A Worker’s Way Of War: The Red Army’s Doctrinal Debate, 1918–1924

Following the October 1917 Revolution, the leaders of the fledgling Red Army embarked on a debate concerning the nature, form, and function of military doctrine. A group known as the ‘military communists,’ including M.V. Frunze, M.N. Tukhachevsky, K. Voroshilov, and S.I. Gusev sought to formulate a ‘proletarian’ military doctrine based on the lessons of the Russian Civil War (1918-21) and purged of supposedly outmoded, bourgeois military thought. Their doctrine, they claimed, would be based over