Report to the extraordinary joint session of the 5th All-Russia Central Executive Committee, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Men’s Deputies, the trade unions and the factory committees, July 29, 1918
Comrades capable of going into each unit and forming a
close nucleus of five to ten members can be found only among the most
conscious workers. And we have them both in Moscow and in Petrograd.
Moscow has already furnished some two or three hundred agitators,
commissars and organizers, a considerable number of whom have gone into
Red Army units. But Moscow will, I am convinced, furnish twice as many
as that. You, the organs of Soviet power, and you, the factory committees, look around you: everywhere, in the districts, in the trade
unions, in the factory committees, you will find comrades who are now
performing work of first-class importance but who are more urgently
needed at the front, for, if we do not overcome the Czechoslovaks, that
work they are doing, and all the forces of the factory committees, the
trade unions and so on, will go for nothing. We must overcome the
Czechoslovaks and White Guards, strangle the serpent on the Volga, so
that all the rest of our work may possess meaning and historical
significance. You are required to furnish some hundreds of agitators –
first-class, militant Moscow workers who will go to the front, join the
units and say: ‘We shall stay with this unit till the war is over: we
shall go into it and carry on agitation both among the masses and with
every individual, for the fate of the whole country and of the
revolution is at stake, and, whether there be an offensive, a victory or
a retreat, we shall be with the unit and shall temper its revolutionary
spirit.’ You must and you will give us such people, comrades! I was
talking yesterday on this very subject with the chairman of the
Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, Comrade Zinoviev,
and he told me that the Petrograd Soviet has already supplied a quarter of its membership, that is, about two hundred, sending them to the
Czechoslovak front as agitators, instructors, organizers, commanders and
fighters. In this lies the fundamental condition for the turn that we
have to bring about. What the old armies provided through months of
prolonged schooling, correction and drill, which mechanically forged a
unit, we have to provide, as I have already said, spiritually and by
ideological means, introducing into our army the best elements of the
working class, and this will fully ensure our victory, despite our
weakness where commanding personnel are concerned.
We have
irreproachable, devoted commanders at the lowest level, but only at the
lowest level, of the military hierarchy. Where higher commanding
personnel are concerned, we have too few officers who are devoted to the
Soviet power and who honestly carry out their obligations: worse still,
as you know, some of them have actually gone over to the enemy’s camp.
There have been several such cases lately. Makhno went over on the Ufa
front, and Bogolovsky, a professor at the General Staff Academy, went
over almost at once when he was appointed to the Yekaterinsburg front.
He has disappeared, which obviously means that he has fled to the
Czechoslovaks. In the North the former naval officer Veselago has sold
himself to the British, and a former member of our White Sea
commissariat has also gone over to the Anglo-French imperialists, and
has been appointed by them to the command of armed forces. The officers
seemingly do not take full account of the acuteness of the situation
which is created for us not only by their past but also by their
present. You all remember how harshly the soldiers and sailors of the
old army dealt with their officers at the critical moments of the
revolution.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch32.htm
The Military Writings of Leon TrotskyVolume 1, 1918
How the Revolution Armed THE CIVIL WAR IN THE RSFSR IN 1918
Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive by David Walters
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