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Russian and Soviet Armed Forces (Military History)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The literature on Russian and Soviet military history is dominated by one question: the availability of sources. More than other fields of Russian-Soviet history, the scholarly study of military questions has depended on the vicissitudes of Russian politics, and the limitations they place on historical research. Intellectual and cultural history, for example, can rely on public productions of culture, whether in the upper or lower levels of society, and so are somewhat less dependent on archival access. Even in the higher levels of Soviet politics, often conducted behind closed doors, traces were left in the records of the rise and fall of individual figures. Soviet political culture, with its emphasis on public rituals declaring orthodox belief and denouncing those who deviated from it, also provided valuable material for scholars. Well before Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of glasnost (which allowed open discussion of political and social issues and led to the democratization of the Soviet Union), Western scholars of social or economic history enjoyed limited access to Soviet historical documents. Military questions were different. The Soviet Union’s military archives were off-limits to Western scholars, forcing those interested in the place of the military in Soviet society to rely on memoirs, official publications, and careful reading of Soviet secondary literature. Even with these limitations, work of high quality and lasting significance could still be produced. The overall picture, though, was decidedly mixed. Lack of archival access justified a substantial number of ostensibly scholarly works by authors who did not know Russian. In the early years of the Cold War, much of the Western literature on the Soviets was based on the work of former Wehrmacht generals, who came to the subject with their own axes to grind. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, this changed dramatically. Although his policy of glasnost took several years to reach full fruition, archival access to all subjects improved. Military history, because of its previously taboo status, changed most dramatically. Millions upon millions of documents from the pre-1917 Russian empire’s military and the post-1917 Red Army were thrown open to scholars. Access remains incomplete. Military records from before 1941 are largely in the hands of Russia’s civilian archivists, who have a mandate to make materials available to researchers. Military documents from 1941 on, though, are still overwhelmingly in military possession. The Russian Ministry of Defense, for better or worse, does not have a particular interest in easing the work of Western historians. Even Russian historians have difficulties in covering that period, because military history in Russia remains largely the preserve of the military itself. Military intelligence, in addition, is still a closed subject except to those employed in the Russian security services.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. Liddell Hart 1956 and Seaton and Seaton 1986 as general surveys were quite influential on an earlier generation of scholarship, but these have been superseded by later works that are able to take advantage of new archival sources. Higham and Kagan 2002 and Kagan and Higham 2002 include specialists on a variety of topics and have been able to cover more subjects in detail. Stone 2006 aims at a general readership in a more concise volume. Fuller 1992 limits the discussion to the imperial period, but at a high level of abstraction. Reese 2000 covers the Soviet period alone, with a focus specifically on social history, whereas Ziemke 2004 is more recent but does not include recent scholarship.
  8.  
  9. Fuller, William C. Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914. New York: Free Press, 1992.
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  11. A sweeping account of Russian grand strategy, focusing on the long-term processes that shape military policy. In particular, emphasizes social and economic backwardness and the state institutions established to compensate for that weakness.
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  13. Higham, Robin, and Frederick Kagan, eds. The Military History of the Soviet Union. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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  15. An able and comprehensive collection of essays by authorities in the field.
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  17. Kagan, Frederick, and Robin Higham, eds. The Military History of Tsarist Russia. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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  19. An able and comprehensive collection of essays by authorities in the field.
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  21. Liddell Hart, B. H., ed. The Red Army, 1918–1945. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
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  23. Very much shaped by a German view on the Red Army, one that has been largely discredited by subsequent research.
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  25. Reese, Roger R. The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991. Warfare and History. London: Routledge, 2000.
  26. DOI: 10.4324/9780203011850Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  27. Provides a brief but able summary of the history of the Soviet military, focusing particularly on the Red Army as a social institution, the experience of the common soldier, and the decline of revolutionary ideals over time.
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  29. Seaton, Albert, and Joan Seaton. The Soviet Army: 1918 to the Present. London: Bodley Head, 1986.
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  31. Although a useful synthesis at its time of publication, this has been superseded both by new research and more up-to-date synthetic works.
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  33. Stone, David R. A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
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  35. A brief overview of Russian military history, aimed at synthesizing recent research for the general public.
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  37. Ziemke, Earl F. The Red Army: 1918–1941: From Vanguard of World Revolution to US Ally. London: Frank Cass, 2004.
  38. DOI: 10.4324/9780203498446Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  39. Although published well after the archival revolution transformed our understanding of Soviet military history, the book ignores recent literature and instead relies on pre-glasnost scholarship to retell the Red Army’s history.
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  41. Reference Works
  42.  
  43. Most of the relevant reference works to Russian-Soviet military history are available solely in Russian. Two notable exceptions are the general text Wieczynski 1976 and Krivosheev 1997. Krivosheev provided a welcome starting point for serious and objective work on the question of Soviet casualties, which had been based on guesswork for far too long.
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  45. Krivosheev, G. F., ed. Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. London: Greenhill, 1997.
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  47. Translation of a Russian original, this is the starting point for all research on Soviet casualties, including the issue of relative Soviet and German losses on the Eastern Front. It provides voluminous data, but it cannot be the final word. Its figures on Afghanistan, for example, differ substantially from those in the Russian General Staff’s official history.
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  49. Wieczynski, Josph L. Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History. Vol. 1. Academic International Reference. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1976.
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  51. Large and comprehensive, but necessarily out of date with regard to recent findings.
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  53. Anthologies
  54.  
  55. Lohr and Poe 2002 and Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Menning 2004 are collections of articles published first and exclusively in those volumes; Reese 2006 and Jensen 2008 bring together articles previously published in scholarly journals.
  56.  
  57. Jensen, Geoffrey. Warfare in Europe, 1919–1938. The International Library of Essays on Military History. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
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  59. Although the coverage is substantially broader than that of the Soviet Union alone, a substantial number of the journal articles collected are classics on the Red Army.
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  61. Lohr, Eric, and Marshall Poe. The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002.
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  63. A varied collection of essays on the social and cultural history of the imperial Russian army and, in particular, its interrelation with Russian society.
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  65. Reese, Roger. The Russian Imperial Army, 1796–1917. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  67. A selection of classic essays on prerevolutionary Russian military history.
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  69. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David, Bruce Menning, eds. Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution. Woodrow Wilson Center Series. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004.
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  71. A varied collection of essays on particular periods and aspects of reform of the Russian imperial army, with the bulk of the contributions focusing on the period between the Crimean War and World War I. By comparison with Lohr and Poe 2002, its closest analogue, this volume concentrates more on personalities and military institutions.
