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Civil-Military Relations and the Evolution of the Soviet Socialist State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Mark von Hagen
Mark von Hagen*
Affiliation:
The Department of History, Columbia University
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Extract

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

Type
1989 Moscow Historians Conference
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 268 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

1. See the recent roundtable discussions in Kommunist, Voprosy istorii, and Istoriia SSSR, articles by Igor’ Kliamkin and Vasilii Seliunin in Novyi mir, and many other forums.

2. See Cohen's, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973 Google Scholar; Lewin's, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Tucker's, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929 (New York: Norton, 1974.Google Scholar

3. Cohen, Bukharin, 124.

4. Sheila Fitzpatrick has contributed most to the shifting of attention to Stalin's victory; see her The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and especially Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

5. See Trotskii, Lev, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit, 1965 Google Scholar; for explanations of Stalin's victory as a consequence of machine politics, see Carr, E. H., Socialism in One Country, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1958) 2: 224 Google Scholar; Fainsod, Merle, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 156–166.Google Scholar

6. See Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 292, 303; Cohen, Bukharin, 327-328.

7. Much of the following argument is based on my book, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State. 1917-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

8. Among the full members of the Politburo through 1951, thirteen had held important positions during the civil war. Schueller, George K., “The Politboro,” in World Revolutionary Elites: Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements, ed. Lasswell, Harold and Lerner, David (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 123–125.Google Scholar

9. For more on the problems that have characterized the debate on militarism, see Volker Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861-1979 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982). I distinguish Soviet militarized socialism from other twentieth century political developments, including, especially, Latin American military juntas and the Nazi German political and social system.

10. See Trotskii's suggestion that the best type of cultured human would come about by militarizing the whole nation in “Stroitel'stvo krasnoi vooruzhennoi sily,” Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia 3 vols. (Moscow: Vysshii voennyi redaktsionnyi Sovet, 1923-1925) 2, 1: 127.

11. For the most part, the left intelligentsia persisted as well in treating soldiers as backward peasants in uniform and, therefore, as reliable bulwarks of the autocracy against revolution. On the prerevolutionary status of soldiers, see Bushnell, John, Mutiny amid Repression (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985 Google Scholar; and Wildman, Allan K., The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980; 1988).Google Scholar

12. John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York: Norton, 1976), xiv-xv, 115-119, 126, 130, 159-160, 196-198, 208, 210, 215Google Scholar; see also Abramovitch, Raphael R., The Soviet Revolution (New York: International Universities Press, 1962), 21, 83–84, 88.Google Scholar

13. When Lenin analyzed the election returns nearly two years later, he concluded that without the support of half the armed forces, “we could not have been victorious.” V. I. Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Collected Works, 40 vols. (Moscow, 1958-1965) 30: 261.

14. See the concerns about “class purity” voiced by Mikhail Kedrov, quoted in Korablev, Iu. I., V. I. Lenin i zashchita zavoevanii Velikogo Oktiabria (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 183 Google Scholar; for a perspective typical of the old regime, see the comments by Tsar Nicholas and his army minister Aleksei Kuropatkin, in Zaionchkovskii, Petr A., Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii (Moscow: Mysl', 1973), 118, 120.Google Scholar

15. Urban Soviets were entitled to send one delegate for 25, 000 inhabitants; provincial Soviets, representing the rural population, sent one delegate for every 125, 000 inhabitants.

16. See a leaflet issued by the Smolensk Party Committee that summarized the benefits to which soldiers were entitled, “The Red Army man's family is the highest priority of the Soviet Republic; his family is exempted from all direct taxes; his family keeps its right to the land; his family can receive a subsidy to maintain his household; his family members who are no longer able to work are exempted from paying apartment rent; his family has the right to the ration card ‘Red Star’ and to receive bonus groceries; in case of death [the Red Army man's family] receives his pension,” quoted by Olikov, S., Dezertirstvo v Krasnoi armii i bor'ba s nim (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Shtaba, 1926), 57–58 Google Scholar.

17. For more on the early history of the Red Army, see Kliatskin, S. M., Na zashchite Oktiabria: Organizatsiia reguliarnoi armii i militsionnoe stroitel'stvo v sovetskoi respublike, 1917-1920 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965 Google Scholar; Erickson, John, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Benvenuti, Francesco, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. See Gerhard Ritter, Das Kommunemodell und die Begriindung der Roten Armee im Jahre 1918 (Berlin: Osteuropa Institut, 1965), 196-209.

19. By the end of the civil war, only 34 percent of the total officer corps were military specialists, and nearly 65, 000 men and women passed through the red commander training courses, most of them from working-class and peasant backgrounds. See P. N. Dmitriev, “Organizatsionnye printsipy sovetskogo voennogo stroitel'stva i ikh vliianie na sposoby vooruzhennoi bor'by,” in h istorii grazhdanskoi voiny i interventsii, 1917-1922 (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 196.

20. See Benvenuti, Bolsheviks and the Red Army, for more on the effect of army service on party life.

21. See ibid., chapter 7; and Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 119-136.

22. See Desiatyi s “ezd RKP (b), mart 1921 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Politizdat, 1963), 139-180; 217-336.

