Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring

by Mike Gonzalez (Editor), Houman Barekat (Editor)

Overview

Looking at a range of global historical experiences, Arms and the People examines the relationship between mass movements and military institutions. Some argue that it is impossible to achieve and protect a revolution without the support of the army, but how can the support of the army be won?

Arms and the People explores the impact of profound social polarisation on the internal cohesion of the state’s ‘armed bodies of men’ and on the contested loyalties of soldiers. The different contributors examine a series of historical moments in which a crisis in the military institution has reflected a deeper social crisis which has penetrated that institution and threatened to disable it.

With a range of international contributors who have either studied or been directly involved in such social upheavals, Arms and the People is a pioneering contribution to the study of revolutionary change and will appeal to students and academics in history, politics and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745332970
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/05/2012
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mike Gonzalez is professor emeritus of Latin American studies at University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Soldiers, Sailors and Revolution: Russia 1917

Mike Haynes

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 seemed to unite the masses behind their respective governments, not least in Russia where 96 per cent of those called up willingly enlisted. But within three years the strain of war was being felt everywhere and several states were racing each other to revolution. Austria-Hungary and Italy were close, but it was Russia which won. In late February 1917, troops from the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on demonstrators. The mutiny turned the demonstrations into a revolution which overthrew the 300-year Romanov dynasty. The months of radicalisation which followed led, in October 1917, to a second revolution and the call to soldiers, sailors and airmen across the world to lay down their arms and cease fighting in the interests of their rulers.

A century later, this remains one of the most intense revolutionary crises in history and at its heart were the Russian armed forces. These events challenge established views, and generations of historians have tried to explain their import. Claiming to rise above the passions of the past, they too often fall prey to the prejudices of the present in questioning the nature and possibilities of fundamental change. The aim of this chapter is to contest such interpretations and show how the disintegration of the armed forces not only contributed to the democratisation of Russian society in 1917, but also prevented the old order and its generals from mustering sufficient forces to halt the revolution by the imposition of military rule or defeat it in the civil war that followed.

Whatever else states may do, they are about power. At their core is the ability to deploy military power to defend or project influence outside their borders and to contain the home population to whom (in a democratic order) they are nominally responsible but over whom, radical critics suggest, they rule. States are therefore Janus-faced – looking both inwards and outwards. Military power too is Janus-faced – capable of being used against external and internal enemies. Max Weber famously argued that as states develop they come to claim 'the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory'. 'The state,' he argued, 'is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be.' If men and women do not obey and the state cannot deploy the means of force to make them obey, then it falls apart. Lenin, following Engels, made the same point. The essence of the state is that it is 'a body of armed men'. In a class society military power cannot be based on an armed population; it must be separate from society and rise above it. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. This is because social divisions mean that the control and organisation of the means of violence have to be alienated from the mass of the population.

The complex links between the rise of the state system and the development of capitalism need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that the rise of a separate military force was an important element in the development of a state-based global system. States tend not to emerge as a result of any essential democratic process; they are made by force. From the seventeenth century onwards, the intermittent organisation of military forces for specific actions gave way to the development of standing armies led by professional officer elites. In the first instance armies and navies were loyal to the monarch, who was deemed to embody the state. But from the late eighteenth century, and not least with the French Revolution, a more fundamental identification was made with the (nation) state whose nature was no longer sufficiently captured in the person of the sovereign. With this, mass conscription followed and the idea of service armies based on citizens or quasi-citizens. Clausewitz recognised that that this enabled capitalist states to deploy almost unlimited resources to build up the military for war. But it also allowed the development of the idea that the military itself might better express the interests of the state/nation than civilian politicians. The armed forces could then either act as arbiter or take power themselves to bring order or progress where others had failed.

The separation of the military from society as a hierarchical, disciplined force gives them the capacity to act if their leaders, or a group of them, decide to do so and sufficient members of the lower ranks can be assured to obey. The fact that the military have a monopoly of arms also makes possible the speedy imposition of order. What has been called the military 'mind' or 'ethic' also plays a role. The military see themselves as the core of the state and its guardian. They not only have a right to intervene in a crisis, but a duty to do so. This is reinforced by their sense of professionalism and lack of corruption (something perhaps belied in practice) compared to the dirty world of civilian politics.

Lenin described the conditions for a successful revolution as being where 'the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way'. But these were also to become the conditions for direct military interventions and coups or indirect military action associated with paramilitary forces, of which the role of the Freikorps in Germany in 1919 was an early example. In the early twentieth century such military actions were a new phenomenon but they were soon to become commonplace, reflecting what some called a praetorian tendency in politics (after the Praetorian Guard of Imperial Rome, who acted as bodyguards to the emperor).

