Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
Let us consider in fact what was the organism of the Third Army. Taken
all in all, one rifle division and one cavalry division--a total of
fifteen regiments--and, in addition, special units. The remaining
military formations had already been transformed to other armies and
fronts. But the apparatus of military administration had remained
untouched as yet, and we considered it probable that in the spring we
should have to transfer it along the Volga to the Caucasus front,
against Denikin, if by that time he were not finally broken. On the
whole, in the Third Army there remained about 120,000 Red soldiers in
administrative posts, institutions, military units, hospitals, etc. In
this general mass, mainly peasant in its composition, there were
reckoned about 16,000 Communists and members of the organization of
sympathizers--to a considerable extent workers of the Ural. In this
way, in its composition and structure, the Third Army represented a
peasant mass bound together into a military organization under the
leadership of the foremost workers. In the army there worked a
considerable number of military specialists, who carried out important
military functions while remaining under the general control of the
Communists. If we consider the Third Army from this general point of
view, we shall see that it represents in miniature the whole of Soviet
Russia. Whether we take the Red Army as a whole, or the organization
of the Soviet regime in the county, province, or the whole Republic,
including the economic organs, we shall find everywhere the same
scheme of organization: millions of peasants drawn into new forms of
political, economic, and social life by the organized workers, who
occupy a controlling position in all spheres of Soviet construction.
To posts requiring special knowledge, we send experts of the bourgeois
school. They are given the necessary independence, but control over
their work remains in the hands of the working class, in the person of
its Communist Party. The introduction of general labor service is
again only conceivable for us as the mobilization of mainly peasant
labor-power under the guidance of the most advanced workers. In this
way there were not, and could not, be any obstacles in principle in
the way of application of the army to labor. In other words, the
opposition in principle to labor armies, on the part of those same
Mensheviks, was in reality opposition to "compulsory" labor generally,
and consequently against general labor service and against Soviet
methods of economic reconstruction as a whole. This opposition did not
trouble us a great deal.