Chapter 3: Changes in the Red Army

A most shocking criticism by Trotsky of the Stalin period is that in 1935, the officers’ corps was resurrected in the Red Army in all its bourgeois magnificence!

Trotsky writes: “The army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature.... The army needs the fresh air of criticism. The commanding staff needs democratic control. The organizers of the Red Army were aware of this from the beginning, and considered it necessary to prepare for such a measure as the election of the commanding staff. “The growth of internal solidarity of the detachments, the development in the soldier of a critical attitude to himself and his commanders ...” says the basic decision of the party on military questions, “will create favourable conditions in which the principle of electivity of the commanding personnel can receive wider and wider application.”

However, fifteen years later – a span of time which was sufficient for the maturing of inner solidarity and self-criticism – the ruling circles took exactly the opposite turn. In September 1935, the government announced that the Red Army would now be crowned with an officers’ hierarchy, beginning with lieutenant and ending with marshal. Additional perks and a raise in salaries for the commanding staff were also announced.

Trotsky analyses this development very appropriately: “No army ....can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it. The source of bureaucratism with its routine and swank is not the special needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling stratum. In the army these needs only receive their most finished expression. The restoration of officers’ castes eighteen years after their revolutionary abolition testifies equally to the gulf which already separates the rulers from the ruled...” [1]

He adds, “ The bourgeois press has appraised this counter-reform as it deserves. The French official paper, Le Temps, wrote on September 25, 1935: “This external transformation is one of the signs of a deep change which is now taking place throughout the whole Soviet Union...Revolutionary habits and customs are giving place within the Soviet family and Soviet society to the feelings and customs which continue to prevail within the so-called capitalist countries.” [2]

Our Comments

This single fact – the resurrection of the officers’ corps, is of such significance, carries so much weight, that it is by itself virtually enough to justify Trotsky’s criticism of the Stalinist regime, that it represents a new ruling stratum, a bureaucracy, totally alienated from the masses.

The establishment of an officers’ corps in the Peoples’ Army: this was one of the demands of the capitalist roaders in China, which had been rightly opposed by Mao. Surprisingly, Mao has made no comment on this same step taken in the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1935.

References

[1] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972, pp. 221-224

[2] Ibid., p. 225

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