Authors

Discussion

The Red Army created in 1918 was forged in the battles of the Civil War. The majority of the soldiers of the new army did not have any consistent military training even before the war was over, the command was facing a  question of how to collect and systematise the experience of the conflict. In 1918 Trotsky ordered a creation of the Commission for the Study and Use of the War Experience within the General Staff initially to process the lessons of the First World War but soon it incorporated the experience of the Civil War as well. However, if the party leadership dismissed the experience of the world war as ‘imperialist’ war and granted Commission full access to the archives of the Russian Imperial Army, it was much more sensitive when it came to the questions of Civil War. Using the experience of the Civil War for army training proved to be challenging, gradually political leadership gained more control over the commission publications, purged it from tsarist officers and restricted access to the documents relating to the actions of the Red Army in the Civil War. This paper examines the Commission’s attempt to study the Civil War in this challenging circumstances. It looks at its publications and explores how its work affected the nascent Red Army by looking at its ties with the General Staff, the military academy and multiple military magazines that appeared at the time.