Army in the Soviet Republic

An Armed People Guarding Their Conquests.

“The best guarantee, the best assurance of freedom is a rifle in the hands of a worker,” said Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of scientific communism. Now we can truly see how correct this statement is. It is fully confirmed by the experience of the great revolution of 1917.

A few years ago, even some leftist comrades put forward the slogan of disarmament. They said: everywhere the bourgeoisie is building new, monstrous fleets: submarines, surface ships, and aircraft; insanely huge armies are growing; supernatural fortresses are being built; huge cannons and such instruments of extermination as armoured cars and tanks. We need to destroy this whole horrible system of violence. General disarmament must be demanded.

That is not how we, the Bolsheviks, put the question. We said: our slogan is this: disarm the bourgeoisie, arm the working class unconditionally and universally. Indeed, it is ridiculous to persuade the bourgeoisie to break its sharpest wolf fang, the armed force (of workers and poor peasants fooled by it) which it has in its hands. This deadly machine of violence can only be destroyed by violence. Weapons are laid down when forced to do so by other weapons. This is the meaning of armed insurrection against the bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie, the army is an instrument of the struggle for the division of the world on the one hand, and an instrument of the struggle against the working class on the other. The Tsar and Kerensky dreamed of conquering Constantinople, the Dardanelles Strait, Galicia, and many other tidbits with the help of the army. At the same time, both the Tsar and Kerensky (hence the landlords and the bourgeoisie) were strangling the working class and the peasant poor. The army was a tool in the hands of the big owners to divide the world and enslave the poor. This is what the old army was.

Why could the bourgeoisie make the workers and peasants (after all, the majority of the army, the soldiers, consisted of them) a tool against the workers and peasants themselves? Why could the Tsar and Kerensky do this? Why do the Wilhelms and Hindenburgs, the German bourgeoisie, who turn their workers into executioners of the Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian, and German revolutions, still manage to do this? Why were German sailors shot by the hands of German sailors who finally rose up against the oppressors? Why did the English bourgeoisie suppress the revolution in Ireland, a country oppressed and trampled on by England's bankers, with the hands of English soldiers (who were also workers)?

This question must be answered in the same way as the question of how the bourgeois gentlemen can stay in power at all. We have seen that this is achieved by the excellent organisation of the bourgeois class. In the army, the power of the bourgeoisie rests on two foundations: first, on the officer corps of nobles and bourgeois; second, on the drilling and spiritual suppression, i.e., on the bourgeois treatment of the soldiers' souls. The officer corps generally has a purely class character. It is so well-trained that it knows perfectly well the military business and the business of meting out beatings, the business of brutal reprisals against soldiers. Look at some brave officer of the Guards or at a Prussian dandy with the face of a zealous pug. One can see at once that he, like an animal trainer in a circus, does not spare soldiers, giving out orders right and left, and that he has learned (and learned it much, long and hard) how to keep the human herd in fear and obedience.

It is clear that if such gentlemen are recruited from the bourgeoisie and nobility, from the sons of landlords and capitalists, they will lead the army along a very definite path.

Look now at what soldiers are. They arrive as grey people, unconnected with each other, scattered, unable to fight back, with souls that have already been worn out by priests and schools. They are immediately placed in barracks, and the processing begins. Intimidation, inculcation of the most anti-people thoughts, a constant system of fear and punishment, corruption by rewards for crimes (for example, for shooting strikers) – all this makes a man a half-idiot, a puppet who blindly obeys his mortal enemies.

It is clear that with the revolution, the army, which stood with both feet on the old tsarist foundations, the army which Kerensky had driven to slaughter for Constantinople, was bound to decay. Why? Because the soldiers saw that they were being organised, trained, and thrown into battle for the criminal lucre of the bourgeoisie. They saw that they had been sitting in the trenches for almost three years, exhausted, dying, starving, and killing for the sake of a sack of money. It is quite natural that when the old discipline was blown away by the revolution and the new one had not yet had time to be born, the old army disintegrated and died.

