Soviet October Revolution and the Peasants: Russian Land Reform and the First World War
How Did Trotsky Gather the Revolutionary Army?
September 2016
Author Prof. Jin Yan is from the China University of Political Science and Law, and a well-known expert on Russian and East European issues.
Although the peasants’ will in this process was not to physically destroy the landlords, and their main purpose was not to “fight the landlords” but to “divide the land”, the township committee could not restrain the peasants’ actions, and incidents of “peasants being tyrannical towards their masters” occurred every day in the countryside.
“Land distribution” was a popular consensus after 1861
For a long time, under the indoctrination of the “Short Course of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Bolsheviks ) ,” which is regarded as the “Bible of Socialism”, books on the history of the Soviet revolution have been telling such a view: On the night of November 8 , after the victory of the attack on the Winter Palace, the Second Soviet Congress passed two most important decrees – the “Peace Decree” and the “Land Decree”, especially the latter declared: “Immediately abolish the ownership of landlords without compensation, abolish the ownership of land by the bourgeoisie, the royal family, the church and the church. Private ownership of land is declared to be abolished forever, all land belongs to the property of the people, and the land is handed over to the workers for use.” This move solved the desire of the working people for land for thousands of years in one fell swoop, and was warmly supported by the peasants, which led to the triumphant march of the October Revolution. When encountering the enemy’s counterattack, the peasants voluntarily joined the Red Army in order to defend their revolutionary achievements and became an indestructible fortress of the revolution.
But is this the true history ? There are many ambiguities and deliberate concealments in this narrative.
Were the Bolsheviks the only party advocating the distribution of land to the peasants ? Did the peasants obtain land only after the Land Law was announced ?
The land of the service nobles, the predecessors of Russian landlords, was formed by the state allocating public land and the labor force on it. The peasants believed that the nobles’ land originally belonged to the peasants. After the emancipation of serfs in 1861 , the landlords cut off a large amount of good land. The public has always called for the deprivation of landlords’ land. From the names of the “land redistribution” and “black division” organized by the populists in the 1870s, we can know how high the call for “land distribution” was at that time. When the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party was established in 1905 , it announced to the peasants, “The first thing we want to do is to give you freedom over land.” They called for correcting the “existing unfairness of land distribution” in the State Duma and demanded the unconditional and mandatory abolition of large estates through legislation. As long as the parties in the Russian Duma have a slightly left-wing spectrum, from the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, the Social Revolutionary Party, the subsequent organization of Narodniks, which was the People’s Socialists, and the “Labor Party” of the Peasant Party Group, not to mention the social democratic parties, all regarded “fair resolution of the land issue” as their top priority.
According to incomplete statistics, about a dozen parties proposed to fulfill the long-cherished wish of the peasants for many years as soon as possible – “recovering the ceded land”. The so-called “ceded land” refers to the original communal land that was seized by the nobles during the reform in 1861 , and to take these lands back from the landlords and return them to the peasants. At that time, even those right-wing parties that were considered the most conservative did not dare to frankly admit the legitimacy of “landlord land ownership”. They only emphasized that “the landlord economy is highly commercialized” and should not be blindly destroyed, or that this social contradiction should be resolved by “redemption” with less social shock. This proposition was of course opposed by revolutionary parties. In other words, since 1861 , “dividing the landlords’ land” has been a “political correctness” of national consensus, not just the proposition of the Bolsheviks. Lenin admitted that “on the issue of land use forms… the social democrats generally accepted the populist assumption of allocating land to peasants.” The Stolypin reform in 1907 then made one-fifth of the peasants own 17 million plots of land and become “independent farmers”, leading to serious bankruptcy of peasants, and the problem of unfair land distribution in Russia became more prominent.
Lenin’s party did not discuss the question of land distribution on the eve of the revolution
In February 1916, the Russian Social Democratic Party held the last special representative meeting on the land issue before the February Revolution. In response to the changes in the situation after Stolypin’s land reform, Lenin emphasized the necessity of revising the land program at the meeting. Mainly due to the government’s implementation of land reform, Russia’s land relations have undergone great changes since 1906 , so the party’s current program is outdated and no longer in line with Russia’s current system. According to Lenin, Russia’s land issue has undergone fundamental changes in the past decade. Due to the government’s abolition of the village community, a large number of independent farms have emerged. The bankruptcy of the village community system has caused a considerable number of people to go bankrupt due to lack of funds necessary for cultivating the land, becoming proletarians and having revolutionary sentiments. But on the other hand, some relatively wealthy small owners have increasingly become medium-sized and large farmers, and agriculture has gradually been capitalized, forming a reactionary peasant class loyal to the old system, and capital and real estate in rural areas are rapidly concentrating.