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  73. Bibliographies
  74.  
  75. Smith 1982 covers older, English-language literature; Erickson and Erickson 1996 is a selective guide to Russian-language sources.
  76.  
  77. Erickson, John, and Ljubica Erickson. The Soviet Armed Forces: A Research Guide to Soviet Sources. Research Guides in Military Studies 8. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.
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  79. A bibliography of Russian-language literature that catches the first wave of glasnost-era scholarship. Given its date of publication, though, it misses a flood of more recent Russian-language work.
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  81. Smith, Myron J. The Soviet Army, 1939–1980: A Guide to Sources in English. War/Peace Bibliography Series 11. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1982.
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  83. A useful guide to older published literature.
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  85. Journals
  86.  
  87. Only the Journal of Slavic Military Studies is exclusively devoted to military questions of Russia and the former Soviet bloc. The other journals referenced in this section—Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Military History, Russian Review, Slavic Review, and Slavonic and East European Review—regularly carry material on military questions, alongside a host of other topics.
  88.  
  89. Europe-Asia Studies.
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  91. Formerly Soviet Studies, this journal’s focus is on recent and contemporary issues, although it does regularly include articles on military questions from a social-science perspective on all parts of the former Soviet bloc. Available online by subscription.
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  93. Journal of Military History.
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  95. As the title suggests, this journal is quite broad in its scope, but it does regularly include articles on Russian-Soviet military history. Available online by subscription.
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  97. Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
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  99. Formerly the Journal of Soviet Military Studies. The only forum devoted exclusively to Russian, Soviet, and Eastern European military questions, this journal’s coverage includes both historical and contemporary issues. Available online by subscription.
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  101. Russian Review.
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  103. Limiting itself to Russia, this journal includes substantial coverage of literature and culture, in addition to history. Available online by subscription.
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  105. Slavic Review.
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  107. Extending across all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, this is the journal of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the main American professional association studying Russia and the former Soviet Union. Available online by subscription.
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  109. Slavonic and East European Review.
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  111. An important British interdisciplinary journal.
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  113. The Great Reforms
  114.  
  115. After the debacle of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the premature death of the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, his son and successor Alexander II had little choice but to embark on substantial reforms in order to maintain Russia’s standing as a great power. Although these reforms affected all sections of Russian society, two key elements are particularly relevant to the military. First, Miller 1968 and Brooks 1984 lay out the basics on the military reforms that were the handiwork of War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin, one of the tsarist empire’s most effective administrators. These streamlined the Russian military and established institutions (such as the military district) that survived past the imperial period into the Soviet era and even beyond. Second, military reforms were inextricably linked to the 1861 emancipation of the Russian serfs. Because peasants made up the bulk of Russia’s recruits, Miliutin’s move toward a universal-conscription, short-service military could take place only in close coordination with emancipation. Bushnell 1994 and Kipp 1994 explore particular topics in more detail. Roberts 1991 and Kagan 1999 show that the Russian army before the Great Reforms was not nearly as hidebound and ineffective as sometimes perceived. We still lack rigorous scholarly treatments using Russian-language sources on the 1826–1828 Russo-Persian War and the1827–1829 Russo-Turkish War.
  116.  
  117. Brooks, E. Willis. “Reform in the Russian Army, 1856–1861.” Slavic Review 43.1 (1984): 63–82.
  118. DOI: 10.2307/2498735Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  119. Examines the neglected period between the end of the Crimean War (1856) and Dmitrii Miliutin’s takeover of the Ministry of War (1861), looking particularly at the ignorant and obtuse N. O. Sukhozanet, the former war minister. Brooks finds that Sukhozanet’s ineffectiveness was in part a deliberate policy of Tsar Alexander II, who wanted cost cutting and efficiency but not radical change and instructed Sukhozanet accordingly. Available online by subscription.
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  121. Bushnell, John S. “Miliutin and the Balkan War: Military Reform vs. Military Performance.” In Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881. Edited by Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larisa Zakharova, 139–160. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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  123. Explores the successes and failures of Dmitrii Miliutin’s military reforms through the lens of Russian performance in the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War. Notes the obstacles to effective reform created by tsarist interference, nepotism, and incompetence.
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  125. Kagan, Frederick W. The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
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  127. Contrary to the standard picture of Nicholas I as a hidebound reactionary, Kagan’s book demonstrates substantial reforms, at least with the Russian military. The reforms of Nicholas I rationalized and centralized the administration of the Russian army in the War Ministry but could not solve the problem of peasant soldiers imposed by serfdom.
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  129. Kipp, Jacob W. “The Russian Navy and the Problem of Technological Transfer: Technological Backwardness and Military-Industrial Development, 1853–1876.” In Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881. Edited by Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, 115–138. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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  131. Emphasizes the technical problems revealed by the Crimean War and the tsarist regime’s efforts to create the industrial infrastructure required to sustain a modern navy, particularly through the cultivation of private shipyards.
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  133. Miller, Forrestt A. Dmitrii Miliutin and the Reform Era in Russia. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
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  135. An early effort at understanding the military side of the Great Reforms, based on published primary sources and contemporary journal literature. Quite good on narrowly technical aspects of the reform, particularly military education, but less acute on putting the military reforms into the broader context of the politics of Alexander’s reign.
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  137. Roberts, Ian W. Nicholas I and the Russian Intervention in Hungary. Studies on Russia and East Europe. London: Macmillan, 1991.
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  139. More a diplomatic than a military history, this straightforward traditional narrative is nonetheless the best recent work on Russia’s two-month campaign to restore the Habsburg Empire by intervening against Hungarian forces in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. There is substantial room for a newer account employing Russian archival sources.
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  141. The Late Imperial Army
  142.  
  143. The best overview of the period leading up to World War I is Menning 1992, which also includes the best description (although only brief) of the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War. Most literature on the period is written with a view to explaining the Russian military’s poor performance in World War I and its collapse in 1917. The question is whether Russian military failures are best attributed to the baleful influence of tsarist autocracy or to failings within the military itself. Some, such as Gatrell 1994, focus on the particularly feckless Nicholas II or on the obsolete and ineffective tsarist system more broadly. Fuller 1985 pays particular attention to tensions between the tsarist regime and its military. Bushnell 1981 sees deeper problems of anti-intellectualism and unprofessionalism imbedded within the tsarist officer corps. Because of relatively accessible evidence on doctrinal and intellectual questions, and because of the clear links between those subjects and Russian society more broadly, the intellectual history of the officer corps is particularly well covered in Rich 1998, Marshall 2006, and Steinberg 2010.
