The Soviet leaders never forgot the war with Poland. Twenty years later the area was reoccupied amidst an orgy of reprisals. The defeat of 1920 showed that despite victory in the civil war the new state was weakly defended and insecure. Throughout the 1920s there were regular war scares, often based on the most trivial pretext – in 1923 when the Frenchman Marshal Foch visited Warsaw, in 1925 after the signing of the Treaty of Locarno (‘preparation for war against the USSR’, as the Soviet newspaper Pravda put it), in 1927 following the British decision to break off diplomatic relations.4 It is customary to see these fears as a product of domestic politics, a device to focus popular attention on the external enemy and to unify the Party, but Russia's recent history, which included invasion by Germany and the Habsburg empire in 1914, intervention by fourteen states in the civil war and invasion by Poland in 1920, was enough in itself to encourage a constant vigilance and helps to explain the almost paranoid fear of attack or subversion that distinguished the Stalinist dictatorship.
The question of Soviet security was central to the development of the Soviet system. The Soviet state found itself, in Lenin's famous mixed metaphor, ‘an oasis in the middle of the raging imperialist sea’.5 Lenin counted on the Bolshevik example to provoke social revolution in the rest of Europe, so that the isolation would be overcome. In March 1919 an international Communist organization, the Comintern, was set up in Moscow. Its first task was to call on workers everywhere ‘to wipe out the boundaries between states, transform the whole world into one co-operative commonwealth’. Lenin promised the first assembly of the International that the victory of Communism throughout the world was only a matter of time.6 By the time of his death, in January 1924, that confidence had evaporated. The Soviet state was not in the vanguard of world revolution, but was an international pariah, perpetually on the defensive. Lenin's successors could not agree among themselves whether security lay in the hope that imperialist competition would engulf capitalism and usher in world revolution or in the mobilization of the Soviet Union's own resources to defend its own revolution. The former carried impossible risks. In 1925 the General Secretary of the Party, Josef Stalin, announced to Party leaders what was to become the chosen strategy for the regime, the building of ‘socialism in one country’.7
The strategy of socialist self-defence made it imperative that the Soviet Union be adequately protected by military force. The position of the Red Army after the civil war was an uncertain one. It was regularly referred to as the Worker-Peasant Red Army to reflect its popular social base. Much of the civil war force melted away with the end of hostilities. Trotsky, who led the Red forces as head of the Revolutionary Military Council, established in April 1918, lost interest in military developments once the war was won. There was popular hostility to the officer corps on the grounds that the military élite constituted a threat of Bonapartist dictatorship, composed as it was of a great many officers unsympathetic to Bolshevism. Conditions in the armed forces were poor, with low pay, inadequate housing and limited career prospects. The place of the armed forces in a socialist society was poorly defined, their status insecure.
In January 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, the Central Committee established a commission to review the whole question of the future of the military in the Soviet state. The findings represented a powerful indictment of Trotsky's fading leadership. Many units had only half their officers. Out of 87,000 men trained to officer standard during the civil war, only 25,000 remained in service. Of the rest 30,000 were dead and approximately the same number demobilized.8 The supply situation was found to be anything but adequate, with insufficient weapons and poor levels of food and equipment. The rank and file were regarded as demoralized; their officers were condemned as ill-trained and unprofessional. Trotsky's role was usurped by his deputy, Mikhail Frunze, a veteran civil war commander, who was to play a central part in shaping the development of the modern Red Army and Soviet military strategy. In January 1925 Trotsky was removed from his position as Chairman of the Military Council and Commissar for the Army and Navy, and Frunze took his place.
