Creation of the Red Army

On 28 January 1918 (15 January in the Julian calendar) the Council of People’s Commissars adopted a decree establishing the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. The old army, according to its preamble, had been a class instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the seizure of power by the workers required the creation of a new one. It was to defend Soviet power, prepare the transition from a standing army to “the armed people” and become a support for the expected socialist revolution in Europe. The decree was signed by Lenin, the Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissars for Military and Naval Affairs Nikolai Podvoisky and Pavel Dybenko, and commissars from the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, among them Prosh Proshyan.

The new force was to be voluntary. Any citizen of the republic who had reached the age of 18 and was ready “to give his strength and his life” in defence of the gains of the October Revolution, Soviet power and socialism could join. The army was to be formed from the “most conscious and organised” people of the working classes, so a candidate needed a recommendation from a military committee, a soviet, a party organisation or a trade union, or as a last resort from two of their members. A whole unit could pass into the Red Army only with the consent of all its soldiers. The state undertook to support the volunteers’ families, and the volunteers received an additional 50 roubles a month. Supreme authority over the army lay with the Council of People’s Commissars, and its direction was entrusted to the Commissariat of War and to a special collegium attached to it for the formation of the new army.

The decree was a response to the disintegration of the old army. After the October coup and the conclusion of the armistice at Brest, millions of soldiers were leaving the front of their own accord. The Bolsheviks had themselves hastened this collapse: they abolished military ranks, introduced the election of commanders and handed authority in units to soldiers’ committees, while the demobilisation of the older age groups was in full swing. Until then the new regime had been defended by workers of the Red Guard, sailors of the Baltic Fleet and a few reliable regiments such as the Latvian Riflemen. This was enough to disperse the Constituent Assembly or to fight the first volunteers on the Don, but not to defend the country against a regular army. Meanwhile the negotiations at Brest had stalled, and the Germans could resume operations at any moment. The announcement of “the formation of a socialist Red Army of workers and peasants” had already appeared in the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People, which the Bolsheviks put before the Constituent Assembly, and a few days before the decree it was adopted by the Third Congress of Soviets.

In the first weeks there were few volunteers. When in the second half of February the Germans went over to the offensive and the government proclaimed that “the socialist fatherland is in danger”, mass recruitment of volunteers began. That is why 23 February was later regarded as the day of the Red Army’s foundation, still celebrated in Russia as Defender of the Fatherland Day. A couple of weeks after the army decree, on 11 February (29 January Old Style), a similar decree created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. In March 1918 Leon Trotsky became Commissar for War, and within a few months he abandoned the volunteer principle: in the summer conscription was introduced, and thousands of officers of the old tsarist army were drawn into the army. The army born of the decree of 28 January won the Civil War and survived as the armed forces of the Soviet state.