Vladimir Lenin's Creation Of The Imperial Army After World War I

With their newly acquired power after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, anticipated opposition in the very near future. To combat this inevitable force against them, Lenin proposed the notion of creating “a people’s militia and to fuse it with the army (the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the entire people.)” Its purpose was to transform the current Imperial Army, whose morale had been broken-down by combat and poor leadership, into a well-oiled military machine. Thus, the Workers-Peasant Red Army was created in January of 1918, made up of what was thought to be the best of the working class. With the combined influence of both Lenin and his right-hand man Leon Trotsky, together were able to motivate and push the Worker and Peasant classes to join the fight as the Red Army and secure power.

Of the numerous wars they were involved in, the most significant were the Napoleonic War and World War I, as neither had little to no success in terms of military victories. It was after the Napoleonic War that major changes had started to take hold within the army and how they viewed their purpose. The Crimean War debacle, which stemmed from a loss of confidence and prestige among officers, brought upon a low morale for those enlisted in the army at the time. Despite these fluctuations in morale after a series of defeats, the Imperial Army was tightly bound to the Empire and its exhibition of external strength for the vast majority of its later days. Russian politicians thought that without the Army, the rest of the elaborate bureaucratic and police framework could not have survived into the twentieth century