  144.  
  145. Bushnell, John. “The Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881–1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency.” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 753–780.
  146. DOI: 10.2307/1860133Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. Portrays the tsarist officer corps as unprofessional, irresponsible, and inefficient, presaging its dismal performance in 1914.
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  149. Fuller, William C. Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
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  151. In addition to perennial budgetary fights, traces the tensions between increasingly professional officers who saw their task as defense of Russia against external threats and tsarist bureaucrats who continued to see a central purpose of the army in policing the Russian empire. Emphasizes the difficulty of establishing military autonomy in a system in which the tsar saw no justification for an exclusively military sphere in policy.
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  153. Gatrell, Peter. Government, Industry, and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  154. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511562877Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  155. Emphasizes Russia’s rapid economic modernization in the years before World War I, coupled with incompetent political leadership that failed to set rational priorities or effectively tap the resources of Russian private industry.
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  157. Marshall, Alex. The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917. London: Routledge, 2006.
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  159. Contrary to the picture of Russia blundering into confrontation with Japan, this book uses particular military intellectuals who studied Asia to argue that its importance in Russian strategy and planning grew steadily over the 19th century, although the East never achieved the importance accorded to Europe.
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  161. Menning, Bruce. Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
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  163. An excellent and comprehensive survey, one that explores in detail the intellectual roots of tsarist military doctrine as well as its efforts to deal with the problems created by modern firepower, the organizational changes that followed from those intellectual beginnings, and the concrete performance of the resulting Russian army in the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War.
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  165. Rich, David Alan. The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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  167. Traces the emergence of professionalism in the Russian military through the importance of good staff work. Focuses particularly on the contributions of N. N. Obruchev to mobilization and war planning, while noting the inherent contradiction between scientific knowledge and the personal and arbitrary rule of Nicholas II.
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  169. Steinberg, John W. All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010.
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  171. Examines the place of the Imperial Nicholas Military Academy, intended as the intellectual center of the Russian army through its role in training General Staff officers. It finds remarkable intellectual ferment and desire for innovation, held back by tsarist rigidity and traditionalism.
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  173. The Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution
  174.  
  175. Only in recent years has the Russo-Japanese War begun to receive its due as a significant precursor to 20th-century war, with the inclusion of Russian perspectives. Menning 1992 (see The Late Imperial Army) has a good brief introduction, whereas Westwood 1986 and Connaughton 1988 are longer but still accessible. Steinberg, et al. 2005 brings full scholarly rigor and employment of new sources. Bushnell 1985 covers the military dimensions of the 1905 revolution.
  176.  
  177. Bushnell, John. Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905–1906. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
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  179. Stresses the continuing peasant nature of Russian soldiers. The argument emphasizes that soldiers mutinied when central authority was weakened, as after the issuance of the October Manifesto in 1905.
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  181. Connaughton, R. M. The War of the Rising Sun and the Tumbling Bear: A Military History of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5. London: Routledge, 1988.
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  183. A strictly military-operational history, without use of Russian- or Japanese-language sources, but providing a clear and well-written narrative of battlefield events.
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  185. Steinberg, John W., Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolfe, and Yokote Shinji. The Russo-Japanese War in Historical Perspective: World War Zero. Vol. 1. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005.
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  187. This is the most up-to-date work on the military side of the Russo-Japanese War (Volume 2 concentrates on the cultural and economic context of the war more than its military side), bringing together an international team of scholars to cover the war in great detail. For a brief and succinct introduction, readers should start with Menning 1992 (see The Late Imperial Army) and return to this work for more-detailed analysis of particular questions.
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  189. Westwood, J. N. Russia against Japan, 1904–05. London: Macmillan, 1986.
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  191. A brief but comprehensive survey of the war, covering both prewar and postwar diplomacy. As a result, provides an excellent introduction to military questions but not in much detail.
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  193. World War I Operations
  194.  
  195. The literature on World War I is characterized by a terrible imbalance between the war in the West and the war in the East. The Western Front is covered in voluminous detail. Among these, Stone 1975 remains the only comprehensive military history of the Eastern Front, but Churchill 1931 is still entertaining. Although there are a number of books intended for popular audiences about the Eastern Front, they are almost always written exclusively from German sources, and in many cases only from those German sources available in English. This is not the result of the inaccessibility of Russian material. In the 1920s and 1930s, when the Soviet Union saw World War I as its most instructive example of how the next war would be fought, Soviet military scholars published a host of high-quality works on strategic and operational aspects of the war on the Eastern Front. In addition, a series of massive documentary publications provided thousands of pages of archival material, material that has received remarkably little attention from scholars. Finally, the relevant archive in Moscow, the Russian State Military-Historical Archive, is now quite open to researchers. A combination of lack of knowledge of Russian among historians in the West and disinterest of the historical community in operational military history means the literature in English on the Russian side of the front lines has gone an embarrassingly short distance beyond the state of knowledge in 1975. As a result, the following sources include a number of works that are essentially about the Austrian or German sides of the front lines, such as Showalter 1991, Dowling 2008, DiNardo 2010, and Tunstall 2010. Cockfield 1998 tells the entertaining story of Russian troops, but on the Western Front.
  196.  
  197. Churchill, Winston. The Unknown War: The Eastern Front. New York: Scribner’s, 1931.
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  199. Included here primarily because of the prominence of its author, this book has the virtues of style and flair one would expect from Churchill. The source base is extremely limited, however, and confined more or less to German views.
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  201. Cockfield, Jamie H. With Snow on Their Boots: The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
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  203. An engaging account of the fascinating story of Russian troops sent to fight on the Western Front, this book provides extensive archival documentation, but from Western archives and about Russian soldiers not actually fighting in Russia.
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  205. DiNardo, Richard L. Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnów Campaign, 1915. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010.
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  207. An excellent and succinct account of a key campaign, but written from Austro-German sources.
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  209. Dowling, Timothy C. The Brusilov Offensive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
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  211. Despite its title, this book is much more about the German and Austrian responses to the 1916 Brusilov offensive than the Brusilov offensive itself. Its sources are overwhelmingly German language, and it does not use a host of published Russian documentary sources available on the offensive.
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  213. Sergeev, B. A. Nastuplenie iugo-zapadnogo fronta v mae-iiune 1916 goda. Moscow, USSR: Voenizdat, 1940.
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  215. An example of the massive document collections produced by the Soviet government in the interwar period, this volume covers the 1916 Brusilov offensive.
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  217. Showalter, Dennis E. Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1991.
