The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917-1991 (Warfare and History)
Roger R. Reese
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 0415217202
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Soviet Military Experience is the first general work to place the Soviet army into its true social, political and international contexts.
It focuses on the Bolshevik Party's intention to create an army of a new type, whose aim was both to defend the people and propagate Marxist ideals to the rest of the world. It includes discussion of the:
* origins of the Workers and Peasant's Red Army
* effects of the Civil War
* Bolshevik regime's use of the military as a school of socialism
* effects of collectivization and rapid industrialisation 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
Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich
Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe
Anzacs In Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise
Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
sent to work on officers’ homes – I did all the bricklaying for one of them. We spent a fortnight putting a roof on a pigsty.”16 In his entire period of training he went to the live fire range only twice, once to fire nine rounds, and the second to throw one hand grenade. This inexcusable and negligent attitude toward training cost some men their lives and kept the combat efficiency of the units low. The experience of war in Afghanistan was made worse for the soldiers by the continuing practice
single piece of factory-made medical equipment or a conventional operating room.”22 The military had only one major hospital in the DRA in Kabul; most serious cases had to be treated in the USSR. 172 WA R I N A F G H A N I S TA N A N D T H E G O R B A C H E V E R A The soldiers only got ten rubles a month and usually spent it on food to supplement their rations or substitute for army food that simply was so bad the men would not eat it. In desperation soldiers bought food directly from Afghans.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 168–75; and Mark Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: the Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 137–52. 2. Mikhail V. Frunze, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow/Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929), 211. 3. Leon Trotsky, Military Writings (New York: Merit Publisher, 1979), 106–8. 4. Sergei I. Gusev, Grazhdanskaia voina i Krasnaia Armiia: sbornik statei (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1958),
One serious obstacle the Red Army eventually failed to overcome in its quest to thoroughly train its men was the many internal and external distractions from military training. Internal distractions can be understood as fatigue details and administrative tasks assigned by commanders or commissars that took soldiers away from scheduled military training. External distractions consisted of the re-assignment of entire units from military training to non-military tasks in support of state objectives,
hindering delivery of supplies was a shortage of horses from death by air attacks on transport units.58 To make up for its poor planning the Red Army often resorted to exploiting Soviet citizens every bit as ruthlessly as the Germans would. In Belorussia, in the first weeks of war, military authorities requisitioned 3,300 automobiles, 630 tractors, 35,900 head of cattle and swine, over 10,300 tons of cereal grains and more than 4,000 tons of food stuffs.59 When supplies, and especially food,