On the Military Doctrine of the Red Army in the early 20s - are we defending or advancing?
The last quarter of the 20th century was marked in Russian history by the introduction into scientific circulation of a huge array of previously inaccessible documents. But little-explored topics remain. One of them is the discussion in the early 1920s of the Military Doctrine of the Red Army.
In the USSR, ideas about it were reflected in the words of a popular song about civilians and an armored train, standing on the side track, but ready to set off at the right time. Thus, the idea was postulated: we do not want war, but if anything, remember, bourgeois, "from the taiga to the British seas, the Red Army is the strongest." And if necessary, it will provide assistance to the proletariat of any neighboring country.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a different point of view emerged: the Leninist government, obsessed with the idea of a world revolution, followed a very aggressive formula in foreign policy: "We will foment a world fire on all the bourgeoisie." Let not a fire, but at least a fire in the vastness of Europe, the Bolsheviks tried to kindle in 1920, extending a helping hand to the Polish proletariat. However, the latter showed a blatant class irresponsibility and began to actively fight for the freedom of the Polish landlord. The defeat at Warsaw cooled the ardor of the communists, and plans to export the revolution were shelved - as history has shown, before the Khrushchev era.
Marx was not a general
After the end of the Civil and the failure of the Polish campaign, the prospects for a big war of Soviet Russia with any of the neighboring countries were absent. And the leadership of the young state could think about ways of developing the Armed Forces. Which led to a discussion about the Military Doctrine of the Red Army.
Two glances collided. The first was defended by Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), who headed the Revolutionary Military Council and the People's Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs. To this figure, the Bolshevik state owes much of its victory in the Civil War, for even at the very beginning, Trotsky, who did not have a military education, understood perfectly well: the key to victory was in creating a regular army, for which it was necessary to abandon amateurism and recruit professionals. In a very short time, a significant part of the officer corps of the former imperial army was mobilized in the Red Army. By the end of the Civil War, the number of military experts in the Red Army was 75 thousand. They are the real creators of the victories of the communists on all fronts.
Close communication with the Russian military elite was not in vain for Trotsky, and therefore the successful completion of the Civil War for the Bolsheviks could not shake his convictions: the future of the Red Army should be built on the basis of a thorough study of world experience - first of all, the First Imperialist. Trotsky outlined his views at the April 1922 meeting of delegates to the 11th Congress of the RCP, and in the same year published the book Military Doctrine and Sham Doctrinairism.
Trotsky's opponent was his future successor as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Mikhail Frunze, who wrote the work "The Unified Military Doctrine and the Red Army." Frunze is also a purely civilian person who was interested in military issues exclusively at the journalistic level. From a military point of view, he had nothing to do with the victories attributed to him by Soviet historiography. They are the merit of the commander's advisers, former generals F. F. Novitsky and A. A. Baltic. However, to Frunze's credit, we note that he never claimed the status of a commander, and the post of head of the Revolutionary Military Council required not so much strategic talent and professional training as loyalty to the Bolshevik ideals and the party, and these qualities Mikhail Vasilyevich was not to occupy. The very same line of Trotsky on attracting military experts to the construction of the Red Army, Frunze, being a smart man, was not going to wind down, although he was skeptical of them, considering them retrogrades.
The discussion between Trotsky and Frunze revolved around the question of which war experience should be taken as a basis: the First World War, which was predominantly of a positional nature, or the Civil War, with its maneuverable nature, the absence of a continuous front line, the conduct of hostilities mainly along the railways, raids on the rear enemy and cavalry battles.
Already in the first pages of his work, Frunze complains about the inability of the former generals to say something meaningful about the Military Doctrine of the proletarian state. He seemed to have forgotten that it was thanks to the military experts that the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, and he himself acquired the status of a commander in the eyes of the people. A considerable part of the Bolshevik command staff, of which Frunze was the herald, could not help idealizing the actions of the Red Army. They even talked about a new proletarian strategy and other innovations in military affairs, born in the bloody chaos in the vastness of Russia.
Paradoxically, Trotsky, a Marxist to the marrow of his bones, rather sharply opposed the division of military science into bourgeois and proletarian. From his point of view, the class nature of the proletarian state determines the social composition of the Red Army and especially the governing apparatus, its political outlook, goals and moods, however, the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik Armed Forces depend not on the worldview, but on the state of technology, supply capabilities and the nature of the theater of the military. action. Criticizing the views of his opponents, Trotsky does not hide his irony: "To think that it is possible, armed with the Marxist method, to decide the question of the best organization of production in a candle factory, means to have no idea of either the Marxist method or the candle factory."
Defense according to Trotsky
How did Trotsky see the future of the Red Army? In his opinion, the cornerstone of the Bolshevik Military Doctrine in the conditions, as he put it, "the greatest demobilization of the army, its continuous reduction in the era of the NEP" should be defense, because it "corresponds to the whole situation and our entire policy."
If we take into account the circumstances of the era, then Trotsky's judgment cannot but be recognized as running counter to the sentiments of the military elite of the Red Army, who made a dizzying career on the fields of the Civil War.
He substantiated his position as follows: “We deliberately imagine the enemy to attack first, not at all considering that this gives him some kind of“moral”advantage. On the contrary, having space and numbers for ourselves, we calmly and confidently outline the line where the mobilization provided by our resilient defense will prepare a sufficient fist for our transition to a counteroffensive. Very sober and reasonable judgments, coinciding with the views of the Russian military thinker A. A. Svechin - the author of the strategy of starvation.
