Class War and Military Reform

Pravda confirmed the Civil War’s having ended in an announcement on 15 December 1920 that ‘because military action has ceased at the fronts, the Field Staff of the Revvoyensovet of the Republic will no longer issue daily operations reports’. In the same issue it gave the country a new slogan: ‘The fronts are quiet. There is work [to be done] in the rear’.1 A week later, the Eighth Congress of Soviets inaugurated the ‘Period of Peaceful Socialist Development’ with a ‘search for a new economic policy’ and authorized an ‘Order of the Red Banner for Labor’.2