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?