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  219. A classic of its type, this book is nonetheless built on German sources and as a result cannot avoid portraying this key 1914 campaign from a German viewpoint.
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  221. Stone, Norman. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917. New York: C. Scribner, 1975.
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  223. Still the only comprehensive operational account of the war in the East. In addition to summarizing the war at the front, the author stresses the economic successes of the tsarist regime in scaling up production to support the war effort. As a result, the ultimate collapse of the tsar’s regime was not from failure to boost economic performance, but instead from a crisis of growth: inflation and transportation shortages produced by industrial success put too great a demand on Russia’s workers.
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  225. Tunstall, Graydon A. Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010.
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  227. Using exclusively German-language sources, this is a vivid recreation of an almost entirely unknown campaign in horrific conditions that eviscerated the armed forces of the Habsburg monarchy.
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  229. World War I Diplomacy, Politics, and Society
  230.  
  231. There has been much excellent, recent work on Russian society during the war, covering, among other topics, refugees, ethnic relations, popular culture, and patriotism. That flood of research has not been particularly focused on military questions. Gatrell 2005 is a short, clear survey of World War I on the Russian home front, but it gives only the briefest discussion of military questions. Lieven 1983 is the best introduction to the outbreak of war, whereas Jones 2010 is an excellent introduction to the Russian army as an institution. Neilson 1984 covers the complicated relations with Russia’s allies. Fuller 2006 deals with the vicious politics unleashed by defeat, and Stoff 2006 comprehensively reconstructs Russia’s experiment with women soldiers.
  232.  
  233. Fuller, William C. The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
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  235. Deals with the notorious World War I treason trials of Lieutenant Colonel S. N. Miasoedov and General V. A. Sukhomlinov, former minister of war. Fuller finds that both men were unscrupulous, opportunistic, and corrupt, but that their convictions for spying were based on thin and incoherent evidence. Fuller links their downfall to a general crisis of faith in authority that ultimately brought down the tsarist regime.
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  237. Gatrell, Peter. Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History. London: Longman, 2005.
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  239. Synthesizes recent research on Russian politics and society during the war but contains only a few pages on military developments.
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  241. Jones, David R. “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War.” In Military Effectiveness. Vol. I, The First World War. 2d ed. Edited by Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 2010.
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  243. Originally published in 1988. An excellent survey of the organizational makeup of the Russian army and its changes over time. In general, argues effectively that the Russian military needs to be seen as much more effective and responsive than it has generally been perceived to be.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Lieven, D. C. B. Russia and the Origins of the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983.
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  247. Although far more of a diplomatic than a military history, this is the best short introduction to the issues facing Russia on the eve of World War I. Its section on the army and navy should be read in conjunction with the chapters in Menning 1992 (see The Late Imperial Army) on the prewar years for the strategic calculations behind Russian diplomacy.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Neilson, Keith. Strategy and Supply: The Anglo-Russian Alliance, 1914–17. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984.
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  251. Based primarily on British sources, this traces the high politics and strategy of wartime arrangements for delivery of war material and financial support to sustain the Russian war effort. Emphasizes how British military weakness in the early years of the war, and Russian fragility in the later years, drove British policy to accommodate Russian needs.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Stoff, Laurie S. They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
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  255. Although this includes some discussion of the actual battlefield experiences of Russia’s women’s units in 1917, it focuses on the politics behind their creation. Russian feminists, at this stage largely from elite backgrounds and politically liberal, saw the creation of women’s units as a way of highlighting their contributions to society while at the same time bolstering the rapidly deteriorating position of the moderates in Russia’s provisional government.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. The Russian Revolution
  258.  
  259. Given the rapid transition from revolution to civil war in 1917 and early 1918, much of the work on the Civil War covers the revolution as well. Wildman 1980 and Wildman 1987, along with Wade 1984, are compelling accounts of the end of the Russian army and the first steps toward creating a new one. Holquist 2002 suggests the importance of looking at continuities across the revolutionary divide, whereas Swain 1996 shows the continuing importance of parties and ideas from before the October Revolution, even in the early months of the Civil War.
  260.  
  261. Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
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  263. Argues for continuity across the revolutionary divide of 1917. Concentrating on the Don region, Holquist’s work sees clear parallels between World War I and the Soviet government afterward in terms of government intervention into society.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Swain, Geoffrey. The Origins of the Russian Civil War. London: Longman, 1996.
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  267. Contrary to much work on the Civil War that takes for granted the emergence of contending Red and White camps, this looks in detail at the period between the October Revolution and the outbreak of full-scale hostilities. In particular, it devotes a great deal of attention to the hopes and efforts of non-Bolshevik socialists to engineer a cross-party coalition and avoid full-scale civil war.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Wade, Rex. Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984.
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  271. Looks at the armed formations that put the Bolsheviks into power in 1917 and then fought the early months of the Civil War. Stresses the importance of popular radicalism in driving workers’ turn to arming and organizing themselves. Although the Bolsheviks were able to use and tap these groups, they had not created them.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Wildman, Allan K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
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  275. Traces the partial modernization of the imperial army, then the disintegration of traditional hierarchies within the army in the wake of the February Revolution. Emphasizes the importance of soldiers’ movements from below and the emergence of soldiers’ committees as an alternative source of authority over the deliberate actions of revolutionary parties.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Wildman, Allan K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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  279. Continues the story of the disintegration of the old army through the creation of the Soviet regime. Emphasizes the autonomy and increasing radicalization of soldiers’ views, which were not created by political parties but instead were forced on political parties to adapt to popular demands. Soldiers were not particularly supportive of the Bolsheviks, but instead they wanted peace and a broad left-wing government.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. The Civil War
  282.  
  283. Both Mawdsley 1987 and Lincoln 1989 are excellent surveys of the Civil War, but we remain in much the same situation for the military history of the Russian Civil War as we do for World War I. That is, extensive Russian archival holdings and published documents are readily available, but operational military histories in English have not taken advantage of them. Kenez 1971, Kenez 1977, and Figes 1989 are good regional studies of the Civil War, with interests more political than military. Figes 1990 explores the complications of building armies from unwilling peasants. Davies 2003 remains the best available account of the Russo-Polish War, and Trotsky 1979 is a valuable collection of primary sources.
  284.  
  285. Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20. London: Pimlico, 2003.
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  287. Originally published in 1972. Although the author’s sympathies clearly lie with Poland, this is still a generally evenhanded account of a war that was central to the territorial settlement of eastern Europe after World War I, and that also set the parameters for Soviet and Polish foreign and defense policy for the decade following the war.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Figes, Orlando. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921). Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
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  291. Focuses on the experience of the peasantry, which enjoyed a brief interim of self-rule at the level of the village community. This was crushed by the Bolsheviks, who had a very different set of priorities and were perceived by the peasants as outsiders and interlopers.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Figes, Orlando. “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920.” Past and Present 129 (1990): 168–211.