Lenin believed that the Russian government “has solved the land problem reasonably, but it has only solved half of the problem for the time being.” The government’s land reform only touched the land owned by the village community. As for the private estates of landlords, official land, royal land, temple land, and church land, they remained intact, which is the weakest aspect of the government’s reform. Social Democrats should pay attention to this. If the government further promotes reforms, that is, transfers large tracts of private land, etc., it will create a large middle-class peasant class for a long time. This class is a reliable pillar of the current political and economic system. Although the government’s adoption of this measure will not prevent the development of the revolution, it can always delay the development of the revolutionary movement to a large extent.
Lenin said that the changes in the Russian land issue forced the party to stipulate in the party program that large tracts of land, official land, royal land, temple land and church land should be confiscated and nationalized. Lenin argued the necessity of revising the land program based on the above reasons. Obviously, at this meeting, like the “land program” of previous party congresses, it was limited to theoretical analysis. It neither raised the issue of leading the peasants’ land reform, nor put forward guiding opinions on the special situation that might arise in the First World War, nor foresaw the coming revolutionary storm. As for advocating the confiscation of large estates, it was a consistent view that many political parties, including liberalism, had no objection to.
Although the conference noticed the problem of rural differentiation, it still affirmed the direction of Stolypin’s land reform, believing that such a trend of development would be unfavorable to the revolutionary situation. It did not clearly realize that “Stolypin’s reform has split the peasants into two opposing groups.” Moreover, the opposition to the “invasion and division of noble estates” organized by the commune in the previous representative conference was not revised. In the past, Russian Marxists believed that “village communities” were an outdated feudal patriarchal organization, and that their dominance in future rural struggles would cause “the wheel of history to turn backwards.” It can be seen that the Bolsheviks were caught off guard by the upcoming “farmers’ land distribution,” and naturally there was no talk of leading it. Moreover, before 1917 , the Bolsheviks had only 4 branches and 494 party members in the countryside. Even in 1917 , after coming out of the underground, there were only 203 branches and 4,122 party members, which could not match the Social Revolutionary Party, which had a million people in the countryside. Therefore, even if it wanted to lead the peasants, it could not compete with them for leadership.
The Provisional Government’s land policy was a “hindsight”
In fact, by the third year of the First World War, that is, 1916 , due to Russia’s successive defeats on the battlefield, public resentment was boiling, the Tsar’s authority was weakened, and it was already a well-known phenomenon that the Tsarist government was ineffective and could not lead the country. In the eyes of the vast majority of peasants, the romantic halo shrouded in the Tsar had dissipated, the legal system in various places was relaxed, and the government had no time to take care of the peasants’ seizure of the landlords’ land, which played a vital role for the peasants. Spontaneous “land grabbing” movements had already arisen in various places. As mentioned earlier, most of the landlords’ land came from the “cutting of land” in the 1861 serfdom reform, while the private peasant land came from the disintegration of the village community by Stolypin’s “police-style reform”. These two reforms of turning public into private under the autocratic system were very unpopular, and the voices of “reversing” and “anti-reform” have always been high. After the weakening of government authority, a wave of using traditional village communities to deprive landlords and “rich peasants” ( private farmers who left the village communities during the Stolypin reforms ) spontaneously emerged . By this time, the landlords had long become “dead tigers”. They either handed over their land to their stewards and fled to the city to become “absentee landlords”, or sold their land at a low price and transferred funds to other areas.
After the February Revolution, the provisional government clearly knew that the first thing to do was to distribute land to the peasants. This was what the Constitutional Democratic Party had promised for many years ! Now it was the turn of liberalism to make great plans for the first time and realize the peasants’ dreams. How could it act rashly ? The land must be distributed, but it cannot be “randomly distributed” without any plan in a state of war. How to distribute it when there is a war at the front ? If the villages and communities in various places were allowed to divide the land on their own initiative before the national measurement and unified planning came out, and the land system was changed without authorization, it would inevitably cause double tension and turmoil in the countryside and the front, which would directly affect the outcome of the war.
