discipline imposed by their epauletted superiors, they would consciously resist this discipline. For this reason, the discipline of bourgeois armies must be maintained by force; for this reason, flogging, tortures of every kind, and mass shootings, are not simply occasional incidents, but the very foundations of order, discipline, “military education.”
On the other hand, in the Red Army, which is formed by the workers and the peasants and which defends their interests, coercive discipline must to an ever greater extent be replaced by the workers’ voluntary acceptance of the discipline of the civil war. As the Red Army grows more clearly aware of its own nature, the Red soldiers come to realise that in the last resort they are commanded by the whole working class, through the instrumentality of the workers’ State and its military staff. Thus the discipline of the Red Army is the submission of the minority (the soldiers) to the interests of the majority of the workers. Every reasonable order is backed, not by the commanding officer and his arbitrary will, not by the bourgeois minority and its predatory interests, but by the whole Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. In the Red Army, therefore, propaganda and agitation, the political education of the rank and file, assume peculiar importance.
65. The political Commissars and the communist Groups.
In the Russian Soviet Republic, in which all workers can express their will through the soviets, the workers and peasants have for the last two years been electing communists to the various executive organs. The Communist Party — we put the matter in bourgeois phraseology — has become by the will of the masses the ruling party of the republic, for no other party was capable of conducting the victorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution to a successful issue. As a result of this, our party has become as it were a huge executive committee of the proletarian dictatorship. This is why the communists fill the leading role in the Red