Trotsky, the Red Army and Uneven and Combined Development

Abstract

Discussions of Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development tend to ignore one of the major components of his revolutionary praxis: his role in the creation and development of the Red Army. Trotsky’s military work is a concrete if implicit expression of what would become his theory of uneven and combined development. The Red Army was instrumental in ensuring the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but given the relatively small working class in Russia this army would have to be a largely peasant army under proletarian leadership. Trotsky rejected calls for a ‘unified’ or ‘proletarian’ military strategy as vulgar economic determinism, arguing instead for the objective necessity for the Red Army to make use of existing military science and of military specialists from the former Tsarist army. Given the relatively underdeveloped material and cultural conditions which characterized Soviet Russia, the Red Army could not avoid being an amalgamation of elements from both relatively advanced and relatively retrograde modes of production.