On 7 October 1918, the RMCR authorized an Academy of the General Staff, giving it a mandate to train party members with some military experience either in the old army or the Red Army. A week later, Trotskiy told Dzerzhinskiy, the head of the Cheka, and Lenin and Sverdlov that ‘in view of changed circumstances’, the arrested officers were showing readiness to work in the Soviet service and those who had no serious charges against them could be put at his disposal for enrolment in the Red Army and Navy. Doing so, he said, would lighten the load on the prisons, and treachery could be averted by holding their families hostage for their good behavior. The General Staff Academy opened in early December with 183 students. The number was later increased to several hundred, but few, perhaps none, completed the full two- year course during the Civil War. Trotskiy’s approach to the former officers, on the other hand, was almost instantly effective. The Red Army, which had about 8,000 military specialists in August, had nearly 25,000 by 15 November.12 stalin and the rmcr Trotskiy’s next and more difficult task after having erected the machinery was to make it work. A breakdown came at once – no doubt not unexpectedly – at South Front. In a telegram to the Council of People’s Commissars Stalin announced, ‘The enemy has been utterly routed and hurled back across the Don. Tsaritsyn is secure.’ On the 15th, he arrived in Moscow to report in person to Lenin. Before departing for Tsaritsyn four days later, he gave an interview to Pravda in which he spoke of ‘the appearance of a new corps of commanders promoted from the ranks’ and asserted that ‘whereas our combat units are being welded and cemented, the enemy is undergoing complete disintegration’.13 The situation did not look nearly as bright to the Supreme Military Inspectorate, which was engaged in organizing South Front. From its point of view, reopening the railroad line from 68 an armed camp Povorino to Tsaritsyn (and restoring the connection into the North Caucasus) was as important as holding Tsaritysn. Doing that required coordinated thrusts to the west on the front between Kamyshin and Tsaritsyn and south on the front between Kamyshin and Povorino; but the Inspectorate reported that ‘at the present time’ the two groups were operating with ‘virtually no relationship to each other’ because one group, the Tsaritsyn group, was concentrating exclusively on the area round Tsaritsyn.14 On the day Stalin arrived back in Tsaritsyn, 22 September, the Cossacks launched another attack toward the city. For the moment, however, Stalin and his colleagues, Voroshilov and Minin, were preoccupied with another problem: they had been ordered to join Sytin as members of the South Front revolutionary military council (RMC). Stalin promptly designated himself chairman and began issuing orders in the name of the South Front RMC. In one of the first, Order No. 118 of 24 September, he placed all South Front forces under I. L. Sorokin, an ex-noncommissioned officer and partisan detachment commander, and instructed him to report directly to Tsaritsyn. In another, he ordered Sorokin to dispatch the 1st Steel Rifle Division, a recently converted partisan unit under D. P. Zholba, to Tsaritsyn. On the 27th, ignoring Sytin, whom he dismissed as being interested only in the Povorino sector, he sent the RMCR an elaborate plan for defeating Krasnov by 150-mile-deep thrusts from the vicinity of Voronezh to Kantemirovka and Millerovo and out of the North Caucasus to Rostov, accompanying it with a list of weapons and ammunition ‘absolutely essential’ to the plan’s execution. If those requirements could not be met in short order, he concluded, ‘we will have to cease fighting and withdraw to the left bank of the Volga’. On 30 September, in a telegram to Trotskiy, Sytin summarized the results of a meeting he and RMCR-member Mekhoshinin had held in Tsaritsyn with Stalin, Voroshilov, and Minin. Citing the RMCR regulations, he and Mekhoshinin had asserted the front commander’s independence in operational matters. The other three declared that they could, in the first place, not accept the commander’s exclusive right in operational decision-making and, in the second, did not regard the RMCR regulations as an official order; and they insisted that the front headquarters had to be in Tsaritsyn. A day later, in a telegram of their own to the RMCR, on the grounds that Sytin had neither an interest in nor a strategic plan for the southern front, they demanded his dismissal and nominated Voroshilov to replace him. They received two answers. In the first, Sverdlov transmitted a Central Committee decision made on 2 October requiring front RMCs to carry out all RMCR orders ‘because without subordination there will not be an army’. Trotskiy’s response arrived on 3 October in a directive, transmitted through Headquarters, South Front, confirming Sytin’s ‘full independence in all questions of strategic-operational character’, appointing Mekhonoshin to the front RMC ‘to ensure unity of command’, and requiring the entire South Front RMC to be ‘in residence at Kozlov’ by 5 October.
