ABSTRACT
The resolutions passed in the Congress of Soviets gave the Red Army two specific and, by the standard generally applied to regular national armies, modest missions: those were to operate against counterrevolutionaries and ‘foreign mercenaries’ (the Czech corps) on Soviet soil. Consequently, the Red Army was for the time being a subsidiary component in a predominantly nonmilitary defensist strategy predicated on ‘contradictions’ in the capitalist, ‘imperialist’ world. As Lenin construed them, the contradictions were of two kinds: one stemmed from the dialectically foreordained crisis of capitalism, the other from tensions within the imperialist blocs. The first kept the imperialist powers locked in war with each other, limited the resources they could bring to bear against their common enemy, Bolshevism, and fostered world revolution. The second forced the Allies to contend with deep-seated hostility between the United States and Japan in their schemes for intervention in Russia and made Germany weigh the satisfaction of demolishing the Bolshevik regime against the immense profit it stood to gain without any further effort under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The contradictions of the first kind kept capitalism on a suicidal course that it could not alter. In the short term, however, those of the second kind would determine whether Bolshevism survived in Russia, and they were susceptible to change ‘any day, any moment’, change to which the only effective Soviet responses were ‘maneuver, retreat and bide our time’.1 In July and August 1918, the strategy came to the test.
