“The lesson of the experience is that, whatever the immediate problems, of this or that situation, if a standing army has to be formed which operates outside the control of the organs of working class rule, this is not just undesirable but also a real obstacle to the process of building socialism. The Red Army may have won the civil war, but its victory turned out to be a Pyrrhic one which sounded the death-knell of the kind of society most Bolsheviks, and the majority of the working class, had envisaged in 1917.”