When a successful revolution occurs, we have to ask not only what happened but also what did not happen. A successful revolution cannot defeat a united army. The army must come over to the people and in such a way that it makes it an unstoppable force, not only against the old order but also against the potential of the officer class to seize power itself. This is what happened in Russia, not because anyone had a 'plan', but because they were able, at times almost intuitively, to grope towards solutions which, it could be argued later, embodied fundamental lessons.

THE TSARIST MILITARY AND STATE POWER BEFORE 1914

In 1914 the Russian empire was the largest country in the world, covering a sixth of the earth's surface and stretching at its furthest 5,000 miles west to east and 2,000 miles north to south. Its strategic position at the heart of the global system worked in two ways – it was able to project out, but it was also threatened by powers along its extensive borders. To expand or hold on to its gains, Russia had built up the largest peacetime army in Europe, numbering at least one million in most years before 1914, as well as developing the fifth biggest navy. In the nineteenth century the military had been involved in wars with other European powers ? with France between 1805 and 1814, with Sweden in 1808–9 and three wars with Turkey: the Crimean War against the combined forces of Britain, France and Turkey in 1853–56; and war with Japan in 1904–5. Military action also supported the incorporation of less developed areas into the empire, though often opposed by local peoples and their overlords such as Persia, with Russia expanding to the east across Siberia to the Pacific, south into the Caucasus and south-east to Central Asia. But large forces were also needed because the army had to be deployed to contain revolution. In 1849 the Tsarist armies moved into Hungary to crush revolution there. But such actions were usually 'internal' – in 1830–31 in Poland, again in Poland in 1863 and against the 1905 revolution – in the towns in 1905?6 and the countryside in 1906–7. During the restoration of order in 1905–9 some 2,500 (estimates are conflicting) were executed after field courts martial and an unknown number summarily shot in punitive expeditions, among them troops that had mutinied. In tandem with these large-scale actions it was common to find the military involved in more local policing actions against peasants and workers as Russia had a weak police force. Thus between 1890 and 1914 the army was used 3,000 times to suppress internal disorder. Finally, the size of the army reflected a growing tendency to use Russia's cheap manpower as a substitute for capital in the form of modern weaponry. Much as workers might be referred to as 'hands', it was common until quite late for these ordinary soldiers to be referred to as 'bayonets' in the assessment of military strength and less flatteringly as 'cattle'. For although Russia was the world's fifth largest industrial power, it remained largely undeveloped; the mass of its population were peasants, who made up the majority of army conscripts.

The officer class, and through them ordinary soldiers and sailors, were supposed to be personally loyal to the Tsar and the wider landowning class on whose power Tsarism initially rested. Military reform had been undertaken in 1874 to create a more modern army with new forms of conscription and organisation, but also to help define the role of the military as an expression of a unified nation. But these reforms had a limited impact on the army's sense of itself. The day-to-day behaviour of troops in society at large was ordered and regulated in petty ways by the military code. Soldiers were subject to rigid, brutal and humiliating forms of discipline. Their officers saw themselves as a superior caste, reflected in part by their noble origins, but in practice they were generally anti-intellectual and had a limited interest in military theory and techniques.

Mutinies did take place, but until 1905 they had little impact. In the revolution of 1905–6 they were more widespread, but the army held together and was deployed more against the revolution than contributed to it. Trotsky, with some exaggeration, said of the workers' uprising at the end of 1905, 'the Russian proletariat in December foundered not on its own mistakes, but on a more real force: the bayonets of the peasant army'.

The officer corps before 1914 was changing socially. The 1913 class of the General Staff Academy had only 9 per cent of nobles compared to 19 per cent from the peasant estate. But among the 41,000 officers of the existing officer corps, nobles still just dominated and in the high command over 85 per cent were of noble origin. A minority of the newer generation hoped that the army might be a force for modernisation in its own interest. In 1908 they found a source of inspiration in the Ottoman empire, where the Young Turks revolution led by army officers overthrew the failing regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Their interest was reinforced by the fact that a reinvigorated Ottoman empire would stand in the way of Russian influence in the Balkans and its aim of controlling access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean through the Straits. But those like the politician Alexander Guchkov (a 'liberal with spurs') also saw that any positive elements in the actions of an officer group had to balance the risk in Russia that a process might be unleashed they would be unable to control.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO FEBRUARY 1917

Russia had allied itself with France in 1894 and with Britain in 1907 against the rising power of any alliance led by Germany. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 then set in train events in which each side claimed the mantle of right while really engaged in an imperial conflict that would lead to an estimated 8.5 million military deaths and 10–13 million civilian dead.

