. In August 1917, Latvian units distinguished themselves in the defense of Riga.
The Bolsheviks treated the Latvians differently from all the other units of the Russian army, keeping them intact and entrusting to them vital security operations. They gradually turned it into a combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Nazi SS, a force to protect the regime from internal as well as foreign enemies, partly an army, partly a security police. Lenin trusted them much more than Russians.
Early plans to create a Worker-Peasant Red Army came to naught. Those who enlisted did so mainly for the pay, which was soon raised from 50 to 150 rubles a month, and the opportunity to loot. Much of the army was riffraff made up of demobilized soldiers, whom Trotsky would later describe as “hooligans” and a Soviet decree would call “disorganizers, troublemakers, and self-seekers.”15 Contemporary newspapers are filled with stories of violent “expropriations” carried out by the early troops of the Red Army: hungry and ill paid, they sold uniforms and military equipment, and sometimes fought each other. In May 1918, having occupied Smolensk, they demanded that Jews be expelled from Soviet institutions in the name of the slogan “Beat Jews and Save Russia.”16 The situation was so bad that the Soviet authorities occasionally had to request German troops to intervene against mutinous Red Army units.17