Though he held office for only ten months, until his death in October, Frunze achieved a great deal. Frunze's view of the armed forces represented a compromise between those who saw them as an instrument of revolution, to be led by Communists and composed of a proletarian militia, and those like Tukhachevsky who favoured large professional armed forces equipped with modern weapons and free from political supervision. Frunze started from the point of view that war with any capitalist enemy would be a total war, drawing on all the social and economic reserves of the state as the civil war had done. He favoured the development of an offensive army, rooted in the proletariat. But to achieve forces capable of protecting the revolution required, he believed, large-scale industrialization, with a commitment to a major defence sector, and a programme of military education to turn workers into professional soldiers with a Communist outlook. Professionalism combined with revolutionary zeal was to be assured by organizing both a regular army, with enhanced status and powers for its officer corps, and a territorial militia of workers and peasants.9
The organization was launched in 1924, but the first full call-up was achieved only in 1925 with a comprehensive military service law which laid down the foundation for the remarkable record of military mobilization achieved after 1941. For the regular soldiers the role of the political commissar, who had dominated the military system since the civil war, was downgraded, and full command responsibility was granted to officers. To counter the numerous complaints from Communist functionaries about the political unreliability of the officer corps, the proportion of Communists among the corps was increased. In 1925 over 40 per cent of the 76,000 officers and military officials were members of the Party.10 Frunze also tackled one of the major problems exposed by the 1924 review: low morale and poor discipline. For officers there were immediate improvements. A distinctive uniform was introduced to set them apart from the rank and file. They were given a generous pay rise and better living quarters. Above all, they were given the right to tell their men what to do. This was the most contentious issue of all, for under Order Number 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet in the memorable spring of 1917, officers could be challenged by those they led. The object had been to make the army democratic, but it led, as might have been expected, to ordinary soldiers arguing for hours about whether to obey a particular order. Discipline was impossible under such conditions. Scant attention was paid to the regular routine of military life; observers found Red Army soldiers shabby and unkempt. In 1925 Frunze introduced a new disciplinary code. Though strongly opposed by Communists, who saw this as a return to the bad old habits of the imperial army, it was gradually implemented, restoring the right of officers both to order and to punish.11
Frunze laid the foundation of the armed forces that fought the war against Germany, but he died before he saw the fruits of his reform programme in circumstances that remain obscure. He suffered from a chronic stomach complaint that doctors insisted required surgery, despite his protests. Stalin visited him in the hospital, where he pressured the surgeon to operate. Frunze died shortly afterwards. Foul play has never been proved.12 Frunze's place was taken by one of Stalin's closest political allies, Kliment Voroshilov. A former metalworker from the southern Ukraine, he was a military amateur, with little formal education and no military training. Most of his forty-four years had been spent as a terrorist and, first in 1905 then 1917, as a revolutionary. During the civil war he became a political soldier, like Stalin. He was an unprepossessing personality. Short and pig-nosed, he had nothing of the military dash of other civil war heroes. He was an intimate of Stalin's from the civil war and remained part of the inner circle around the dictator for more than twenty years, a remarkable achievement in itself. He became Commissar of the Army and Navy (later changed to Commissar of Defence) in 1925 and kept the post until 1940. America's wartime ambassador doubly damned him as a man who was ‘incompetent, but not dangerous’.1
3
Voroshilov's manifest ineptitude was compensated for by a second appointment in 1925. At the young age of thirty-two, Mikhail Tukhachevsky became chief of staff. A colonel in the Tsarist army, he had spent most of the Great War in a German prison camp. On his return he joined the Red Army and became an enthusiastic revolutionary and outstanding commander. He fought the campaign against the Poles in 1920 with Stalin as his political officer. His appointment was an inspired choice. What Voroshilov lacked in energy and experience was supplied by Tukhachevsky, a contrast that permanently soured relations between the two men. The chief of staff had one overriding ambition: to create a modern professional armed force fired with revolutionary élan. As did almost all the leading figures in the military establishment, Tukhachevsky saw the mass offensive as the strategy most appropriate to a revolutionary state. In 1926 he ordered a complete review of the armed forces and Soviet military doctrine. The fruit of that review, unambiguously titled The Future War, was published in May 1928. In it Tukhachevsky first laid out the idea that the grand offensive must be supported by thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles and thousands more aircraft, pouring forward at great speed to deliver to any enemy a knock-out blow of annihilating power.14
It was no accident that such a description almost perfectly matched the German attack launched on the Soviet Union thirteen years later. Tukhachevsky was a firm advocate of military westernization. The Future War owed not a little to a burgeoning programme of military collaboration in the 1920s between two most unlikely partners, the Red Army and the German Reichswehr. Links were first established between them in 1921. In August 1922 a firm agreement on military co-operation was signed, with a second and more extensive programme agreed to in March 1926 in Berlin. They were drawn together by their shared status as international pariahs in the early 1920s, the Soviet Union for its Communism, Germany for its alleged responsibility for the war of 1914.15 Each had something the other badly wanted: the Soviet Union wanted access to advanced military technology and military thinking; Germany needed somewhere to develop the weapons and tactical experience it was denied under the disarmament terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
So it was that German officers, who were separated from their Communist collaborators by a yawning ideological chasm, found themselves operating together in secret three major military installations and a handful of industrial enterprises. At the spa town of Lipetsk, 300 miles south-west of Moscow, an airfield was set up where German pilots were trained and new aircraft were put through their paces. At Kama on the Volga a tank school was founded, where German soldiers first tried out the ideas that bore rich fruit in 1939. At Tomka a chemical warfare centre was built, where Soviet observers watched the German staff experiment with gas attack and gas protection. The entire collaboration was kept as secret as possible. Trainees travelled to the Soviet Union on false passports, in civilian dress. Those that died in training accidents were put in coffins in large crates described as ‘aircraft parts’, and shipped by sea back to the Baltic port of Stettin.16 There also existed a more public exchange. Red Army officers were invited to German manoeuvres from 1925 on. Under Tukhachevsky's guidance Soviet military leaders spent months or years in Germany absorbing German strategic thinking, German tactical doctrine and German ideas on the military economy and logistical support. In 1931 German officers were sent to Moscow on training courses. The roll-call of Germans involved in the exchanges included names that became famous a decade later – Model, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Manstein, Guderian. But a decade later almost all their Red Army counterparts were dead.17
The lessons Tukhachevsky drew from the German side were central to the conception of modern war that emerged from the modernization of Red forces in the late 1920s. The primacy of the offensive became dogma. Revolutionary spirit may have been its justification, but the idea drew its real rationale from the nature of modern military technology – primarily the tank and the airplane. Tukhachevsky assumed that an offensive force, using these in combination and in large quantities, could, once it was mobilized, power forward at speed, penetrate the enemy lines of defence and then envelop the main enemy force in large, sweeping operations.18 The concept of ‘deep operations’, so very different from the static trench warfare and the primacy of the machine-gun in the Great War, was bound up with modernity. The armed forces Tukhachevsky inherited were almost all horse-drawn; mobility was more likely to be supplied by a bicycle than a truck. The equipment was obsolete and badly made. He recognized that the offensive strategy could work only in the context of a more general modernization of Soviet society. He accepted the views of his German acquaintances that modern war meant total war, the mobilization of economic resources as a fundament for successful military campaigns. The Soviet Union lacked those resources. There thus existed a profound gap between the operational plans for the fast-moving armoured offensive and the reality of economic underdevelopment, which could be bridged only by a radical transformation of the Soviet economy.
