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

221 Pages·2000·0.83 MB·English

by  Roger R. Reese

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
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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