60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
ture and organisation of the Red Army as an instrument of a working class state. As Lenin himself had clearly seen after the revolution, State and Revolution was a theoretical abstract and what would give teeth and substance to it was political practice.
It is remarkable—in spite of a wide spectrum of overlapping opinions regarding particular points—to what extent the differing positions that we are familiar with as regards the economy, the mass organisations and other institutions are spelled out in the debates over the nature and position of the Red Army in the new Soviet State, and how the actual Party positions adopted with regard to them show a conformity to the phases of War Communism and NEP. But whereas it was the central concern of victory in the war which was the overriding factor in ultimately determining the shape of the Army, as he shows, and consequently also, according to him, of other institutions of the Soviet State in their inter-relationship, it was the difficulties in the economic sphere and the transition to NEP which consequently had its effect on the Army structure and its relationship with the Party and State institutions. In other words, in the first phase it was the military situation that determined the economic and political aspects of the socialist construction, and in the second the economic and political situation which had as its necessary component some changes in the military organisation.
In his first chapter Benvenuti shows how during the February Revolution the political and social concerns of the civilian population came to prevail over those of the front, and how this was quite logical given the size and composition of the Russian Imperial Army in the background of a growing revolutionary movement. World War I mobilised nine million men—that is over a third of the able-bodied male population. It meant the disintegration of the Imperial Army. In terms of the organisation of the revolution it meant the democratisation of the army, and a role of great initiative for the Communist soldiers. The period following the February Revolution entailed a working out of the relationship between the soldiers' committees and the Soviets. The democratisation of the army, as Benvenuti shows, 'upset the new democracy of the Soviets as it did the army High Command.' In other words, as we know to be the case with the workers and the peasants, the aspirations of the soldiers after February were far ahead of the Soviets and the Party. What went into the creation of the Red Army after October were, therefore, not only the experience of the tight-knit centralised structure of the Bolshevik Party organisations and the principles on which the Red Guard squads functioned, but also the political and organisational experience that the soldiers' committees gained during this phase. This rich experience gave the early armed forces also a very politicised conception of discipline. It also created scope for differing perceptions, which were