Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4(2): 343–67, Spring 2003.
Mobilization and the Red Army’s Move into
Civil Administration, 1925–31
David R. Stone
Civil authority in all states has long been intimately connected to preparations
for war: gathering recruits and collecting taxes to pay for them have always been
central functions of the state.
1
Long before the Bolsheviks, the Russian empire
had been forced by the changing nature of industrial warfare to adapt to the
needs of mobilization. From the late 1860s, even before German victory in the
1870–71 Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated the importance of carefully
coordinated mobilization, the Russian War Ministry’s Main Staff had been
preoccupied with assembling an army over Russia’s entirely inadequate railroad
net.
2
This 50-year lead time meant that the Soviet state inherited a relatively
effective infrastructure for mobilizing men in the event of war. This human mo-
bilization was, however, only a part of what modern war would involve. The
Russian empire, like most Western states, neglected the economic and adminis-
trative demands of war, focusing instead on preparing its human material. Before
World War I, militarization was not a matter of preparing institutions, but of
preparing full-fledged citizens to make them better soldiers: fit, trained, intelli-
gent, and patriotic.
3
As a result, when the Soviet state expanded military industry and prepared
for war in the 1920s and 1930s, it faced qualitatively different tasks in preparing
the various sectors of its civil administration. Certain people’s commissariats were
able to draw on a substantial imperial tradition. The People’s Commissariats for
Transport and for Post and Telegraph, given their long-recognized centrality to
manpower mobilization, were relatively well prepared for distributing
1
Charles Tilly has argued that military imperatives essentially created the modern state. See Tilly,
“War and the Power of Warmakers in Western Europe and Elsewhere, 1600–1980,” in Global
Militarization, ed. Peter Wallensteen et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), esp. 77–78; and
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990),
chap. 1.
2
Bruce Menning, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 116–17.
3
See William C. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 196–98, 203, 220–21, and Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the
Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (Dekalb, IL:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
