Where Was the Conscience of the Revolution? The Military Opposition at the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919)

Abstract

This article examines the debates and decisions of the military section of the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919, only released in Izvestiia TsK KPSS in 1989-90. It rebuts the standard interpretation of the military section (usually referred to as the Military Opposition) as a minority platform opposed to the use of former tsarist officers in the Red Army, most notably proposed in R. V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (1960). Instead, I argue that the debates were more concerned with the military's increasing autonomy at the expense of party control. These fears were compounded by the introduction of the mass conscription of an apolitical peasantry at a time of extreme instability. This indiscriminate conscription had alarmed many Red Army party workers, who were only too aware of the dangers of arming an unconscious peasant mob. In addition, the article lays bare the beginning of the longer-term conflict between Iosif Stalin and Lev Trotskii and demonstrates Stalin's early influence within the party membership.