  294. DOI: 10.1093/past/129.1.168Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. A social history of the rank-and-file of the Red Army, covering the problems of mobilizing millions of unwilling peasants into the Red Army.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1918: The First Year of the Volunteer Army. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
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  299. Highlights many of the problems of the White movement through a study of the Volunteer Army in southern Russia: its lack of unified leadership, resources, and popular backing, combined with lack of experience or interest in the politics of managing a war.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920: The Defeat of the Whites. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
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  303. Emphasizes the Whites’ political inability in southern Russia to organize effective government and its resulting lack of resources to defeat the Reds militarily. Also notes the division between the White leadership, which thought in all-Russian terms, and the more locally focused Cossacks.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Lincoln, W. Bruce. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War. New York: Touchstone, 1989.
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  307. A highly readable and entertaining narrative of the Russian Civil War, and a good starting point for more in-depth reading.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
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  311. A straightforward, clear, and comprehensive survey of the Russian Civil War.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Trotsky, Leon. How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky. Translated and annotated by Brian Pearce. 5 vols. London: New Park, 1979.
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  315. Although a primary rather than a secondary source, this collection has the merit of gathering military and political materials from the head of the Red Army in one easily accessible collection. Trotsky’s gifts as a literary stylist make these items much more reader friendly than equivalent collections of Lenin’s works.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Politics of the Red Army
  318.  
  319. Erickson 2001 is an encyclopedic survey of the political battles within the Red Army. Even during the Civil War, the Communists and the Red Army were divided on a number of controversial political questions relating to the use of former tsarist officers and the proper place of political officers in military formations. This extended to broader questions of the role of the military in a socialist state. The early expressions of this are evident in Trotsky 1979 (see The Civil War) as well as Trotsky 1969, and Benvenuti 1988 traces the early debates. Von Hagen 1990 shows just how central the military veterans were to building the new Soviet state. Fedotoff White 1944 does a remarkable job with open sources to show the social tensions with the Red Army, a story continued with better source materials in Reese 1996. Main 1995 shows how those disputes continued through the 1920s, and Main 1997 explores the still poorly studied and poorly understood purges of the Soviet military at the end of the 1930s.
  320.  
  321. Benvenuti, Francesco. The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
  322. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511562853Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. Based on published primary sources, explores the political fights within the Red Army during the Civil War and immediately afterward over the related issues of the use of former tsarist officers (the military specialists) and the proper place and role of political officers.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Erickson, John. The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918–1941. 3d ed. Cass Series on Soviet (Russian) Military Institutions. London: Frank Cass, 2001.
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  327. Originally published in 1962, this encyclopedic work takes the high politics of the Red Army as far as it is possible to go in the absence of archival sources. Erickson is remarkably careful and judicious in his use of evidence, so his judgments and conclusions hold up remarkably well decades after first written.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Fedotoff White, Dmitrii. The Growth of the Red Army. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944.
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  331. Like Erickson 2001, this is a remarkable work of scholarship produced solely from careful and perceptive reading of Soviet open sources. Unlike Erickson’s work, which concentrates on high politics, Fedotoff White emphasizes the social makeup of the Red Army and the effects this had on its structure and function.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Main, Steven J. “The Red Army and the Soviet Military and Political Leadership in the Late 1920s: The Case of the Inner-Army Opposition of 1928.” Europe-Asia Studies 47.2 (1995): 337–355.
  334. DOI: 10.1080/09668139508412259Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Covers the so-called Tolmachev-Belorussian Opposition, the last clearly defined opposition group within the Red Army. Resistance centered around political officers and trainees resentful of the rapid introduction of one-man command and their resulting loss of influence. Available online by subscription.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Main, Steven J. “The Arrest and ‘Testimony’ of Marshal of the Soviet Union M. N. Tukhachevsky (May–June 1937).” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 10.1 (1997): 151–195.
  338. DOI: 10.1080/13518049708430280Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Explores the documentary record surrounding Tukhachevskii’s arrest and execution, reading them not at face value but to see what light they shed on the political circumstances of the Great Purges. Available online by subscription.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Reese, Roger R. Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
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  343. Explores the Red Army’s struggle with poverty and social backwardness in efforts to convert a peasant population, indifferent or actively hostile to Communist ideology, into effective soldiers. In particular, argues that the negative effects of the Great Purges on military effectiveness are exaggerated. The impact of prewar expansion and the need for a deeper pool of officers, Reese claims, had more to do with the Red Army’s poor performance in the early years of World War II than the purges did.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Trotsky, Leon. Military Writings. New York: Merit, 1969.
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  347. The best introduction to the controversies about the structure of the Red Army and its political role is reading Trotsky’s works themselves on the question, supplemented by Benvenuti 1988 and von Hagen 1990.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. von Hagen, Mark. Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930. Studies of the Harriman Institute; Studies in Soviet History and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
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  351. The first of a new wave of studies of the interwar Soviet military as a key element in the creation and maintenance of Stalinism. Finished just before the opening of the Soviet archives, it uses published sources and contemporary newspapers and periodicals to show the Soviet regime’s reliance on the army and on military veterans as bulwarks of the system.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Rearmament, Military Doctrine, and the German Collaboration
  354.  
  355. In the early 1920s, both Germany and the Soviet Union were international pariahs, which led to a productive economic and military collaboration. The outlines of the story were made clear in Gatzke 1958, whereas excerpts from numerous Soviet documents appear in Dyakov and Bushuyeva 1995 and Philbin 1994, which explore the naval side. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave the Soviet-German relationship much greater significance in retrospect than it enjoyed at the time. Whereas Habeck 2003 sees some importance in the development of a military doctrine, Harrison 2001 sees a long domestic tradition in Russia, then the Soviet Union. Hofmann 1996, Samuelson 2000, and Stone 2000 do not see great German influence on Soviet rearmament, although purchases of foreign technology played a vital role in the creation of the Soviet military industry.
  356.  
  357. Dyakov, Yuri, and Tatyana Bushuyeva. The Red Army and the Wehrmacht: How the Soviets Militarized Germany, 1922–33, and Paved the Way for Fascism. Russian Studies Series. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995.
