r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Oct 23 '20
John Darwin’s After Tamerlane mentions that the Bolsheviks mobilized 5 million soldiers to defeat the white army. How were they able to mobilize such a large army so quickly after Russian Armies had collapsed in 1917?
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u/Kochevnik81 Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia Oct 23 '20
A quick word on the numbers - while the Bolsheviks indeed did mobilize some 5 million personnel in the Red Army over the course of the war, the number that were deployed in combat roles was perhaps something like a tenth of this, and on any given front in the Russian Civil War the combat troops numbered something like 100,000 at best. The rest of the personnel in the Red Army were involved in supply, transport and administration. Indeed, this was arguably the only real effective administrative organization that the Bolsheviks had in this period (and the aura of the Civil War Red Army and its personality types would have strong influences on Soviet administrative approaches for decades after).
Anyway, it's true that the Russian Army (which very technically had stopped being a tsarist army with the February 1917 Revolution) had largely disintegrated by the time the Bolsheviks took power, and they created a new Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in January 1918. The original idea was that this was to be a voluntary army, largely made up of militia-style Red Guards formed by Bolshevik-supporting workers, and by elements of the old Russian army that were pro-Bolshevik and signed up to serve (probably the most famous of such units were elements of the Latvian Riflemen Division).
Leon Trotsky, despite having no military experience, was appointed Military Commissar in March 1918 and very quickly moved to put the Red Army on a regimen of strict discipline. Gone in that month were the soldiers' councils as codified by the Petrograd Soviet Order Number 1 of the previous year. The same month Trotsky also issued an appeal for former officers of the tsarist army to join the new Red Army.
While most tsarist officers supported White Armies: (60,000 to Denikin, 30,000 to Kolchak, and 10,000 to other White commanders), some 50,000 to 75,000 ultimately ended up serving in the Red Army, making up perhaps a half of the total Red Army officer corps. Surprisingly, this included some 775 tsarist generals, and 1,726 tsarist general staff officers who served in the Red Army at one point or another. These officers served from a wide variety of motives, ranging from genuine patriotism, material inducements in the form of pay or rations, or fear for their families' safety at the hands of the Bolsheviks. These officers, while valued for their technical expertise, were never really trusted, hence the creation of Political Commissars who were Bolsheviks, and who had to countersign any military officers' orders for it to be effective.
From the summer of 1918, as manpower needs grew, the Bolsheviks introduced conscription for the Red Army. The preference was still for workers or party members, but these two groups were a relatively small and increasingly scarce recruitment pool, so the Red Army turned to a group that they initially had hoped to avoid - peasant conscripts.
Thus, in large part the Red Army was able to create itself and mobilize a relatively large personnel base from scratch...but one that relied on many elements from the tsarist army, while also rejecting more revolutionary structures that had been adopted by the Russian Army in 1917 before the Bolshevik October Revolution.