Order of the Day Number Eighty-Three to the Red Army and Navy [1]¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter reproduces Order of the Day Number Eighty-Three, issued by Leon Trotsky on 9 March 1919, which conveys to the Red Army and Navy the fraternal greetings adopted by the newly founded Communist International. The core argument is that the Red Army is not a national military force in the conventional sense, but the armed vanguard of the world proletariat, tasked with establishing a World Soviet Republic that will abolish war and class enmity permanently. The order announces that the First Congress of the Communist International, meeting in Moscow with delegates from Europe and America, has resolved to send “heartiest greetings” and “fullest hopes for a complete victory” to the Red Army in its struggle against world imperialism. Trotsky commands all commissars to publicise this message to every squad, detachment, squadron, battery, and ship, insisting that every soldier and sailor will hear it with “merited pride” and will not fail the expectations of the international working class.
The chapter’s editorial note provides crucial historical context: this order is one of many documents proving that Lenin and his co-thinkers never conceived of the Red Army as anything other than “the military arm of the world working class in its struggle for emancipation.” It records that the day after the First Congress adjourned, 7 March 1919, was declared a public holiday, with a Red Army parade in Red Square and mass meetings across the country—a pattern repeated throughout Lenin’s lifetime. The note thus underscores the organic link between the Third International’s congresses and sustained propaganda and agitation within the Red Army’s ranks.
The polemical thrust is implicit but unmistakable: the order is a direct repudiation of any conception of the Red Army as a merely defensive or national force. It asserts that the army’s ultimate purpose is international revolutionary struggle, not the defence of existing state borders. The text also implicitly argues against the Second International’s collapse into national chauvinism during the First World War, presenting the Communist International as the authentic, revolutionary alternative. The order’s language—“world imperialism,” “World Soviet Republic,” “world working class”—frames the Russian Civil War as a single front in a global class war, demanding that the Red Army see itself as answerable to an international revolutionary authority, not merely to the Soviet state.