On 7 October 1918, the RMCR authorized an Academy of the General Staff, giving it a mandate to train party members with some military experience either in the old army or the Red Army. A week later, Trotskiy told Dzerzhinskiy, the head of the Cheka, and Lenin and Sverdlov that ‘in view of changed circumstances’, the arrested officers were showing readiness to work in the Soviet service and those who had no serious charges against them could be put at his disposal for enrolment in the Red Army and Navy. Doing so, he said, would lighten the load on the prisons, and treachery could be averted by holding their families hostage for their good behavior. The General Staff Academy opened in early December with 183 students. The number was later increased to several hundred, but few, perhaps none, completed the full two- year course during the Civil War. Trotskiy’s approach to the former officers, on the other hand, was almost instantly effective. The Red Army, which had about 8,000 military specialists in August, had nearly 25,000 by 15 November.12 stalin and the rmcr Trotskiy’s next and more difficult task after having erected the machinery was to make it work. A breakdown came at once – no doubt not unexpectedly – at South Front. In a telegram to the Council of People’s Commissars Stalin announced, ‘The enemy has been utterly routed and hurled back across the Don. Tsaritsyn is secure.’ On the 15th, he arrived in Moscow to report in person to Lenin. Before departing for Tsaritsyn four days later, he gave an interview to Pravda in which he spoke of ‘the appearance of a new corps of commanders promoted from the ranks’ and asserted that ‘whereas our combat units are being welded and cemented, the enemy is undergoing complete disintegration’.13 The situation did not look nearly as bright to the Supreme Military Inspectorate, which was engaged in organizing South Front. From its point of view, reopening the railroad line from 68 an armed camp Povorino to Tsaritsyn (and restoring the connection into the North Caucasus) was as important as holding Tsaritysn. Doing that required coordinated thrusts to the west on the front between Kamyshin and Tsaritsyn and south on the front between Kamyshin and Povorino; but the Inspectorate reported that ‘at the present time’ the two groups were operating with ‘virtually no relationship to each other’ because one group, the Tsaritsyn group, was concentrating exclusively on the area round Tsaritsyn.14 On the day Stalin arrived back in Tsaritsyn, 22 September, the Cossacks launched another attack toward the city. For the moment, however, Stalin and his colleagues, Voroshilov and Minin, were preoccupied with another problem: they had been ordered to join Sytin as members of the South Front revolutionary military council (RMC). Stalin promptly designated himself chairman and began issuing orders in the name of the South Front RMC. In one of the first, Order No. 118 of 24 September, he placed all South Front forces under I. L. Sorokin, an ex-noncommissioned officer and partisan detachment commander, and instructed him to report directly to Tsaritsyn. In another, he ordered Sorokin to dispatch the 1st Steel Rifle Division, a recently converted partisan unit under D. P. Zholba, to Tsaritsyn. On the 27th, ignoring Sytin, whom he dismissed as being interested only in the Povorino sector, he sent the RMCR an elaborate plan for defeating Krasnov by 150-mile-deep thrusts from the vicinity of Voronezh to Kantemirovka and Millerovo and out of the North Caucasus to Rostov, accompanying it with a list of weapons and ammunition ‘absolutely essential’ to the plan’s execution. If those requirements could not be met in short order, he concluded, ‘we will have to cease fighting and withdraw to the left bank of the Volga’. On 30 September, in a telegram to Trotskiy, Sytin summarized the results of a meeting he and RMCR-member Mekhoshinin had held in Tsaritsyn with Stalin, Voroshilov, and Minin. Citing the RMCR regulations, he and Mekhoshinin had asserted the front commander’s independence in operational matters. The other three declared that they could, in the first place, not accept the commander’s exclusive right in operational decision-making and, in the second, did not regard the RMCR regulations as an official order; and they insisted that the front headquarters had to be in Tsaritsyn. A day later, in a telegram of their own to the RMCR, on the grounds that Sytin had neither an interest in nor a strategic plan for the southern front, they demanded his dismissal and nominated Voroshilov to replace him. They received two answers. In the first, Sverdlov transmitted a Central Committee decision made on 2 October requiring front RMCs to carry out all RMCR orders ‘because without subordination there will not be an army’. Trotskiy’s response arrived on 3 October in a directive, transmitted through Headquarters, South Front, confirming Sytin’s ‘full independence in all questions of strategic-operational character’, appointing Mekhonoshin to the front RMC ‘to ensure unity of command’, and requiring the entire South Front RMC to be ‘in residence at Kozlov’ by 5 October.