The Military Opposition

Abstract

Before the seizure of power, the aim of the Bolsheviks had been the destruction of the imperial army from within. The Petrograd Soviet had already started the process, with its famous Order No. 1. The network of army committees which it set up in all military units enabled bolshevik influence to grow. It was not, apparently, the aim of the Bolsheviks ever to use the existing army as the basis for a new army. The ‘armed people’ of the future socialist state was identified with the Red Guards, while the disintegrating army was looked upon as a mere reservoir of manpower on which the Red Guards could draw.¹ But the destruction of the army and the attempt to replace it by the Red Guard were not merely tactical moves. The existence of a standing army was inconsistent with socialist principles, which demanded an armed people’s militia in its place. At a military conference of delegates from the front held in June 1917 the speakers demanded the ‘immediate destruction of standing armies everywhere and their replacement by a national militia and the universal arming of the people’. Lenin had repeatedly asserted that the replacement of the army by a militia was bolshevik policy.²