Trotsky as People's Commissar for War, 1918 to 1925, including the construction of the Red Army on conscription and military specialist foundations, the political commissar system, the armoured train, the defence of Petrograd in 1919, and the Polish War of 1920

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline the construction of the Red Army under Trotsky and to assess his contribution to the Bolshevik Civil War victory. Strong answers integrate the conscription decree, the use of ex-Tsarist military specialists, the political commissar system, the armoured train, the major operational turning points (Kazan 1918, Petrograd 1919, the Polish War 1920), and the Kronstadt revolt of March 1921.

The answer

Appointment as War Commissar

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. The peasant base was war-weary. Allied intervention was beginning on every Russian frontier.

Trotsky added the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Military Council (Revvoensovet, RVS) on 6 September 1918. The RVS was the high command of the new army.

Conscription and military specialists

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.

Trotsky's most controversial decision was the recruitment of ex-Tsarist officers. By 1920 the Red Army included some 50,000 "military specialists" (voenspetsy), among them former Tsarist generals Aleksei Brusilov, Sergei Kamenev (no relation to the Politburo Kamenev), and Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich. The decision was opposed inside the Bolshevik Party by the "Military Opposition" (Stalin, Voroshilov, Frunze, Bubnov), which argued for a "proletarian" officer corps.

Trotsky defended the specialists on grounds of military competence. His argument at the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919) won Lenin's support and decided the dispute. The specialists provided the operational and staff skills that turned the Red Army from a militia into an army.

The political commissar system

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.

The system was modelled loosely on French Revolutionary practice but went beyond it. The commissar tradition produced the political officer of every twentieth-century Communist army from China to Vietnam.

The armoured train

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.

The train was both an operational headquarters and a political instrument. It arrived at threatened fronts to inject Bolshevik authority into demoralised units. The Train of the Predrevvoensoviet became a Trotsky personal symbol.

Tsaritsyn and the dispute with Stalin (1918)

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.

Kazan, Perm, Petrograd: the turning points

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. Yudenich's army collapsed by November 1919.

The Polish War, 1920

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.

Responsibility was divided. Stalin, as political commissar of the Southwestern Front, had delayed the transfer of the First Cavalry Army from Lwow to Warsaw. Tukhachevsky overextended the Western Front. Trotsky bore overall command responsibility. The Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) ceded western Belorussia and western Ukraine to Poland.

Kronstadt, March 1921

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 Kronstadt episode is the major mark against Trotsky from the libertarian Left. Sereny, Service, and the older Voline (The Unknown Revolution, 1947) all treat it as the act in which Trotsky most clearly identified himself with the new state's coercion.

How to read a source on this topic

How the Revolution Armed (5 volumes, 1923-1925) is Trotsky's own narrative and is the major primary source. The Trotsky Papers (Jan M. Meijer, ed., 1964-1971) contain the operational correspondence.

Erickson's The Soviet High Command 1918-1941 (1962) and Mawdsley's The Russian Civil War (1987) are the standard military histories. Service (Trotsky, 2009) is generous on the Red Army achievement and critical on Kronstadt.

Common exam traps

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

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

Overlooking Kronstadt. The March 1921 suppression is part of the assessment.

In one sentence

As People's Commissar for War and chair of the Revolutionary Military Council from 1918 to 1925, Trotsky built the Red Army on conscription, ex-Tsarist military specialists, and political commissars, ran the war from the armoured train, won the Volga and Petrograd campaigns of 1918-1919, lost on the Vistula in 1920, suppressed the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921, and produced the institution that won the Civil War for the Bolsheviks.