It is a commonplace in even authoritative discussions of the Russian armed forces to throw in bewilderingly large numbers. But to appreciate how the armed forces partly politicised and partly disintegrated, it helps to have a sense of the numbers involved. We will follow the data collected and in some cases estimated by Nicholas Golovine, a former Tsarist general writing in the late 1920s. Although his work can be criticised, it remains the best attempt to track the human scale of the war effort and its costs to the Russian side. Table 1.1 sets out the main components of the 'military' between 1914 and 1917.

At the outset of the war Russia had 1,423,000 troops and before October 1917, as Table 1.1 shows, perhaps another 14 million were mobilised. Those mobilised were men, though token women's battalions drew brief publicity in 1917.11 In terms of age, 16 per cent were under 20 years, 49 per cent were 20–29, 30 per cent were 30–39 and 5 per cent over 40. They came overwhelmingly from Russia's rural poor. But even among the 20–29 age group only about half were called up. Non-Russians were excluded; others were in occupied areas; still others – perhaps as many as five million – were physically unfit to serve; and some 2.5 million had deferment for war work. Initially, this did not include many skilled workers and miners, who were lost to the front to the detriment of the war effort. It was never fully appreciated that, in the words of a memorandum of the Special Council for National Defence, 'an experienced smith ... may be incomparably more useful doing the work on national defence in a factory than in the trenches'. At the top and middle of society, although many Russian families lost their sons, there was less evidence of any disproportionate sacrifice in the interests of patriotism and national salvation. Wartime deferments were relatively easy to obtain by middle- and upper-class men, who could show that they were needed for essential work on the home front. In reality, therefore, there was a volunteer element in conscription which depended on who you were. As Golovine noted, 'whenever [the Ministry of War] took measures against "slackers" those measures chiefly affected workers and peasants'.

Before the war Russia had been divided into military districts under the command of the commander-in-chief, and non-military districts. Although the former were ostensibly border regions, in fact they covered vast areas, which expanded during the war. Troops in these districts served in what was called the Army of the Field. Those closest to the front and in the immediate rear of the front were 'troops in combat'. As can be seen in Table 1.1 these numbered between 1.5 and 3.5 million at any one time with rotation between the field and front elements. Beyond the military zones was the 'remote rear'. Here were to be found garrison troops and mobilised men undergoing training. The numbers here too represent a constantly churning group, as men were drafted, all too briefly trained, and sent to the Army of the Field. A third component was represented by Ministry of War employees and local territorial units, which protected the interior. Finally, large numbers were involved in various auxiliary activities such as the Red Cross or the supply work of the Union of Zemstvos and Towns. These did not serve as part of the military but they did come under the army supply system for rations. Beyond them, and not counted here, were the vast numbers of civilian workers employed more or less directly in making and transporting war goods.

Table 1.2 sets out the basic data for Russia's losses in the war which for Russia lasted 39 months (compared to 51 months on the Western Front). Again drawing on Golovine, the statistics here are a combination of hard data, estimates and guesses because record-keeping was poor and many records were subsequently lost.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Soldiers and Revolution
1. Soldiers, Sailors and Revolution: Russia 1917 / Mike Haynes
2. An Army in Revolt: Germany 1918-19 / Volkard Moser
3. Nation against Nation: Italy 1919-21 / Megan Trudell
4. Soldiers on the Side of the People: Portugal 1974 / Peter Robinson
The Popular Forces Mobilise
5. Militia and Workers’ State: Paris 1871 / Donny Gluckstein
6. The People in Arms: Spain 1936 / Andy Durgan
7. Never ‘One Hand’: Egypt 2011 / Philip Marfleet
Guerrilla Wars and the Limits of Imperial Power
8. People Change: American Solidiers and Marines in Vietnam / Jonathan Neale
9. Crazy Little Armies: Guerrilla Strategy in Latin America, 1958 - 1990 / Mike Gonzalez
Counter-Revolution and the Military
10. The Iron Fist: Chile 1973 / Mike Gonzalez
11. Reaction and Slaughter: Indonesia 1965-66 / Nathaniel Mehr
The Civic-Military Alliance
12. Storming the Ramparts of Tyranny: Egypt & Iraq 1945-63 / Anne Alexander
13. The Civic-Military Alliance: Venezuela 1958-1990 / Douglas Bravo & Mike Gonzalez
Index

Editorial Reviews

'A most revealing study of some of the most dramatic moments of modern history''These engaged case studies from some 150 years represent a very welcome review of both the popular armed struggle and the institutions of state violence'

From the Publisher