Despite its title, this is not a work of military history. The principal military operations of the Russian Civil War are not described and no attempt is made to present a comparative survey of the service structure of the Red Army. I have merely sought to highlight the ways in which the Bolsheviks, on seizing power, responded to the need to construct new armed forces, and the variety of attitudes that they adopted towards this issue between 1918 and 1922.

Attention has been focussed on the changes that the internal Red Army regime underwent, on its institutional position within the Soviet state, and on how the Bolsheviks themselves perceived these issues. To borrow from Soviet vocabulary an expression that was in common use at the time, this book is concerned with the ‘military policy’ (voennaia politika) of the Russian communist party (Bolsheviks) (RKP(b)) during the Civil War. It is my contention that this policy was much less clear-cut, unswerving, and consistent than contemporary Soviet and Western studies tend to suggest.

According to pre-1914 European socialist thinking, the nature of armies was such that the very features that reinforced their military power and operational capacity necessarily conflicted with their role as bodies of the state subject to the will of the people and to its legitimate elected representatives. Indeed, even in Jaurès' L'armee nouvelle, perhaps the boldest attempt by any socialist to confront orthodox military thinking, the overriding concern of the author clearly remained the democratization of the armed forces - which he presented as compatible with the demands of combat efficiency.