Comrade Lenin did not write that. More about classics and war
So, we have received carte blanche from the readers. Almost 10 thousand views and about a hundred comments are a good reason to continue the topic. "Classics and War"... Let me remind you that the author's choice of classics is completely different than in the textbook collection of the 20s.
Wasn't that "our" army yet?
A quarter of a century after the October Revolution, in the days of the war with Hitlerite Germany, the cruel reality forced Stalin to return to his roots, relying on the experience of the great Russian commanders and the Russian army. However, his predecessor Ulyanov-Lenin, following in the footsteps of the founders of Marxism, had no doubt that the revolution needed a completely new army - a workers 'and peasants', that is, a class one.
It is hardly worth reminding here that not only the rank and file, but also the officers of the Russian imperial army, since the times of Peter the Great, were formed from peasants and workers as well. The main thing is that by the end of World War I, of course, almost three quarters of the junior commanders were not nobles or representatives of other exploiting classes.
But back in 1912, the "Military Statistical Collection" stated that among generals, hereditary nobles accounted for 87,5 percent, headquarters officers - 71,5 percent, chief officers - 50,4 percent. However, the share of nobles with land ownership among them was significantly lower, but only the war changed the social composition of the Russian officer corps, one might say, radically.
Isn't that why the bet on military experts, made during the construction of the Red Army at the suggestion of Trotsky, turned out to be absolutely correct. Indeed, even among the senior officers by 1917, the "exploiters" were by no means in the majority. In a multimillion army that suffered colossal losses, this was simply impossible.
Workers and peasants managed to settle in the ranks of generals and admirals. Thus, the notorious General N. Ivanov, whom Emperor Nicholas II instructed to "crush the revolutionary infection" in Petrograd, was a native of peasants. However, an armed people is not yet a people's army; here you cannot argue with Lenin.
Ilyich had no less reason to harshly criticize the tsarist army than Engels. And not only for the sake of turning the imperialist war into a civil war, and not only because the Bolsheviks were consistent “defeatists”.
He did not go into details, unlike Trotsky and Stalin, who knew how to count thousands of soldiers, Tanks and cannons, as well as poods and tons, while remaining strategists. But Lenin is also a true strategist, the overwhelming majority of his military articles, speeches and essays are literally overflowing with strategic analysis, albeit sometimes not too noticeable under the veil of propaganda.
Lenin, already very young, more than once compared both the uprising and the revolutionary war with art, and therefore not only dealt with the analysis of the flights of the old army. It is much more important for the leader of the Bolsheviks to bring out all the best that could and should have been learned from her. After all, it will not be possible to endure that in the new revolutionary army:
The darkness, ignorance, illiteracy, and the downtroddenness of the peasant masses came out with terrifying frankness in the clash with the progressive people in modern war, which just as necessarily requires high-quality human material, as does modern technology. Success in modern warfare is impossible without a proactive, conscientious soldier and sailor.
Who and what will become the foundation of the new army? This worried the irrepressible Ilyich most of all. And it worried even before the first Russian revolution of 1905. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War became a strong incentive for all revolutionary propagandists, including Lenin, to take up the pen.
Fortunately, in a country where no more than 15 percent of the population knew how to read, freedom of speech was really not seriously limited. Another thing is that for effective revolutionary propaganda, completely different conditions and unthinkable efforts of the revolutionaries themselves were soon needed.
But in 1905, even they were clearly not enough to raise not only the factory workers of two capitals and a number of other cities. Only on the fronts of the World War a man with a gun, as they say, fell under agitation and became a real representative of the electorate for real revolutionaries: Socialist-Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks and even anarchists.
No reason not to speak
So, there are reasons, I quickly found a reason not only to study, but also to write, write, write. The tragedy of Port Arthur - it seemed that no one would even think of making it a reason to pounce not only on those in power, but on all those who defend it, but also defend their homeland.
However, real Social Democrats, by definition, should be against wars of conquest, and the second issue of the illegal weekly Vperyod, published for only six months in Geneva, publishes Lenin's angry Fall of Port Arthur.
Lenin begins with a lengthy, dramatic quotation from an unnamed European newspaper, a bourgeois one, of course. It says, among other things, not only that "the moral strength of a mighty empire is crumbling," but also that "now the significance of the collapse that has occurred cannot be weakened."
However, a very young still, only 34 years old, but already an experienced revolutionary, this is not enough, brushing aside the hated "class instinct of the bourgeoisie of the old world," smashing tsarism, smashing the tsarist administration, the tsarist army and tsarist generals. And he never misses an opportunity to note that "the bourgeoisie has something to be afraid of," and "the proletariat has something to rejoice in."
As if their heads far from their homeland then laid down not thousands of his compatriots, representatives of not only the backward peasantry, but also the revolutionary (potentially) proletariat, but the wordless slaves of the emperor and his clique.
But why on earth did Lenin decide that the war was not aggressive on the part of Japan, researchers still cannot understand.
Progressive, advanced Asia dealt an irreparable blow to backward and reactionary Europe.
This is exactly what Vladimir Ulyanov, who is still almost unknown as Lenin, wrote then.
