Stalin by Leon Trotsky & Alan Woods & Rob Sewell

Author:Leon Trotsky & Alan Woods & Rob Sewell [Trotsky, Leon & Woods, Alan & Sewell, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History : Revolutionary
ISBN: 9781900007641
Google: z40hvgAACAAJ
Publisher: Wellred Books
Published: 2016-09-15T23:22:54.168970+00:00

The Military Opposition

The Military Opposition consisted of two groups. There were numerous underground workers who were utterly worn out by prison and exile, and who now could not find a place for themselves in the building of the Army and the state. They held a grudge against the upstarts – and there was no lack of them in responsible posts. But in this opposition there were also very many advanced workers, militant elements with fresh reserves of energy, who trembled with political apprehension when they saw yesterday’s engineers, officers, teachers, professors, once again in commanding positions. This Workers’ Opposition reflected, in the final analysis, a lack of confidence in its own powers and uncertainty that the new class which had come to power would be able to dominate and control the broad circles of the old intelligentsia.

With reference to the Military Opposition, Stalin behaved just as he had with regard to the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev during the pre-October period, or with reference to the conciliators of 1912-13. He did not come out openly for them but he supported them against Lenin and tried to find support from them. In an argument with one of Stalin’s guerrilla partisans I wrote in January 1919:

In one of our armies, it was considered a mark of the highest revolutionism not so very long ago to jeer rather vulgarly and stupidly at ‘Military specialists’, i.e., at all who had studied in military schools; yet in this very same army practically no political work was carried on. The attitude there was no less hostile, perhaps even more so, towards Communist Commissars than towards the specialists. Who was sowing this hostility? The worst kind of the new commanders – military know-nothings, half guerrillas, half Party people who did not want to have anyone around, whether Party workers or serious military workers… Clinging fiercely to their jobs, they cursed the very mention of military studies… Finally having gotten into a hopeless mess, many of them simply ended up by rebelling against the Soviet Government.

During the period of the Civil War there were two aspects to military work. One was to select the necessary workers, organise them properly, establish the necessary supervision over the commanding staff, weed out unsuitable elements, exert the necessary pressure and also punish the miscreants. All such activities of the administrative machine suited Stalin’s talents to perfection. The craving for lording it over others found here its fullest expression. Here he could answer all objections and arguments with an order that was not subject to appeal. That is why the military front undoubtedly attracted Stalin; the military apparatus is the most absolute of all apparatuses.

In the military the masses are de-personalised and held tightly in the vice of the machine. But there is also another side, which has to do with the necessity of improvising an organised force out of human raw material by appealing to the hearts of the soldiers and the commanders, arousing their better selves, and inspiring them with confidence in the new leadership.

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