ABSTRACT
The defeat ofWrangel marked the final stage in the military engage-ments of the Civil War. It was a victory, however, which brought little respite to the Soviet armed forces and none of the realities of
peace to the Soviet state. Throughout the latter half of 1920 a political and economic crisis, of an intensity and duration which involved the regime in the gravest dangers, began to occupy an increasingly dominant part in the problems evolving from the newly-won victories. That precarious alliance between the worker and the peasant, upon which the man-power policies of the Red Army were based and realised, suffered grievous deterioration, leading to eventual rupture. The shift in the centre of gravity towards the problems of the shattered economy and the urgency of economic reconstruction markedly affected the status of the military who ceased to be, in Fedotoff White's phrase, 'the petted child of the government'. As 'War Commurusm' displayed to an alarming degree its UllSuitability as a governmental and administrative method, in the Party itself a fateful struggle opened into a simultaneous fight for leadership at the top and the efforts by the upper sections for control over the lower and oppositional elements of the Commurust Party. The Red Army and its command could not long remain isolated and immune from these involved and menacing circumstances.