So the new government asked the peasants to be patient until the dust of the war settled and the provisional government could gain a firm foothold. Then it convened a constitutional assembly and conducted a nationwide survey, which would surely fulfill the long-cherished wish of Russian peasants that had been waiting for hundreds of years. In its decision on the land issue issued on March 19 , the provisional government said: “The land issue cannot be solved by any preemptive means… The land issue should be solved through the enactment of laws by the people’s representative bodies.” It required the peasants to “divide the land” within the framework of the law.
The Social Revolutionaries, who represented the interests of the peasants, had stopped burning the landlords’ estates and distributing land, and called for “not turning the great cause of land socialization into arbitrary private occupation of land”. Chernov said that it was not possible to seize land by unorganized means, and he called on the Soviet of Peasants’ Representatives to seize land in an organized manner. Chernov opposed “self-seizure of land”, and the peasants’ attack on landlords and landowners was given the title of anarchism. He called on the peasants to wait patiently for the convening of the Constituent Assembly. At the first All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets in early 1917 , the Social Revolutionaries agreed with the Provisional Government’s proposition that “the solution of the land issue is the matter of the future Constituent Assembly” and that self-seizure of land would be regarded as illegal. Only the Bolsheviks, who wanted to seize power in the chaos, incited the peasants not to wait a moment and promised to support the immediate launch of the land distribution movement.
In the land distribution movement that had already begun in different regions, latecomers were afraid that others would take the lead, and those who got the land were also afraid that they would not be recognized, so the peasants’ emotions became radicalized. In the first two months after the February Revolution, the peasants placed their hopes on the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government’s attitude of delaying the resolution of the land issue under the pretext of influencing the war made the peasants transfer their hopes to the Socialist Revolutionary Party. However, when they learned that the Socialist Revolutionary Party asked the peasants to wait for the convening of the Constituent Assembly with a restrained attitude, and when the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Mensheviks accused “self-seizure of land” as an anarchist illegal act, the peasants began to abandon them and look for more radical spokespersons. The Bolsheviks’ propaganda to encourage the peasants to divide the land in the chaos worked. In those places close to the front and the city, many people changed from supporters of the Socialist Revolutionary Party to supporters of Lenin’s party. The party advocating legal land distribution delayed the opportunity, allowing the radical Bolsheviks to take advantage of the loophole. In their view, the land movement provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the revolution.
How Dis Lenin Use the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Hesitation
Lenin saw the hope of seizing power in the turbulent land distribution wave. So the Bolsheviks quickly adjusted their strategy and proposed to satisfy the peasants’ desire for land, use the “land movement” to create a favorable opportunity for revolution, and turn it into a powerful lever for launching the revolution. Lenin knew that putting forward simple, catchy and easily accepted slogans by the masses was a skill in struggle. Lenin denounced those parties that regarded the provisional government as a “revolutionary government” and demanded that the people obey as “running dogs of the bourgeoisie” and suppressed revolutionary actions. Lenin said that the people’s own seizure of land was a natural expression of the pursuit of social justice by the working people who had been cruelly exploited for a long time, and it was an outburst of the rebellious spirit of the exploited working people. Only the Bolsheviks could reflect and represent the will of the people, be responsible for the revolutionary creativity of the masses, and use the revolutionary creativity of the masses to fundamentally change the social system.
Lenin refuted the Provisional Government’s statement, “We want the peasants to get the landlords’ land immediately without delay for a month, a week, or a day ! ” Lenin’s words were cheered by the peasants. In order to seize the forefront of the movement, the Bolsheviks turned the slogans of the Social Revolutionary Party into their own slogans, and turned the distrust of Stolypin’s reforms in 242 peasant mandates in the Duma into their own demands. The mandate mainly put forward three demands: First, eliminate private ownership of land. Second, prohibit wage labor. Third, distribute all land equally among the peasants. In the eyes of the peasants, Stolypin gave Russia “dirty freedom” in 1907 , and only the powerful and the rich enjoyed this freedom, and they wanted to carry out a land revolution against “dirty freedom”.