  358. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Although this is a document collection, not a work of secondary literature, it is worth including here because of the extensive collection of sources (albeit selectively chosen and edited) covering multiple aspects of the Soviet-German collaboration.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Gatzke, Hans. “Russo-German Military Collaboration during the Weimar Republic.” The American Historical Review 63.3 (1958): 565–597.
  362. DOI: 10.2307/1848881Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. Although Gatzke’s findings have been supplemented and expanded in a variety of works, his outline of the major elements of the German-Soviet collaboration in training and development of technology is still quite good and is an excellent example of detective work, largely from German sources. Available online by subscription.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Habeck, Mary. Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union 1919–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
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  367. Claims that German and Soviet doctrine for mechanized warfare depended on J. F. C. Fuller’s and British approaches. More successful in showing vigorous and vibrant doctrinal developments, not in fact dependent on foreign models.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Harrison, Richard. The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940. Modern War Studies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
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  371. Covers the imperial antecedents of Soviet military thinking and is particularly good on lesser-known Soviet military theorists and their approaches to modern mechanized operations. The implication is that Mikhail Tukhachevskii, generally seen as the key Soviet theorist of mechanized warfare, in fact owes his ideas to other, more obscure thinkers such as G. S. Isserson and V. K. Triandafillov.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Hofmann, George F. “Doctrine, Tank Technology, and Execution: I. A. Khalepskii and the Red Army’s Fulfillment of Deep Offensive Operations.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9.2 (1996): 283–334.
  374. DOI: 10.1080/13518049608430236Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. Good, brief survey of Innokent Khalepskii’s role in the development of Soviet tank technology, particularly the purchase of tank designs from abroad. Available online by subscription.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Philbin, Tobias R. The Lure of Neptune: German-Soviet Naval Collaboration and Ambitions, 1919–1941. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
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  379. Extends the literature of the German collaboration to naval affairs. In contrast to the German army and air force, where cooperation with the Soviets essentially ended in 1933 with Hitler’s rise to power, Philbin finds that the naval relationship was quite late to flower and extended in some forms to the eve of World War II.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Samuelson, Lennart. Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
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  383. Unlike Stone 2000, emphasizes planning in its coverage of the Soviet military industry, including both long-term plans for the development of defense production: year-by-year procurement plans and wartime mobilization plans.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Stone, David R. Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
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  387. Unlike Samuelson 2000, emphasizes the political dynamics of defense spending, including the Bolshevik right wing’s role in restricting military spending until Stalin’s political victory over them, as well as the centrality of Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria in unleashing a crash program of military production.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. The Road to Barbarossa
  390.  
  391. The Soviet Union’s role in the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and the Soviet policy in the run-up to the German invasion of June 1941, remain extremely controversial. Access to source materials is spotty, leaving many questions unanswered and for the moment unanswerable. Suvorov 1990 argued that well before 1939, Stalin’s intention was to see the European powers exhaust one another in order to ease his path to the total domination of Europe and that Stalin was preparing an attack on Nazi Germany in 1941, only to find himself preempted by Hitler. Suvorov, a defector from Soviet military intelligence, has argued this case in a series of books. Although many historians have serious questions about Suvorov’s methods and use of evidence, Suvorov’s basic conclusions have been shared by more-conventional historians, notably Raack (Raack 1995). In contrast, Jukes 1991 and Ragsdale 2004 find Soviet readiness to oppose Hitler in cooperation with Western allies in 1938. The work of others, particularly Glantz 1998 and Gorodetsky 1999, has argued that the Red Army was in no condition for offensive warfare in 1941 and that Stalin’s own weakness and self-deception led him to ignore Hitler’s preparations for war. Roberts 1995 and Stone 2005 find ample explanation for poor Soviet preparedness without presupposing Stalin’s intent to attack Germany in 1941. Only better access to Soviet military and diplomatic sources for the 1939–1941 period will allow final settlement of the question.
  392.  
  393. Glantz, David. Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. Modern War Studies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.
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  395. On the one hand, this work is a straightforward evaluation of the Red Army’s preparedness for war in terms of equipment, manpower, doctrine, and training. It finds that the Red Army was unready for modern, mechanized warfare as a result of the purges and rapid expansion. In addition, the book uses the Red Army’s lack of preparation to argue that Suvorov’s thesis is wrong. The problem is that the Red Army’s objectively low readiness for war is quite different from Stalin’s perception of the Red Army’s readiness. Indeed, in May 1941 Georgii Zhukov, well informed of the true state of the Red Army, believed that attacking Nazi Germany was preferable to waiting to be attacked.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Gorodetsky, Gabriel. Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
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  399. More diplomatic than military, this book takes direct aim at the Suvorov school by arguing that Stalin was calculating and opportunistic rather than acting in terms of a master plan of fomenting European war. Based on greater access to Soviet documents than most Western scholars have managed, argues that Stalin deluded himself into ignoring signs of Hitler’s imminent attack in June 1941.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Jukes, Geoffrey. “The Red Army and the Munich Crisis.” Journal of Contemporary History 26.2 (1991): 195–214.
  402. DOI: 10.1177/002200949102600201Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403. Based on memoirs and other available primary sources, finds that the Soviets mobilized to fight in the 1938 Munich crisis on behalf of Czechoslovakia. Available online by subscription.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Raack, R. C. Stalin’s Drive to the West 1938–1945: The Origins of the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
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  407. Raack argues in general terms a thesis quite similar to that of Victor Suvorov: that Stalin’s intent in the period from 1938 to 1941 was to foment European war in order to take advantage of that opportunity to Sovietize Europe. Although employing newly available evidence from East European archives, the author has little direct evidence for Soviet intentions and therefore has to rely on inference and supposition for conclusions about Stalin’s plans.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Ragsdale, Hugh. The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  410. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511912Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. Finds that the Soviet military engaged in massive mobilization in response to the Munich crisis, suggesting an intent to intervene in support of Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany, possibly by force through Polish territory. Sadly, vagaries of archival access limited the author’s ability to document his findings.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Roberts, Cynthia A. “Planning for War: The Red Army and the Catastrophe of 1941.” Europe-Asia Studies 47.8 (1995): 1293–1326.
  414. DOI: 10.1080/09668139508412322Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. Seeks to explain the Red Army’s forward deployment and lack of preparation for defensive warfare by a systematic failure of doctrine dating back to the 1920s. The Soviet assumption had been that foreign attack would be held at the borders and followed by an immediate Soviet counterattack, leaving the Red Army intellectually unprepared for what happened in 1941. Available online by subscription.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Stone, David R. “Soviet Intelligence on Barbarossa: The Limits of Intelligence History.” In Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society. Edited by Peter Jackson and Jennifer Siegel, 157–172. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
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  419. Examines the nature and extent of the documentary evidence on Soviet intelligence prior to Barbarossa. Finds that despite its fragmentary nature, this intelligence produces a confusing picture that Stalin could deceive himself into interpreting as evidence that Germany was not going to attack.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Suvorov, Viktor. Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Translated by Thomas B. Beattie. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990.
