Bolsheviks in the Armed Forces¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter examines the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary work within the Tsarist armed forces during the First World War, arguing that despite severe repression and the overwhelmingly peasant composition of the army, significant inroads were made, particularly in the Baltic Fleet. The core narrative thrust is that the objective conditions of imperialist war and brutal class oppression created a revolutionary potential which the Bolsheviks sought to organise, not create from nothing.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, it asserts that the Party’s policy was never pacifist abstention but rather to join the army alongside the class and conduct agitation in the barracks and trenches. Second, it argues that the navy, especially the Baltic Fleet, was uniquely receptive because its crews were drawn from skilled industrial workers—engineers, stokers, electricians—who were already touched by pre-war Bolshevik propaganda. Warships, the text notes, were “like floating factories.” The biography of Raskolnikov is offered as a typical example: a poor student radicalised by Marx, an editor of Pravda, exiled, and then a naval cadet who became a key revolutionary organiser.
The chapter draws heavily on the testimony of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, as a paradoxical source of evidence. It cites a detailed police report describing the emergence of independent Social Democratic cells on every major warship, linked by a “Chief Committee of the Kronstadt Military Organisation.” The police report inadvertently confirms that these cells arose “quite independently” due to “favourable soil” among the ratings, and that their leaders actively restrained sailors from “sporadic unrest” to coordinate action with the working class. The chapter uses this police intelligence to validate the Bolsheviks’ own account of their disciplined, patient work.
A notable polemic is directed against two targets. The first is the “Khrushchevite Istoriya,” a Soviet history from the Khrushchev era, which claims over 80 party cells in the Baltic Fleet. The chapter dismisses this as “almost certainly an exaggeration,” arguing the real position was far more complex and that connections with the party leadership were tenuous, as Alexander Shlyapnikov’s memoirs attest. The second, more sustained polemic is against the police mentality itself, which the text mocks for its “unconscious humour” and “demonology.” The Okhrana’s claim that agitators created discontent “for which no other reason could be observed” is ridiculed as “priceless bureaucratic-police wisdom,” which ignores the “atrocious conditions, bad food, autocratic officers, and a bloody and reactionary war” that were the true material causes of the sailors’ “restive mood.” The chapter concludes by citing Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to show that by October 1916, the entire army was in a state of “utter moral disintegration,” with revolutionary elements rising to the surface as general discontent grew.