At the enlarged meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks at the end of August 1917 , it was proposed to recognize the “fait accompli of the peasants’ seizure of land” on the land issue. They realized that whoever resisted in this situation would lose the support of the masses, and “before the convening of the Constituent Assembly, the land should be handed over to the Peasant Committee for management.” However, the party had almost no rural party members at that time, and its influence on the countryside was negligible. Originally, Russian peasants had their own grassroots organizational resources, namely traditional village communities. In the near anarchy at the time, peasants from all over the country used village communities as organizations to rob and distribute land on their own. In the process of peasants seizing land, except for casualties caused by excessive acts, the main purpose of the struggle was not to endanger the lives of landowners.
Russian peasants “care more about land distribution” and treat different lands differently. In the eyes of peasants, the legitimacy of land bought and sold in Russia is higher than inherited land. People try to distinguish between “inherited land and purchased land. They believe that inherited land is less sacred because the initial acquisition of land is most likely an act of force. In contrast, land purchased by individuals is legal. Even the “village assembly resolution” spontaneously generated by peasants agrees that those purchased lands should be compensated. Representatives of the Social Revolutionary Party believe that it is inhumane to let landowners ( who have no labor experience ) suffer poverty and hunger, so they suggest providing a lifelong pension, but never compensate for this type of land ownership. This suggestion was welcomed by the Social Revolutionary Party and peasants.
It was neither the Provisional Government nor the Soviets that gave the peasants the land, but rather the spontaneous land seizure movement of traditional village communities.
Following the first wave of movement in 1905 , the second wave of land distribution movement began in 1916. The village committees in various provinces demanded that “all cultivated land and pastures” owned by landlords, the state, the royal family, the church, and the government be transferred to the village committee, and that “all farm tools, livestock, and property of the landlords should be handed over to the village committee”. The demand for land immediately emerged after the relaxation of imperial power. The peasants proposed to distribute royal land, state-owned land, large estate land, and “land not owned by landlords”. The most important thing was to restore the authority of the “Stolypin peasants” ( another name for independent peasants ) of the commune and reaffirm the rural commune. This fighting spirit emerged from the internal source of the countryside itself. Although the “spontaneous struggle for land seizure” emerged at that time, in fact, “the invasion and division of the noble estates were organized and coordinated by the rural commune.”
Although the peasants’ will in this process was not to destroy the landlords physically, and their main purpose was not to “beat the local tyrants” but to “divide the land”, the township committee could not restrain the peasants’ actions, and “peasants’ tyranny against the masters” happened every day in the countryside. In a letter to his friend Sheremetyev, the chief noble of Mozharsk County, Moscow Province, Valzhenevsky described the situation in the countryside after the February Revolution, “the catastrophe and terror of 1905-06 have appeared ” , “peasants are asking for land again”, and this is their “only thing to consider, which is how to occupy other people’s things more and without sanctions”, “it is impossible to refuse such a ‘request’”, “everything left to us by our fathers and grandfathers will be destroyed, robbed and deprived”.
The peasants exercised their revolutionary power without official permission. 86.6% of the township peasant executive committees adhered to the revolutionary position, 3.6% stayed out of the class struggle, and 9.8% of the committees defended the interests of the landlords. The peasant organizations established in the summer of 1917 were composed of poor and middle peasants, who completed 10,210 of the total 16,298 revolutionary actions. The 58 million acres of land owned by the Russian nobles had been divided up. The land of the former tsarist officials, which was not protected by the fall of their government, was occupied by the local village communities. The estate of Korvin Litvitsky, chairman of the Upper Autonomous Bureau of Korchev County, was burned by the peasants. He was also burned to death while trying to save his property. The forests were cut down. The property of the former Minister of Internal Affairs Protopopov was looted. By 1918 , the peasants in 36 counties had seized more than 86% of the landlords’ land, 80% of the farm tools and equipment, and the arable land owned by the peasants increased from 80% to 96.8% .
The characteristics of this struggle were to seize the land of landlords and strike against independent households with the village community as the bond. The peasants were mostly led by the village community power organ – the village meeting and the township committee composed of representatives of each village. In many places, such meetings had not been held for a long time as the functions of the village community declined, but now they have regained their vitality. By March 21 , 1917 , township meetings had been established in 19 of the 26 townships in Eratomsk County, Tambov Province. By June , all townships in Vyatka Province had held township meetings. In late August , 220 of the 253 townships in Nizhnegorod Province had held township meetings. The bond of small communities became an organizational tool for the land seizure movement.
