I remember being present at a report made to Ilyich concerning the mistrust towards the old military specialists on the part of the Red Army men. At the beginning we had been obliged to take lessons from the old military specialists—that much, the Red Army men understood, but they regarded them nevertheless with suspicion and were intolerant of even their petty faults. This was understandable when one remembers what a gulf there had been between the commanding officers and the soldiers under the old regime. After the man who had made the report had gone, Ilyich spoke to me about the strength of the Red Army lying in the fact that its commanders stood so close to the mass of the soldiers. We were reminded of Vereshchagin's pictures portraying the war with Turkey in 1877- 1878. They were fine paintings. He has one battle scene in which the commanding officers are shown standing on a mound, watching the battle from afar. Spruce officers in gloves watch the soldiers dying in battle through binoculars, themselves standing at a safe distance. I first saw this picture when I was ten. My father had taken me to the exhibition of Vereshchagin's paintings, and his pictures had burned themselves into my memory for a lifetime.
Ilyich once received a letter from Professor Dukelsky, in Voronezh, who demanded comradely treatment of specialists on the part of the Red Army men. Ilyich answered him with an article in Pravda, in which he said:
"Show a comradely attitude towards the exhausted soldiers, the tired-out workers, embittered by centuries of exploitation, and then the rapprochement between the workers of physical and mental work will advance in gigantic strides." (Ibid., p. 207.)
I was once present during Lunacharsky's report to Ilyich after a visit of his to the front. Lunacharsky, of course, was no great specialist in military matters, but Ilyich kept asking him such questions, kept linking together a number of seemingly unrelated facts and steered the speaker skilfully into such channels, that it turned out to be a report of absorbing interest. Ilyich always knew what to ask this or that person and how to get the information he wanted from him. He talked with many workers going to or coming from the front. Ilyich had a good idea of the face of the Red Army, he knew that most of the Red Army men were peasants. He knew the peasantry well, knew how the toiling peasantry had been exploited by the landowners, how they hated the landowners, and what a tremendous motive force it was in the civil war. He did not idealize the individual farmer, though (and the peasants in those days were all individual farmers); he knew how strong and tenacious the petty-bourgeois mentality was among the peasantry, how difficult it was for the peasants to organize, how helpless, in fact, the peasant was in those days in the matter of organization.
The crux of socialist construction is organization, Ilyich never tired of repeating. He attached tremendous importance to questions of organization, and set his hopes on the working class, on its organizing experience, its close ties with the peasantry. Ilyich demanded that the entire experience of the old army and the old specialists should be mastered, he demanded that knowledge and science should be placed at the service of the working people of the Soviet Republic.
The policy of the Soviet Government was directed the right way.
In his interview with the first American labour delegation in September 1927, Stalin said:
"Is it not known that the outcome of the civil war was that the armies of occupation were driven from Russia and the counter-revolutionary generals were wiped out by the Red Army?
"It turned out that the fate of a war is decided in the last analysis not by technical equipment, with which Kolchak and Denikin were plentifully supplied by the enemies of the U.S.S.R., but by a correct policy, by the sympathy and support of the vast masses of the population. (My italics.—N.K.)
"Was it an accident that the Bolshevik Party proved victorious then? Of course not."
The policy of the Soviet Government in 1919 was directed towards strengthening the ties with the masses.
"If we call ourselves a Party of Communists, said Ilyich, "we should realize that only now, when we have finished with external obstacles and scrapped the old institutions does the first task of a real proletarian revolution-that of organizing dozens and hundreds of millions of people—face us actually and fully for the first time." (Works, Vol. 29, p. 310.)