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  423. The first of several books by Suvorov on Soviet aggression, beginning in the interwar period, extending through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and culminating in what Suvorov sees as Stalin’s plans to attack Germany in the summer of 1941 to Sovietize all Europe. As it happens, Hitler attacked first, caught Stalin wrong footed, and nearly won World War II. To sustain this thesis, Suvorov is forced to use evidence selectively and tendentiously.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. World War II
  426.  
  427. Although the Eastern Front lacks the extensive literature that covers World War II in western Europe or the Pacific, much high-quality work is still available. Barber and Harrison 1991 and Stone 2010 cover Soviet society and the home front, whereas Overy 1997 is a good comprehensive introduction. Roberts 2006 takes a long view but argues the unsustainable position that Stalin’s military leadership was peace loving and wise.
  428.  
  429. Barber, John, and Mark Harrison. The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London: Longman, 1991.
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  431. An excellent survey of the available literature on Soviet society at war, particularly on economic questions. Notes the economic crisis of 1942, produced by the overmobilization of the Soviet economy—that is, its excessive direction of resources to the army and to military production, thereby starving supporting sectors of the economy until a sustainable balance was achieved in late 1942.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.
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  435. A vivid and impressionistic account of life and death during the war, as experienced by rank-and-file Soviet soldiers.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Overy, Richard. Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, 1997.
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  439. Although the author is a specialist in German history, this book is an excellent introduction to the Eastern Front. For those interested in a strictly military narrative, Glantz and House 1995 (cited under Operations and Campaigns) is the better choice; this volume is preferable for those whose interests are more general.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
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  443. Evaluates Stalin’s record as a war leader and finds him to be remarkably effective. To do this, however, the author consistently attributes Soviet successes to Stalin, and Soviet failures to his subordinates, undermining the force of his conclusions.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Stone, David R., ed. The Soviet Union at War, 1941–1945. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2010.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. An edited collection on the Soviet home front at war, updating Barber and Harrison 1991 through the integration of new research produced by the archival revolution.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Military Institutions
  450.  
  451. Shukman 1993 provides a better sense of the generals who fought for the Soviet Union, much as Pennington 2001 does for the women combatants whom the Soviet Union employed in large numbers. Stephan 2004 looks at the obscure but important subject of Soviet counterintelligence, whereas Glantz 2005 covers the institutional development of the Red Army in great detail.
  452.  
  453. Glantz, David M. Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941–1943. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.
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  455. In contrast to the author’s other works, which are meticulously detailed operational narratives, this is a massive account of the organizational history of the Red Army as it recovered from the disasters of 1941 to reestablish itself as an effective military machine.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Pennington, Reina J. Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
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  459. The Soviet Union relied more heavily on women as combat soldiers than any other combatant in World War II; this book focuses on the experience of women pilots, both personally and as combatants.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Shukman, Harold, ed. Stalin’s Generals. New York: Grove, 1993.
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  463. An excellent introduction to the less familiar commanders who won the war in the East. Georgii Zhukov is relatively well known in the West, but others such as Konstantin Rokossovsky and Aleksandr Vasilevsky receive their due here.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Stephan, Robert W. Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence against the Nazis, 1941–1945. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
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  467. The author’s status as an intelligence professional prevented him from using Russian archives for the project, forcing him to use German archival sources instead. He finds Soviet counterintelligence was centralized and effective, using radio games, well-established security networks, and effective disinformation.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Operations and Campaigns
  470.  
  471. Erickson 1975 and Erickson 1983 provide extensive coverage based on secondary sources and memoirs. Seaton 1971 reflects the state of the field, based on German sources, as of the time of writing. Glantz and House 1995 brings additional contemporary Soviet documents to bear in a one-volume operational narrative. In addition, David Glantz, working on occasion with Jonathan House, has produced a host of massive operational histories of battles and campaigns, of which Glantz 1999, Glantz and House 1999, and Glantz and House 2009 are only a sampling. Glantz’s works are intricate narratives of military maneuvers but do not include much political, economic, or social context. He has gone far beyond Erickson’s work, by including the fruits of recent Russian documentary publications as well as contemporary Soviet analyses of military operations. No Western scholars have yet (as of 2011) exploited raw Soviet archival holdings in their unprocessed form, given continuing difficulties of access to historical materials in the hands of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
  472.  
  473. Erickson, John. The Road to Stalingrad. Vol. 1, Stalin’s War with Germany. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975.
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  475. Together with Erickson 1983, this massive work covers the war through November 1942, as far as it is possible to go without the use of Russian archival sources. Erickson mined available German materials along with the skilled and exhaustive use of Soviet memoirs and secondary literature. These sources are not for the casual reader, because the operational narrative is extremely dense and the books lack the extensive and detailed maps necessary to make them easily comprehensible.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Erickson, John. The Road to Berlin. Vol. 2, Stalin’s War with Germany. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1983.
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  479. This continues Erickson 1975 from Stalingrad through the end of the war and shares the earlier volume’s strengths and weaknesses.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Glantz, David M. Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat: The Red Army’s Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
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  483. Argues controversially that the Stalingrad counteroffensive at the end of 1942 was only one of two major offensives planned for that time. The other was Operation Mars, an attack on the Rzhev salient under the command of Georgii Zhukov. Because Mars ended in disaster, it was expunged from the Soviet historical record to salvage Zhukov’s reputation. Goes beyond the norms of scholarly history in attributing thoughts and beliefs to historical actors, without clear evidence.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Glantz, David M., and Jonathan House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
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  487. The best one-volume operational survey of the Eastern Front, with a clear narrative and excellent maps. The book does not cover the Soviet home front, diplomacy, or the partisan war, but it does an excellent job on a strictly military history of the war. In particular, it does not neglect the important years from 1943 to 1945, which are often given short shrift by other treatments.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. The Battle of Kursk. Modern War Studies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
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  491. A detailed operational reconstruction of the battle, putting it into a broader context of the Soviet Summer 1943 counteroffensive.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Glantz, David M., with Jonathan M. House. To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April–August 1942. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
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  495. Part of a projected trilogy, deemphasizes the city of Stalingrad itself as a peripheral objective in the original German offensive. Also stresses the importance of German losses in the open warfare west of Stalingrad to their ultimate defeat.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Mawdsley, Evan. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005.
