MIA > Archive > Cliff > Trotsky 2
Military science or art?
The case of Tukhachevsky
The armed militia
AFTER the end of the civil war and the Polish campaign there was an ardent discussion on the military doctrines that the Red Army should adopt.
The question of military doctrine had been the subject of discussion in professional military circles as early as 1918 in the journal Voennoe delo. The journal tried to undertake a systematic study of the issue, but the immediate problems of the civil war prevented this. In 1920 it resumed the discussion, again at first amongst professional officers. But then the debate widened: the former Military Opposition joined the fray. At the Tenth Party Congress (March 1921), what became known as the ‘single military doctrine’ was first formulated by Mikhail Frunze, a former Tsarist NCO who had risen rapidly in the Red Army. He had been in command in Turkestan in 1919, and as commander of the southern front against Wrangel in the autumn of 1920 had gained high prestige for his victory. The theoretician of the group was Gusev. Belonging to the group were many of the former Military Opposition, including Voroshilov and Budenny.
The ‘single military doctrine’ reduced itself to the assertion, which had already been repeated continually in the preceding years, that there was a specifically Marxist, proletarian, revolutionary theory of military affairs. Since ‘the working class will be compelled by the very course of the historical revolutionary process to pass over to the offensive against capital’, it followed that this offensive must be the basis of the tactics of the Red Army. [1]
Trotsky proceeded to demolish this idea. In general the issue of military doctrine occupies an important place in the five volumes of his How the Revolution Armed, and he brought to this question a combination of creative originality and a broad historical standpoint. He had to fight on two fronts: against the advocates of proletarian military doctrine on the one hand and leaders of the Moscow Military Academy – professors, lecturers and old generals – on the other. The latter were so conservative as to view the civil war contemptuously, as if its experience was of no significance in contributing to any discussion of military doctrine. Trotsky criticised them for ‘pedantic disdain for the military work that history is carrying on now’.
You say ... that ... the present civil or small-scale war ... has nothing to do with science, for science has, in general, nothing to do with all that. But I say to you, military specialist gentlemen, that this is an utterly ignorant statement ...
With the mobility and flexibility of its fronts, the civil war offers immense scope for real initiative and real military creativity, and that is where the whole problem lies – achieving maximum results with minimum expenditure of forces.
It is precisely the 1914-18 war that
gave comparatively little scope for creativity, as was very soon revealed on the western front, in France. After that gigantic front had been established, between the Belgian coast and Switzerland, the war at once became automatic, with the art of strategy reduced to the minimum, and everything was staked on the card of mutual exhaustion – whereas our war, which is wholly an affair of mobility and manoeuvres, presents opportunities for the greatest talent to be revealed in ‘small-scale’ war. [2]
While the old generals refused to learn the lessons of the civil war, the supporters of the ‘proletarian military doctrine’ refused to learn anything else. Their ambition was to create a brand new military doctrine, in the same way as others in the party leadership later wanted to produce ‘proletarian culture’ and ‘proletarian literature’. The ‘single military doctrine’, they said, should fit the revolutionary mentality of the proletariat, it should disdain defensive and static warfare and adopt mobility and the offensive; only reactionary, decaying classes favoured defensive strategy. The adherents of the ‘proletarian doctrine of the offensive’ theorised from their own experience of the civil war, in which rapid manoeuvre predominated.
Trotsky pointed out that the Red Army had learned manoeuvrability – now claimed as the exclusive creation of a revolutionary class – from the Whites. On 24 July 1919 he wrote:
Newcomers to Marxism are trying to deduce from the aggressive psychology of the proletariat, in one breath, its military organisation and its class strategy. In doing so, alas, they fail to notice the fact that to the aggressive character of a class there does not always correspond a sufficient number of ... cavalry horses.
On the other hand
... distrust of worker and peasant manpower, an abundance of experience, White-Guard-minded commanders and a comparatively plentiful supply of cavalry impelled the military leaders of the counter-revolution to take the road of light, mobile detachments and well-calculated guerrilla ‘ventures’.
Just as the Red Army learned manoeuvrability from the Whites, so the latter borrowed methods of propaganda from the Reds. While the Red Army became more mobile over time, the White armies became less so:
Having won certain successes, the White Guard generals are proceeding to conscript the peasants and even the workers, and to form a numerically imposing army – which will, naturally, lack mobility and manoeuvrability.
