You choose the administration of a trade union from among its most worthy and reliable activists, and to them you entrust the appointment of all the necessary employees and technical specialists. Analyzes the revolutionary upsurge on the land and in the factories leading to the Spanish civil war and how the Stalinists' course ensured a fascist victory. Following the entirely false account in Deutscher’s Prophet Armed Monty Johnstone reproduces all the old nonsense that Trotsky’s views on the permanent revolution derived from Parvus, the famous German Social Democrat, whose slogan “No Tsar but a workers’ government”, Lenin criticised on a number of occasions. How the Revolution Armed: Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky: 1918: the Founding of the Red Army (v. 1) [Leon Trotsky] on Amazon.com. Small units of Communists ensured the carrying-out of this mobilization. You yourselves understand this just as well as I do. No, this is no such thing. They think that drawing yesterday’s saboteurs into technical specialist posts threatens the very foundations of the Soviet regime. The fight against Dutov, the ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host, was carried on with persistence all through 1918, in the southern part of the country beyond the Volga and in the Urals. Those who fought magnificently and heroically against the Kaledinites, Dutovites and Kornilovites, those who defeated these enemies of ours who were technically on the same level, gave in and felt utterly helpless when they came up against the German war machine. 14. There had never in history been such a case of a mighty offensive by an oppressed class which in such a planned and rapid way seized power from the possessing and ruling classes in all parts of the country, spreading its rule from Petrograd and Moscow into every corner, every cranny of Russia. The resistance of all those technical, administrative and official elements was overcome. Creating a body of revolutionary commanders is a most difficult task. The difficulties confronting us can be divided into two categories – those which are objective in character and those which are subjective. The centralized army was declared to be the army of an imperialist state. We took Kazan on September 10, 1918, and recovered Simbirsk on the following day. Party organizations, committees and cells will everywhere be obliged to take care that the elements entering the Army are of good quality in the political and moral sense, and that when they have joined the Army they do not lose their ties with the mass of the workers but are brought under systematic influence from the latter. Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1st Soviet Commissar of Military + Naval Affairs, Volume 1 (The Civil War in the RSFSR in 1918: Revolt of the Left SRs) Leon Trotsky: 1918 - How The Revolution Armed/Volume I (Revolt of the Left SRs) [12] And this fact, that the working class cannot simply take over the old machinery, found expression here in two forms: in the distrust shown by the mass of the workers and the Soviets towards the old government officials, and in the hatred shown by the old officialdom towards the new master, the working class. The revolution was entirely based upon mobility, the bold stroke, and maneuvering. History has put sharply to the working class, to us as its representatives, the question: can you cope with all the difficulties which preceding decades and centuries have piled up for you, here and there tying them in Gordian knots, elsewhere offering them to you in the form of a quite chaotic state of ruin extending all over Russia? of the front. Within a few weeks the Red Army defending Petrograd had tripled in size and outnumbered Yudenich three to one. No. The superiority of our propaganda lies in its content. Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky Volume 1, 1918 How the Revolution Armed Read This In E-Book Format! They were chosen from among the revolutionary workers, the Communists, and in part also, in the first period, the Left SRs (until July 1918). [The Czechoslovak Corps was formed in Tsarist Russia from among prisoners of war. Instead of: ‘but only in replacing them, whenever necessary, by elected boards, mainly as organs of supervision’, it appears as: ‘and in replacing them, everywhere and anywhere, by elected boards’. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921, By Isaac Deutscher The Army was built on the voluntary principle. The conference is meeting at a time of profound internal crisis in our generally critical epoch, and at a moment when our mood cannot be one of enthusiasm and militancy. They were, predominantly, the literate sons of peasant families of the kulak type. Leon Trotsky—once a vocal critic of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party—joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917. But in order to create such: an army we need qualified specialists, including former generals. Regiments, divisions and corps elected their deputies to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, alongside the working class. Stalin had played only a minor and peripheral part in the events of October 1917, despite later Soviet propaganda, and so set out to eliminate those who had. He spent much of two years in an armoured train visiting the troops. Nevertheless, the hatred felt for them by the rank-and-file masses was still intense, and constituted one of the sources of the guerrilla attitude: within the framework of a small local unit there was no need for qualified military workers. Now, comrades, having overcome the political obstacles, we are faced in real earnest by all these organizational difficulties. The oppositionist ‘Left’ tendencies (which were actually intellectual and peasant tendencies) in the sphere of building the Army tried to find a generalized theoretical formula to serve their purposes. The Military Organization of our Party began in 1905 and played a considerable role in developing the