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  499. A clear and straightforward one-volume operational history, balanced in its coverage of the German and Soviet sides of the conflict.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Seaton, Albert. The Russo-German War, 1941–45. New York: Praeger, 1971.
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  503. Although a straightforward and readable account of the war in the East, it is still reliant mostly on German sources (with some Soviet accounts) and has been supplanted by Glantz and House 1995.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency
  506.  
  507. For decades, the Soviet partisan movement was obscured by a carefully constructed Soviet image of a mass movement, ideologically unified, which played a vital role in Soviet victory. Howell 1999 gives a basic picture of the tactical use of partisans. More-recent work has revealed a more nuanced picture. Although Grenkevich 1999 has emphasized the importance of central control over the movement, Zarubinsky 1996, Hill 2005, and Slepyan 2006 show how in the early years of the war, when Soviet victory seemed unlikely, the partisan movement was relatively small and primarily made up of party and police personnel left behind in the wake of the German invasion. Only when Soviet victory seemed likely did this change. The partisans indeed played an important role in the war, primarily in hampering German mobility during major Soviet offensives and in delivering the political message that Soviet power was not gone. Soviet counterinsurgency was even more difficult to find, but Baumann 1993 took a long view of several episodes of Russian-Soviet counterinsurgency, whereas Burds 1996 and Statiev 2010 covered the particular case of the Soviet Union’s newly acquired western territories in the wake of World War II.
  508.  
  509. Baumann, Robert. Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1993.
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  511. A comparative study in long-term historical perspective of Russian-Soviet counterinsurgency on the fringes of the state. Still the best brief survey of the basmachi resistance to Soviet rule in central Asia.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Burds, Jeffrey. “Agentura: Soviet Informants’ Networks and the Ukrainian Underground in Galicia, 1944–48.” East European Politics and Societies 11.1 (December 1996): 89–130.
  514. DOI: 10.1177/0888325497011001003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. Much broader in scope than the informant networks described in the title. Excellent, brief history of the Soviet reassertion of control in Ukraine through exploitation of intelligence. Available online by subscription.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Grenkevich, Leonid. The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944: A Critical Historiographical Analysis. London: Frank Cass, 1999.
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  519. Emphasizes the importance of centralized control over the partisan movement to Soviet successes, particularly in 1943 and 1944, in assisting the advance of the Red Army and denying the Germans effective exploitation of occupied territories.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Hill, Alexander. The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941–1944. Cass Series on the Soviet (Russian) Study of War 18. London: Frank Cass, 2005.
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  523. Contrary to the long-held Soviet picture of the partisan movement, this book argues that in the areas around Leningrad, the Soviet partisan movement was small and weak and grew only to significance only when there were clear signs that the Germans were losing the war. It also argues that German occupation policy was less draconian than often believed. The question is whether these findings for the northern regions are equally applicable to Belorussia and Ukraine.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Howell, Edgar M. The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944. Bennington, VT: Merriam, 1999.
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  527. Originally published in 1956. An old account of the partisan movement, based largely on German sources, but nonetheless remarkably good. Holds up well in light of later literature.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Slepyan, Kenneth. Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
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  531. A social history of the partisan movement, exploring the makeup and motivation of partisan bands. Finds a surprising persistence of Soviet ideas among partisans who seek to preserve and recreate Soviet norms in the resistance movement.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Statiev, Alexander. The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  534. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511730399Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. An excellent and evenhanded study of the reassertion of Soviet control in Ukraine, eastern Poland, and the Baltic region. Emphasizes the Soviets’ ideological approach to counterinsurgency, intent on finding or creating class divisions, and using those to undermine resistance.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Zarubinsky, O. A. “The ‘Red’ Partisan Movement in Ukraine during World War II: A Contemporary Assessment.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9.2 (1996): 399–416.
  538. DOI: 10.1080/13518049608430239Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Sees a similar dynamic of weak and ineffective partisans in 1941 and 1942 becoming increasingly effective in 1943 and 1944. Emphasizes, however, the movement in Ukraine as imposed by the Soviets and lacking much support from the Ukrainian population. Available online by subscription.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Civil-Military Relations
  542.  
  543. Although civil-military relations are of more interest to political scientists than to historians, long-standing debates about the place of the military in Communist societies have wide applicability outside the Soviet Union and rely heavily on historical evidence. There are three major approaches. One, based on Samuel Huntington’s ideas of separate and conflicting civil and military authorities, points to the centrality of institutions of monitoring and control and the lack of anything resembling the professional autonomy of Western militaries. Characteristic here are Kolkowicz 1967 and Reese 2005. A second school, led by Odom 1978, denies the applicability of Western notions of professionalism and argues instead that a common Marxist-Leninist ideology unites party and military elites in Communist societies. Finally, Colton 1979 sees a complex relationship of institutional rewards in the ruling party’s relationship toward the military. More recently, Taylor 2003 argues for a cultural norm of military subordination to civilian authority.
  544.  
  545. Colton, Timothy J. Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
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  547. Finds a much more complex relationship between the Communist Party and the military in the Soviet Union than that portrayed in Kolkowicz’s and Odom’s models. Colton sees a constant process of bargaining and negotiation, one in which the military receives extensive resources from the state in order to pursue its institutional aims.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Kolkowicz, Roman. The Soviet Military and the Communist Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.
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  551. Following Samuel Huntington’s model of subjective control in civil-military relations, finds a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between the Soviet military’s high command and the ruling Communist Party. Although the book concentrates on the post-Stalin period, its analysis is more general.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Odom, William. “The Party-Military Connection: A Critique.” In Civil-Military Relations in Communist Systems. Edited by Dale R. Herspring and Ivan Völgyes, 27–52. Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978.
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  555. Sees the concept of civil-military relations as misapplied to the Soviet Union, because the party and military share ideology and interests. They are best regarded as a unity, unlike the divided and hostile structures seen by Kolkowicz.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Reese, Roger R. Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. Looks at the social origins and development of the Soviet officer corps through a lens of military professionalism. Argues that Soviet officers never constituted professionals in the sense of enjoying autonomy from political interference in military matters. The question is whether this Western standard of professionalism is applicable in the same way to very different Soviet circumstances.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Taylor, Brian. Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  562. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511615719Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. Although the title suggests broad chronological coverage, the book is overwhelmingly focused on the period after 1917. Taylor seeks to explain the lack of a military coup in Russia after 1825 by a cultural norm of military subordination to civilian authority, although the origins of that norm are left somewhat obscure.
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