Civil War (1918–1920)
The military situation tested Trotsky's organisational skills. In May–June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions revolted, leading to the loss of most of Russia's territory, increasingly organised resistance from anti-Communist forces (the White Army), and widespread defections by military experts Trotsky relied on.
Trotsky and the government responded with a full mobilisation, increasing the Red Army from under 300,000 in May 1918 to one million by October, and introducing political commissars to ensure loyalty of military experts (mostly former Imperial officers) and co-sign their orders. Trotsky viewed the Red Army's organisation as built on October Revolution ideals. He later wrote:
An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.
A controversial measure was hostage-taking of relatives of ex-Tsarist officials in the Red Army to prevent defection or betrayal. Service noted this practice was used by both Red and White armies. Trotsky later defended this, arguing no families of betraying ex-officials were executed and that such measures, if adopted earlier, would have reduced overall casualties. Deutscher highlights Trotsky's preference for exchanging hostages over execution, recounting General Pyotr Krasnov's release on parole in 1918, only for Krasnov to take up arms again shortly thereafter.
The Red Terror was enacted following assassination attempts on Lenin and Trotsky, and the assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and the party editor V. Volodarsky. The French Reign of Terror is seen as an influence. The decision was also driven by early White Army massacres of "Red" prisoners in 1917, Allied intervention, and massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War (10,000–20,000 workers killed by Finnish Whites). In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky argued the terror in Russia began with the White Terror under White Guard forces, to which the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, director of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB), was tasked with rooting out counter-revolutionary threats. From early 1918, Bolsheviks began eliminating opposition, including anarchists. On 11 August 1918 Lenin telegraphed orders "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod and to "crush" landowners resisting grain requisitioning.
On 30 August Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary, unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Lenin. In September Trotsky rushed from the eastern front to Moscow; Stalin remained in Tsaritsyn. Kaplan cited growing Bolshevik authoritarianism. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's calls for greater terror. The Red Terror officially began thereafter, between 17 and 30 August 1918. Trotsky wrote:
The bourgeoisie today is a falling class... We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.
Trotsky appealed politically to deserters, arousing them with revolutionary ideas.
In...Kaluga, Voronezh, and Ryazan, tens of thousands of young peasants had failed to answer the first recruiting summons by the Soviets ... The war commissariat of Ryazan succeeded in gathering in some fifteen thousand of such deserters. While passing through Ryazan, I decided to take a look at them... The men were called out of their barracks. "Comrade-deserters—come to the meeting. Comrade Trotsky has come to speak to you." They ran out excited, boisterous, as curious as schoolboys... I spoke to them for about an hour and a half... I tried to raise them in their own eyes; concluding, I asked them to lift their hands in token of their loyalty to the revolution... They were genuinely enthusiastic... Later on, regiments of Ryazan "deserters" fought well at the fronts.
The Red Army first used punitive barrier troops in summer/autumn 1918 on the Eastern Front. Trotsky authorised Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commander of the 1st Army, to station blocking detachments behind unreliable infantry regiments, with orders to shoot if front-line troops deserted or retreated without permission. These troops comprised personnel from Cheka punitive detachments or regular infantry regiments. In December 1918 Trotsky ordered more barrier troops raised for each infantry formation. Barrier troops were also used to enforce Bolshevik control over food supplies, earning civilian hatred.
Given manpower shortages and 16 opposing foreign armies, Trotsky insisted on using former Tsarist officers as military specialists, combined with Bolshevik political commissars. Lenin commented:
When Comrade Trotsky informed me recently that the number of officers of the old army employed by our War Department runs into several tens of thousands, I perceived concretely where the secret of using our enemy lay, how to compel those who had opposed communism to build it, how to build communism with the bricks which the capitalists had chosen to hurl against us! We have no other bricks! And so, we must compel the bourgeois experts, under the leadership of the proletariat, to build up our edifice with these bricks. This is what is difficult; but this is the pledge of victory.
In September 1918, facing military difficulties, the Bolshevik government declared martial law and reorganised the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished, and the position of commander-in-chief restored, filled by Jukums Vācietis, commander of the Latvian Riflemen. Vācietis handled day-to-day operations. Trotsky became chairman of the new Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, retaining overall military control. Despite earlier clashes with Vācietis, Trotsky established a working relationship. This reorganisation caused another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September. Trotsky appointed the former imperial general Pavel Sytin to command the Southern Front, but Stalin refused to accept him in early October, and Sytin was recalled. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to reconcile Trotsky and Stalin, but their meeting failed.
In 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters out of 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed under Trotsky's measures. According to Orlando Figes, most "deserters...were handed back to the military authorities, and formed into units for transfer to one of the rear armies or directly to the front". Even "malicious" deserters were returned to the ranks when reinforcements were desperate. Figes noted the Red Army instituted amnesty weeks, prohibiting punitive measures against desertion, which encouraged the voluntary return of 98,000–132,000 deserters.
Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, Trotsky's leadership faced attacks, including veiled accusations in Stalin-inspired newspaper articles and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. He weathered them, being elected one of five full members of the first Politburo after the Congress. But he later wrote:
It is no wonder that my military work created so many enemies for me. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who interfered with military success, or in the haste of the work trod on the toes of the unheeding and was too busy even to apologize. Some people remember such things. The dissatisfied and those whose feelings had been hurt found their way to Stalin or Zinoviev, for these two also nourished hurts.
In mid-1919 the Red Army had grown from 800,000 to 3,000,000 and fought on sixteen fronts, providing an opportunity for challenges to Trotsky's leadership. At the 3–4 July Central Committee meeting, after a heated exchange, the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga against Vācietis and Trotsky. Trotsky's plan was rejected, and he was criticised for alleged leadership shortcomings, many personal. Stalin used this to pressure Lenin to dismiss Trotsky.
Significant changes were made to Red Army leadership. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while Smilga informally coordinated work in Moscow. Most non-day-to-day Revolutionary Military Council members were relieved of duties on 8 July, and new members, including Smilga, were added. The same day, Vācietis was arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of an anti-Soviet plot and replaced by Sergey Kamenev. After weeks in the south, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control. A year later, Smilga and Tukhachevsky were defeated at the Battle of Warsaw, but Trotsky's refusal to retaliate against Smilga earned his friendship and later support during 1920s intra-Party battles.
By October 1919 the government faced its worst crisis: Denikin's troops approached Tula and Moscow from the south, and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops approached Petrograd from the west. Lenin decided Petrograd had to be abandoned to defend Moscow. Trotsky argued Petrograd needed to be defended, partly to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky, supported by Stalin and Zinoviev, prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee.
With Denikin and Yudenich defeated in late 1919, government emphasis shifted to the economy. Trotsky spent winter 1919–1920 in the Urals region restarting its economy. A false rumour of his assassination circulated internationally on New Year's Day 1920. Based on his experiences, he proposed abandoning War Communism policies, including grain confiscation, and partially restoring the grain market. Lenin, still committed to War Communism, rejected his proposal.
In early 1920, Soviet–Polish tensions led to the Polish–Soviet War. Trotsky argued the Red Army was exhausted and the government should sign a peace treaty with Poland quickly, not believing the Red Army would find much support in Poland. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders believed Red Army successes meant "The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war." Poland defeated the Red Army, turning back the offensive at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued for peace, and this time prevailed.
