Red Army

The Red Army is the armed force of the revolutionary government and one of the principal agents through which political change becomes immediate in the novel. It fights the Whites, recruits and mobilizes civilians, requisitions resources, and enforces revolutionary decisions. The narrative shows these functions not as a single, unified experience but at several scales: wounded men carried toward hospitals, exhausted units withdrawn from battle, commanders imposing discipline, families caught in mobilization, and soldiers appearing amid displaced civilians. Its growing strength brings military victory, yet victory does not restore ordinary security; it accompanies coercion, flight, and a widening reach of political control.

Military Force and Wartime Experience

The Red Army’s presence is first registered through the material demands of war. A truck carrying two trailers brings wounded men to a Moscow hospital, where the influx has overwhelmed the available space. The overcrowding, intensified after the battle of Lutsk, pushes casualties into passages and onto landings and begins to affect the women’s wards. War thus enters the city not only through news from the front but through the pressure placed on medical care and hospital space.

At the front, the experience of an attack is rendered through the distance between an observer’s view and the soldiers’ exposure. Lieutenant Antipov leads his men across an open field toward enemy trenches. Seen from an observation post, the advancing unit repeatedly drops to the ground and rises again; men struck during the advance fall and do not get up. Galiullin, watching through field glasses, initially mistakes the explosions of German shells and the smoke that hides the field for proof that Antipov and his men have been killed. The account establishes how little an observer can know in the instant of battle: a false report of Antipov’s death grows out of a frightening but incomplete view, while the actual outcome is that he is captured after his platoon surrenders.

The medical stations behind the lines make the consequences of fighting equally plain. After four days of heavy fighting, survivors of a decimated unit are withdrawn for a brief rest. At the same time, unsprung ammunition carts bring wounded men from the battlefield to a first-aid station in a damaged forest clearing. The casualties have been collected during a short lull in the artillery fire, and many are unconscious. Orderlies unload them on stretchers; the most urgent cases are to be operated on after hurried bandaging. The nearby presence of a shouting officer demanding to know where an artillery park has been moved contrasts with the doctor’s insistence that wounded men need attention. Military logistics continue around medical care, but the immediate work of treating the wounded gives that care its own practical priority.

Discipline, Mobilization, and Revolutionary Authority

The Red Army’s ability to fight depends on measures that reach beyond the battlefield. As a new offensive is planned, revolutionary courts-martial are instituted and the death penalty, recently abolished, is restored in an effort to improve morale. At Biriuchi, the 212th rebels are surrounded by Cossacks and Gints addresses the assembled soldiers from a pile of timber. His appeals to duty and the fatherland meet indifference and hostility. The men are exhausted by war and tired of political phrases; the growing murmur makes plain that formal authority alone cannot command their assent. When Gints invokes the courts-martial and threatens death unless the soldiers disarm and surrender their ringleaders, the scene turns from persuasion to coercion.

That coercive reach appears also in accounts of villages targeted for resisting state demands. A speaker explains that Nizhni Kelmes was shelled after its residents dissolved their Poor Peasants’ Committee, refused to supply horses to the Red Army, and resisted a mobilization decree. The explanation compresses punishment into a list of infractions, but its consequence is substantial: the army’s requirements and the authorities’ response bring military force into the lives of a rural community. The episode shows how wartime governance can treat resistance to particular demands as grounds for armed reprisal.

Mobilization also entangles people who are not serving soldiers. On a train of twenty-three cars, passengers occupy the front and middle sections, while labor conscripts fill eight cars at the rear. There are about five hundred conscripts, drawn from sharply different backgrounds and occupations. Later, during a railway emergency, an official proposes using a labor corps of passengers—about seven hundred people—to clear the line, while specifically excluding sailors and Red Army soldiers from the work. The distinction makes the military’s practical authority visible in the organization of civilian labor: people travelling through the country can be turned into a work force to meet an urgent transport need.

Command and Campaigns

The novel’s portrait of Red Army command is sharpened by the record of Strelnikov, whose appointment and authority are tied to the crises of the civil war. Over a few months, he has been involved in actions at Nizhni Kelmes and Ust-Nemdinsk, the suppression of peasants resisting food levies, and the punishment of infantrymen who plundered a food convoy. He has also dealt with an uprising by Stenka Razin soldiers who defected to the Whites, and with a mutiny in which a loyal commander was killed. In each case, his method is presented as rapid and severe: he takes opponents by surprise, investigates, tries, sentences, and enforces the sentence with resolution.