... it can be said that, as a result of the protracted civil war, the military methods of both camps are drawing closer together. While we are now giving very close attention to the creation of cavalry, the enemy, who long since followed our example by carrying out mass conscription, has begun to form his own political departments, agitational centres and agitational trains. [3]
The similarities between the manoeuvrability of armies in the Russian civil war and those in the American civil war, said Trotsky, are a proof that manoeuvrability is not derived from the class nature of the proletariat but from the nature of the terrain. [4] The fact that the Red Army is the weapon of a new class does not denote the establishment of a new military doctrine. Military doctrines cannot be reduced to politics alone:
I said that politics rules over military affairs. That is undoubtedly the case, but if anyone thinks that politics can ‘replace’ military matters, he is very much mistaken. Politics rules over literature, over art, but politics does not replace literature and art. Politics rules in the sense that it reflects class ideology – it penetrates everything and compels everything, from guns to literary verses, to serve this class ideology: but that does not mean that if I know the politics of the working class I can make a gun or write lyrics. For that, one has to have talent and training, to know the laws of prosody, and so on. In order to follow the military vocation, one has to know the laws of military affairs and to know military technique ...
Military affairs constitute an independent sphere which lives by creative analysis, investigation of mistakes, correction of mistakes and development of accumulated knowledge.
And Trotsky poked fun at the ignoramuses who
think that politics ‘replaces’ everything else, and that with this talisman in our hand we shall be able to open all doors. [5]
The dilettante strategists, who resented being told that they were ignorant and had to learn – especially from the hated former Tsarist generals, were livid at Trotsky’s words.
In building the Red Army, Trotsky argued, the Bolsheviks had to combine the new and the old, to combine working-class experience with the traditions and experiences of the old armies. In an article whose title was quite insulting to the amateur ‘proletarian strategist’: Military Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism, Trotsky explained that from the beginning of the Red Army there had been comrades who had argued that everything should be new, different to what existed in the old army. But there was nothing of substance in their ‘originality’:
As a matter of fact, the noisy innovators were themselves wholly captives of the old military doctrine. They merely tried to put a minus sign wherever previously there was a plus. All their independent thinking came down just to that.
Actually, in creating the Red Army, the Bolsheviks had
proceeded along a different path. We tried, especially in the beginning, to make maximum possible use of the habits, usages, knowledge and means retained from the past, and we were quite unconcerned about the extent to which the new army would differ from the old, in the formally organisational and technical sense, or, on the contrary, would resemble it. We built the army out of the human and technical material ready to hand ... [6]
One should avoid, in military doctrine as in everything else, either accepting that ‘nothing is new under the sun’, or that everything is completely new, that the present has no connection to the past.
The proponents of proletarian military doctrine simply turned the ‘eternal truths’ of ‘military science’ inside out, but Trotsky poked fun at all these ‘eternal truths’:
If ... we check the inventory of eternal truths of military science, we obtain not much more than a few logical axioms and Euclidian postulates. Flanks must be protected, means of communication must be secured, the blow must be struck at the enemy’s least defended point, etc. All these truths, in this all-embracing formulation, go far beyond the limits of the art of war. The donkey that steals oats from a torn sack (the enemy’s least defended point) and vigilantly turns its crupper away from the side from which danger may be expected to come, acts thus in accordance with the eternal principles of military science. Yet it is unquestionable that this donkey munching oats has never read Clausewitz ...
War ... is a social and historical phenomenon which arises, develops, changes its forms and must eventually disappear. For this reason alone war cannot have any eternal laws. But the subject of war is man, who possesses certain fixed anatomical and mental traits from which are derived certain usages and habits.- Man operates in a specific and comparatively stable geographical setting. Thus, in all wars, in all ages and among all peoples, there have obtained certain common features, relatively stable but by no means absolute.
Based on these features, an art of war has developed historically. Its methods and usages undergo change, together with the social conditions which govern it (technology, class structure, forms of state power). [7]
The whole argument put forward by the protagonists of proletarian military doctrine was based on a false premise: they believed that there was or would be a military science; in fact war, said Trotsky, was not a science at all, but an art.
There is not, and never has been, a military ‘science’. There are a whole number of sciences on which the soldier’s trade is based. Essentially, these include all the sciences, from geography to psychology. A great military commander must necessarily know the basic elements of many sciences ... War is based on many sciences, but war itself is not a science, it is a practical art, a skill ...
