Is it true that the Soviets were seriously considering abolishing the Red Army after the RCW?

Today, someone in the Alternate History Online Facebook group told me that after the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership was debating as to whether or not to abolish the Red Army and replace it with a militia. He claimed a faction of the Soviet leadership believed that the Tsars only kept a large army to aggrandize their neighbours and that a militia would be more in line with socialism.

Did this debate really happen and who were the major participants in this debacle? And why is the concept of a militia considered to be more line in with socialism than an actual army?
 

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Today, someone in the Alternate History Online Facebook group told me that after the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership was debating as to whether or not to abolish the Red Army and replace it with a militia. He claimed a faction of the Soviet leadership believed that the Tsars only kept a large army to aggrandize their neighbours and that a militia would be more in line with socialism.

Did this debate really happen and who were the major participants in this debacle? And why is the concept of a militia considered to be more line in with socialism than an actual army?
I mean it sounds very revolutionary left to abolish the army, but I think the Politiburo wouldn't have considered that even for a second, they knew they needed it.
 
Why? What was so 'revolutionary' about abolishing the army?

Well...

It could be said that an army is a tool of the central state. A militia, on the other hand, is something made and manned by the people. By having militia forces be the keystone of national defence, it would be placing much more power in the hands of the people. In theory, anyway...
 
Well...

It could be said that an army is a tool of the central state. A militia, on the other hand, is something made and manned by the people. By having militia forces be the keystone of national defence, it would be placing much more power in the hands of the people. In theory, anyway...
Some of the US' founding fathers did not like the idea of a standing army either and made quite similar arguments IIUC.
 
Today, someone in the Alternate History Online Facebook group told me that after the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership was debating as to whether or not to abolish the Red Army and replace it with a militia. He claimed a faction of the Soviet leadership believed that the Tsars only kept a large army to aggrandize their neighbours and that a militia would be more in line with socialism.

Did this debate really happen and who were the major participants in this debacle? And why is the concept of a militia considered to be more line in with socialism than an actual army?

In 1918 the Finnish Reds fighting our civil war did explicitly choose not to create a system of forced conscription, as doing that seemed to contradict their Socialist ideology, and then (at least in theory) relied on only volunteer troops in the war. This shows that Socialists in the timeframe of the Russian Civil War, and ones in close cooperation with the Russian revolutionaries at that, could see excessive "forced militarism" as unacceptable even while fighting a war for survival. Our Whites of course had no qualms for setting up a conscription system even while the war was going on, and that decision then in part helped them win the civil war as it boosted their numbers significantly.
 
There was such a debate but much of it occurred mainly in the midst of the Civil War, at least in terms of practicality, and was finished in the years following the war since by that point a professional army had already been formed.

Trotsky as Army Commissar advocated for the recruitment of former tsarist officers and specialists. For Trotsky, there were elements of controlling an army successfully that required more than just high motivation, such as knowing how to position artillery or machine guns to cover advances or retreats, that required the professionalisation of the army because there weren't enough working class soldiers with the technical knowledge to organise as needed. It was the reverse for the Whites who had a bevy of officers but couldn't convince the workers or peasants to fight for them. Trotsky instigated a massive education programme within the army in order to try and increase the number of educated workers to fill officer roles but for the time being military exigency required a relapse towards former hierarchical structures. Similarly, the number of worker and peasant volunteers weren't enough and so after the initial battles they began conscription.

On the other side you had Voroshilov, an ally of Stalin's, who advocated for a partisan militia system and was part of the so-called 'military opposition' to the centralisation of the army and against the recruitment of former Tsarist specialists. Ultimately, Voroshilov ignored orders from the centre to listen to the Tsarist military specialists assigned to the southern front which led to Tsaritsyn being surrounded and almost taken by the Whites. He, and many other former non-commissioned officers, would submit to the central authority and structures of the Red Army as the civil war progressed but there was always a sense amongst revolutionaries that their 'style' of war shouldn't emulate the strict armies of the imperialist nations.

