Red Guards

Origins and name

The prototype of the Red Guards was the workers' combat squads of the 1905 Revolution. The name itself arose in Finland during that revolution and came back into use from around April 1917 to designate the more militant section of armed workers. Lenin set out the theoretical justification for this armed organization in "The Last Word of 'Iskra' Tactics". The term spread widely after the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) published its resolution "On the Provisional Government" on 26 March 1917.

The first detachments named Red Guard arose in spring 1917 in Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Revel, Kharkov, Odessa, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities. They were organized mostly at enterprises and subordinated to local soviets and, less often, to Bolshevik committees. Centralized structures formed in Petrograd (Main Staff) and Moscow (Central Staff).

Organization and size

Units were built at the factory level, with factory committees playing a large role. A detachment commander was appointed by the factory-plant committee organizer or a military instructor, and the composition of the detachment was approved by the factory committee rather than by the Red Guards' own will. Candidates were approved on the recommendations of work collectives, local soviets, trade-union committees and RSDLP(b) branches. There was no uniform; members served in civilian clothes with identity documents and badges or armbands. Pay for hours spent on public-order duty became a point of dispute, with workers demanding average wages and employers refusing. Combat organization ran from the desyatok of 10 to 15 men, through a vzvod of four desyatoks, to a druzhina (company) of three to four vzvods and a battalion of three to four companies.

Sources differ materially on size. One estimate is about 200,000 in October and November 1917 (over 30,000 in Petrograd, up to 30,000 in Moscow); another is about 150,000 to 175,000 at the October Revolution (25,000 to 30,000 of them in Petrograd); a third is 276,230 men in 599 towns between November 1917 and April 1918. The figure of roughly 200,000 for October and November 1917 is adopted by several references, and Konstantin Yurenev was head of the Petrograd Red Guards (30,000 men).

1917: outlawing and renewed expansion

After the July Days of 1917 the Red Guard was declared outside the law and some detachments were temporarily disbanded, as recorded at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b). During the Kornilov affair the Provisional Government drew the Bolsheviks into defending government authority, which let the Bolsheviks arm legally, and Red Guard detachments were created en masse, typically under Bolshevik leaders. Organization spread beyond the Central Industrial Region to Belorussia, the Don, the Kuban, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, reaching 104 proletarian centres by the end of September 1917.

The October Revolution and the early Civil War

In October 1917 the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee armed and trained the Red Guards legally, and the Red Guard was given the main role. Together with Bolshevik-controlled military units, detachments seized the Neva bridges, post offices, stations and the telegraph, and freed Bolsheviks from the Kresty prison. During the armed seizure of the Winter Palace, however, most Red Guards acted passively: no more than 3,200 of the roughly 50,000-strong Petrograd force took part, out of 11,000 attackers, although the vanguard detachments were mostly Red Guards. The absence of serious resistance is the explanation given for that passivity. Where resistance did occur, at the Neva bridges and party newspaper offices, it was quickly suppressed by Red Guards and pro-Bolshevik servicemen.

On 27 October 1917 Red Guard detachments with the Centrobalt and pro-Bolshevik army units moved to Krasnoye Selo and Pulkovo to stop Krasnov's 3rd Cavalry Corps, and the Red Guard Main Staff carried out a labour mobilization that sent up to 20,000 workers to build defensive fortifications. On 30 October Red Guards under K. S. Eremeev fought Krasnov's cossacks on the Pulkovo heights, took Tsarskoye Selo and on 1 November Gatchina. They helped suppress the Junker mutiny on 29 October, though some Red Guards in the Junker area allowed themselves to be disarmed.

In February and March 1918, amid the German offensive and the evacuation of Soviet institutions from Petrograd to Moscow, Petrograd Red Guards in conditions of chaos and weakened discipline carried out indiscriminate street shootings, and victims' corpses were often robbed.

Regional actions

In Moscow the local Red Guard came under the newly created Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee from 25 October 1917, though its first actions, the seizing of district weapons depots, occurred spontaneously. On the evening of 26 October a Red Guard detachment took the Kremlin without a fight, defended it until the morning of 28 October and retook it on 2 November. Moscow Red Guard numbers grew from about 15,000 at the start of the fighting to 30,000, including arrivals from Moscow and neighbouring provinces.