War cannot be turned into a science, because of its very nature, just as one cannot turn architecture, commerce or the work of a veterinary surgeon, and so on, into sciences. What people call the theory of war, or military science, is not a totality of scientific laws, which explain objective phenomena, but a totality of practical procedures, methods of adaptation and knacks which correspond to a specific task, that of crushing the enemy. [8]
Frunze and company argued that proletarian military science was derived from Marxism. However, this gave Marxism too much honour and too much insult by transforming it into a supra-historical science:
Attempts to proclaim Marxism the method of all sciences and arts often serve as cover for a stubborn aversion from entering new fields: it is, after all, much, much easier to possess a passe-partout, that is, a key which opens all doors and locks, than to study book-keeping, military affairs, and so on ... This is the greatest danger when people try to endow the Marxist method with such an absolute character ...
Marxism can be applied with very great success even to the history of chess. But it is not possible to learn to play chess in a Marxist way. With the aid of Marxism we can establish that there was once an Oblomov-like nobility who were too lazy even to play chess, and that later, with the growth of towns, intellectuals and merchants appeared who felt the need to exercise their brains by playing draughts and chess. And now, in our country, workers go to chess clubs. The workers play chess because they have thrown off those who used to ride on their backs. All this can be excellently explained by Marxism. One can show the entire course of the class struggle from the angle of the history of the development of chess. I assert that one could, using Marx’s method, write an excellent book on the history of the development of chess. However, to learn to play chess ‘according to Marx’ is altogether impossible, just as it is impossible to learn to wage war ‘according to Marx’. [9]
The sad thing was that the new self-educated and half-educated military cadres preaching the ‘proletarian military doctrine’ were trying above all to be original: they had the
urge to say ‘something new’. This is like someone who, because he appreciates original people, sets himself the task of becoming an original person: nothing would come of that, of course, except the most pathetic monkey-tricks. [10]
Trotsky did not pull his punches or defer to the sensibilities of the members of the Military Opposition, but his arguments did not convince many of the former NCOs, old Bolsheviks, who now commanded large army units. He merely put their backs up. His sharpness only insulted them. The shallowness and vagueness of the ‘single military doctrine’ was for them a source of emotional strength rather than weakness.
As already mentioned, the specific feature of proletarian military strategy according to Frunze and company was its aggressiveness. Trotsky comments on this:
The attempt to build a doctrine on this foundation appears all the more one-sided in view of the fact that during the epoch preceding the world war the strategy of the offensive was cultivated in the by no means revolutionary general staffs and military academies of nearly all the major countries of Europe. Contrary to what Comrade Frunze writes, the offensive was (and formally still remains to this day) the official doctrine of the French Republic. [11]
In any case, the mechanical juxtaposition of offensive to defensive strategy was mistaken. What was necessary was to grasp the dialectical relation between the two:
It is precisely in a war of manoeuvre that the distinction between offensive and defensive is wiped out to an extraordinary degree.
Thus, during the civil war,
while taking the offensive on one front, considered by us at a given moment as being the most important, for political or military reasons, we weakened ourselves on the other fronts, considering it possible to remain on the defensive there and to retreat. But, you see, what this shows is, precisely, the fact – how strange that this is overlooked! – that into our overall operational plans retreat entered, side by side with attack, as an indispensable link.