Taking for granted Ilyich's contempt and scornfulness towards the Russian imperial army, we admit that his further analysis of flights is simply brilliant. Here is the question of domination at sea, as "the main and fundamental issue of a real war," and a scrupulous analysis of the balance of forces and painfully accurate forecast of the impending collapse of Admiral Rozhestvensky's Pacific squadron.
Autocratic Russia has already been defeated by constitutional Japan, and any delay will only strengthen and aggravate the defeat. The best part of Russian fleet has already been exterminated, the position of Port Arthur is hopeless, the squadron coming to his aid has not the slightest chance not only of success, but even of reaching its destination, the main army with Kuropatkin at its head lost more than 200 people, is exhausted and stands helpless in front of the enemy, who will inevitably crush her after the capture of Port Arthur. A military collapse is inevitable, and with it an increase in discontent, fermentation and indignation is inevitable.
About the war with Japan and the peace that Premier Witte gave Russia, nicknamed the Count Polusakhalinsky for a reason, Lenin will not write much yet: he had to switch to other topics. Revolution and plans for an uprising were on the agenda.
Articles from the emigre "Forward" in the days of the first Russian revolution are actively reprinted at home. The majority of publishers are not revolutionists, but just successful entrepreneurs. They need circulation, and circulation is given by the opposition press, no matter how much it is banned.
The first of the Bolsheviks, like many of his associates, immediately turns to the French experience - from the Great Revolution and, of course, from the very recent Paris Commune. In his short essay "Revolutionary Days", Lenin even cites a plan for the Petersburg battle, but more publicistic than real.
But when a harsh reaction follows after the first revolutionary outburst, Lenin writes the most important article "Two Tactics", which says that the Bolsheviks should not support the impatient appeal of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists for an immediate uprising. Simply because it is still very poorly prepared.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Bolsheviks, as well as a number of other revolutionary parties, are preparing for an uprising simply at a frantic pace, is reflected in the publications of the same Vperyod, even in the smallest details. Thus, the weekly publishes detailed and very specific notes by General Clusere "On street fighting." With Lenin's preface "From the Editor".
The notes of Gustave-Paul Cluseret, a participant in the Crimean campaign and the American Civil War, a Garibaldian and one of the commanders of the Commune, are titled “Advice of the General of the Commune”. And although Ilyich is forced to confine himself to general phrases and a short biography of the author, this passage seems to the author extremely important in itself, even today:
For the Russian proletarian, the original thoughts of Cluseret should serve only as material for an independent, in relation to our conditions, processing of the experience of Western European comrades.
On the eve
Lenin practically never abandoned the military theme, at least for a long time. She came up with him even when writing key works on economics and politics. Lenin, pardon the repetition, like his teacher, bowed to Clausewitz for the fact that he called the war a continuation of politics by other means.
Lenin did not miss the fight between Italy and Turkey, but he has no more than five or six works on the Balkan Wars, and with distinctly political accents. The Balkan problems are the subject of Trotsky, about which a little below. But for a world war, which he always considered inevitable, Ilyich prepared, as he himself admitted, badly.
No, for Lenin, the clash of the great imperialist powers did not come as a surprise - it was unexpected that the terrible flywheel of the worldwide massacre was spinning “only” because of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne. Only - it was thrown by Ilyich in a conversation with Y. Ganetsky and recorded in one of Lenin's collections.
The puncture had to be worked out in full, and Lenin wrote his programmatic works "The Collapse of the Second International", "Socialism and War", as well as the legendary "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism". How not to remember that it was in this book, a popular essay, as the author himself called it, among other things, it was about the division of the world between the great powers.
In addition, Lenin wrote there not only about the betrayal of the working class by the Western Social Democrats who spoke out for the war, but also about Russia's goals in the war, and about pacifism. World war, at that time the most terrible in storiesLenin and his associates immediately accurately described as "the war of the slave owners for the preservation of slavery."
In the fall of 1916, just six months before the February events in Russia, Lenin wrote his "Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution." It is quite detailed, and the depth of the study of the topic can be judged by at least three key theses of this Leninist "program":
First, socialists have never been and never can be opponents of revolutionary wars.
The bourgeoisie of the "great" imperialist powers has become thoroughly reactionary, and the war that this bourgeoisie is now waging, we recognize as a reactionary, slave-owning and criminal war ...
Secondly, civil wars are also wars. Whoever recognizes the class struggle cannot but recognize civil wars, which in any class society represent a natural, under certain circumstances inevitable continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. All great revolutions confirm this ...
Third, the victorious socialism in one country by no means excludes all wars at once. On the contrary, he assumes them. The development of capitalism is proceeding extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise with commodity production. Hence the immutable conclusion: socialism cannot win simultaneously in all countries. He will win initially in one or several countries, while the rest will remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois for some time. This should cause not only friction, but also a direct desire of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the victorious proletariat of the socialist state. In these cases, the war on our side would be legal and just. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other peoples from the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie of the "great" imperialist powers has become thoroughly reactionary, and the war that this bourgeoisie is now waging, we recognize as a reactionary, slave-owning and criminal war ...
