Quick questions on Trotsky and the Red Army: HSC Modern History Personality

Trotsky was appointed People's Commissar for War on 13 March 1918, immediately after Brest-Litovsk. The military situation was desperate. The Red Guard of October 1917 was a workers' militia of perhaps 30,000 men, suited to a coup in a capital city but not to a continental civil war. The old imperial army had melted away.

Trotsky moved at once from volunteers to conscription. The Conscription Decree of 29 May 1918 called up workers and peasants by age class. By the end of 1918 the Red Army numbered some 800,000; by the end of 1919 some 3 million; by the end of the Civil War some 5 million. The administrative scale was unprecedented in Russian history.

Each military specialist was paired with a political commissar of proven Bolshevik loyalty. The commissar countersigned operational orders, monitored the specialist's reliability, and managed the political education of the troops. The commissar had the legal authority to shoot the specialist if he defected.

From August 1918 Trotsky spent two and a half years on the front in a special armoured train ("Train of the Predrevvoensoviet"). The train had a printing press (publishing the daily V Puti, "En Route"), a telegraph, a garage with cars and motorcycles, a library, a small radio station, and a personal guard of 250 Latvian riflemen. Trotsky travelled some 105,000 kilometres in the Civil War years.

In summer 1918 Trotsky's defence of the Volga front against Krasnov's Don Cossack Whites collided with Stalin's parallel command at Tsaritsyn. Stalin and Voroshilov rejected the central staff orders and ran the Tsaritsyn defence on their own terms, executing several of Trotsky's specialists. Lenin sided with Trotsky and recalled Stalin in October 1918. The dispute was the first major Trotsky-Stalin clash.

Three operational moments turned the Civil War. The recapture of Kazan from the Czechoslovak Legion and the People's Army of Komuch (10 September 1918) was Trotsky's first major Red Army success. The recapture of Perm in summer 1919 against the Whites of Kolchak rebuilt the eastern front. The defence of Petrograd in October 1919 against the Northwestern White Army of Yudenich was the decisive moment: Trotsky organised street-by-street defence with the Petrograd workers and the cadets of the Red officer schools.

The Polish War of 1920 was the Red Army's only major foreign-offensive operation of the Civil War period. The Soviet Western Front, under Mikhail Tukhachevsky, advanced on Warsaw between June and August 1920. The Battle of the Vistula (15-25 August 1920, known in Poland as "the Miracle on the Vistula") routed the Soviet forces. Tukhachevsky lost 25,000 dead, 65,000 captured, and 30,000 interned in East Prussia.

The Kronstadt revolt of 28 February to 18 March 1921 was the most serious challenge to Bolshevik power from inside the revolutionary camp. The sailors of the Baltic Fleet, who had been a Bolshevik bastion in 1917, demanded soviet democracy, free trade, and the end of grain requisitioning. The revolt was suppressed by Red Army forces under Tukhachevsky on Trotsky's orders, with heavy casualties on both sides.

The Red Guard was the October 1917 workers' militia; the Red Army was the conscript force Trotsky built from May 1918.

Trotsky's reliance on ex-Tsarist officers is the defining controversy.

The March 1921 suppression is part of the assessment.