... there are strategic retreats due to an endeavour either to preserve manpower intact, or to shorten the front, or to lure the enemy in deeper, all the more surely to crush him. And if a strategical retreat is legitimate, then it is wrong to reduce all strategy to the offensive. [12]
Frunze, Budenny and company argued that the proletarian character of the leaders of the Red Army caused them to have much more initiative than the military leaders of the capitalist armies during the First World War, and this proved the superiority of ‘proletarian military strategy’. Trotsky retorted:
Comrade Budenny explained the positional character of the imperialist war as being due to the absence of great initiative, the irresolution of the leaders. ‘There was no commander of genius!’ ... In my opinion this explanation is wrong. The crux of the matter is this, that the imperialist war was a war not of armies but of nations, and of the richest nations, huge in numbers and with huge material resources. It was a war to the death. To every blow the opposing side found an answer. Every hole was blocked. The front was steadily consolidated on both sides: artillery, shells, men were piled up both on this side and on that. The task thus transcended the bounds of strategy. The war was transformed into a most profound process of measuring strength, one side against the other, in every direction. Neither aircraft, nor submarines, nor tanks, nor cavalry could by themselves produce a decisive result: they serve only as means for gradually exhausting the enemy’s forces and constantly checking on his condition – was he still standing firm, or was he ready to collapse? This was in the fullest sense of the word a war of attrition, in which strategy is not of decisive but only of auxiliary importance. [13]
The tendency of Frunze and company to raise the experience of the civil war into a dogma was most damaging. The Red commanders did not escape the usual trap for successful generals – that of visualising the next war in terms of the last:
The endeavour to fix as laws and erect into dogmas those features of the Red Army’s strategy and tactics which were characteristic of it in the recent period could do a great deal of harm and could even prove fatal. It is possible to say in advance that operations by the Red Army on the continent of Asia – if they are destined to take place there – would of necessity be profoundly manoeuvring in character. Cavalry would have to play the most important, and in some cases the one and only role. On the other hand, however, there can be no doubt that military operations in the western theatre would be far more constrained. Operations conducted in territory with a different national composition and more densely populated, with a higher ratio between the number of troops and the given territory, would undoubtedly make the war more positional in character and would, in any case, confine freedom to manoeuvre within incomparably narrower limits. [14]
Tukhachevsky, the most gifted of the Military Opposition, insisted more emphatically than anyone else on the specifically proletarian military doctrine permeating strategy, tactics and organisation. Being of a more modern outlook than his colleagues, Tukhachevsky saw the future of the offensive – so crucial to proletarian military strategy – as conducted by means of mass formations of tanks and armoured vehicles co-operating with air forces. His offensive doctrine was associated with the idea that the Red Army’s mission was to carry the proletarian revolution to other countries. Tukhachevsky was very much influenced by the Napoleonic tradition of ‘revolution from without’.
The war with Poland, although it failed, still fuelled Tukhachevsky’s enthusiasm for exporting the revolution on the points of bayonets. At the height of the operation against Poland, on 18 July 1920, Tukhachevsky wrote to Zinoviev, as president of the Communist International, about his new ideas:
Considering the inevitability of a world civil war in the very near future, we must now set up the general staff of the Comintern ...
To avoid those difficulties and crudities, from which we suffered at the creation of our Red Army, it is vital to work out beforehand a plan for the mobilisation of the working class, worker Red officers must be trained in advance, both senior combat chiefs and staff workers must be prepared beforehand.
... It is essential for us in Soviet Russia to open a series of military instruction centres and academies of the general staff to train command staff from workers and Communists of all nationalities in their languages.
It seems to me that the situation permits of no delay in this undertaking. [15]
Trotsky retorted:
[Tukhachevsky] writes that the time has come for the Comintern to set up an international general staff. Neither more nor less! An international general staff! What’s that? The Communist International is the political organisation which unites the national Communist Parties. When did the International become a possibility? When, alongside the Russian Communist Party, there appeared the German and other Communist Parties. Well, and when would a common general staff become possible? When, alongside the government of the Russian proletariat, other proletarian governments have arisen. Then and only then will it be possible to speak seriously of a common general staff, in the military sense of the word. But, you know, this necessary pre-condition is not present!
Moreover, Trotsky argued, the policy of the Russian, as well as the other Communist parties at present, was based not on an offensive but on a retreat:
we are now at the stage of retreat and preparation. What about our concessions to foreign capitalists? What about our recognition of the Tsarist debts? Are these, perhaps, elements in an offensive? No, they are elements of compromise and preparation ... If we were now in a position to take the offensive, we should not have recognised the Tsarist debts. Concessions, the New Economic Policy, recognition of the Tsarist debts, and, along with all that, offensive war: why, it would make a cat laugh!
... What are we doing now in the military field? We are carrying out a general demobilisation. It is astonishing how inconsistent some comrades are in their thinking ...
... We are demobilising because we are not at present going to fight, and, consequently, we are not going to launch an offensive. This is what we say to the workers and peasants: we have no war at present, there are no fronts, we are not going to attack anyone, and so we are demobilising. [16]
Nor did an offensive correspond to the strategy of the Comintern:
The idea of a revolutionary offensive war can be linked with the idea of an international proletarian offensive. But is this the current slogan of the Comintern? No: we have put forward and are upholding the idea of the workers’ united front, of joint actions even with the parties of the Second International, who do not want revolution – on the basis of defending the current vital interests of the proletariat, because these are being threatened on all sides by the aggressive bourgeoisie.
