368
IRVING HOWE
Civil War broke out across the whole of Russia, Trotsky became
Minister of War. Without military experience, he applied himself
to creating a revolutionary army from almost nothing. He began
with a few thousand Bolsheviks, Red Guards who had fought in
the revolution; a considerable group of Russian army officers willing
to serve the new regime in a nonpolitical capacity; and masses of
untrained recruits who lacked discipline and often enough arms.
For almost two years Trotsky lived in an armored train which
served as the political-military headquarters of the new army. Moving
from front to front, working with ferocious energy, exposing himself
in crucial battles to rally frightened men, insisting upon the military
authority of the old officers while checking their power through
a network of political commissars, holding fast to standards of
ef–
ficiency and discipline among soldiers who had long been demoralized,
but above all else, stirring his followers to fight and die through the
exaltation of his speeches and manifestoes, Trotsky created an
ef–
fective army which finally defeated the Whites. He understood that
in a revolutionary army it is the will to struggle which is often de–
cisive; victory would come to his troops only as they believed them–
selves to be crusaders in behalf of a better world, only as they were
ready to face death out of a conviction that they were- to quote
from one of Trotsky's speeches to his soldiers-"participants in an
unprecedented historic attempt ... to create a new society, in which
all human relations will be based on . . . cooperation and man
will
be man's brother, not his enemy."
Once the Red Army had ended the threat of counter-revolution,
the young Bolshevik regime had for the first time to face the
problems of social reconstruction. In these difficult years, when Rus–
sian economic life was reduced to chaos and hunger swept across the
land, Trotsky argued in behalf of compulsory work and labor armies
based on military discipline-draconian measures, he admitted, but
necessary for lifting the economy to that minimal level of production
where ordinary incentives might begin operating. (It is but fair to
add that Trotsky advocated these measures only after his proposal
for modifying "War Communism" had been rejected and that he
was among the first Bolshevik leaders to urge the economic relaxa–
tion that went under the name of NEP.)