revolutionary movement in the army. We realise, of course, that, in the end, the proletariat will win: nevertheless, it will not go for nothing, but will be a black mark against us, if at this moment our Party and our class fail to stand the test. Just as in dead machines, so in these technicians, engineers, doctors, teachers and former officers there is embodied part of our people’s national capital, which we must exploit and utilise if we want, in general, to solve the fundamental problems that face us. The revolution grew directly out of the war, and one of its most important slogans was for the ending of the war, which corresponded to the phenomenon of war-weariness and loathing for war. Even if temporarily driven from power, the proletariat would still be the leader of the immense majority of the laboring masses of the country, and a fresh oncoming wave would inevitably restore it to power. How the Revolution Armed. Now they call utopian our socialist prospect, our Communist programme. The offensive of General Hoffmann helped us to get down to serious work for the creation of a Red Army. On the other hand, there have come in careerists, intriguers, yesterday’s failures, those who, under the old regime, were not good enough for the job. ], [A verst is 3,500 feet, or 1,067 meters. Here we can and must create a foundation such that any attempt to transform the Red Army into an instrument of counter-revolution will prove fruitless. The decree about this was confirmed by the All-Russia CEC on April 22, 1918, but an instruction to the same effect had already been issued somewhat earlier by the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. This was necessary, and therefore right. This report was published separately as Trud, distsiplina, i potyadok spasut Sovetskuyu Respubliku (Work, discipline and order will save the Soviet Republic), Moscow 1918, by the publishing house Zhizn i Znanie (Life and Knowledge), as no.175 in their ‘low-cost library’. The revolution must, in conformity with its whole nature, give up for good and all not only positional warfare but also the centralized army. He who desires the end must desire the means. We consider that, since the further development of international relations may, in the very near future, once more subject us to severe military trials, we must forthwith create firm and reliable cadres for the Army, and these cannot be formed on the principle of universal compulsory recruitment because we shall not carry out such recruitment in the next two months. That is why all the organizational, creative state tasks which I have mentioned are now being transformed directly and immediately into political obligations for our Party to fulfil. How much arbitrariness, this resolution comments, is to be observed in the case of some Soviet representatives, how much slovenliness, even dishonesty and thieving – yes, thieving! Now, with power in our hands, we, the representatives of the working class, must quite clearly and honestly review those internal sins and shortcomings of ours which constitute the greatest danger to the cause of socialist construction. Click here for the lowest price! The year 1918 and a substantial part of 1919 were spent in constant stubborn struggle to create a centralized, disciplined army, supplied and controlled from a single center. For the first time, commissars were given in the units the status of revolutionary leaders and direct representatives of the Soviet power. But the army did not want to fight. Our analysis, which was confirmed in October, was called utopian. All these elements reared up after the seizure of power by the working class. But the system of election could in no way secure competent, suitable and authoritative commanders for the revolutionary army. Out of Stock. His theoretical development of Marxism remains relevant today . Hitherto, comrades, many decrees and regulations which we have published have remained on paper. 15. Hence the flood of disorganising attitudes, individualistic, anarchistic, predatory tendencies which we observe especially in wide circles of the de-classed elements in our country, among the men of the former Army, and also in certain elements of the working class. [Trotsky quotes from this 1918 speech in his pamphlet, [Author of a number of sketches of Russian peasant life, Uspensky lived from 1843 to 1902. Only a very narrow stratum of devoted proletarians consciously set about creating armed forces for the Soviet Republic. We saw this and were clearly aware of it. I have had occasion several times already to say at public meetings that in the sphere of command, of operations, of military actions, we place full responsibility upon the military specialists and, consequently, give them the necessary powers. Trotsky rightly laid out the ways that Stalin and his clique had subverted the revolution. But, given that we have absolutely no grounds for adopting such monstrous hypotheses, given that we are convinced that the European proletariat, as a result of this war and probably already while it is going on, will rise in revolt, and the new offensive on the Western Front is impelling it to take this road, since once again the working masses have been shown the whole hopelessness of their situation; we can therefore say that the future of our revolution, inseparably bound up with the fate of the European revolution and, therefore, with the fate of Europe on the international scale, is rather favourable. At the same time an intense agitation was carried on, by means of both the spoken and the written word, with groups of Communists proceeding from one village to the next. He directed the operation of the armed uprising on November 7, when the members of the provisional government were arrested and Soviet rule established. The revolution could not stop halfway and would be impelled to move toward socialist goals. At that moment (August 1918) the Soviet Republic put forth extraordinary efforts to develop and strengthen its Army. These guerrilla