ABSTRACT
Although Bolshevik doctrine did not follow mainstream Marxism and reject the idea of war, it held armies to be an unmitigated evil that would have to be abolished along with capitalism. In his work, The State and Revolution, written while he was in hiding during August and September 1917, Lenin predicted that the revolution would wipe the standing army off the face of the earth and replace it with a workers’ militia. Lenin did not anticipate, however, that the Bolsheviks would have to create an armed force while actively engaged against domestic insurgents and still nominally at war with foreign enemies. When government and party committees went to work in December 1917 to devise a substitute for the then rapidly disappearing old army, experience with the Red Guards had shown that the politically ‘higher type’ force, the militia, was not likely to be effective in the existing circumstances. Consequently, the committees had to take up what Lenin described as ‘an entirely new question which had never been dealt with before, even theoretically’, namely, how to incorporate into a workers’ state the most reactionary bourgeois institution, the standing army.2