Frunze, another member of the military opposition, advocated for a Marxist understanding of war. Lenin and Trotsky both read Clausewitz and had rather orthodox understandings of war whereas for Frunze the war should be an extension of class analysis. He wanted to maintain the elections of military commissars and wrote, "The tactics of the Red Army were and will be impregnated with activity in the spirit of bold and energetically conducted offensive operations. This flows from the class nature of the workers’ and peasants’ army and at the same time coincides with the requirements of military art." Frunze and other advocated for a partisan, democratic army that would rely heavily on manoeuvre and dynamism of which he believed only a working class army would be capable.

Tukhachevsky was sort of a middle ground. He wrote, "The characteristic features of a militia army are its vast size and its comparatively small war efficiency. Large armies which lack the nuclei of permanent military formations can receive no thorough training with regular units in time of peace, since they are assembled only by mobilisation orders. Their war efficiency is therefore bound to be small." He attacked the insubordination and incompetence of partisan detachments in the civil war and agreed with Trotsky's position on centralising out of necessity but he agreed with Frunze about the nature of manoeuvre and utilising dynamism where Trotsky had a more conventional 'trenches and artillery' perspective.
 
On the other side you had Voroshilov, an ally of Stalin's, who advocated for a partisan militia system and was part of the so-called 'military opposition' to the centralisation of the army and against the recruitment of former Tsarist specialists. Ultimately, Voroshilov ignored orders from the centre to listen to the Tsarist military specialists assigned to the southern front which led to Tsaritsyn being surrounded and almost taken by the Whites. He, and many other former non-commissioned officers, would submit to the central authority and structures of the Red Army as the civil war progressed but there was always a sense amongst revolutionaries that their 'style' of war shouldn't emulate the strict armies of the imperialist nations.

Had Voroshilov gotten his way, what would've this 'Red Militia' looked like?
 
Had Voroshilov gotten his way, what would've this 'Red Militia' looked like?
Voroshilov wasn't a very effective military commander during the Civil War. This is short a description of him from Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin: "Stalin now expropriated Snesarev’s [a former Tsarist military specialist] operations department: a July 22 inventory yielded typewriter (Remington), one; telephone (city line), one; telephone (Tsaritsyn HQ), one; desks, four; wicker chairs, seven; pens, three; pencils, five; folders, one; trash can, one. Stalin had forced Snesarev, whom he viewed as Trotsky’s man, to unite two armies under the command of Klim Voroshilov. Born in Lugansk, the same Donbass coal-mining hometown as Alexander Chervyakov of the Tsaritsyn Cheka, Voroshilov had met Stalin at the 4th Party Congress in 1906 (they shared a room). His origins were similarly humble: the son of a washerwoman and a peasant who worked the mines and railways. Voroshilov had ended his formal schooling at age eight, tended animals, and trained as a locksmith. In August 1917, he took over the Lugansk City Duma from Chervyakov, heading it through February 1918, when the Germans began to overrun Ukraine and he turned to partisan warfare, which constituted his first military experience. He had retreated from Ukraine to Tsaritsyn with other Red Guards. Although a fine horseman and marksman, and a genuine proletarian, which garnered him some popularity with rank-and-file troops, he was no strategist. “Personally Voroshilov does not sufficiently possess the characteristics necessary for a military chief,” Snesarev had written to Trotsky in July 1918, adding that he “does not observe elementary rules of commanding troops.” But Stalin, with Voroshilov, pushed a defense plan that stipulated removing troops from Tsaritsyn’s northern defenses to its southern and western side for an offensive. It was duly launched on August 1. Within three days Tsaritsyn had lost contact with Moscow; units had to be transferred back to the city’s north. Stalin wrote to Lenin (August 4) blaming his “inheritance” from Snesarev."

Essentially, partisan bands are useful in certain circumstances but not necessarily all circumstances - sometimes you need standardised a standardised military and certainly there would need to be some coordinating structure in place to organise those partisan bands into something that can be trusted to hold positions, flank enemies, retreat in order etc. I think if Trotsky hadn't been Army Commissar then perhaps there would have been more internal democratic elements within the army but it would eventually be forced by circumstance to adopt a more conventional structure just due to the necessities of the civil war.
 
