⧠66. Structure of the Red Army

In our system of universal military training, barrack life must be reduced to a minimum, so that ultimately the Red barracks may completely disappear. The structure of the Red Army must be gradually approximated to the structure of the productive units of the workers, whereby the artificial character of military unification will be overcome. We may express the matter more clearly by saying that the typical standing army of tsarist days, the standing army in the State of the bourgeoisie and the landed gentry, was composed of persons belonging to the most diverse classes. Those who were called up for service were forcibly dragged from their natural surroundings: the worker, from the factory; the peasant, from the plough; the clerk, from the desk; the shopman, from the counter. The recruits were then artificially assembled in barracks, and distributed in the various army divisions. It was advantageous to the bourgeois State to break off all connexion between the proletarian recruit and his factory and between the peasant recruit and his village, so as to make of worker and peasant alike blind tools for the oppression of the labouring masses, and so that it might be easy to employ the workers and peasants of one province to shoot down those of another.

In the upbuilding of the Red Army, the Communist Party works in the opposite way. Although the conditions of the civil war have frequently compelled the party to make the best of the old methods of organization, the essential aspiration is towards something utterly different. Our aim has been to ensure that the army subdivisions in the course of their construction (the company, the battalion, the regiment, the brigade, etc.) shall harmonize as far as may be with the factory, the workshop, the village, the hamlet, and so on. In other words, our aim is to remodel the artificial military unity - a unity which existed only for its own sake - into a natural, productive unity of the workers, and thus to reduce the artificiality of army life. The proletarian divisions built up in this manner are more compact; they are disciplined by the very method of production; and there is, therefore, the less need for a discipline imposed from above.

The formation of a sturdy, class-conscious proletarian nucleus is of primary importance to the Red Army. In such a country as Russia, in which peasants constitute the enormous majority of the population, the dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily means that the proletarian minority shall lead and organize the peasant majority (the middle peasantry); and that the peasant majority shall follow the lead of the organizing proletariat, and shall have complete confidence in the political wisdom and constructive capacity of the urban workers. This statement is fully applicable to the Red Army, which is strong and disciplined precisely in proportion as its skeletal framework is proletarian and communist. To assemble this skeletal material, to distribute it properly, and to clothe the framework with a sufficient quantity of the disintegrated but far more abundant peasant material-this constitutes the fundamental organizatory task of the Communist Party in the upbuilding of the Red Army.