This disintegration was unavoidable. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary fools blamed the Bolsheviks: "What have you done? You've decomposed the tsarist army!" But the Menshevik and SR fools do not see that the revolution could not have succeeded if the army had remained loyal to the Tsar and his generals in February and to the bourgeoisie in October. After all, the soldiers' revolt against the Tsar was already the decomposition of the tsarist army. Every revolution smashes the old and rotten, and at first, a (very difficult) period passes until the new is created, until a beautiful house is built in place of the wreckage of the old pigsty.

We will now give an example from another field. Old workers know that in the old days, when peasants turned into factory workers and went to the city, the first thing they did was to turn into desperate hooligans, "ogoltsy," "masterovshchina." The word “master” or “factory worker” was then almost a swear word. Indeed, these workers were masters of mischief, lewdness, swearing, and debauchery. On this basis, all reactionaries, fearful of anything new, preached a return to serfdom.

They said: “Since the city corrupts, since people get spoiled in the city, what is needed is the village and the stick of the father-landlord. That’s where virtue would flourish.” And they laughed maliciously at those who saw the working class as the salt of the earth. They said to us, Marxists, students of the great communist Karl Marx: “You see, your workers?! After all, they are pigs, not people, they are foul-mouthed! And you say they are the salt of the earth! A good whip and a lash in the stable, then they would know how to behave.”

All this convinced many people. But in fact, here was the point. When peasants went to the cities and broke with the village, the old village customs were destroyed. In the village, they live according to the old ways: look up to the old man and listen to him, even if he has long since gone out of his mind. Sit still in your vegetable garden and don’t poke your nose beyond it, fear everything new more than fire. That’s the wisdom of the village. It was bad wisdom, but it was the bridle that maintained village order. This wisdom quickly disappeared in the cities; here everything is new: new people, new relationships, a lot of new, unexplored temptations. It is not surprising that the old village morality disappeared. And for a new one to be created, some more time had to pass.

This interval is the period of decomposition.

But in the end, a new wisdom emerged on a new basis: the solidarity of the proletariat. The factory united the workers, the oppression of capital accustomed them to common struggle, and in place of the old, outdated, useless wisdom, a new proletarian wisdom arose, infinitely higher. This is what turns the proletariat into “the salt of the earth,” the most advanced, the most revolutionary, the most creative class. We communists were right, not the serf-owning landlords.

Now the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries take the place of the serf-owners in relation to the army. They sing about the decay of the army and blame the Bolsheviks. And just as the serf-owners called for a return to the village, to the landlord's porch, to the whip, so the Mensheviks and SRs call for the old discipline, for the service of the Constituent Assembly, based on a return to capitalism and other such things. But we communists look forward. We know: the old has rotted away, and it inevitably had to rot, and without this, the workers and the poor peasants could not have seized power in the state with their own hands. The new, higher order is coming, and in place of the old army, the Red Army of socialism is being built.

As long as the bourgeoisie is in power, as long as the "fatherland" is the fatherland of bankers, merchants, speculators, gendarmes, kings, and presidents, the working class has no interest in protecting this filthy machine for profit. Its proletarian obligation is the obligation to revolt against it.

Only the pathetic lackeys and servants of the moneybag say that it is impossible to strike and revolt against the brigand imperialist state in time of war. It is clear that this hinders the cause of the brigand war. It is clear that unrest within the country and even more so unrest in the army contributes to its disorganisation. But how to break, for example, Wilhelm's rule without disorganizing Wilhelm's discipline? It's impossible. The German sailor-martyrs executed by Wilhelm's executioners certainly contributed to the decomposition of the brigandishly organised army. But if the brigand army is internally strong, it means the death of the revolution. If the revolution is strong, it means the death of the brigand army. The Scheidemann, the German social traitors, also persecute Liebknecht as a decomposer of the army. They persecute all German revolutionaries, the German Bolsheviks, as people who "stab the valiant army in the back," i.e., undermine the cause of brigandage. Let the Mensheviks embrace the Scheidemanns and other stinking rottenness: they are of the same ilk.