In Ukraine, on 14 December 1917 Kharkov Red Guards stopped the Chuguev military school junkers without a fight, and on 15 December a combined 600-strong Red Guard detachment under N. A. Khovrin occupied Chuguev and disarmed the junkers. On 28 and 29 December 1917, on Antonov-Ovseenko's order, up to 2,000 Kharkov Red Guards disarmed the 2nd Ukrainian Reserve Regiment and the 503rd Chigirin Regiment of the Central Rada, 2,400 men, ending dual power in Kharkov. Red Guards also took Kherson on 31 January 1918 and Kiev on 26 January / 8 February 1918, and in Siberia they were the main force against the mutinous Czechoslovak Corps.

Absorption into the Red Army and dissolution

Between the demobilization of the old Russian army and the creation of the Red Army in January 1918, the Red Guards performed regular-army functions. On 15 January 1918 Sovnarkom decreed the creation of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army as a volunteer force drawn from "the most class-conscious and organized elements of the toiling masses", because the rag-tag Red Guard units and pro-Bolshevik imperial army elements were inadequate to defend the new government against external foes. The architect of the Red Army's formation was Trotsky, appointed People's Commissar for the Army and Navy in March 1918. In April 1918 universal military training (Vsevobuch) was introduced, abandoning the volunteer principle, and military commissars were introduced. Some Red Guard detachments were incorporated into the new Red Army in 1918, others withered away, and the Soviet government formally abolished the Red Guard in April 1918; its essential features of self-organization, local orientation and elected leaders were unsuited to civil war or the new Communist era.

The ending is disputed. Russian Wikipedia states that by March 1918 Red Guards were officially declared outside the law, that Cheka combat detachments were tasked with liquidating formations refusing to integrate or disarm, and that dissolution finished at different times regionally, with the last Red Guard detachments in Turkestan transferred to the Red Army in October 1919. The same source reports, attributed to the historian A. I. Fursov, that the Red Guards' social base included criminals and criminal elements mass-released from places of confinement who terrorized the population under cover of revolutionary terror, and that Soviet historiography dubbed the fight against the Red Guard "suppression of kulak revolts". This is a contested, attributed claim rather than an established fact, so 1917 to 1918 is a conventional dating and not a uniform national end-date.

Repertoires and significance

Red Guards performed public-order and guard duties, armed escort, barricade and trench building, picket duty and the defence of district Military Revolutionary Committees in Moscow; labour mobilization for fortification-building in Petrograd; and expeditionary forces sent from Petrograd and Moscow in late 1917 and early 1918 to secure control over outlying regions. This worker self-organization was a symbol of the working class's most emphatic self-assertion. Red Guards and Bolsheviks found common ground in the slogan "All Power to the Soviets", in the call for radical social reforms and an end to the war, and out of that came a close working relationship.

Not to be confused with

The Red Guards in Russia of 1917 to 1918 must not be confused with the Soviet Guards of the Great Patriotic War or with the Chinese Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1968). The latter took their name from the armed workers' groups of the 1917 Russian Revolution, attacked "revisionists", Westerners and alleged bourgeois influences, were originally encouraged by Mao Zedong, caused severe social disorder and were suppressed after 1968. North Korea's Worker-Peasant Red Guards militia also shares the name, and the "Black Guards" were a distinct formation in the Russian Civil War period. The Russian Red Guards were not a centralized body: they were organized across most of the former Russian Empire, including Finland, Poland, Estonia and Ukraine.

Sources

• Russian Wikipedia, "Красная гвардия": volunteer armed detachments created by territorial organizations of the RSDLP(b) to seize power in 1917; 104 proletarian centres by late September 1917, up to 250,000 men.
• English Wikipedia, "Red Guards (Russia)": paramilitary volunteer formations consisting primarily of urban workers; 200,000 personnel at the time of the October Revolution.
• Encyclopedia of Russian History (Rex A. Wade): the term originated in Finland during the 1905 Revolution; loosely organized, they chose their own leaders; formally abolished in April 1918.
• Lewis Siegelbaum (Michigan State University): Red Guard units were rag-tag and inadequate to the task of defending the new government, leading to the Sovnarkom decree of 15 January 1918 forming the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.