ABSTRACT
Much has been said already on the issues of the army and war, especially during 1917. The main task of this chapter is to bring together the strands of the previous discussion, and amplify it where necessary, before concentrating on the formation of the Red Army and the heated debates which it provoked. As we saw in Chapter 3, the army, in Allan Wildman’s opinion, ‘the chief bulwark of the old order, its only major defense against revolutionary challenge’, had played a crucial role in influencing the outcome of the February Revolution. In the final analysis the High Command had been prepared to abandon Nicholas II and accept the Revolution. In return, it expected the soldiers, and the population generally, to support the intensification of Russia’s war effort. The Petrograd garrison too, increasingly reluctant to shoot unarmed workers demonstrating on the streets of the city, transferred its allegiances to the side of the Revolution, so aiding its victory. Yet February was neither simply nor solely a military revolution, despite Richard Pipes’s claim that it ‘was, first and foremost, a mutiny of peasant soldiers’ (Pipes 1992a: 278), as it was the workers of Petrograd who had precipitated the chain of events that led to the collapse of the autocracy.