tendencies, reflecting the element of peasant spontaneity in the revolution, found their most finished expression among the Left SRs and the Anarchists, but also took possession of a considerable section of the Communists, especially those who came from the peasantry or had formerly been soldiers or NCOs. The Soviet Republic declared that it could not sign the enforced treaty, but neither would it fight, and issued an order for the Army to disband. Having taken over the state machine, the Commune proved unable to reconstruct it. Leon Trotsky - Leon Trotsky - Role in Soviet government: As foreign commissar, Trotsky’s first charge was to implement the Bolsheviks’ program of peace by calling for immediate armistice negotiations among the warring powers. Vikzhel meant Vsyerossiisky Ispolnitelnyi Komitet Zheleznodorozhnogo Professionalnogo Soyuza (‘All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railway Trade Union’), which united all the manual and office workers employed on the railways. What has happened in the Ukraine shows us that, if we are talking seriously about the defence of the Soviet Revolution by armed resistance, by war, we must cast aside all Left SR phrases about guerrilla risings, all ‘narrow circle’ measures: we must face the task of creating a regular Army. This item appears on. If such sweeping away of obstacles momentarily intensified the state of collapse, then all this must be made up for a hundred fold by the politically intense creative work in the economic field which the working class must get down to without delay once it had come to power. Our new regiments, created in the period of the spontaneous break-up of the old ones, were lacking in steadiness and not very reliable. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution held that Russian capitalism was so backward, its capitalist class so weak and immature that it was incapable of introducing bourgeois democratic reforms. Because if we do not cope with this task, we shall be overthrown, and that will go down in the world history of the proletariat as a big setback. In Mexico Trotsky developed an interest in farming and started breeding chickens and rabbits. How the Revolution Armed: Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky: 1918: the Founding of the Red Army (v. 1) by Trotsky, Leon Book condition: Used - Acceptable Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. Hence, sabotage, desertion, disorganization of all governmental and many social and private institutions, on the part of their leading technical and administrative staffs. Type Book Author(s) Leon Trotsky Date 1918 Volume 1 eBook. Regions, provinces, uyezds and towns vied with one another in trying to show their independence. The February revolution revealed the basic relation of forces: first, the combination of all the property-owning and ruling classes, a combination headed by the Cadet Party, within which were dissolved all the contradictions, all the antagonisms between the different groups among the property-owners, precisely because the revolution posed sharply the root question of property as such, and thereby eliminated the … Yet the revolution itself gave rise to new dangers of war, which kept increasing. We must carry out a process of selection with iron ruthlessness, because in this sphere many dangerous and alarming symptoms are to be seen. He was exiled and later assassinated by Soviet agents. Look and see what is happening now in the Ukraine. Trotsky suffered frequent blackouts, including one on the day of the October Revolution. After the arrest of those who took part on that occasion, the conference was held in Tammerfors in the winter of 1906. Hence the slightness of the political resistance which our bourgeoisie proved able to put up against us in October, November and the subsequent months, when in particular parts of the country there occurred the revolts of the Kaledinites, the Kornilovites and the Dutovites [10] and of the Ukrainian Rada. The political work which with us preceded every step forward along the path of construction, in the military sphere as well as elsewhere, led to the need for creating an extensive political apparatus for the Army. Lenin and Trotsky were both public figures, Trotsky having written prior to the revolution and after. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921, By Isaac Deutscher. Free delivery on qualified orders. Yesterday the mass-man was nobody, a slave to the Tsar, the nobles and the bureaucracy, an appendage to the manufacturer’s machine. This, except for the first word, which is ‘but’ instead of ‘and’, is how the phrase appeared when the speech was first published, as a pamphlet in 1918. Praise For The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921… “In the 1930s, Trotsky, with a handful of followers, attempted to block the path of Stalin’s relentless hurricane of betrayal and murder. If we were the foremost in the revolutionary battle, as previously we were foremost in the underground work, and then foremost in conquering the posi tions of the enemy class, we must now, in every post that we occupy (I do not forget for one moment that we are now the ruling class), display the greatest conscientiousness, executive sense and creativity – in short, those qualities which are characteristic of a class of genuine builders of a new life. Having come to power, the working class had to examine critically the old state apparatus of class oppression. The third camp was made up of the working class, headed by our Party, and the working masses who were linked with it. The Red Army’s slogan in 1919 became: ‘Proletarians, to horse!’ After only a few months our cavalry could stand comparison with the enemy’s, and subsequently it seized the initiative once and for all. Checking that this decree actually becomes operative is a task for the Party organizations and cells. Today as of May 1922 it includes, together with the Navy, about one-and-a-half million, and is still contracting. Out of a shaky, unsteady, disintegrating mass, a real army was created. What explains why it was that, in the first phase of the revolution, the Menshevik and SR parties played the leading role, and thereby held back the development of the revolution, worsened the country’s collapse, and gave to the whole subsequent process of development an extremely acute and painful character? They now entered the army not as representatives of the old ruling classes but as henchmen of the new revolutionary class. The Rada withdrew troops from the front, and at the beginning of January the Soviet Government was obliged to liquidate this pocket of resistance by force of arms. Trotsky armed all available workers, men and women, ordering the transfer of military forces from Moscow. (ISBN: 9780861510214) from Amazon's Book Store. The advantages of centralized organization and strategy over local improvisation, military separatism and federalism were revealed so quickly and vividly that today the basic principles of the building of the Red Army are beyond dispute. And here the Party’s task is, again, to deal quite ruthlessly with this sort of phenomena occurring in our own midst, for they are ruining the country, and disgracing and disorganising our Party. Petlyura, realising that he had no support inside the country, made an agreement with the Germans whereby the latter undertook to clear the Red Guard units out of the Ukraine. Propaganda plays an immense role in all the world’s armies. Short courses lasting a few months produced, in the main, not commanders but merely middling Red Army soldiers. How the Revolution Armed, Volumes 4-5 How the Revolution Armed, Brian Pearce Selections, Leon Trotsky: Author: Leon Trotsky: Translated by: Brian Pearce: Publisher: New Park Publications, 1979: Original from: the University of Michigan: Digitized: Jul 1, 2008 : Export Citation: BiBTeX EndNote RefMan Our railway carriages have been stripped and smashed up. Its apparatus was extraordinarily unwieldy and, in many cases, clumsy. None of that is possessed by the working class, it has it all to acquire. But, all the same, it is a malady, and we have to try and overcome it in the shortest possible time. Whereas previously the political task consisted in agitation, in propaganda, in open struggle in the streets, on the barricades, in winning power, in elections, now the political task of our Party lies in organising the railways, establishing labor discipline on them, with everyone assuming full responsibility for the post he holds. But the scattered nature and political helplessness of these units foredoomed them to defeat. I said that the compromisers’ camp, which set its fatal mark on the first phase of the revolution, appeared to itself and to others incomparably more powerful than actually accorded with the social nature of the stratum from which this camp was recruited: I mean the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia from which the compromiser parties drew not only their leaders but also their fighting cadres. It would mean that, at the end of the mighty development of capitalism, as a result of this world-wide slaughter into which world capitalism has driven the people, the European working class has proved incapable of taking power and liberating Europe from the nightmare of the imperialist inferno. This article was written for Yezhegodnik Kominterna (Comintern Annual), May 21, 1922. Once we have established the Soviet regime, that is, a system under which the government is headed by persons who have been directly elected by the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, there can be no antagonism between the government and the mass of the workers, just as there is no antagonism between the administration of the union and the general assembly of its members, and, therefore, there cannot be any grounds for fearing the appointment of members of the commanding staff by the organs of the Soviet power. Trotsky was the first leader of October Revolution and Red Army. The idea of ‘power in the localities’ assumed an extremely chaotic character in the initial period. It was necessary, while smashing the resistance of the counter-revolutionary elements among the old officers, to secure for the loyal elements among them, step by step, the possibility of working as part of the Red Army. Their bold raids often, in the first period, created very great difficulties for us. Many who, though honest, are weak-willed, easily yield to the suggestion that now, in this situation when the country has been weakened, when everything has fallen apart and been shaken loose, there is no point in displaying energy, because in any case it will not make any difference to the general economic state of the country: many people say to themselves: ‘What’s the point of my straining myself amid all this chaos?’. Debuting in 1954, Deutscher's three-volume biography on the Russian revolutionary countered much of the propaganda issued by Stalin's regime to destroy Trotsky's reputation. As an example, let us take the railways. The almost complete defenselessness of the revolution was revealed at the time of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. All this is related, as a whole, to the sphere with which I am now most closely concerned, namely, the military sphere. But as the war grew in scope it increasingly called for proper organization and discipline. In the military sphere this army reflected, though in sharper forms, the process that was going forward in all spheres of the construction of the Soviet Republic. We live in a world of violence, and we cannot avoid treating it politically. This sabotage, in so far as it was not a mere outcome of the panic inspired in the educated elements by the heavy hand of the working class which had taken power, in so far as it pursued a political aim, relied upon the approach of the Constituent Assembly, seen as its natural goal, as the new bridge whereby the possessing classes could return to power. However, the bourgeois press of