Mobilization and the Red Army's Move into Civil Administration, 1925-31

Civil authority in all states has long been intimately connected to preparations for war: gathering recruits and collecting taxes to pay for them have always been central functions of the state. ¹ Long before the Bolsheviks, the Russian empire had been forced by the changing nature of industrial warfare to adapt to the needs of mobilization. From the late 1860s, even before German victory in the 1870—71 Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated the importance of carefully coordinated mobilization, the Russian War Ministry's Main Staff had been preoccupied with assembling an army over Russia's entirely inadequate railroad net. ² This 50-year lead time meant that the Soviet state inherited a relatively effective infrastructure for mobilizing men in the event of war. This human mobilization was, however, only a part of what modern war would involve. The Russian empire, like most Western states, neglected the economic and administrative demands of war, focusing instead on preparing its human material. Before World War I, militarization was not a matter of preparing institutions, but of preparing full-fledged citizens to make them better soldiers: fit, trained, intelligent, and patriotic. ³

As a result, when the Soviet state expanded military industry and prepared for war in the 1920s and 1930s, it faced qualitatively different tasks in preparing the various sectors of its civil administration. Certain people's commissariats were able to draw on a substantial imperial tradition. The People's Commissariats for Transport and for Post and Telegraph, given their long-recognized centrality to manpower mobilization, were relatively well prepared for distributing mobilization notices, coordinating troop movements, and delivering soldiers to the front. Matters were very different in other branches of the Soviet state. In particular, people's commissariats that had not traditionally been part of mobilization in their pre-revolutionary incarnations before World War I were almost entirely unprepared for the demands of total war after World War I.

Part of the story of Soviet civil mobilization and preparation for war is already clear. The opening of Russian archives has produced a flood of work on Soviet military industry in the interwar period. While differing in emphases and conclusions, this research has succeeded in outlining the growth of the Soviet defense industry and its close connections with the Soviet state. ⁴ In particular, planning for war within Soviet industry is now quite well understood. Similarly, Osoaviakhim, the mass organization dedicated to the ostensibly voluntary preparation of the Soviet population for military service, remains the object of serious research. ⁵ Many important questions remain, however, unanswered. This article focuses neither on preparing citizens for war, as in the case of Osoaviakhim or Russia's imperial traditions, nor on preparing industrial mobilization. Instead, it explores the ways in which more and more of the Soviet state, outside the narrow sphere of heavy industry, became embroiled in increasingly elaborate mechanisms to ready the Soviet Union for future conflicts. The Soviet Union's growing militarization did not merely involve funneling resources to military industry, but the comprehensive involvement of all arms of the state in preparing for war. This article will sketch how the imperatives of mobilization in the late 1920s and early 1930s produced increasing links between the Red Army and Soviet civil administration. In doing so, it will bring out three key themes: first, the steady encroachment of military priorities into previously untouched spheres; second, the consistent and yawning gap between directives from the center and implementation on the ground; third, as a partial explanation for this, the recurring problem of a dearth of trained and competent administrators to carry out the Soviet state's ambitious projects.

The Soviet vision of future war was far more total than imperial Russia's had been. One Soviet theorist, in fact, declared that Russia's dismal preparation for World War I made it an exemplary...