Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:06:16.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Building a Red Navy: Communist Activism and Military Authority in the Baltic Fleet, 1918–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2021

Yiannis Kokosalakis Open the ORCID record for Yiannis Kokosalakis [Opens in a new window]
Yiannis Kokosalakis*
Affiliation:
School of History, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the activities of the Soviet military-political organs in the Baltic Fleet. It shows that the web of party institutions transformed the fleet into a space of political and social activism that had little to do with the strictly military aspects of government policy. Such activism was nevertheless unfailingly promoted, even as it became clear that it compromised core elements of military efficiency such as discipline and well-defined chains of command. This argument has implications for our broader understanding of the nature of the Soviet state. It indicates that once the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideology had become institutionalised in the state via the ubiquitous presence of party organs, pragmatic retreats for organisational efficiency became exceptionally difficult to implement.

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 214 - 226
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVFM), f. r-1893, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 25–6, 127.

2 See indicatively Horne, John, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Holquist, Peter, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Jones, Mark, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hanson, Stephen E., Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Priestland, David, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Lomb, Samantha, Stalin's Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution (London: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; Douds, Lara, Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)Google Scholar.

4 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Straus, Kenneth M., Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Lenoe, Matthew E., Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hagen, Mark von, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Stone, David R., Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000)Google Scholar; Reese, Roger R., ‘Red Army Professionalism and the Communist Party, 1918–1941’, The Journal of Military History 66, 1 (2002), 71–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reese, Roger R., Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar.

6 Though all caveats relating to the generalisability of case studies apply here.

7 For the purposes of this article, the activities of political officers and party organisations will be examined as analytically equivalent manifestations of party presence, despite their slightly different remits. For a concise account of the history of the Political Directorate of the Worker Peasant Red Army see Reese, Roger R., The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–91 (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar.

8 On the varying views of the anti-war left, see Nation, R. Craig, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

9 V. I. Lenin, ‘Voennaia Programma Proletarskoi Revoliutsii’, in Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii [PSS], 5th ed, vol. 30 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literaturi, 1973), 131–43.

10 Lenin, ‘Gosudar'stvo i Revoliutsiia’, in PSS, Vol. 33, 36–56.

11 Dekreti Sovetskoi Vlasti, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1957), 21, 66; Viktor S. Zemtsov, Krasnie Komissari Na Fone Epokhi: Ot Podviga Do Zabveniia (Moscow: Granitsa, 2015), 101–3.

12 Dekreti, 356; Zemtsov, Krasnie Komissari, 124.

13 Zemtsov, Krasnie Komissari, 121–4, 142–4.

14 Lenin, ‘Ocherednie zadachi Sovetskoi vlasti’, in PSS, vol. 36, 196, 203–6.

15 Heywood, Andrew, Modernising Lenin's Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holquist, Making War, 282–90.

16 It is indicative of the early Bolsheviks’ visceral resentment of military culture that the reintroduction of military salutes was highlighted by the oppositionists as particularly offensive. Russian State Archive of Social-Political History [RGASPI], f. 41 op. 2 d. 1, ll. 52–6.

17 Nazarenko, Kirill, Flot, Revoliutsiia i Vlast’ v Rossii, 1917–1921 (Moscow: Kvadriga, 2011), 227Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., 238–45.

19 Rabinowitch, Alexander, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 351–5Google Scholar.

20 RGASPI, f. 17 op. 109, op. 27 l. 14–15.

21 Von Hagen, 225.

22 Ibid., 214–20.

23 Ustav VKP (b), 1926; XII: 78.

24 Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF), f. r-34, op. 2, d.1334, l. 72.

25 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1304, ll. 79–80.

26 Ibid. ll. 81–7.

27 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1310, l. 16–17.

28 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 4.

29 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 5.

30 RGAVFM, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 183. The class background of senior officers made them attractive targets for the ever-suspicious secret police. This was often the source of tension with the military-political organs, whose officers naturally resented the usurpation of their powers of oversight by another bureaucracy. Aleksandr Zdanovich, Organi Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti i Krasnaia Armiia: Deiatel'nost’ Organov VChK – OGPU Po Obespecheniiu Bezopasnosti RKKA (1921–1934) (Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2008).

31 In 1928, total party saturation in the Baltic Fleet was 20.3 per cent, or 4,506 communists out of a total of 21,654 servicemen. These were organised in twenty-seven unit-level organisations and 158 ship-department level cells. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1334, 1. 55. During the same period, at Kronstadt, out of 591 party members, 479 were sailors and junior officers. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1346, l. 6.

32 RGVAMF, r-34/2/1348/4.

33 At the same time, insufficient tickets to civilian cinemas at subsidised prices were amongst the common subjects of formal complaints. RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1307, ll. 3–5.

34 From 1926 to 1928 the number of voenkor circles jumped from eight to sixty, while the total membership increased almost tenfold from 128 to 1,137 – 38 per cent of whom were party members. In 1928, there were 179 different papers with a total circulation of 1,001 copies. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1334, l. 66. For an account of the activities of their civilian counterparts, see Hicks, Jeremy, ‘Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature’, The Russian Review 66, 4 (2007), 568–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 RGVAMF f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1421, l. 175, 184–86.

36 KPSS, vol. 4, pp. 338–42.

37 For a conceptual treatment of samokritika, see David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 3. See also Clayton Black, ‘Answering for Bacchanalia: Management, Authority and the Putilov Tractor Program, 1928–1930’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1508 (2002) for an illuminative micro-historical account of how the campaign created a feedback loop between social tensions and political imperatives that precipitated a crisis in industrial relations.

38 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1365, ll. 1–2.

39 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1366, 1; RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1365, l. 3. Civilian communists from Leningrad's factories did come to assist the party purge in the fleet. S. Kostiuchenko et al., Istoriia Kirovskogo Zavoda (Moscow: Misl’, 1966), 299.

40 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 6.

41 ‘Peasant moods’ were a much more common problem in the largely peasant army, leading Defence Commissar Kliment Voroshilov to forbid the involvement of military personnel in collectivisation. Roger R. Reese, ‘Red Army Opposition to Forced Collectivization, 1929–1930: The Army Wavers’, Slavic Review 55, (1996), 24–45.

42 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 12

43 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 13

44 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 16.

45 RGAVFM, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 107.

46 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 165.

47 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, ll. 175–179. Keek already had a reprimand and a strong reprimand for drunkenness, which presumably contributed to his expulsion.

48 Siegelbaum, Lewis, ‘Socialist Competition and Socialist Construction in the USSR: The Experience of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932)’, Thesis Eleven 4, 1 (1982), 48–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siegelbaum, Lewis, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

49 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, l. 12

50 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, ll. 46–56.

51 Pavel Petrov, ‘Krasnoznamennii Baltiiskii Flot Nakanune Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voini, 1935–Vesna 1940 Gg’ (Saint-Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii Gosudarstvennii Universitet, 2014), 329.

52 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, ll. 9–10.

53 Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 252–74.

54 See indicatively Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian Review 52, 3 (1993), 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Wendy Z., Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

55 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, l. 46.

56 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, l. 24.

57 On the 1930s democracy campaigns, see Getty, J. Arch, ‘State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s’, Slavic Review 50, 1 (1991), 18–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lomb, Stalin's Constitution.

58 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2703, l. 5.

59 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 6, d. 24, ll. 117, 123.

60 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 8, d. 19, ll. 11–12.

61 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 8, d. 19, ll. 33.

62 Reese, Soviet Military Experience, 86.

63 Some figures bring the replacement rates of the fleet's formation commanders to 62 per cent, 32 per cent for surface vessels, and 55 per cent for submarines. Petrov, ‘Krasnoznamennii’, 336–9.

64 Ibid., 347–8.

65 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 5, d. 15, ll. 1–3.

66 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 5, d. 15, l. 42.

67 RGAVMF, f. r-1893, op. 1, d. 39, l. 9, 44, 124.