An Army from Nothing

When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they inherited a Russian army that was in the process of dissolving. Three years of catastrophic losses on the Eastern Front had destroyed morale, Soviet Order Number One had undermined discipline, and soldiers were voting with their feet — deserting in their hundreds of thousands to return home. The old Imperial Army effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force in the months following the revolution. By January 1918 it had been formally dissolved.

What the Bolsheviks needed was a new army, built on new principles, capable of defending the revolution against both internal counter-revolution and external intervention. The man charged with creating it was Leon Trotsky, People’s Commissar for War from March 1918. What he built in the following four years was one of the most remarkable military organisations in modern history.

Trotsky’s Army

Trotsky’s approach to army-building was pragmatic to the point of controversy. The Bolsheviks had promised a “people’s militia” — a democratic, egalitarian force that would replace the hierarchical Tsarist army. What Trotsky actually built was, in many respects, the opposite: a conventionally structured army with ranks, salutes, discipline enforced by commissars, and — most controversially — tens of thousands of former Tsarist officers in command positions.

The use of these “military specialists” was essential to the Red Army’s effectiveness but deeply unpopular with ideological Bolsheviks who regarded former Tsarist officers as class enemies. Trotsky’s solution was the political commissar system: every military unit had a commissar alongside its commander, with power to countersign orders and report on the officer’s loyalty. Former Tsarist officers who defected or were suspected of treachery faced immediate execution — as did their families, who were effectively held as hostages. The system was brutal, but it worked.

Military Innovation

The Red Army that emerged from the civil war was not merely a copy of the Imperial Army. It developed new tactical doctrines suited to the mobile warfare of the civil war, including the concept of “deep battle” — the idea of striking simultaneously at the enemy’s entire depth, disrupting reserves and command structures as well as front-line forces. These ideas, developed by theorists like Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced Soviet military doctrine throughout the twentieth century.

The army also had a strong emphasis on political education and ideological formation. Literacy programmes, newspapers, political meetings — the Red Army was conceived as an instrument of social transformation as well as military force. Hundreds of thousands of peasants who had never left their villages received education, training and a sense of belonging to a larger national project through their military service.

The Army and the State

The creation of the Red Army had profound consequences for the character of the Soviet state. The wartime emergency that shaped its formation — the sense of being surrounded by enemies, of fighting for survival — never fully dissipated from Soviet political culture. Stalin’s purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1937–38, which executed three of five marshals, thirteen of fifteen army commanders, and over 35,000 officers, destroyed much of the military expertise that Trotsky had built — with catastrophic consequences when Germany attacked in 1941.

Why It Matters Now

The Red Army’s creation demonstrates how revolutionary states face an unavoidable dilemma: to survive, they must use the skills and expertise of the old order they have overthrown, but doing so compromises their ideological purity and creates political risks. Trotsky’s pragmatic solution — use the experts, but watch them constantly — worked in the short term but created a culture of suspicion within the military that StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More later exploited with devastating results.

Key Figures

• Leon Trotsky — People’s Commissar for War who created the Red Army and commanded it through the civil war. His military achievements were later written out of official Soviet history after his fall from power.
• Mikhail Tukhachevsky — The most brilliant Red Army commander and military theorist, architect of “deep battle” doctrine. Executed in Stalin’s purge of the officer corps in 1937.
• Semyon Budyonny — Civil war cavalry commander and later Marshal, closely associated with Stalin. Survived the purges but proved militarily ineffective in 1941.
• Mikhail Frunze — Trotsky’s successor as Commissar for War (1924–25), who died in suspicious circumstances following surgery that many believed was ordered by Stalin.

Timeline

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