Page:Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky - Third Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (1921).djvu/11

 Rh teers was not enough to meet the needs of the fight on all the fronts. The workers themselves demanded that the proletariat should be mobilised and called up in classes. The first tentative mobilisations in Moscow and Petrograd were successful, and they were followed by the mobilisation of the proletariat in the other parts of Soviet Russia. The Red Army was a child of the Red Guard; the first mobilisations supplied mainly workers to the Red regiments. Officers of the old army who voluntarily offered their services were mobilised. Thus Soviet Russia augmented its military forces. Apart from this the Communist Party mobilised thousands of its members. "Communists to the Fronts!" was the cry raised after the fall of Kazan, and the best forces of our Party went to the Volga, to the Urals, to the South, to take their place in the first ranks of the young Red Army; the results were not long in coming. The workers held up the offensive of the Czecho-Slovaks and the White Guards in the Urals, and for the space of six months kept them in check, half way between Ekaterinburg and Perm. In the North the Red sailors from the Baltic Fleet and the Red Army divisions beat off the offensive of the British and the Northern White Guards aiming at Vologda. Finally fresh forces concentrated at Kazan, and, led by Comrade Trotsky, took the offensive and captured Kazan. This was the first large victory won by the heroic efforts of the Petrograd and Moscow workers, and proved to be the first of a number of further successes. After the capture of Kazan, the victorious Red Army took Simbirsk and then Samara, where the counter-revolutionary