The spearhead of the peasant struggle was first directed at the landlords, and secondly at the independent farmers who benefited from Stolypin’s reforms – “village communes separated”. The land committees of Samara and Saratov provinces declared: “Family farms and independent farmers are economically unsuitable because they destroy the ownership form of land.” In the main agricultural areas, farmers who took spontaneous action implemented the forced elimination of the independent farmer system. For example, some townships in Vladimir stipulated that “all independent farms and individual plots, whether allotments or purchased land, shall be incorporated into the village community. In the spring of this year (1917 ) , the township land committee has ordered that all the directors of independent farms and individual plots shall move into the village community. All buildings shall be demolished after autumn.” In many areas, the independent peasant system was almost completely eliminated. In Samara Province, its proportion dropped from 19% to 0.1%; in Saratovo Province, it dropped from 16.4% to 0.01%; in Stavropol Province, it dropped from 24.9% to 0.4%; in the Don River Region, it dropped from 10.4% to 0.6%; in the Central Black Soil Region, it dropped from 4.1-10% to 0.1-1.2%; in the western and northwestern regions, some people with low agricultural status still have some independent peasants, but the number has also been greatly reduced. In short, throughout Russia, “independent farm owners began to ‘voluntarily’ return to the redistributed communes, and those who were stubborn were forced to take back their land.”
Thus, from February 1917 to the summer of 1918 , the land seized by the communes consisted of 70 million mu from independent peasants, about 42 million mu from landlords, and about 4.78 million mu of land from independent peasants ( about 37% of the peasants’ land in Russia ) was merged and redistributed by the village communes. The first result of the land revolution was the elimination of landlord ownership, but the most significant consequence was the elimination of independent peasants by the village communes, which wiped out the achievements of Stolypin’s reform. I’m afraid not everyone knows that more land was seized from peasants and redistributed during the land revolution than from large estates. This is because, first, the “land revolution” in Russia was completed under the leadership of the village communes. Second, the peasants were not very interested in the “dead tiger” aristocrats, and the main “revolution” was the “life” of independent peasants. During the entire movement, there was no leadership from the Bolsheviks, who were just happy to see it happen.
The division of land in the rear agrarian regions directly affected the outcome of the battle
In fact, the “spontaneous land grabbing” movement affected the army at the front the most. In 1917 , the total population of Russia was 153.6 million, and the number of people serving in the navy and army was 11 million, accounting for 7.2% of the national population . The role of the army was much greater than the proportion of the population they actually occupied. Among them, 60-66% were farmers, 16-20% were proletarians, 3.5-6% were factory workers, and 10-20% were urban middle class. Among them, there were 6.6 million to 7.26 million farmers, 1.76 million to 2.2 million proletarians ( including 400,000 to 650,000 factory workers ) , and 1.1 million to 2.2 million urban middle class . In terms of ethnic composition, there are 5.8 million Russians , accounting for 53% of the total , 2.35 million Ukrainians and 308,000 Belarusians, 600,000 Poles , 500,000-600,000 Tatars , 400,000 Jews, 300,000 Armenians , 200,000 Georgians , 100,000 Moldavians, and 100,000 Balts .
At that time, the war between Russia and Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria was in full swing. Because the struggle for land in the rear was “spontaneous” and not authorized by the government, it led to an uneven distribution of joy and sorrow, which led to the demoralization of the soldiers in the front. When the news of the “land seizure” in the rear came, the troops were in an uproar. The soldiers said indignantly: “We are fighting for our lives in the front, but the rear is snatching the fruits of victory. When the war is over, there will be no share for us ! ” The machine gun regiment in Orenburg even drew lots to decide which battalion would go to the front line.
As a result, the “land seizure” in the rear and the war on the front formed an interaction. The front fought and the land was divided in the rear, which shook the morale of the army and caused a “war-weariness and anti-war” sentiment on the front. In addition, the Bolsheviks had a strong infiltration in the army. All units above the company had branches set up by the Bolsheviks. Under their slogan of “making our government lose the imperialist war”, truces, blank shots, and parties with the “enemy army” were very common on the front line. The Bolsheviks encouraged soldiers to desert, hate discipline, disobey orders, regard superiors as enemies, and the propaganda of everyone going home to divide the land was very successful. Tens of millions of troops collapsed unstoppably.
