isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

NOTE ON TROTSKY'S MILITARY WRITINGS 481
carried out by Stalin and Tukhachevsky, were those which Smilga
had stated in 1920. The counter-reform also harmonized with the
general authoritarian trend of the time.
The problem of military doctrine occupies an important place in
Trotsky's writings. He himself claimed no originality in this field.
But he brought to the discussion of the issues a broad view of history
and a freshness of approach which, if they were not enough to make
a new philosophy of war, did much to guard the Red Army from
pitfalls of one-sided doctrines. He had to contend against the old
generals on the one hand, and against young revolutionary officef3
on the other. To the former he spoke as an innovator, attacking
their conservative habits of thought. To the latter he appeared
almost as an advocate of military orthodoxy.
He was the presiding spirit of Jlvfoscow's Military Academy,
where the old generals were professors and lecturers. He strove to
modernize the Academy's curriculum, to free it from pedantry, and
to bring it close to the fresh experiences of warfare. Once, for
instance, he expostulated with the writers of the Academy for their
lifeless pseudo-historical style and urged them to emulate French
military writers who, he said, knew how to combine historical research
with an interest in contemporary warfare and in its sociological
background. The academicians viewed the civil war rather contemptuously,
as a bastard of grand strategy. Trotsky retorted
irritably:
It is said among you that in the present civil or small war ...
military science has no role, in any case. I am telling you, Jlvfessieurs
the military specialists, that this is an altogether ignorant
statement. ... Civil war, with its highly mobile and elastic fronts,
affords enormous scope to genuine initiative and military art.
The task is just the same here as elsewhere: To obtain the maximum
result through a minimum expenditure of strength ....
It was precisely the last [world] war ... that offered relatively
little scope to strategic art. After the gigantic front from the Belgian
coast to Switzerland had become fixed, the war became automatic.
Strategic art was reduced to a minimum; everything was staked
on mutual attrition. Our war, on the contrary, has been full of
mobility and mana:uvre which allowed the greatest talents to
reveal themselves .... 1
While the old generals refused to learn the lessons of the civil
war, the young ones were often reluctant to learn anything else.
Their ambition was to construct a brand-new 'proletarian military
' Trotsky, op. cit., vol. iii, book 1, p. 156.