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From 1914 to 1921, during the Great War and the Civil War, millions of Russian men were forcefully mobilized and spontaneously demobilized, often changing the color of their uniform. During the 1920s, the ‘red soldier’ who had defeated the Whites and the Greens was supposed to be the ‘New Soviet Man’, half peasant and half revolutionary, and more importantly, the perfect intermediary between the population and the new Soviet leadership. The Bolshevik silence about the First World War and the myth built around the Civil War intended to rewrite the collective memory. But all along the 1920s, the rural realities contradicted these goals and dreams. Back to their villages, the former soldiers wanted peace and waited (in vain) to be rewarded for their sacrifices. Political education leaders, deprived from reliable agents in the countryside, did not manage to remobilize the veterans on the ‘cultural front’ and failed to transfer the new culture and politics from the cities to the peasantry. The general demobilization of the minds contrasted with the ‘overmobilization’ the Bolsheviks wanted to impose on the Russians.