Report on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Red Army¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, Trotsky’s report to the First Congress of the Communist International on 2 March 1919, presents a rigorous defence of the Red Army’s class character and organisational principles against both German Social Democratic fears and the theoretical objections of Karl Kautsky. The core argument is that a revolutionary army cannot be a neutral ‘people’s militia’ but must be a proletarian instrument, forged through compulsory service restricted to workers and peasants who do not exploit labour. Trotsky opens by dismissing German ruling-class nightmares of a Red Guard invasion of East Prussia, clarifying that the Red Guard—improvised partisan detachments of revolutionary workers—had already been superseded. The turning point came when such forces proved impotent against regular German regiments, forcing the Soviet Republic to abandon voluntarism and build a disciplined army on “principles dictated by military science.”
Trotsky grounds this shift in Clausewitz’s axiom that war is the continuation of politics by other means: the army must correspond to the class character of the state. Since the Soviet government is proletarian, the army must be proletarian in social composition. He rejects the democratic demand for a ‘people’s militia’ as impossible under the dictatorship of the proletariat, pointing to the simultaneous existence of hostile class armies within the former tsarist empire—monarchist forces in the Don under Cossack officers, and the Constituent Assembly’s ‘people’s army’ on the Volga, which quickly collapsed and was converted into Admiral Kolchak’s monarchist force. These examples demonstrate that civil war compels armies to be built on class lines alone.
On the question of commanding personnel, Trotsky acknowledges the difficulty of training Red officers from workers and advanced peasants, but notes that the enemy allowed no breathing spell. The solution was to recruit capable elements from the old officer corps, surrounding them with Communist commissars, while promoting the best soldiers from the ranks. He defends this as “socialist militarism” against Kautsky’s accusation that the Bolsheviks were cultivating militarism: if the workers are to hold power, they must learn to use the weapons they forge.
The report concludes with a military assessment: the Red Army has reconquered 700,000 square kilometres and sixteen provinces since August 1918, and its worker-Communist core serves as the “Red Army of the Third International.” Trotsky promises that if the hour strikes and Western brothers call for aid, the Red Army will answer, having become skilled in arms and ready to die for world revolution. The polemic is directed against German Social Democratic leaders Ebert and Scheidemann, whose counter-revolutionary regime Trotsky mocks, and against Kautsky’s theoretical pacifism, which he dismisses as irrelevant to the realities of class war.