Europe patently misrepresents the matter when it depicts propaganda as some devilish invention of the Bolsheviks. We need to prosecute not only those who, directly or indirectly, are guilty of embezzling the people’s money, but also those who show tolerance towards any manifestation of indiscipline and depravity. This is one of the questions concerning the organisation of the Army, namely, the question of drawing military specialists, that is, to speak plainly, former officers and generals, into the work of creating and administering the Army. Leon Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin, was one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. The habits of guerrilla warfare began to turn their negative pole towards the revolution. These writings were first published in 1923 by the Soviet Government. In this quotation the concluding phrase in the above paragraph beginning ‘Democratisation’ is given differently. These were no longer our first helpless attempts: from now on we could fight and win. They relied upon the peasant army numbering many millions. Do you elect your officials, book-keepers, shop-assistants, and cashiers, do you elect those of your employees who have a strictly defined trade? We now need to transform the apparatus of the railways into a punctually-operating mechanism, and this is at the present time one of the most important political tasks of the Communist Party and the Soviet power. The allusion here is to the dried flesh of the roach, a popular delicacy in Russia. Direct and open civil war, together with the fight against sabotage, had to a certain extent distracted our attention from our fundamental, organic tasks in the spheres of the economy and of administration. Our factories and works are disorganised, owing, first, to the mobilisation and then to the partial, extremely incomplete demobilisation. While, as the working class, we, in Marx’s words, cannot simply take over the old state apparatus in a mechanical way, this does not at all mean that we can get by without any of those elements which entered into the composition of the old state apparatus. The problems connected with the creation of the armed forces of the revolution are of immense importance for the Communist Parties of all countries. Its capacity for deployment, if war should come, is increasing steadily. In 1917, the violence of war spread everywhere. This arousal of the most elementary instincts of the individual personality often has a crudely egoistic, or to use a philosophical term, an ‘egocentric’ character. The Red Army was built under fire, and consequently, far from always in accordance with a definite plan, and often by way of rather disorderly improvisations. I am not now going to speak about the country’s international situation, about the external prospects and dangers. In this social fact is rooted the final cause of our victories. We have broken the old sabotage and cleared out most of the old officials. The Left SRs carried this chaotic pseudo-democracy to the point of absurdity when they called upon the individual regiments to decide whether they would fulfill the conditions of the armistice with the Germans or would go over to the offensive. But it is not the last word in the economic constructive work of the proletariat. On April 15 appeared the first issue of the newspaper Soldatskaya Pravda, the central organ of the organization. Indignation against the bureaucratic centralism of Tsarist Russia formed a very important constituent feature of the revolution. Add to My Bookmarks Export citation. Here I come to a ticklish matter which is at the present time, to some extent, a sore point in our Party life. Taking shape under conditions of the complete disintegration of small and medium industry and of the old capitalist ideology in Western Europe, Russian capitalism, which arose from the start in highly concentrated form, undoubtedly developed great economic strength and, along with this, the internal capacity to go over to an improved form of economy – that is, it created the basis for nationalization of the enterprises. 2. mind and organizing mastermind. Yet the crucial moment passed and the Communist Party failed to launch an armed working class rising to counter this threat and seize power from the bosses. Year: 1973. Only in the second half of the war did the Northerners master this arm. It should be the same in the Army. Trotsky on Lenin. When, by the inner logic of the class struggle, our Party, standing at the head of the proletariat, came to power, the third camp was brought to the test, the camp of the working class, which by its entire nature is alone capable of fulfilling the fundamental tasks of the revolution. The revolution, which awakened the human individual out of his oppressed state, naturally, at the start, gave to this awakening an extreme, if you like, an anarchic character. You have read the basic proposals which the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs has put to you. L. Trotskii-----Author: L. Trotskii Published Date: 01 Jan 1981 Publisher: Indexreach Ltd Language: Russian Format: Paperback| 431 pages ISBN10: 0861510143 File size: 15 Mb Dimension: 140x 200x 28mm| 498.95g Download Link: How the Revolution Armed 1920 v. 3 Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky----- First published: 1924 as Book two of Volume II of Kak Vooruzhala Revolyutsiya, by Isaac.. Important was that the commissar was the Cossacks, and their fears find expression in the hands of is... Distrust towards the revolution was entirely based upon mobility, the danger the proved. Were both public figures, Trotsky explains how unexpected the revolution, only! Section: other reading Next: on guerrilla warfare was a very short time of ours we openly divulge without! Of foodstuffs working for war purposes are faced in real earnest by all these organizational political! Confronts us in all our political work success during the last word the. 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