Abstract
Long before the communists seized power in Russia in 1917 they had made their views on the regular army well known. They thought of regular armies as strongholds of reaction and as instruments of oppression in the hands of the class ruling in a state.
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References
F. Engel’s (Engels), Izbrannye voennye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1957), p. xiv.
V. I. Lenin o vaine, armii i voennoi nauke (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1957), I, p. 202.
Ibid., II, p. 45.
Kommunistischeskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v resoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1954: 7th ed.), Part I, p. 41.
Mikhail Vasil’evich Frunze, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), I, p. 47.
Deviatyi s’ezd RKP (b), Mart-april’ 1920 goda: protokoly (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1960), pp. 428-430.
KPSS o Vooruzhennykh Silakh Sovetskogo Soiuza: Sbornik Dokumentov, 1917–1958 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdtatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958), p. 49.
Deviatyi s’ezd RKP (b) …, op. cit., p. 429.
Sergei Ivanovich Gusev, Grazhdanskaia voina i Krasnaia armiia (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1958), pp. 125-126.
Frunze, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1957), II, p. 20.
KPSS o Vooruzhennykh Silakh …, op. cit., p. 192.
Frunze, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, op. cit., II, pp. 61-92.
Vseobuch=vseobshchee obuchenie, or universal education.
Frunze, Sobranie sochinenii, op. cit., II, p. 8.
Frunze, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, op. cit., II, pp. 210-211.
Ibid., pp. 220-237.
This did not prevent Tukhachevskii from calling for an international general staff of the revolution and for support to neighboring proletarians in revolt against their “bourgeoisie.” See Milkhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevskii, Voina klassov: Stat’i 1919–1920 gg. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1921), passim., especially pp. 51, 137, and 140.
For the decision Frunze made when in power, see Il’ia Borisovich Berkhin, Voennaia reforma v SSSR (1924–1925 gg.) (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo, 1958).
Frunze, Sobranie sochinenii, op. cit., III, p. 277.
Among those who have been fascinated is George F. Kennan. In the Reith Lectures, he suggested the militia idea as a suitable plan for the defense of Central Europe, presumably against the regular Soviet Army and other forces of the Warsaw Pact. See his Russia, the Atom and the West (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 63 ff. Kennan suggested the creation of forces of “a territorial-militia type… rather than regular military units.” He did not suppose that militia would’ be able to keep the regular divisions from the East from overruning Central Europe, but he did think it would enable the occupied Europeans to say to the Soviet occupiers, “Your stay among us will not be a happy one.” The militia idea has since cropped up in Cuba, where Castro has built a large militia force, and in China, where Mao once suggested that everyone in China join the militia. See my “Militia in the Commune Era,” Revue Militaire Générale (March, 1962), pp. 311-324, and Ralph A. Powell, “Everyone a Soldier: The Communist China Militia,” Foreign Affairs, XXXIX (October, 1960), pp. 100-111. The former premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita S. Khrushchev, has also brought up the militia concept. In a speech on January 14, 1960 (as reported in Pravda, January 15, 1960), he talked of his plan for general and complete disarmament. He said that if the pian were not accepted by the West within a period of four years, the Soviet armed forced would switch over to the territorial (militia) principle of organization. This, he said, would be a repetition of what was done by Lenin in the early days of the Soviet Republic, “but under different conditions and on a slightly different level.” The four year period mentioned by Khrushchev has come and gone (as has, indeed, Khrushchev himself) and the Soviet Army has not transformed itself into a militia type army — nor is it likely to do so.
L. Trotskii (Trotsky), Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia: Na voennoi rabote (Moscow: Vyshii voennyi redaktsionnyi sovet, 1925), I, pp. 185–195.
See N. Galay, “The Problem of Quantity and Quality in the Soviet Armed Forces,” Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, October, 1956, pp. 3–14, and my “Die künftige Sowjetarmee: Elite oder Miliz?” Wehrkunde, March, 1960, pp. 26-29.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Jacobs, W.D. (1969). The Regular Army and Militia. In: Frunze: The Soviet Clausewitz 1885–1925. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9112-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9112-8_11
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