For Russia, this time has already passed. The revolution of the workers has won. The time of decomposition has passed. The time of building anew is before us. The Red Army is being built not for plunder, but for the defence of socialism; not for the defence of the bourgeois fatherland, where everything was in the hands of capital and landlords, but for the defence of the socialist fatherland, where everything is in the hands of the workers; not for the crushing of foreign countries, but for helping the international communist revolution.

It is clear that this army must be built on different bases than the old one. The Red Army must, we said, be an armed people under a disarmed bourgeoisie. It must be a class army of proletarians and the peasant poor. Indeed, it is directed essentially against the world bourgeoisie, including its own. Therefore, it cannot include armed bourgeois elements. To let the bourgeoisie into the army means to arm it; it means to create within the Red Army a White Guard, which can easily disrupt the whole affair, be the centre of betrayals and revolts, defect to hostile imperialist troops, and so on. Our task is not to arm the bourgeoisie, but to disarm it by taking away its last Browning.

The second, no less important task is the training of the proletarian officer corps. The working class has to fight off enemies advancing from all sides. The war is imposed on it by the imperialist vultures. And modern warfare requires knowledgeable specialists. The Tsar and Kerensky had them. The working class and the poor peasants did not. These specialists must be created. For this purpose, it is necessary to use the old specialists: let them teach the proletarians. Then the socialist Soviet fatherland will have its own officers, its own officer corps. And just as in the revolution the working class, more experienced and active, leads the poor peasants, so in the war against the imperialist oppressors, the worker officers will lead the masses of the peasant Red Army.

The Red Army must be created on the basis of universal training for the workers and the poor peasants.

This training is the most urgent and pressing matter. Not a single minute, not a single second can be wasted.

Every worker and every peasant must be trained, and they must learn to wield a weapon. Only foolish people think like this: "Well, we are still a long way off - while they are still coming to us, we will have time." Russian lazy people often think this way. It is known all over the world that the favourite saying of Russians is "avos." "Maybe we'll make it in time." And then, look, the class enemy, called the former landlords and capitalists, is right there and takes the darlings by the scruff of the neck. And, perhaps, when some brave Prussian non-commissioned officer (or English, who knows?) puts them up against the wall to be shot, then the good-natured countryman will scratch his head and say: "What a fool I was before!"

We must hurry. Let Sidor not nod at Pyotr, and Pyotr at Sidor. Let no one wait, but get to work together. Universal training is the most urgent, the most important task of the day. The old army was based on dumbing down the soldier. This was because the capitalists and landlords had to rule over millions of soldiers-peasants and workers, whose interests were opposed to those of the capitalists. The capitalist government therefore had to make the soldier a mindless tool, acting against his own interests. On the contrary, the Red Army of workers and peasants defends its own cause. It can only be based on the enlightenment and consciousness of the comrades who join its ranks. Hence the need for special courses, libraries, lectures, rallies, and meetings. In their free hours, Red Army soldiers should take part in political life together with the workers, attend meetings, and live as one with the working class.

This is one of the most important conditions for the creation of firm revolutionary discipline—not the discipline of the stick, but the discipline of the class consciousness of the revolutionary. If the link between the army and the working class is lost, then the army quickly degenerates and can easily turn into a gang that will serve the highest bidder. Then it will begin to decompose, and nothing can save it from this decomposition. On the contrary, if the Red Army maintains a living connection with the workers, sharing the same life with them, then it will be just what it should be: an armed organ of the revolutionary masses.

One of the best means of staying in touch with the masses, besides those already mentioned (lectures, political meetings, etc.), is to use the Red Army to continuously train workers in firing rifles, machine guns, and so on. Instead of lectures, cards, and other amusements, instead of mindlessly sitting around in barracks, there is creative work that unites everyone into one friendly revolutionary family. This way, an armed people, an armed proletariat, and an armed peasantry are created, which will stand guard over the great workers' revolution.