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.