Of course one should not be dogmatic in opposing the offensive:
But surely we can’t renounce the idea of the political offensive in general? Of course not! We are not in the least intending to renounce the world proletarian revolution and victory over the bourgeoisie on the international scale. We should be traitors like the gentlemen of the Second and Two-and-a-half Internationals if we were to renounce the revolutionary offensive. We are renouncing nothing, dear comrades; but all in good time. Without an offensive victory is impossible. But only a simpleton supposes that the whole of political tactics is reducible to the slogan – ‘Forward!’ [17]
Furthermore, Trotsky argued, the social composition of the Red Army made the doctrine of the offensive absurd: to train the Red Army composed predominantly of peasants for an offensive war to support a world proletarian revolution was fanciful in the extreme.
Moreover, it would be disastrous for the Red Army to adopt Napoleonic offensive doctrine. First of all France, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the most civilised and technically advanced country on the continent, while Russia was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Secondly, the role of the proletariat, as the subject of history, did not at all fit in with revolution ‘from without’, imposed by an invading army. The proletariat had to be active in its own revolution; the mass of the people had played a relatively passive role in Napoleon’s wars of conquest.
The tradition of the Marxist movement, including the Bolsheviks, was one of opposition to the standing army and advocacy of its replacement by a people’s militia. Thus Lenin, in his Letters from Afar, written in Switzerland in March 1917, had called for a workers’ militia that
must, firstly, embrace the entire people, must be a mass organisation to the degree of being universal, must really embrace the entire able-bodied population of both sexes; secondly, it must proceed to combine not only purely police, but general state functions with military functions and with the control of social production and distribution. [18]
On 20 April (3 May) 1917, Lenin wrote: ‘The workers do not want an army standing apart from the people; what they want is that the workers and soldiers should merge into a single militia consisting of all the people.’ [19]
Unfortunately, in the conditions of Russia after October 1917, the militia was not feasible. First, the working class was a tiny minority, and if the army were to be built of militias recruited on a territorial principle the majority of its units would have been purely peasant in composition. This would have denied the leadership to the proletariat and would have made the army units unstable and unreliable. Secondly, the backwardness of the transport system would have made it impossible to move the militia units to the front in time. Russia’s backwardness dictated to the Red Army principles of organisation that were very similar to those of the Tsarist army. The difference between the two was in the social and political leadership and outlook, not in the main in their structures.
But Trotsky never lost the vision of moving towards the militia system. The Eighth Congress of the party (March 1919) adopted Trotsky’s theses on the future transition to the militia system, and the Ninth Congress (March 1920) endorsed this decision. Trotsky’s ‘Theses on going over to the Militia System’, written on 28 February 1920, state:
To the present period of transition, which may last for a long time, must correspond an organisation of our armed forces such that the working people acquire the necessary military training with the least possible distraction from productive labour. This system can only be a Red Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia constructed on territorial principles ...
In their territorial distribution the militia units (regiments, brigades, divisions) must coincide with the territorial layout of industry in order that the industrial centres, together with the agricultural peripheries which surround them and gravitate towards them, may constitute the basis for the militia units.
The immediate task was to move gradually towards the militia system:
As the Red Army is gradually demobilised, its best cadres must be allocated territorially in the most expedient fashion, that is, most closely adapted to local conditions of production and way of life, so as to ensure that there is an apparatus ready to administer the militia units.
... Going over to the militia system must inevitably be a gradual process in conformity with the military and international diplomatic situation of the Soviet Republic ... [20]
The programme of moving toward the militia system aroused considerable criticism, especially from the military specialists. One of Trotsky’s critics was General Svechin, the author of a standard work on strategy and professor of the Military Academy. Against Svechin’s conservative critique Trotsky defended the revolutionary tradition of the militia. In an article entitled The Militia Programme and its Academic Critic, dated 5 August 1919, Trotsky wrote:
If Professor Svechin thinks that the Communist Party has taken power in order to replace the tricolour barracks [the tricolour was the flag of Tsarist Russia] by a red one, that means that he has not mastered very well the [Communist Party programme] ...