In 1918 the Finnish Reds fighting our civil war did explicitly choose not to create a system of forced conscription, as doing that seemed to contradict their Socialist ideology, and then (at least in theory) relied on only volunteer troops in the war. This shows that Socialists in the timeframe of the Russian Civil War, and ones in close cooperation with the Russian revolutionaries at that, could see excessive "forced militarism" as unacceptable even while fighting a war for survival. Our Whites of course had no qualms for setting up a conscription system even while the war was going on, and that decision then in part helped them win the civil war as it boosted their numbers significantly.

Going for the Moral Victory.
 
I could see the Soviets “disarming” the “army” for a national “militia”

Nothing would change except for the name

I mean, they changed names OTL from the “Red” Army to the “Soviet” Army in 1946. No one really notice or cared
 
There was such a debate but much of it occurred mainly in the midst of the Civil War, at least in terms of practicality, and was finished in the years following the war since by that point a professional army had already been formed.

Trotsky as Army Commissar advocated for the recruitment of former tsarist officers and specialists. For Trotsky, there were elements of controlling an army successfully that required more than just high motivation, such as knowing how to position artillery or machine guns to cover advances or retreats, that required the professionalisation of the army because there weren't enough working class soldiers with the technical knowledge to organise as needed. It was the reverse for the Whites who had a bevy of officers but couldn't convince the workers or peasants to fight for them. Trotsky instigated a massive education programme within the army in order to try and increase the number of educated workers to fill officer roles but for the time being military exigency required a relapse towards former hierarchical structures. Similarly, the number of worker and peasant volunteers weren't enough and so after the initial battles they began conscription.

Trotsky viewed the recruitment of Tsarist officers and specialists as a Civil War expediency, not something to be maintained in permanence. In the aftermath of the Civil War, he very much argued for the abolishment of any sort of a professional army in favor of a mass workers militia. This rather blew away the political capital he had accrued with the officer corps during the Civil War.

On the other side you had Voroshilov, an ally of Stalin's, who advocated for a partisan militia system and was part of the so-called 'military opposition' to the centralisation of the army and against the recruitment of former Tsarist specialists. Ultimately, Voroshilov ignored orders from the centre to listen to the Tsarist military specialists assigned to the southern front which led to Tsaritsyn being surrounded and almost taken by the Whites. He, and many other former non-commissioned officers, would submit to the central authority and structures of the Red Army as the civil war progressed but there was always a sense amongst revolutionaries that their 'style' of war shouldn't emulate the strict armies of the imperialist nations.

I've really never seen anything like that from Voroshilov. Admittedly, mainly because Voroshilov does not seem to have been much of a theoretician. All of this is more stuff that Trotsky was advocating in the mid-1920s.

Frunze, another member of the military opposition, advocated for a Marxist understanding of war. Lenin and Trotsky both read Clausewitz and had rather orthodox understandings of war whereas for Frunze the war should be an extension of class analysis. He wanted to maintain the elections of military commissars and wrote, "The tactics of the Red Army were and will be impregnated with activity in the spirit of bold and energetically conducted offensive operations. This flows from the class nature of the workers’ and peasants’ army and at the same time coincides with the requirements of military art." Frunze and other advocated for a partisan, democratic army that would rely heavily on manoeuvre and dynamism of which he believed only a working class army would be capable.

Tukhachevsky was sort of a middle ground. He wrote, "The characteristic features of a militia army are its vast size and its comparatively small war efficiency. Large armies which lack the nuclei of permanent military formations can receive no thorough training with regular units in time of peace, since they are assembled only by mobilisation orders. Their war efficiency is therefore bound to be small." He attacked the insubordination and incompetence of partisan detachments in the civil war and agreed with Trotsky's position on centralising out of necessity but he agreed with Frunze about the nature of manoeuvre and utilising dynamism where Trotsky had a more conventional 'trenches and artillery' perspective.

