Military Writings

As in all great revolutions, the social struggle in revolutionary Russia was soon transferred to military terrain. The Bolsheviks then faced the tasks of building an army representative of the new social regime and defeating the internal counterrevolutionary armies and the interventionist forces sent by the great powers (including the United States).
Without any prior military training or experience, Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army and led it to victory in the three years of civil war that followed the October Revolution. But he did more—he wrote about the problems of organizing a new army and the problems of revolutionary warfare, problems with which contemporary and future revolutions must grapple: how a revolutionary army differs from other armies, whether there are special “proletarian” military doctrines and tactics, etc.
These are among Trotsky’s most brilliant writings, a remarkable example of the application of Marxism— not abstractly, but concretely—to practical matters, without a hint of dogmatism, sectarianism, or phrasemongering. Nor are they of interest only to students of warfare, for Trotsky’s point of departure is always the inseparability of military matters from the living social and political context.