An Age of Reform 381
What was the legacy of the old army to the new? The Bolsheviks set out to
make a complete break with the policies of the 'feudal' and 'imperialist' past,
but it was not long before their rudimentary militia was superseded by
a regular force. During the civil war of 1918-20 Trotsky's Red Army (RKKA)
proved its \Ycrth as an essential bul\vark cf the revolutionary dictatorship. In
the mid-1930s it was converted into a fully professional body in which many of
the old Imperial traditions were revived: officers' ranks and insignia, strict
discipline, specialized military schools (some of them named for Suvorov) and
so on.
But this army was a very different phenomenon from its predecessor. The
Soviet soldier received a modern technologically-oriented education and his
loyalty to the regime was carefully nurtured by a ramified network of political
officers. The official ideology might acquire a strong patriotic flavour, but its
purpose was to serve the interests of the ruling party, which was committed to
a supranational cause. To that end it mobilized all the country's human and
material resources on a scale undreamed of by the tsars. This was not really
militarization, even if the agitators often used military terminology in their
rhetoric; the Communist party remained in sole charge. The new order which
Stalin created took from Imperial Russia's heritage whatever could help to
substantiate and legitimate its power, but it was not erected directly on its
foundations. It had a different raison d'etre. Even so the old service state,
which in its four hundred years of existence had taken so much from the Rus-
sian people and given so little in return, set an awesome precedent. Perhaps its
principal legacy was psychological. In the USSR-men responded to the call of
the central vlast' in a generally stolid and submissive spirit that their forbears
would have found all too familiar.