Unfortunately, however, the above described organisations have not escaped the common lot of all the organisations of the Soviet Power. They have succumbed to bureaucracy; they have tended towards a detachment from the masses, on the one hand, and from the party, on the other; and in practice they have often shown themselves to be harbours of refuge for idlers and incapables who belong to the party war-office officialdom. A vigorous campaign against such abuses would seem to be of far more urgent importance to the Communist Party than the campaign against bureaucracy and slackness in the general soviet mechanism, for upon the success of the former campaign our speedy victory in the civil war must be said in a sense to depend.
66. Structure of the Red Army.
In our system of universal military training, barrack life must be reduced to a minimum, so that ultimately the Red barracks may completely disappear. The structure of the Red Army must be gradually approximated to the structure of the productive units of the workers, whereby the artificial character of military unification will be overcome. We may express the matter more clearly by saying that the typical standing army of tsarist days, the standing army in the State of the bourgeoisie and the landed gentry, was composed of persons belonging to the most diverse classes. Those who were called up for service were forcibly dragged from their natural surroundings: the worker, from the factory; the peasant, from the plough; the clerk, from the desk; the shopman, from the counter. The recruits were then artificially assembled in barracks, and distributed in the various army divisions. It was advantageous to the bourgeois State to break off all connexion between the proletarian recruit and his factory and between the peasant recruit and his village, so as to make of worker and peasant alike blind tools for the oppression of the labouring masses, and so that it might be easy to employ the workers and peasants of one province to shoot down those of another.