His campaigns are credited with bringing a regional epidemic of desertions under control and reorganizing recruiting bodies. Conscription proceeds, and Red Army reception centers work at high pressure. When White military pressure from the north makes the position grave, Strelnikov receives wider military, strategic, and operational responsibilities, and his interventions produce immediate results. His reputation is inseparable from this efficacy: the nickname Razstrelnikov, meaning the Executioner, circulates among soldiers, but he is described as undisturbed by it. The military institution’s capacity to restore order is therefore shown alongside the methods by which it does so, leaving discipline and terror closely associated.

The Red Army’s growth is also measured through the force of the partisan ranks in which Yurii serves as a doctor. Despite setbacks and retreats, insurgents from settlements and deserters from the enemy continually swell the army. In the eighteen months of Yurii’s service, its size increases tenfold, reaching the strength Liberius had once claimed at an underground meeting. The expansion increases the demands on medical personnel: winter brings typhus, summer dysentery, and renewed fighting adds ever more wounded. The army’s growth is not an abstract statistic alone; it changes the scale of the doctor’s work and the pressures on the people who serve within it.

Medical Service and the Limits of Neutrality

Military medical work is governed by an international rule of neutrality: under the Red Cross convention, medical personnel are not to take part in belligerents’ military operations. Yurii’s experience reveals how difficult that rule can be to maintain in the field. During an engagement, he is caught under enemy fire at the edge of a forest. The Whites attack across an open field, and he lies beside the unit’s telephonist. When the attackers come close enough for him to see their faces, he finds that they are not an indistinguishable force but include young volunteers from the capitals and older men called up from the reserve. Faced with the immediate danger of combat, Yurii has to fire in self-defense, breaking the neutrality that ordinarily defines his medical role.

This episode places the doctor between institutional principle and immediate survival. The convention marks medical personnel as separate from the fighting, but proximity to the front makes separation unstable. Yurii’s act is presented as forced by the circumstances rather than as a change of vocation: the person responsible for treating the wounded briefly shares the combatants’ danger and fate. Across the novel, the Red Army’s medical and military operations thus meet in the same person, exposing the limits of rules when battle reaches those charged with relieving its consequences.

Victory, Displacement, and Civilian Life

The Red Army’s military success does not resolve the displacement produced by war. After the defeat of Kolchak’s forces, the main Red Army pursues them eastward along the railway while another part hurries toward the region where Yurii is staying. The southern part of Russia is reported clear of the enemy, and forces are joining to deal with scattered White troops in the rear. The news marks a decisive military reversal, but Yurii’s question is not about the campaign: he wants to know where the families are. Varykino is deserted, and the surviving inhabitants believe that the families left in time after danger reached the village. Victory changes who controls territory without guaranteeing that those who lived there can return safely.

The aftermath also makes the Red Army part of the landscape of civilian loss. In a town where people have lost their homes, Gordon and Dudorov walk past white stone ruins and sleeping displaced residents: local people, including old men, women, and children, as well as Red Army soldiers separated from their units and trying to rejoin them. Soldiers and civilians share the same exposed public space, though for different reasons. The army’s presence does not simply restore order; its troops too can be dislocated from their units, while civilians bear the longer consequences of destroyed homes and interrupted lives.

In another account of village devastation, the narrator describes Red Army men sent from town after an accusation led to arrests and a local court. They are housed separately and given liquor; during the night the house catches fire, and the flames spread to other houses. The account insists that no one deliberately set fire to the town officials’ house, while also recounting how the villagers fled and did not return because they feared what might happen next. The Red Army men are among those killed in the fire, and the narrator’s mother has drowned herself in an ice hole. The episode does not reduce the village’s ruin to a single deliberate act: accusation, arrest, fear, rumor, flight, and accidental fire converge, with the army’s arrival part of a breakdown in which no authority can secure the community.

Political Reach and Narrative Significance

The Red Army appears not only as a force in battle but as the armed foundation of a changing political order. Its soldiers and institutions are implicated in mobilization, requisition, courts-martial, the suppression of resistance, and campaigns against desertion. Its reach is often explained through the demands made upon communities—horses, recruits, provisions, labor—and the penalties imposed when those demands are resisted. Yet the narrative also shows individual soldiers as tired, wounded, misplaced, or exposed to danger, preventing the institution from being represented solely through commands from above.

That tension shapes the Red Army’s significance in the novel. It is powerful enough to defeat its enemies, reorganize recruitment, and make revolutionary authority felt across a vast region, but military success cannot undo hunger, displacement, or fear. Through hospitals, battlefields, railway cars, villages, and temporary sleeping places, the army is seen as both an instrument of political transformation and part of the disorder that transformation brings. The same force that advances toward victory also presses into the fragile routines of medical work, civilian travel, rural life, and family survival.