The objection that under a militia system the command would not enjoy proper authority strikes one by its political blindness. Has the authority of the present command of the Red Army been established in barracks? ... A commander’s authority is based today not on the statutory hypnosis of the barracks, but on the authority of the Soviet power and the Communist Party. Professor Svechin has simply overlooked the revolution and the enormous spiritual upheaval it has brought about in the Russian working man. To him the ignorant, drunken mercenary, poxed and numbed by Catholicism, who served in Wallenstein’s camp, the Parisian apprentice who, led by journalists and lawyers, destroyed the Bastille in 1789, the Saxon worker and member of the Social Democratic Party in the period of the imperialist war, and the Russian proletarian who, for the first time in world history, took power – all these are to him more or less the same cannon-fodder to be meticulously moulded in the barracks. But isn’t that a mockery of the history of mankind?
The revolutionary spiritual growth of the masses would be the foundation for the militia and the Communist social order:
The development of the Communist order will run parallel with the growth in the spiritual stature of the broadest masses of the people. What the party gave in the past, mainly to an advanced section of the workers, will be given increasingly to the entire people by the actual organisation of society, with all its internal relationships. If the party has in this sense ‘replaced’ the barracks, so that it has given its members the necessary cohesion and made them capable of self-sacrificing collective struggle, communist society will be able to do this on an incomparably vaster scale and higher level. The corporate spirit, in the broad sense, is the spirit of collectivism. It is fostered not only in barracks but in a well-ordered school, especially one which is connected with physical labour. It is fostered by the cooperative principle of labour. It is fostered by broad, purposefully organised sport ... the militia will be infinitely richer in ‘corporate’ spirit, and this will be a spirit of much higher quality, than is the case with barracks-bred regiments. [21]
However Trotsky’s dream of moving from a standing army to a militia was not to be realised. The peasant upheavals of 1920 and 1921 made it impossible to move to a territorially based army. This was explained clearly by Trotsky himself in a speech on 17 February 1921:
Let us take the territorial principle. This has both positive and negative aspects. But they have to be examined in relation to the given conditions. If, in our economic construction, we had attained a state of affairs in which the workers and peasants were well fed, the peasants had a sufficient quantity of nails, calico, and so on, the territorial principle would possess, for us, only its positive aspect ... But if, in a given locality, there is antagonism, enmity, this cohesion may be turned against the government. In the country districts, where revolts are taking place in which a considerable section of the peasants are involved, peasants who are suffering from want and deprivation, such cohesion may be turned against the military system – and not just against a militia system but against any other. We have to take all this into account.
Trotsky’s conclusion was that it was necessary to be very cautious about moving to the militia system:
The whole problem lies in the proportion in which we are to go over to the militia system. Shall we say that we will now disband forty or fifty divisions, leaving ten or twenty; or, on the contrary, shall we keep forty or fifty divisions while at the same time setting about the creation of five or three militia divisions? That is how the practical problem presents itself. I think that we should begin with the minimum ... then, shall we begin by creating three or five divisions? I think it would be more correct to start with three: in Petrograd, in Moscow and in the Urals ... We ought to take as our basis three areas, the most favourable ones, with the biggest percentage of workers. [22]
The Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) devoted three closed sessions to military matters. In its resolution the fundamental attitude to the militia was not changed, but the idea of an immediate transition to a militia was put on ice. [23]
In fact, a full militia brigade was organised only in Petrograd. Again and again the backwardness of Russia and its encirclement by hostile capitalist powers blocked the achievement of Trotsky’s dreams.
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1. M. Frunze, Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow 1929), pages 207-227.
2. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 227-8.
3. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 85-6.
4. Trotsky, HRA, volume 5, pages 396-7.
5. Trotsky, HRA, pages 125-6.
6. Trotsky, HRA, page 317.
7. Trotsky, HRA, pages 317 and 319-20.
8. Trotsky, HRA, page 361.
9. Trotsky, HRA, pages 409-11.
10. Trotsky, HRA, page 397.
11. Trotsky, HRA, page 342.
12. Trotsky, HRA, pages 345-6.
13. Trotsky, HRA, pages 394-5.
14. Trotsky, HRA, pages 340-1
15. M.N. Tukhachevsky, Voina klassov (Moscow 1921), pages 138-40.
16. Trotsky, HRA, volume 4, pages 132 and 134.
17. Trotsky, HRA, volume 5, page 389.
18. Lenin, Works, volume 23, page 319.
19. Lenin, Works, volume 24, page 180.
20. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 190-2.
21. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 167-9.
22. Trotsky, HRA, volume 2, pages 16-18.
23. Desiatii sezd RKP(b) (Moscow 1933), pages 294, 614 and 674-84.
Last updated on 28 July 2009