Marxist History: Early Soviet History: revolultion: Red-Army: 1937: Wollenberg—The Red Army

 

The Red Army

Erich Wollenberg


Formed and trained in the midst of civil war, the Red Army was built as the revolutionary defence force of the world's first workers' state. This book tells how it was done.
Recruited from the working class and peasantry, struggling for vital supplies and equipment in the face of fourteen enemy armies, the Red Army survived and won only through determination to defend the October Revolution. Its ranks included the finest Bolshevik cadre. Its leader and organising genius, second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Revolution, was Leon Trotsky.
Erich Woflenberg, a German communist who joined the Soviet army and held high command, saw this army take shape. He records its battles, and tells how Stalin and his bureaucracy later beheaded the Red Army, liquidating its revolutionary leadership and attempting to re-write its history. His book, republished here for the first time in 40 years, is an important contribution to correcting the historical record.

Introduction

Part 1 The Birth of the Red Army [part I]

Part 2 The Birth of the Red Army [part 2]

Part 3 The Military Specialists

Part 4 Four Years of Civil Ware and Intervention

Part 5 The Polish Campaign of 1920

Part 6 Trotsky and the Red Army

Part 7 The Red Army in the Years of Peace

Part 8 Twenty Years After

Part 9 The Latest Developments in Russia

Appendix 1 The Scheme for a Socialist Army

Appendix 2 Chronicle of the Civil War