Vladimir Mikhaylovich Smirnov (politician)

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Vladimir Mikhailovich Smirnov (1876 - 1952) was a Russian Communist and member of the Bolshevik Party, where he advocated a militant and doctrinally pure line.

He was married to Karin Strindberg, the daughter of the famous Swedish writer August Strindberg. They were married in Strindberg's apartment in Blå tornet, Stockholm in 1910.

Smirnov, who was closely associated with Nikolai Bukharin, was a political commissar in the Red army and represented the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party and was the main spokesman of the Military opposition. He was a member of the editorial board of Kommunist, the organ of the Petrograd Committee of the party. Years before the communist coup d'etat he pushed for a more militant party tactics, much to the annoyance of Lenin. He became the finances director of the governing body of the Moscow oblast, Sovnarkom, which executed wide powers and had high ambitions of local rule, although it was abolished already in June, 1918. His attempts at forming similar bodies where short-lived.^[1]

Smirnov served in the governing bureau of the Supreme Economic Council, set up in December 1917. His Left fraction initially dominated the Council and Lenin had to take their position into recognition.^[2]

[edit] Speech at the 8th Party Congress, 1919

At the 8th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party, Smirnov appeared as a delegate from the 5th army. On 20th March 1919, Smirnov gave a speech to the Congress on the use of former Tsarist Officers (termed 'Specialists' within the party) and political commissars in the Red Army. Responding to accusations from Grigory Sokolnikov that he opposed the use of officers, which by this point had become a key plank of Bolshevik military strategy, he denied favouring the use of Partisan militia in the Russian Civil War. He did, however, warn of the inadequate political mechanisms that the Soviet authority had at its disposal to control these officers. Arguing for the repeal of Decree on Revolutionary Military Councils, he said to the Congress

...The role of the political commissars is limited to the functions of supervision... Now that we have the political commissars with sufficient combat experience and able not to intervene when not needed, we must give them broader rights, a larger part in the direction of the armies.

Smirnov regarded the commissars as an integral check on the potential disloyalty of the old officers. This preference for so-called 'politicisation' of the Red Army was shared by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party in opposition, but largely rejected by Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs, who by 1919 exercised full control over the military.

[edit] References

^ Timothy J. Colton: Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis pp. 68, 102f.
^ The decline of the Russian Revolution and the cult of the Party Revolutionary Perspectives March 1, 2003-03-01, quoting R.V. Daniels: The Conscience of the Revolution. Simon and Schuster 1960, p. 84.