The debate

By 2 February 1919, when Pravda published the Central Committee decision to convene the 8th Party Congress, official military policy was under both frontal and indirect attack from sizable groups of militants and leaders. This broad front of opposition ranged from those (like Sorin) who backed ‘left communist’ positions, to supporters (e.g. Kamenskii) of new and unorthodox ‘revolutionary’ military strategies, to those (like Stalin), who, even though they refrained from voicing broad political formulations of an alternative nature, nonetheless viewed official military policy as an unjustifiable means of reinstating men, ideas, and methods that had not been born of the revolution. But this was not all. Before Congress met in the first half of March, it was clear that, even at the party centre, there were considerable misgivings regarding the line that the War Ministry had been pursuing over the preceding months. Addressing the 3rd Congress of the Ukrainian party, Sverdlov declared, for example, that the Central Committee had passed the resolution of 25 December ‘unanimously’. But although he stressed the lack of any real ‘dissension’ within the leading party organ, he had to admit that there were ‘various shades of opinion’. On 13 December, during a meeting in Petrograd, Lenin was no less ambiguous and evasive. In the middle of a forceful speech, calling for the employment of ‘bourgeois specialists’ in the army as elsewhere, he referred to the opposition in the most benevolent terms, recalling ‘the controversy that has arisen over this question’ within the party and even how ‘some comrades, most devoted and convinced Bolshevik communists, expressed vehement protests’ against this line.