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The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917-1991 (Warfare and History) PDF

221 Pages·2000·0.83 MB·English
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THE SOVIET MILITARY EXPERIENCE ‘Roger Reese utilises an impressive range of archives, military publications and personal accounts to show how persistently peacetime deficiencies, crime, corruption, incompetence, training and leadership affected battlefield performance from the Civil War to Afghanistan’ John Erickson, University of Edinburgh ‘Roger Reese’s The Soviet Military Experience is a clear and persuasive narrative of the Red Army’s history from its founding to its demise. He has made excellent use of recent disclosures from the Soviet archives to shed new light on all the major periods in the Army’s development. Professor Reese’s keen instinct as a social historian allows him to capture from the documentary record what service was like for officers and soldiers during each period, but he also has a welcome sense of the Army as a political and military institution, and the importance of war for such an institution. Finally, Reese stresses the distinctive features of the Red Army throughout its history and compares it to the experiences of other armies; he thereby helps the reader to place the experience of the Soviet Army in the broader context of Imperial and post-Soviet military life’ Mark von Hagen, Columbia University From its revolutionary inception in 1917, to its counter-revolutionary demise in 1991, the Red Army played a crucial role in all aspects of Soviet life. The Soviet Military Experience is the first general work to place the Soviet army into its true social, political and international contexts. Focusing on the Bolshevik Party’s intention to create an ‘army of a new type’, the army’s aim was both to defend the people and propagate Marxist ideals to the rest of the world. Lenin believed that this new people’s army would be a tool for social transformation and cohesion. But The Soviet Military Experience shows that by the end of the cold war and collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russian society once again saw their army as the elitist and callous organization which its Bolshevik founders had tried so hard to avoid. This timely account of the Soviet military experience includes discussion of the: • origins of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army • effects of the Civil War • Bolshevik regime’s use of the military as a ‘school of socialism’ • effects of collectivization and rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s • Second World War and its profound repercussions • ethnic tensions within the army • effect of Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. This up-to-date account is organized chronologically and thematically within chapters, and includes a comprehensive bibliography. Roger Reese is Associate Professor of History at Texas A & M University, USA. Warfare and History General Editor Jeremy Black Professor of History, University of Exeter Published European Warfare, 1660–1815 Jeremy Black Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades John France Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 Rhoads Murphey European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1795 Armstrong Starkey Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa since 1950 Anthony Clayton The Great War, 1914–18 Spencer C. Tucker The Korean War Stanley Sandler Vietnam Spencer C. Tucker Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 Bruce Vandervort Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830 Richard Harding German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 Peter H. Wilson Air Power in the Age of Total War John Buckley Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 John K. Thornton Forthcoming titles include: War and Israeli Society since 1948 Ahron Bregman English Warfare, 1511–1641 Mark Charles Fissel THE SOVIET MILITARY EXPERIENCE A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 Roger R. Reese London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 Roger R. Reese All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Reese, Roger R. The Soviet military experience: a history of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991/Roger R. Reese. p. cm. – (Warfare and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-21719-9. – ISBN 0-415-21720-2 (pbk.) 1. Soviet Union. Sovetskaia Armiia–History. I. Title. II. Series. UA772.R434 1999 355´ .00947–dc21 99-14259 CIP ISBN 0-415-21719-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-21720-2 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-01185-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17341-4 (Glassbook Format) TO MY BELOVED CHILDREN, EMILY, ALEXANDER AND HELEN CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii List of abbreviations ix List of Russian words and phrases x Map xii Introduction 1 1 The birth of the Red Army 7 2 The Civil War, and Polish–Soviet War, 1917–21 26 3 The Red Army between the wars, 1922–39 52 4 PUR and the Army: the political side of military service 71 5 The Red Army and the Second World War, 1939–45 93 6 The cold war years, 1946–91 138 7 The war in Afghanistan and the Gorbachev era, 1979–91 163 Conclusion 184 Notes 186 Select bibliography 200 Index 203 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the help I received from Julia Blackwelder who helped arrange departmental funding and allowed me the flexibility necessary to conduct research. I thank Texas A&M University for funding a year off of teaching and providing a grant for a summer salary to research and write. My thanks go to the staff of the European section of the Library of Congress for their help in uncovering sources and securing valuable materials. I am indebted to the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC for their financial and institutional support. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge: the use of text from Notes of a Red Guard, copyright 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, used with permission of the University of Illinois Press, and Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, Yale University Press, copyright 1995; and the University Press of Kansas for its permission to reproduce extracts from Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, copyright 1996. Extracts have also been taken from The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, Volumes 1 & 2 (1979), by kind permission of Mehring Books. viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS DRA Democratic Republic of Afghanistan GKO State Council of Defense GlavPUR Main Political Administration KGB Committee for State Security KOMUCH Committee of the Constituent Assembly NCOs noncommissioned officers NKO People’s Commissariat of Defense NKVD Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs PUR Political Administration of the Red Army (also PURKKA) RKKA Raboche Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia (Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army) RKP Russian Communist Party RVS Revolutionary Military Council RVSR Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic SRs Socialist Revolutionaries URVS Ukranian Revolutionary Military Soviet VTsIK All-Union Central Executive Committee ix

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Dr. Reese does an outstanding job in finding the middleground between the political, operational, and anecdotal history of the Soviet military. An immense amount of knowledge is ably condensed into a relatively swift read and his analysis of the early years of the Red Army is especially well done. T
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