Mobilization and the Red Army's Move into Civil Administration, 1925-31

Abstract

Civil authority in all states has long been intimately connected to preparations for war: gathering recruits and collecting taxes to pay for them have always been central functions of the state.1 Long before the Bolsheviks, the Russian empire had been forced by the changing nature of industrial warfare to adapt to the needs of mobilization. From the late 1860s, even before German victory in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated the importance of carefully coordinated mobilization, the Russian War Ministry’s Main Staff had been preoccupied with assembling an army over Russia’s entirely inadequate railroad net.2 This 50-year lead time meant that the Soviet state inherited a relatively effective infrastructure for mobilizing men in the event of war. This human mobilization was, however, only a part of what modern war would involve. The Russian empire, like most Western states, neglected the economic and administrative demands of war, focusing instead on preparing its human material. Before World War I, militarization was not a matter of preparing institutions, but of preparing full-fledged citizens to make them better soldiers: fit, trained, intelligent, and patriotic.3 As a result, when the Soviet state expanded military industry and prepared for war in the 1920s and 1930s, it faced qualitatively different tasks in preparing the various sectors of its civil administration. Certain people’s commissariats were able to draw on a substantial imperial tradition. The People’s Commissariats for Transport and for Post and Telegraph, given their long-recognized centrality to manpower mobilization, were relatively well prepared for distributing