Along the way, Trotsky subjected Frunze to well-founded criticism, who asserted: “Our Civil War was primarily of a maneuverable nature. This was the result not only of purely objective conditions (the vastness of the theater of military operations, the relative small number of troops, etc.), but also of the internal properties of the Red Army, its revolutionary spirit, fighting impulse as manifestations of the class nature of the proletarian elements that led it. " Trotsky argued with reasoned Frunze, drawing his attention to the fact that it was the whites who taught the Bolsheviks the maneuverability and the revolutionary properties of the proletariat had nothing to do with it. Then we have to explain the basics of the art of war: "Maneuverability follows from the size of the country, from the number of troops, from the objective tasks facing the army, but not at all from the revolutionary nature of the proletariat …"
Some justification for Frunze can be recognized as his words: "I consider it the most harmful, stupid and childish idea to talk now about offensive wars on our side." However, he immediately did not fail to notice: "We are the party of a class that is going to conquer the world."
One of Trotsky's leitmotifs: the doctrine must correspond to the capabilities of the Armed Forces, this is the task of military art: the number of unknowns in the equation of war is reduced to the smallest number, and this can be achieved only by ensuring the greatest correspondence between design and execution.
"What does it mean?" Trotsky asks. And he replies: “It means to have such units and such their leadership composition that the goal is achieved by overcoming the obstacles of place and time by combined means. In other words, you need to have a stable - and at the same time flexible, centralized - and at the same time springy command apparatus, possessing all the necessary skills and passing them down. We need good personnel."
Born by the revolution
That is, Trotsky advocated building an army in accordance with all the rules of military science. But was it only with Frunze that he argued? No, one of Trotsky's opponents was MN Tukhachevsky, a former second lieutenant and executioner of his own people, who, by the will of Khrushchev, became almost a genius commander. He literally gave the following: “The Marxist method of research shows that there will be a very significant difference in matters of recruiting, in matters of organizing the rear (in a broad sense). And this difference is already changing to a large extent the nature of the strategy that we will adhere to."
How the Marxist method should be reflected in it, Tukhachevsky wrote in his work "National and Class Strategy", but the above lines testify to the tendency of the future marshal to demagogy, which he tried to compensate for the lack of knowledge and education throughout his career in the Red Army.
So, to Trotsky's just assertion that it was the whites who taught the Bolshevik troops to maneuver, Tukhachevsky replies: “Now, as to whether we had maneuverability in the last Civil War and what kind of maneuverability it was. Comrade Trotsky tends to discount this maneuverability. True, it was somewhat primitive, that is, a thousand miles ahead and a thousand miles back, but there was maneuverability and such good that it will probably go down in history."
Comments are superfluous. And this man, who did not know how to formulate his thoughts in an accessible form, which is in principle unacceptable for a strategist, for a long time was considered in the USSR as the standard of a commander. Unfortunately, there was a lot of demagoguery in Frunze's words: “In the Red Army, we sometimes lacked, perhaps, technical knowledge, orderliness, self-control, but there was decisiveness, courage and breadth of the operational concept, and in this direction we are, of course, formally approached the methods that were used in the German army. I put this property of ours in connection with the class nature of the proletarian elements who became the head of the Red Army."
At the head of the Red Army were professional revolutionaries and military experts, most of whom had no relation to the proletariat. Mikhail Vasilyevich knew this very well, but ideology demanded the birth of proletarian commanders, and they "appeared".
Trotsky's recommendations, and in fact the views of military experts voiced by him - to adhere to a strategy of attrition in a future war - ran counter to Voroshilov's doctrine of "Little blood on foreign territory" adopted a decade later. The latter, as history has shown, turned out to be erroneous, for active defense, exhausting the enemy and capable of inflicting significant damage on his manpower, is what the Red Army lacked in 1941.
Trotsky had to polemize not only with Frunze and Tukhachevsky. There were hotheads in the Bolshevik military elite who demanded to prepare for offensive revolutionary wars. So, from the point of view of the head of the Political Administration of the Red Army, SI Gusev, it is necessary to train the class army of the proletariat not only in defense against the bourgeois-landlord counter-revolution, but also in revolutionary wars against the imperialist powers.
In response, Trotsky drew the opponent's attention to the need for favorable foreign policy conditions for the implementation of expansionist ideas.
However, while recognizing the sobriety of Trotsky's strategic views in the period under review, it is necessary to take into account the following. He had a high opinion of the military abilities of the same Tukhachevsky, despite his disagreements with him. And it is likely that he would have left him in key posts in the Red Army, as well as his comrades-in-arms, amateurs Uborevich and Yakir, about whom he wrote very warmly in the preface to the book "Revolution Betrayed", where these military leaders are called the best generals of the Red Army.
Such a flattering assessment would guarantee the named military leaders (they can not be called commanders in any way) preservation of places in the Bolshevik army elite. And in military science, the amateurish views of the former second lieutenant would have taken root, which would have led at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War to even more terrible losses, and perhaps the defeat of the Red Army.
It is unlikely that if a war had happened, Trotsky would have gone to re-establish relations with the Church. Even the attempt by the Bolsheviks to create Cossack formations in 1935 provoked sharp criticism.
Thus, Trotsky's correct vision of the main directions of military development in the USSR could be nullified by his policy, which is pernicious for the country and its national spirit, primarily internal. And over time, Tukhachevsky's amateurish views on how the Red Army should develop could prevail in the top Soviet military-political leadership. And then defeat in the Great Patriotic War would become virtually inevitable.