The soldiers said, “If they want to fight, let them fight. Why should we die for the ruling class? We don’t want to die in the trenches. Give us back our land first, take the land from the landlords, temples, and royal families and give it to us.” “Put your bayonet in the trenches and go home quickly.” Everyone knows that a general’s success is the result of the death of thousands of soldiers. What can those piled-up corpses bring us ? “We want to go home, we want freedom and land. Why should we become disabled ? Overthrow the officers, smash the company’s money box and go home. The government said that it would fight the war until victory. Who needs those straits?” The number of deserters in the Russian army reached 2 million. “Because the soldiers are extremely sensitive to the actions of the rear without their participation in the redistribution of land” is directly related to the morale of the army. Even the command system of the Russian army requires that either the “distribution of land without order” be stopped, or “the written consent of the junior officers must be obtained, or they must participate in person.” It is even suggested that soldiers be given a four to six-week vacation for this purpose.
Menshevik Tsereteli, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the United Provisional Government, said in a report to provincial officials that it was not that the new regime did not support the distribution of land, but that the unauthorized seizure of land “would bring countless disasters to the army, the country and the country itself…” It can be said that even without the October Revolution, as long as the “land seizure and distribution movement” in the rear did not stop, the defeat of the Russian army was a foregone conclusion. If the government could not quell this key link that shook the morale of the army, it would not be able to stop the collapse of the army on the front line and the mass desertion of soldiers. The defeat of the Russian army in World War I was irreversible.
Since there was no nationwide “equalization of land rights” after the revolution, if we regard this large-scale land adjustment before the October Revolution as “land reform”, we can say that the land reform in Russia preceded the revolution, and was not led by the Bolsheviks, but was completed spontaneously by the peasants, which directly led to Russia’s defeat. The Bolsheviks’ exaggerated promises made the peasants fascinated and suddenly regarded them as the party that understood the peasants the most. However, when their propaganda purpose of instigating the revolution was achieved, the promised time was over. The peasants who had just completed the land distribution movement in 1918 immediately faced the cruel blow of the new regime’s “surplus grain collection system”.
It is a myth that farmers voluntarily joined the revolutionary army
In January 1918 , the decree on conscription was promulgated, but almost no one responded. In the summer, the number of applicants reached only 10,000 , and most of them were unemployed workers. In March 1918 , Trotsky was appointed as the Military Appointment Commissioner and Chairman of the Supreme Military Committee. His first task was to create an army out of thin air. Trotsky admitted that he had to break the propaganda system he had formed, restore compulsory conscription, and conduct forced mobilization.
Trotsky said: “Without punishment, the army cannot be established. Without the death penalty, there is no way to let a large number of people fight to the death.” The Bolsheviks’ responsibility to socialism is to maintain the “iron dictatorship” and “political monopoly” by all means at their disposal.
Trotsky strictly prohibited the “soldier democracy” promoted by the Bolsheviks in the Tsarist army in 1917. Trotsky even said bluntly: “The organizational principles of the Red Army are very similar to those of the Tsarist army.”
In fact, the only difference seems to be that the former is more strict than the latter, although it imitates the latter in its coercive nature. The anti-war soldiers and Red Guards used by the Bolsheviks to launch a coup in the city could disperse the women’s battalion and non-commissioned officers in the Winter Palace, but it was proven useless when the war really started. The Red Army, established in 1918 , was formed according to the compulsory conscription system of the Tsarist Russia from the beginning, and in the civil war, almost all the front-line operations were commanded by the old Tsarist officers. In 1920 , there were 70,000 old officers in the Red Army . Of course, the Bolsheviks did not trust them, so they invented the political commissar system. This can be said to be the only difference from the old Russian army.
However, the political commissars at that time were not the kind of roles described later as full-time positive propaganda and education and political mobilization. Their actual identity was “military supervisors”, that is, supervising those old officers who were still in command positions. The political commissars were authorized to execute officers immediately if they found any unusual movements. At the same time, the relatives of the officers were also held hostage in the rear. Once there was any unusual movement, not only would the political commissars immediately shoot them, but their relatives would also die in the rear. This ensured that the officers could only serve the new regime.
In June 1919 , Stalin, commissioned by the National Defense Committee, published an article “To the Army in Petrograd”, announcing a series of strict regulations. All the families of those who defected to the White Army, no matter where they lived, should be arrested immediately. The land assets of these traitors should be immediately confiscated and never returned. The whole country was ordered to execute them on the spot, and the families of the traitor commanders were held hostage. The personnel in the Red Army “even took a step towards the White Army” and they would be shot on the spot.