Tukhachevsky 's proposals for a military revolution were premature. His plans for aircraft and tank production were dismissed as quite unrealistic. His independent mind and authoritarian leadership earned him political enemies. In 1928 Stalin and Voroshilov had him removed as chief of staff. But in 1930, from a more modest post in Leningrad, Tukhachevsky forwarded a memorandum to the Kremlin, pressing the case for 40,000 aircraft and 50,000 tanks. Stalin accused him of ‘Red militarism’ and hinted that the idea smacked of economic ruin and counter-revolutionary sabotage.19 Nonetheless the core of Tukhachevsky's reforms survived. By the early 1930s the Military Council and the General Staff had rejected any idea of defence in depth as an answer to Soviet backwardness. Under the guiding hand of Tukhachevsky's successor, the former Tsarist staff officer Boris Shaposhnikov, a strategy was elaborated which remained in force until its weaknesses were abruptly exposed in 1941. Future war was deemed to be a two-stage affair. The preliminaries would be fought out at or near the frontier by strong covering forces operating behind fixed fortified areas, while the slow process of mobilizing the mass peasant-worker army went on at a prudent distance from the front until it was ready to rain shattering blows on the enemy on the other side of the border. The mass offensive had more of the steamroller about it than Tukhachevsky's fast-moving juggernaut, but the shape of the strategy was not dissimilar. The difference lay with the idea of ‘deep operations’. A powerful mobile strike force able to manoeuvre at will in the rear of the enemy line was regarded as incompatible with the current state of industrial development and the largely peasant soldiery at the army's disposal. The reforms of Frunze and Tukhachevsky supplied a more professional armed force. Standards of training and equipment were raised. The officers were given a status more consistent with their function. But the force was still primitively armed and poorly supplied, with an unsatisfactory level of morale.20
After ten years the Soviet state was little more secure than it had been at the end of the civil war. In 1927 there developed a war scare more alarming than anything Soviet leaders had seen since 1919, when forces from more than a dozen countries fought briefly side by side with the counter-revolutionaries. The war scare had a number of separate components, each by itself only mildly threatening but in combination full of menace. In late May in London the Soviet trade delegation was closed down following pressure from the ‘Clear Out the Reds’ campaign, organized by a group of Conservative Members of Parliament. The British Government broke off diplomatic relations.21 In April the Soviet mission to China was closed down, and Chinese nationalists launched a bloody campaign against the Chinese Communists. In June the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Warsaw was assassinated. That month in Pravda Stalin announced that there was now ‘the real and actual threat of a new war’, though none came. The whiff of imperialist conspiracy begged for scapegoats. In May, twenty former Tsarist nobles who worked in government offices were arrested. On the day following the Warsaw assassination they were all executed without trial. Over the following weeks
war-scare fever gripped Moscow.22
A few months later the Soviet Union embarked on a programme of large-scale industrialization, the first step in what came to be seen as a ‘Second Revolution’. The timing perhaps owed something to the war scare or to the pressures to modernize the armed forces, but ultimately the industrial drive was brought about by the growing recognition among the Party faithful that their revolution was stumbling over the reality of a society largely composed of peasants, craftsmen and petty traders. At the end of the civil war little could be done to reverse the social reality of old Russia. In 1921 Lenin introduced the ‘New Economic Policy’, which permitted private trade and private ownership of land, and the grip on economic life held during the war loosened. By 1927 industrial output was back to approximately the levels of the pre-war Tsarist state, but the proletariat, in whose name the revolution to create a workers' state had been launched, was small, impoverished and socially isolated. Among the vast mass of the Soviet peasantry fewer than 0.7 per cent of households boasted a Communist Party member. The apparatus of state and industry relied on large numbers of what came to be called ‘bourgeois experts’, whose enthusiasm for the new regime was believed to be muted.
Russia's War Page 3