23. “Reorganizatsiia Raboche-krest'ianskoi Krasnoi Armii (Materialy k X s” ezdu RKP),” Desiatyi s “ezd, 710-714.

24. Even in demobilization, however, the state tried to look after the interests of former soldiers. Returning veterans were to be restored to their former jobs in factories, in effect displacing the women and youth who had stepped into their places during the civil war.

25. See Cohen, Bukharin, 123-159, for a discussion of the difficulties of adjustment to peacetime society. For an especially pessimistic view of the veterans who could not adjust to the vagaries of life in the NEP years, see a short story by Aleksei Tolstoi about the fate of a former female army commander who is driven to murder by the unbearable conditions of her demobilization life and employment: “Gadiuka,” Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1958-1961)4: 180-221.

26. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Statin (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 35-36. The author is the son of the hero of the revolution. As the source for his father's threatening letter, he cites the unpublished memoirs of Mikhail Poliak, then head of PUR's press department.

27. For more on the reform commission and the details of the reform itself, see Il'ia Berkhin, Voennaia reforma v SSSR (1924-1925) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1958); Kuibyshev was not a member of the original commission but soon replaced Gusev as chairman.

28. See Frunze, M. V., “Lenin i Krasnaia Armiia,” Sputnik politrabotnika 18 (1925): 1–5 Google Scholar. See also Stalin's remarks prior to the trade union discussion at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 when he compared “trade union methods” to the far preferable “military methods” in which coercion played the primary role and persuasion figured only as an auxiliary means. “Nashi raznoglasiia,” reprinted from Pravda (19 January 1921), in Stalin, I. V., Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1952) 5: 4–14 Google Scholar.

29. As a condition for accepting the mixed system, the army high command seems to have demanded that Podvoiskii have nothing to do with military affairs; Vsevobuch was dismantled and Podvoiskii transferred to international sports organizing.

30. See Frunze, “Ob itogakh reorganizatsii Krasnoi Armii,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 6 (1966): 73-74; his “Front i tyl v voine budushchego,” lzbrannyeproizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1957) 2: 133-143; Also P. Karatygin, Obshchie osnovy mobilizatsii promyshlennosti dlia nuzhd voiny (Moscow, 1925); L. Degtiarev, “Oborona strany i narodnoe prosveshchenie,” in Oborona strany i grazhdanskaia shkola (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927), 102, 106.

31. See Karpushin-Zorin, A., “Podgotovka sel'skogo khoziaistva k obespecheniiu armii i naseleniia vo vremia voiny,” Voina i revoliulsiia 7-8 (1925): 114–121 Google Scholar; also his “Mirovaia voina i prodovol'stvennyi vopros,” Voina i revoliutsiia 8 (1926): 80-92; and Ventsov, S., Ndrodnoe khoziaistvo i oborona SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928), 66ff.Google Scholar On private trade, see Smilga's warning to a meeting of state economic officials in February 1924, in Zagorskii, S. O., Ksotsializmu Hi k kapitalizmu? (Paris, 1927), 125–126 Google Scholar; cited in Ball, Alan, Russia's Last Capitalists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 40 Google Scholar.

32. For examples of the appeal of the army model within Stalin's circle, see Rudzutak's speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress, in which he compared decisions of the Central Committee of the party to military commands of the communist army, and Ordzhonikidze's speech in Stalingrad, April 1931, lauding the army as a model for economic development, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, Stat'i i rechi (Moscow: Politizdat, 1956) 2: 304.

33. Trotskii, The Revolution Betrayed, 89-90.

34. The army's political workers had the closest and most prolonged contact with soldiers. For a social and political profile of political workers, see Dunaevskii, Vladimir, “PolitrukKrasnoi Armii i Flota,” Politrabotnik 2-3 (1924): 42–47 Google Scholar. For figures on the party organization in the army, see the tables in O Suvenirov, leg, Kommunisticheskaia partiia—organizator politicheskogo vospitaniia Krasnoi Armii i Flota, 1921-1928 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 112–113 Google Scholar. The overwhelming majority were peasant youth who had entered the party during the civil war. Among these men, at least 40 percent called themselves razryvniki. They explained that they had broken their ties to their former villages, largely because they had come from the poorest sectors of the peasantry or because their households had been devastated during the war and famine.

35. B. Zorin, “Esche o derevenskom voprose v agitatsii i propagande v Krasnoi Armii,” Sputnik politrabotnika 20 (1925): 1; Zorin, “ ‘Derevenskii vopros’ v agitatsii i propagande v Krasnoi Armii,” Sputnik politrabotnika 19 (1925): 4.

36. Leonid Degtiarev, Politrabota v Krasnoi Armii (Leningrad, 1925), 142.

37. V. I. Varenov, Pomoshch’ Krasnoi Armii v razvitii kolkhozonogo stroitel'stva 1929-1933 gg. Po materialam Sibirskogo voennogo okruga (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 136.

38. Report in the archives of the British Foreign Office, cited in Davies, , The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980 Google Scholar, The Socialist Offensive, 280. Also in Haslam, Jonathan, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930-1933: The Impact of the Depression (London: Macmillan, 1983), 121–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar