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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
This article examines the debates and decisions of the military section of the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919, only released in Izvestiia TsK KPSS in 1989-90. It rebuts the standard interpretation of the military section (usually referred to as the Military Opposition) as a minority platform opposed to the use of former tsarist officers in the Red Army, most notably proposed in R. V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (1960). Instead, I argue that the debates were more concerned with the military's increasing autonomy at the expense of party control. These fears were compounded by the introduction of the mass conscription of an apolitical peasantry at a time of extreme instability. This indiscriminate conscription had alarmed many Red Army party workers, who were only too aware of the dangers of arming an unconscious peasant mob. In addition, the article lays bare the beginning of the longer-term conflict between Iosif Stalin and Lev Trotskii and demonstrates Stalin's early influence within the party membership.
I would like to thank Steven J. Main for reading early versions of this article and for his help in clarifying the structure of the Red Army in the civil war. My thanks as well to Harriet Murav and the editorial staff at Slavic Review.
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27 Izvesdia TsKKPSS, no. 9 (1989): 181, point 7 of Sokol'nikov's theses.
28 Ibid., point 4 of Sokol'nikov's theses.
29 Izvesdia TsKKPSS, no. 9 (1989): 181.
30 Ibid., 149,162.
31 The first meeting had a break and is listed as two separate meetings, while the final one ensured that all were agreed on the amendments before it went to the plenary meeting.
32 Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 9 (1989): 143. Okulov was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR).
33 Ibid., 149.
34 Ibid., 140. Aleksandr Miasnikov had been commander of the Volga front in the summer of 1918. In early 1919, he was appointed chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus and chairman of the Central Bureau of the Belarusian Communist Party.
35 Ibid., 151.
36 Ibid., 149. Nothing is known of Abramov according to the list of delegates and their attachments in ibid., 187.
37 Ibid., 153.
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39 Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 9 (1989): 150. Ivan Smilga was a CC member and military delegate. He advocated edinonachalie (one-man command) for all commanders, including former tsarist officers.
40 Ibid., 165.
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45 Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 10 (1989): 176.
46 Ibid., 177-78.
47 Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 156.
48 Point 5 of Smirnov's theses, Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 10 (1989): 173.
49 Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 9 (1989): 182.
50 Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 10 (1989): 173. Meaning, as it was in the old-style partisan divisions and, prior to that, in the ranks of the army during the time of the Provisional Government, when the Bolsheviks had encouraged this type of democratic participation within the military as a way of undermining the old army.
51 Point 7 of Smirnov's theses on measures to be taken, Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 9 (1989): 183.
52 Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 10 (1989): 173.
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54 Stalin's speech was eventually published in his collected works, although in a heavily edited version. The sections missing from the original version produced much discussion as to Stalin's line of argument, and in subsequent attempts to predict their contents, the suspicions and suppositions contained in Trotskii's memoirs were often relied on.
55 Izvestiia TsKKPSS, no. 11 (1989): 163.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 164.
58 Ibid., 169.
59 Ibid., 169-71.
60 Ibid., 167-68.
61 See Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 110-11.
62 Ibid., 110-14.
63 Main, “The Creation, Organisation and Work of the Red Army's Political Apparatus,“ 238.
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