Formed and trained in the midst of civil war, the Red Army was built as the revolutionary defense force of the world's first workers' state. This book tells how it was done. Recruited from the working class and peasantry, struggling for vital supplies and equipment in the face of fourteen enemy armies, the Red Army survived and won only through determination to defend the October Revolution. Its ranks included the finest Bolshevik cadre. Its leader and organizing genius, second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Revolution, was Leon Trotsky. Erich Wollenberg, a German communist who joined the Soviet army and held high command, saw this army take shape. He records its battles, and tells how Stalin and his bureaucracy later beheaded the Red Army, liquidating its revolutionary leadership and attempting to re-write its history. His book, republished here for the first time in 40 years, is an important contribution to correcting the historical record.