Secondly, civil wars are also wars. Whoever recognizes the class struggle cannot but recognize civil wars, which in any class society represent a natural, under certain circumstances inevitable continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. All great revolutions confirm this ...
Third, the victorious socialism in one country by no means excludes all wars at once. On the contrary, he assumes them. The development of capitalism is proceeding extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise with commodity production. Hence the immutable conclusion: socialism cannot win simultaneously in all countries. He will win initially in one or several countries, while the rest will remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois for some time. This should cause not only friction, but also a direct desire of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the victorious proletariat of the socialist state. In these cases, the war on our side would be legal and just. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other peoples from the bourgeoisie.
History testifies that the Bolsheviks adopted it as a real program much later, and the work was directed primarily against the pacifist idea of general disarmament. But it was with this work that the leader of the world proletariat, as it were, threw the bridge in 1917, when tsarism would collapse, and after it the dubious democratic power without power.
And from the imperialist war with its millions of senseless victims, Russia will emerge with the Brest-Litovsk Peace, yes, separate, yes, "obscene" - according to Lenin. And then the war, exactly according to Lenin, will turn into a civil war - fratricidal, but let us be objective, at least here, not as bloody as the world war.
Short, but honest
It is characteristic that from the very beginning Lenin's works on a military topic were for the most part not as voluminous as those of his teachers. Ilyich was not ordered to report, he did not cooperate with encyclopedias. The leader of the semi-legal RSDLP (b) had to publish mainly in the left, and most importantly, in his own, social democratic press.
The authors-compilers of the two-volume book "Lenin on War, the Army and Military Science" from the "Officer's Library" can be understood: they had to attract articles and speeches there that were very indirectly related to military affairs. However, to reduce the matter to a single volume, and even less in volume than Engels's, could simply not be understood in the communist Central Committee.
It is believed that the first volume of the collection should have completely included the famous program article, more precisely, the book "What is to be done?", But someone at the top, either M. Suslov, or B. Ponomarev, realized in time that it would be overkill ... It was decided to confine ourselves to lengthy excerpts and quotations.
Lenin would be able to write his great works, such as Marxism and Uprising or War and Revolution, only much later, after the February coup and the fall of the monarchy. The famous and bright, but at the same time scrupulous "All for the fight against Denikin" will be released after the Great October Revolution in the midst of the battles between the Reds and Whites.
The need to fight for peace by all means, albeit a separate and annexationist one, recognized a little later and completely "obscene", became the reason for writing a whole series of articles and even a special publication of the "Position" of the Bolshevik Central Committee on the question of peace.
The rapid arming of the workers and peasants begins during the formation of the Red Army, and the head of the first Soviet government backs this up with the "Report on War and Peace", theses for the VII Congress of the RCP (b) in parallel with the constant control over the replenishment of the Red Army with soldiers and command personnel.
All this is interspersed with numerous speeches, lengthy speeches at congresses of Soviets and party plenums, as well as concrete military work at the head of the Council of People's Commissars. It is especially remarkable, and today as never before, from the point of view of an analysis of the realities and prospects of the civil war, Lenin's "Letter to American Workers" is relevant.
Here are just a few lines from it, which are especially relevant today, when only the lazy does not frighten the world with predictions about the coming civil war in the United States:
... in the era of revolution, the class struggle inevitably and inevitably always and in all countries took the form of a civil war, and a civil war is inconceivable neither without destruction of the gravest kind, nor without terror, nor without the constraint of formal democracy in the interests of war.
However, even today the main thing remains that Ilyich, who solved a lot of military issues and wrote so much about them, categorically did not want and did not allow himself to be considered an expert in military affairs. He is a revolutionary, he is a politician-practitioner, if someone wanted to, a philosopher, and finally a lawyer by profession.
But the authority of his closest comrade-in-arms, with whom he really got along only in 1917, Trotsky, as an expert in military affairs, Lenin recognized very quickly. His appointment as People's Commissar for Military Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic happened at the suggestion of Lenin.
How could it be otherwise, Trotsky did not only write about the war, really knowing it as a war correspondent for Kievskaya Mysl. It was he, Trotsky, who went through two Balkan campaigns and was under fire more than once. Some of Trotsky's biographers noted that he “wrote a series of“ heartbreaking ”articles dedicated to the suffering of ordinary participants in the war and“ war atrocities ”."
Another thing was more important: back in 1905, Leiba Bronstein, who had recently adopted a pseudonym by the name of his prison warden, turned out to be one of the leaders of the uprising in St. Petersburg. The uprising did not develop to a real battle with tsarism, as in Moscow, it did not come to guns, machine guns and the massive construction of barricades.
Nevertheless, even the fact that Trotsky took the high post of one of the three co-chairmen of the Petrosovet clearly faded before this. He became its de facto leader instead of Khrustalyov-Nosar, who was then no less popular than the priest Gapon. The arrest and exile, and then the escape, bold in its impudence, only added to Trotsky's whists.
Read about the military prose of Trotsky and his main enemy Stalin, as well as about the works of Frunze and Mao, which, in the author's opinion, cannot but be recognized as classics, read in the following notes of the cycle "Classics and War".
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