The requisite solidarity and stability can only be supplied to the young revolutionary army by means of an officers’ staff composed of class-conscious workers and peasants, appointed only as subalterns at the outset. Obviously, therefore, one of the most important tasks in the creation of the Red Army is to prepare for the duties of commanding officers those soldiers who are peculiarly capable and energetic and whose devotion to the cause of socialism is exceptionally ardent.[§67.]
We must make the widest possible practical use of the operative and technical experience gained during the world war. In the fulfilment of this aim we must attract to the work of organising the army and to its effective leadership the military experts who were trained in the schools of the old army. But a necessary condition of the employment of such experts is that the political leadership of the army and the effective control of the military staff shall be concentrated in the hands of the working class.
The demand for the election of officers, which had great importance as a matter of principle in relation to the bourgeois army whose commanders were especially trained as an apparatus for the class subjugation of the common soldiers (and, through the instrumentality of the common soldiers, the subjugation of the toiling masses), ceases to have any significance as a matter of principle in relation to the class army of the workers and peasants. A possible combination of election with appointment from above may be expedient for the revolutionary class army simply on practical grounds. Whether this is so or not depends upon the cultural level of the military units, upon the degree of solidarity among the sections of the army, upon the efficiency of the commanding cadres, and upon similar considerations.[§68.]