The Red Army to the General Staff of the Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is a short address by Leon Trotsky, in his capacity as People’s Commissar of War and Naval Affairs, to the Red Army on the occasion of the third World Congress of the Communist International, convening in Moscow in June 1921. Its core narrative thrust is to frame the Red Army’s military struggle as the indispensable material precondition for the political and strategic work of the world revolution. Trotsky directly links the soldiers’ sacrifice on multiple fronts—the Volga, the Obi, the Northern Dvina, the Neva, the Berezina, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Kuban—to the very possibility of the Comintern delegates assembling in safety. The Red Army is not merely a national defence force; it is the armed shield of the global proletarian vanguard.
The key claim is that the Red Army’s three-and-a-half years of continuous combat have “defended the first Toilers’ Republic in the world” against “the brigands and oppressors of all countries,” thereby securing Moscow as the “fortress of the world proletariat.” The address presents Soviet Russia as the sole redoubt from which the international working class can “elaborate the further ways and methods of waging the struggle against capitalist coercion.” The evidence is implicit but powerful: the very fact that the Congress can meet in the Red capital is proof of the army’s success. Trotsky’s language is deliberately martial and fraternal, casting the Red soldiers, commanders, and commissars as “brothers in struggle” alongside the foreign delegates.
Historically, the address sits at a critical juncture. The immediate threat of the White armies and foreign intervention had been largely defeated by 1921, but Soviet Russia remained devastated, isolated, and under severe economic pressure. The Comintern’s third congress was tasked with reassessing revolutionary strategy after the failed uprisings in Germany and elsewhere. Trotsky’s polemical target is twofold. Externally, he denounces the “uninterrupted predatory attempts” of international capital. Internally, the address implicitly argues against any conception of the Red Army as a merely national or defensive institution; it insists on its identity as the “General Staff of the Revolution,” a force whose duty extends beyond Russia’s borders to the entire world proletariat. The chapter is a concise, stirring piece of revolutionary morale-building that subordinates military history to the political imperatives of the international class war.