This was the case with officers, not to mention ordinary soldiers. A large number of peasant children in the Soviet Red Army were forcibly recruited like the Tsarist soldiers, which was completely different from the previous workers’ Red Guards and the anti-war soldiers who shot their former officers under “soldier democracy”. Originally, according to the ideology of the European left, the standing army was to be abolished after the revolution and replaced with “arming the people” based on the citizens’ right to bear arms. Engels once pointed out that the United States “has no standing army except for a few soldiers who monitor the Indians”, and said admiringly: “If every citizen has a gun and 50 rounds of bullets at home, which government dares to infringe on political freedom ? ” ( Volume 21 of “Collected Works of Marx and Engels” , page 395. )
So some people say: Marx and Engels never talked about “people’s arming”, they only talked about “armed people”. After the “October Revolution”, it was based on this concept that the Soviet regime also once began to disband the army, demobilize officers and soldiers, and only retain the Red Guards of militia nature. Later, it was found that the “armed people” did not work, so in 1918 , the “Decree on the Establishment of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” was promulgated. The decree still defined the Red Army as a temporary army and promised to “replace the standing army with the whole people’s armament in the near future.” Although this originally temporary army was said to have a different “purpose”, its “organizational principles” were no different from the Tsarist army, as Trotsky said.
In fact, the so-called compulsory military service system is a compulsory conscription system ( although in peacetime, especially under various preferential arrangements, the compulsory nature is not obvious ) .
In ancient Rome, it was called “blood tax”, that is, military “service” is not essentially a “voluntary right” just like paying taxes. Although this system does not exclude people from voluntarily joining the army, it does not rely on volunteers to fight.
At that time, due to the general shutdown of factories in Russia during the war, some unemployed workers volunteered to join the army. However, Russia’s population structure determined that the soldiers mainly came from farmers. They were basically conscripted. During the civil war, due to the implementation of the surplus grain collection system and other reasons, the relationship between the Soviet regime and the peasants was tense. Lenin once said, ” Before 1921 , peasant uprisings could be said to be a common phenomenon.”
This is not a revolutionary uprising against the Tsar or the “White Bandits”, but an anti-Soviet uprising. So much so that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” at that time was publicly promoted as a response to the “bourgeoisie”, but internal occasions often bluntly stated that the “dictatorship” was to deal with the peasants. Lenin once said in an internal meeting: “We never talk about freedom, but only about the dictatorship of the proletariat ! We implement the dictatorship of the proletariat because it is a regime that serves the interests of the proletariat. Because the working class in the original sense of Russia, that is, the industrial working class, is only a minority ( among the Russians ) , and the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is for the interests of this minority.” “The peasants are psychologically opposed to our system ; their way of thinking is petty-bourgeois ; the counter-revolutionary leaders Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel found supporters among them.” “We told the peasants: Either you obey us, or we will think that you are declaring a civil war with us, then you are our enemy, and we will respond with a civil war.”
Under such circumstances, how could we talk about peasants enthusiastically joining the army and volunteering to fight for the Soviets ? On the contrary, mutinies and rebellions by Red Army troops composed of peasants who were conscripted into the army were common scenes in that civil war. Especially in the later period of the civil war, as the anti-Soviet armies led by former Tsarist generals were defeated one after another and the Soviet-Polish War ended, the civil war continued for another year. At this time, the Soviet army mainly faced peasant rebellions, including a large number of mutinous Red Army troops.
So how did the Soviet Union win the civil war ?
There are many reasons. The civil war at that time was not a so-called “red – white” “two-side” war. The forces that confronted Lenin’s regime were many independent and often hostile forces. As Russian scholar Iskendev said, “The lack of communication, mutual suspicion and distrust made the White Guard movement have the typical characteristics of internal secret opposition. For example, two opposing factions emerged in the volunteers in southern Russia – the pro-Alexeev faction and the pro-Kornilov faction. There were often “secret frictions and struggles” between the two factions. Strictly speaking, Russia in 1918 was a state of fragmentation and division. The newly born Soviet Union may not be strong in the face of all enemies at first, but it was the strongest from the beginning in the face of each enemy. The inability of her many opponents to act together was the basic condition for her to flatten the heroes one by one, and this had nothing to do with the support of the peasants.