Things could not go on like this and Lenin reluctantly began to reconcile himself to the idea of a professional army urged on him by the old General Staff and the French military mission. In February and early March 1918 discussions were held in the party between proponents of a “pure” revolutionary army, composed of workers and democratically structured, and those who favored a more conventional military force. The debate paralleled the one that went on concurrently between advocates of worker control of industry and advocates of professional management. In both instances, considerations of efficiency overruled revolutionary dogma.
On March 9, 1918, the Sovnarkom appointed a commission to provide in a week a “plan for the establishment of a military center for the reorganization of the army and the creation of a mighty armed force on the basis of a socialist militia and the universal arming of workers and peasants.”18 Krylenko, who had led the opposition to a professional armed force, resigned as Commissar of War and took over the Commissariat of Justice. He was replaced by Trotsky, who had had no military experience, since, like nearly all the Bolshevik leaders, he had dodged the draft. His assignment was to employ as much professional help, foreign and domestic, as required to create an efficient, combat-ready army that would pose no threat to the Bolshevik dictatorship either by defecting to the enemy or by meddling in politics. Concurrently, the government created a Supreme Military Council (Vysshyi Voennyi Soviet), chaired by Trotsky. The council’s staff consisted of officials (the commissars of War and the Navy) and military professionals from the Imperial Army.19 To ensure the complete political reliability of the armed force, the Bolsheviks adopted the institution of “commissars” to supervise military commanders.20
Trotsky continued military negotiations with the Allies. On March 21, he sent General Lavergne of the French military mission the following note:
After a conversation with Captain Sadoul, I have the honor to request, in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, the technical collaboration of the French military mission in the task of reorganizing the army which the government of soviets is undertaking.
There followed a list of thirty-three French specialists in all branches of the military, including aviation, navy, and intelligence, whom the Russians wanted detailed to them.21 Lavergne assigned three officers from his mission as advisers to the Commissar of War: Trotsky allotted them space near his office. The collaboration was handled very discreetly and is not much talked about in Soviet military histories. Later on, according to Joseph Noulens, Trotsky asked for five hundred French army and several hundred British naval officers; he also discussed military assistance with the U.S. and Italian missions.22
Organizing a Red Army from scratch, however, was a slow procedure. In the meantime the Germans were advancing southeast into the Ukraine and adjacent areas. In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks undertook to explore whether the Allies would be prepared to help stop the German advance with their own troops. On March 26, the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs, George Chicherin, handed the French Consul General, Fernand Grenard, a note requesting a statement of Allied intentions in the event Russia turned to Japan to help repel German aggression, or to Germany against Japan.23
The Allied ambassadors, established in Vologda, reacted skeptically to the Bolshevik approaches, which were made through Sadoul. They doubted whether the Bolsheviks really intended to deploy the Red Army against the Germans: as Noulens put it, its more likely use was to serve as a “Praetorian Guard” to solidify their hold on Russia. One can imagine their thoughts as they listened to Sadoul’s impassioned plea on Moscow’s behalf:
The Bolsheviks will form an army, well or badly, but they cannot do it seriously without our assistance. And, inevitably, someday this army will stand up to Imperial Germany, the worst enemy of Russian democracy. On the other hand, because the new army will be disciplined, staffed by professionals and permeated with the military spirit, it will not be an army suited for a civil war. If we direct its formation, as Trotsky has proposed to us, it will become a factor of internal stability and an instrument of national defense at the Allies’ disposal. The de-Bolshevization which we will thus accomplish in the army will have reverberations in the general policies of Russia. Do we not see already the beginnings of this evolution? One must be blinded by prejudice not to see, through the unavoidable brutalities, the rapid adaptation of the Bolsheviks to a realistic policy.24
This plea must be one of the very earliest claims on record that the Bolsheviks were “evolving” toward realism.
For all their suspicions, the Allied ambassadors did not want to reject the Soviet request out of hand. Communicating frequently with their governments as well as with Trotsky, they reached on April 3 an understanding among themselves on the following principles: (1) the Allies (without the United States, which refused to go along) will assist the organization of the Red Army, with the proviso that Moscow reintroduces military discipline, including the death penalty; (2) the Soviet Government will consent to Japanese landings on Russian soiclass="underline" the Japanese forces, meshed with Allied units sent from Europe, will form a multinational force to fight the Germans; (3) Allied contingents will occupy Murmansk and Archangel; (4) the Allies will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia.*
While these talks were in progress, on April 4 the Japanese landed a small expeditionary force in Vladivostok. Its ostensible mission was to protect Japanese citizens, two of whom had recently been murdered there. But it was widely and correctly believed that the true objective of the Japanese was to seize and annex Russia’s maritime provinces. Russian military experts pointed out that the collapse of transport and the breakdown of civic authority in Siberia precluded the movement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, with the vast logistic support they required, to European Russia. But the Allies persisted in this plan, promising to dilute the Japanese expeditionary force with French, English, and Czechoslovak units.
At the beginning of June, the English landed 1,200 additional troops at Murmansk and 100 at Archangel.
Lenin did not give up hope of American economic aid to supplement the military help promised by France. The United States continued to profess amity for Russia even after the Brest Treaty had been ratified. The Department of State notified the Japanese that the United States continued to regard Russia and her people as “friends and allies against a common enemy” although she did not recognize her government.25 On another occasion Washington declared that in spite of “all the unhappiness and misery” which the Russian Revolution had caused, it felt for it “the greatest sympathy.”26 Curious to know what these friendly professions meant concretely, Lenin on April 3 again asked Robins to sound out his government on the possibility of economic “cooperation.”27 In mid-May, he gave him a note for Washington which stated that the United States could replace Germany as the principal supplier of industrial equipment.28 Unlike German business circles, the Americans showed little interest.
It is impossible to determine how far Bolshevik collaboration with the Allies might have gone, or even how seriously it was intended. The Bolsheviks, aware that the Germans knew of their every step, may well have made these overtures to force Germany to observe the terms of the Brest Treaty or risk pushing Russia into Allied arms. Be that as it may, the Germans came around and assured the Bolsheviks that they had no hostile intentions. In April the two countries exchanged diplomatic missions and made ready for talks on a commercial agreement. In mid-May, Berlin, abandoning the hard line advocated by the generals, advised Moscow it would occupy no more Russian territory. Lenin publicly confirmed these assurances in a talk he gave on May 14.29 They paved the way for a Russo-German rapprochement. “When it emerged in the course of German-Russian relations that Germany did not intend to overthrow [the Bolsheviks], Trotsky gave up” the idea of Allied assistance.* From now on, relations between the Bolsheviks and the Allies rapidly deteriorated, as Moscow moved into the orbit of Imperial Germany, which seemed about to win the war.