Этнические формирования Красной армии на Восточном фронте в 1918 году: проблемы комплектования и боеспособности

Abstract

The activities of the Soviet state and military authorities of the initial period of the Civil War aimed at involvement of non-Russian peoples to the army have been examined in the article. It is analyzed the practices and institutions of the Red Army conscription system in the Volga and Ural regions controlled by the central government. The purpose of the work is to identify the specifics of implementation of the Soviet leadership ethno-military policy during the Civil War with the help of national military formations, to determine the degree of effectiveness of state measures to organize the recruiting of the nonRussian population into the army. A number of problems has been solved by this study: conducting a comparative analysis of the views of the party and military leadership which regulated the national military policy during the initial period of the civil war; revealing the features of creation of the ethnic formations and the experience of their combat use; analyzing the factors influencing decisionmaking in the field of management of representatives of national minorities in the armed forces; identifying the role of public and political institutions in the process of involvement of the peoples from the Volga region and the Urals to the army service; on the basis of the principle of objectivity, the level of real loyalty to the Soviet government and communist ideology by the servicemen of the national units of the Eastern Front was investigated; the reasons of these units use as the punitive structures in the region were determined. The analysis of the practices of the initial period of the civil war allows us to conclude that the government's policy of creating ethnic military units based on ideological dogmas was insufficiently effective contrary to the basic principles of building the armed forces. However, the party leadership showed flexibility and the ability to abandon its non-working installations and use the achievements and experience of previous periods, and instead of the old, destroyed structures of military administration new ones were created. All that required time, resources, and error correction.