Central Commission for Combating Desertion

The problem began with the first compulsory call-ups in May and June 1918. Trotsky recalled in My Life that tens of thousands of young peasants in Kaluga, Voronezh and Ryazan provinces did not report for the first call-ups, and "those who did not report were called deserters". In a speech to the Petrograd Soviet on 1 September 1919 he added: "The word is inaccurate: we are talking about people evading the call-up." At the front the principle was set by Order No. 18, issued at Sviyazhsk in August 1918: "If any unit retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the unit's commissar, the second its commander." In its resolutions "On Desertion", "On Measures to Combat Desertion" and "On Measures to Eradicate Desertion" the Council of Defence classed desertion with treason as one of the gravest and most shameful crimes, and the central and local commissions formed patrols of party members and Red Army men to search houses and carry out round-ups. In Tambov province the People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs, Vadim Podbelsky, came down as commissioner, and the patrols were given the right to shoot "in special cases". Villages suspected of hiding deserters faced hostage-taking, fines, confiscation of livestock and even the burning of houses.

Amnesty was used alongside coercion. An amnesty for deserters was declared in June 1919, and in its first month the patrols brought in 44,000 men while 156,000 gave themselves up; those who returned were sorted into "malicious" deserters and those deserting "from weakness of will". Trotsky spoke for an hour and a half to 15,000 "comrade deserters" at Ryazan and wrote that "the regiments made of Ryazan 'deserters' later fought well at the fronts", and on 24 February 1919 he said: "Give me three thousand deserters and call it a regiment; give them a commander and a commissar, and in four weeks three thousand deserters will make a splendid regiment." The sources disagree on the scale. The English sources state that of 837,000 draft evaders and deserters in 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters (616 in another article) were executed and 98,000 to 132,000 returned voluntarily during amnesty weeks, and also that special Cheka commissions caught 500,000 deserters in 1919 and 600,000 to 800,000 in 1920. The Russian source says up to 2.6 million men deserted between June 1919 and June 1920. Deserters who took to the forests became the backbone of the "Green" peasant uprisings. Reporting on the reduction of the army in December 1920, Trotsky announced that leaving the ranks without permission would still be punished as desertion, but evaders and deserters who reported to the labour front in time would be freed from criminal liability; local commissions such as the one in Astrakhan province worked until the end of 1921.