Army and Party in Conflict: Soldiers and Commissars in the Prose of Vasily Grossman

Abstract

The Communist Party’s suspicion of Bonapartism and the military’s resentment of Party controls always ran deep. In fact, the sources of conflict go back to the very beginnings of the Soviet regime, when the Bolsheviks had to rely on former tsarist officers in order to survive and finally triumph in the Civil War. Many of these officers were naturally hostile to their new masters, and some may well have done what they could to damage the Bolshevik cause. One recent study claims that desertion of units under the command of ex-tsarist officers in the Civil War was so frequent that it created ‘a deep-seated and long-lasting Bolshevik mistrust of the professional military.’¹ The Party responded during the Civil War itself by creating the position of military commissar to serve as its arm in the field with the authority to override any decisions which were felt to be detrimental to its interests.²