In the first half of the twentieth century, both czarist Russia and
its successor, the Soviet Union, were confronted with the problem
of conducting military operations involving mass armies along the
broad fronts, a characteristic of modern war. Despite the
ideological and technological differences between the two regimes,
both strove toward a theory which became known as operational
art-that level of warfare that links strategic goals to actual
combat engagements.
From the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, through World War I,
the civil war, and to the eve of World War II, modern operational
art grew from theoretical speculations by a small group of officers
to become a critical component of the Soviet art of war. In this
first comprehensive treatment of the subject, Richard Harrison
shows how this theory emerged and developed to become--despite
radically different political settings and levels of
technology--essential to the Red Army's victory over Germany in
World War II.
Tracking both continuity and divergence between the imperial and
Red armies, Harrison analyzes, on the basis of theoretical writings
and battlefield performance, the development of such operationally
significant phenomena as the "front" (group of armies), consecutive
operations, and the deep operation, which relied upon aircraft and
mechanized formations to penetrate the kind of intractable defense
systems that characterized so much of World War I.
Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including memoirs,
theoretical works, and materials from the Russian military archives
(many presented here for the first time), Harrison traces the
debates within the Russian and Soviet armies that engaged such
theorists as Neznamov, Svechin, Triandafillov, and Isserson. The
end result is an exemplary military intellectual history that helps
illuminate a critical element in the "Russian way of war."
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