Not... quite. Tukhachevsky and Frunze both advocated for a mass army and disparaged the idea that "small armies" could bring victory or had any sort of inherent efficiency advantage. Tukhachevsky in particular once wrote out a scenario in which a small British army in Canada takes on a large American one and observes that the British army would likely be quite soundly crushed. That said, their envisioning of a such a mass army was very much not one of a militia army: rather, they advocated a mass conscript army which would be led a professional officer corps, who would form the "nuclei in time of peace" he believed militia armies lacked, and who would be thoroughly indoctrinated in Communist ideology and subordinate to the Communist Party.
 
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Trotsky viewed the recruitment of Tsarist officers and specialists as a Civil War expediency, not something to be maintained in permanence. In the aftermath of the Civil War, he very much argued for the abolishment of any sort of a professional army in favor of a mass workers militia. This rather blew away the political capital he had accrued with the officer corps during the Civil War.
For Trotsky, the question that faced the Red Army in the post Civil War period was that of making it not just a Great Russian army but an army that would be able to represent all the nationalities of the USSR fairly. In "Prospects and Tasks in Building the Army" he certainly did advocate for a militia system as something that would help tie the Army together with the various states within the Union but he stressed the caveat that it would be "a long-term process. Parallel with it must proceed intense work at educating and re-educating the present Red Army, to develop within it a clear awareness that it is the armed force a union of national and autonomous republics. It is necessary systematically, persistently, firmly, tirelessly – and, where necessary, also ruthlessly – to drive out national prejudices, the heritage of chauvinism, arrogance, the great-power attitude. It is necessary that units of the Red Army, and, above all, their political and commanding personnel, shall know the character, peculiarities and history of the nationalities among whom they are stationed. Military centralisation, insofar as this results from the inevitable demands of army life, must be effected in such a way that the local inhabitants and, above all, their leading circles, may clearly understand the practical need for centralisation. And, to this end, it is necessary that the War Department itself shall take account of the admissible limits of centralisation. Any administrative excesses must be ruthlessly extirpated; any vestiges of Arakcheyevism, however ‘Soviet’ or even ‘communist’ these may be, must be burnt out with a white-hot iron." He also was keen to stress the important differences in technical knowledge between the Red Army and the capitalist armies and the need to have strong central coordination in order to implement advances quickly. So I would argue that whilst Trotsky, and many others, might have made allusions to a militia system in fact he were arguing practically for a centralised army - at least for the time being whilst the capitalist nations still threatened them. And, it was almost a moot point by the late 1920's considering he was about to be expelled but there's not any discussion of altering the army into a militia system in the Platform of the Joint Opposition.

I've really never seen anything like that from Voroshilov. Admittedly, mainly because Voroshilov does not seem to have been much of a theoretician. All of this is more stuff that Trotsky was advocating in the mid-1920s.
Voroshilov is sometimes given as a figurehead of the Military Opposition undeservedly, in part because he was an ally of Stalin. Partly why I mentioned him at all was to indicate the concrete issues of command, technical skill etc facing the Red Army in regards to why Trotsky favoured a more standardised structure of authority in the army temporarily whilst the war was raging (and practically this continued after the war). The results of Voroshilov's style of command are discussed in the Kotkin quote I give above but Orlando Figes gives a brief overview of the differences in a less-than-flattering way which I'll quote below.

Kliment Voroshilov, an Old Bolshevik and Red Guard commander, was the leading figure of this Military Opposition, as it soon came to be known. Based in Tsaritsyn, Voroshilov refused to carry out the orders of Trotsky’s central command organ, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (RVSR) and its Commander on the Southern Front, the ex-tsarist General Sytin based at Kozlov. Stalin backed Voroshilov, although he always denied belonging to the Military Opposition. This direct challenge to Trotsky’s authority from such a senior party comrade was the origin of much of the personal animosity between Trotsky and Stalin in the years to come.

