All this would now change because of one mindless act of Trotsky’s. As the newly appointed Commissar of War, Trotsky wanted to act the part, although he had virtually no troops under his command. This ambition in no time transformed a body of well-disposed Czechoslovaks into a “counterrevolutionary” army which in the summer of 1918 presented the Bolsheviks with the most serious military threat since they had taken power.
As soon as Trotsky learned what had transpired at Cheliabinsk and that the Czechs had convened a “Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army,” he ordered that the representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council in Moscow be placed under arrest. The frightened Czech politicians agreed to all of Trotsky’s demands, including complete disarmament of the legion. On May 21, Trotsky ordered that all further movement of the legion eastward must cease: its men were to join the Red Army or be pressed into “labor battalions”—that is, become part of the Bolshevik compulsory labor force. Those who disobeyed were to be confined to concentration camps.* On May 25, Trotsky followed with another order:
All soviets along the railroad are instructed, under heavy responsibility, to disarm the Czechs. Any Czech along the railroad line found in possession of weapons is to be executed on the spot. Any military train [echelon] containing a single armed Czech is to be unloaded and [its personnel] placed in a prisoner-of-war camp.66
It was a singularly inept command, not only because it was unnecessarily provocative but because Trotsky had no means of enforcing it: the Czech Legion was far and away the strongest military force in Siberia. At the time, it was widely believed that Trotsky acted under German pressure, but it has been established since that the Germans bore no responsibility for these May orders.67 It was Trotsky’s very un-Bolshevik disregard of the “correlation of forces” that sparked the Czechoslovak rebellion.
The Czechoslovaks on May 22 rejected Trotsky’s order to disarm:
The Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army, assembled at Cheliabinsk, declares … its feelings of sympathy with the Russian revolutionary people in their difficult struggle for the consolidation of the Revolution. However, the Congress, convinced that the Soviet Government is powerless to guarantee our troops free and safe passage to Vladivostok, has unanimously decided not to surrender its arms until it receives assurance that the Corps will be allowed to depart and receive protection from counterrevolutionary trains.68
In communicating this decision to Moscow, the Czechoslovak Congress said that it had “unanimously decided not to surrender arms before reaching Vladivostok, considering them a guarantee of safe travel.” It expressed the hope that no attempts would be made to impede the departing Czechoslovak troops, since “every conflict would only prejudice the position of the local soviet organs in Siberia.”69 The Allied instructions for units of the legion to be rerouted to Murmansk and Archangel were simply ignored.
When Trotsky’s instructions became known, 14,000 Czechoslovaks had already reached Vladivostok, but 20,500 were still strung out along the length of the Trans-Siberian and railroads in central Russia.* Convinced that the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to the Germans and threatened by the local soviets, they seized control of the Trans-Siberian. But even while so doing, they reaffirmed that they would have no dealings with anyone fighting the Soviet Government.70
86. General Gajda, Commander of the Czech Legion.
Once the Czechoslovak troops took over the railroads Bolshevik authority in the cities along them crumbled; and as soon as that happened, the Russian rivals of the Bolsheviks moved in to fill the vacuum. On May 25, the Czechoslovaks occupied the railroad junctions at Mariinsk and Novonikolaevsk, which had the effect of cutting Moscow off from rail and telegraph communications with much of Siberia. Two days later, they took over Cheliabinsk. On May 28 they seized Penza, on June 4 Tomsk, on June 7 Omsk, and on June 8 Samara, the latter of which was defended by the Latvians. As their military operations expanded, the Czechoslovaks centralized the command, choosing as their chief the self-styled “General” Rudolf Gajda, an ambitious adventurer, whose considerable military talents were not matched by political sense. His men had unbounded confidence in him.†
Although not directed against it, the Czechoslovak rebellion presented the Bolshevik Government with its first serious military challenge since the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Despite months of talk, the Red Army existed largely on paper. Bolshevik effectives in Siberia consisted of a few thousand “Red Guards” and a like number of pro-Communist German, Austrian, and Hungarian POWs. This motley force, without central command, was no match for the Czechoslovaks. Desperate, the Soviet Government asked Berlin at the end of June for permission to arm German prisoners of war in Russia for use against them.71
It was the Czechoslovak rebellion that finally forced the Bolsheviks to tackle the formation of an army in earnest. The ex-tsarist generals on the Supreme Military Council had been urging them all along to give up the idea of an all-volunteer force composed exclusively of “proletarian” elements and go over to general conscription. Given Russia’s population structure, in a conscript army peasants would constitute the overwhelming majority. Lacking any realistic alternatives, Lenin and Trotsky now overcame their aversion to a regular army with a professional officer corps and a mass of peasant conscripts. On April 22 the government ordered all male citizens aged eighteen to forty to undergo an eight-week course of military training. The ruling applied to workers, students, and peasants not engaged in “exploitation”—i.e., not employing hired labor.72 This was the first step. On May 29 Moscow ordered general mobilization to be carried out in phases. First to be called to colors would be workers from Moscow, Don, and Kuban, born in 1896 and 1897; they were to be followed by workers from Petrograd; then the turn would come for railroad workers and white-collar employees. They were to serve six months. Peasants were as yet unaffected. In June, soldiers’ pay was raised from 150 to 250 rubles a month, and the first attempt was made to outfit them with standard uniforms.73 At the same time, the government began the voluntary registration of ex-officers of the Imperial Army and opened a General Staff Academy.74 Finally, on July 29, Moscow issued two further decrees, which laid the foundations of the Red Army, as it has been known since. One introduced compulsory military service for all males aged eighteen to forty.75 Under the provisions of this decree, over half a million men were to be conscripted.76 The second ordered the registration of all officers of the old army (born in the years 1892 to 1897 inclusive) in designated areas, under threat of punishment by Revolutionary Tribunals.77
Such was the origin of the Red Army. Organized with the assistance of professional officers, and soon commanded almost exclusively by them, in structure and discipline it not unnaturally modeled itself on the Imperial Army.78 Its only innovation was the introduction of political “commissars,” posts entrusted to dependable Bolshevik apparatchiki, who were to be responsible for the loyalty of the command at all levels. Addressing the Central Executive Committee on July 29, Trotsky, with the bluster that made him so unpopular, assured those worried about the reliability of the former tsarist officers, now called “military specialists,” that any who contemplated betraying Soviet Russia would be shot out of hand. “Next to every specialist,” he said, “there should stand a commissar, one on the right and another to the left, revolver in hand.”79