Trotsky turned the criticisms of his policies into a question of the party’s general confidence in himself as Commissar for War. He demanded that the editors of Pravda be censured for publishing the articles by Sorin and Kamensky. He also demanded Stalin’s recall from the Southern Front, where the Georgian was shooting dozens of officials and creating havoc as a special commissar for food supply. This was a dangerous game for Trotsky to play. The sentiments of the Military Opposition, like those of the Left Communists, from which it had in part originated, were widely shared among the rank and file who had joined the party since 1917. As they saw it, the whole purpose of the revolution was to replace the old ‘bourgeois specialists’ with proletarians loyal to the party. Theirs was a communism of careerists — one that combined an egalitarian rejection of the old authorities with the demand that they, as Communists, should enjoy a similar position of power and privilege within the new regime. In their eyes, comradeship and class were the only necessary qualifications for military advancement. Battles would be won by the ‘revolutionary spirit’ of the comrades and their men, not by the outmoded science of the tsarist Military Academy.

Underlying this mistrust of the officers was an instinctive lower-class resentment of all privilege and a deep anti-intellectualism. These same attitudes were also displayed towards the other so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’ employed by the Soviet regime in the bureaucracy and industry (i.e. Civil Servants, managers and technicians who had held their posts before 1917). Many intellectuals in the party leadership were themselves targets of this demagogic hostility from the rank and file. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin’s three great rivals in the 1920s, suffered particularly on this score. Their Jewish looks no doubt had much to do with it. Most of the Military Opposition came from lower-class families and had had no more than a basic education. Voroshilov was the son of a casual labourer on the railways, and had spent only two years at school. These ‘sons of the proletariat’ were resentful at having to give way to officers who had enjoyed all the privileges of noble birth and education in the Military Academy. Much of their resentment, as junior commanders, was provoked by what they saw as Trotsky’s arrogance and his Bonapartist manners as the head of the Red Army. He always arrived at the Front in his richly furnished train (Trotsky was well known as a gourmet and his train was equipped with its own high-class restaurant). His commissars were always dressed in immaculate uniforms, with expensive leather boots and shiny golden buttons. Perhaps with a little more sensitivity Trotsky might have neutralized the Military Opposition. But he had never been noted for his tact — Trotsky himself once admitted that he was disliked within the party for his ‘aristocratism’ — and his pride had been wounded by the Opposition’s challenge to his position and authority. Trotsky chose to strike back where it would hurt most, ridiculing his critics as ‘party ignoramuses’. The odd betrayal by the military specialists, he claimed, was not as bad as the loss of ‘whole regiments’ through the incompetence of ‘semi-educated’ Communist commanders who ‘could not even read a map’.

The conflict rumbled on through the winter, until March 1919, when, with Kolchak on the Volga, Lenin made an appeal for party unity, and a compromise of sorts was struck at the Eighth Party Congress. Trotsky’s employment of the ex-tsarist officers was to be supported on the grounds of military exigency, but the supervisory role of the commissars and the general power of the party in the army were both to be increased, along with the training of Red Commanders for future leadership of the army. This, however, was just to throw a blanket over the dispute. The chain of command in the army became even more confused, with the commanders, the commissars and the local party cells all engaged in a three-cornered struggle for authority. Moreover, the conflict between Trotsky and the Military Opposition was to emerge the following summer, when Stalin relaunched a general attack on the leadership of the army.

Not... quite. Tukhachevsky and Frunze both advocated for a mass army and disparaged the idea that "small armies" could bring victory or had any sort of inherent efficiency advantage. Tukhachevsky in particular once wrote out a scenario in which a small British army in Canada takes on a large American one and observes that the British army would likely be quite soundly crushed. That said, their envisioning of a such a mass army was very much not one of a militia army: rather, they advocated a mass conscript army which would be led a professional officer corps, who would form the "nuclei in time of peace" he believed militia armies lacked, and who would be thoroughly indoctrinated in Communist ideology and subordinate to the Communist Party.
Frunze actually wrote specifically about the significance of the guerrillas in Siberia, the Cossacks and Basmachi, even the Machnovischina, in his conception of the proletarian/Marxist style of warfare. Like many generals he imagined the wars of the future would take on the characteristics of the previous war and based much of his ideas on the anarchic experiences of Civil War. For Frunze, the warfare of the future would be one of manoeuvre and propaganda and he supported a democratic hierarchy within the army as much of the Military Opposition did. Tukhachevsky was more obviously against a militia system and for a standardised command structure.
 
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