Russia at war 1941-1945

If any enemy inflicts war upon us, our Red Army will be the most fiercely-attacking army the world has ever known;

We shall conduct the war offensively, and carry it into enemy territory;

The activity of the Red Army will aim at the complete destruction of the enemy and the achievement of a decisive victory at a small cost in blood.

The present-day History strongly criticises this document, as well as other pieces of military doctrine current in the Red Army before 1941.

Soviet strategic theory [it says] as propounded by the Draft Field Regulations of 1939 and other documents did not prove to be entirely realistic. For one thing, they denied the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg which tended to be dismissed as a lopsided bourgeois theory. Soviet military theory was largely based on the principle of endingany attack on the Soviet Union with the complete rout of the enemy on his own

territory.

Thus, the whole emphasis of Soviet military theory was on the offensive, and the failure of both Poland and France to break the German attack was, all too easily, attributed to a) the lack of organised resistance and b) the nefarious activities of "fifth columns" in the rear in the case of France, and to the lack of national homogeneity in the case of the Polish army.

Soviet strategy (says the History) considered defence as an essential part of war, but stressed its subsidiary role in relation to offensive operations. In principle, our strategy considered a forced retreat as a possibility, but only on a limited and isolated part of the front, and as a temporary measure, connected with preparationsfor the offensive. The question of large forces having to break out of a threatened

encirclement was never seriously examined at all... (Emphasis added.) This makes, indeed, ironical reading in the light of what happened in 1941. There is another important point the History makes— namely, the "deadening" effect on Soviet military thought of the Stalin "personality cult":

This "personality cult" led to dogmatism and scholasticism, which impaired the independent initiative of military research. It was necessary to wait for the

instructions by a single man, and to look for the confirmation of theoretical

propositions, not in life and practical experience, but in ready-made formulae and quotations... All this greatly reduced the scope of any free discussions of military theory.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 439. ]

There were other shortcomings. The Red Army had had very little actual experience of war. Its only major experience dated back to the Civil War of 1918-20, and the conditions in which that war was fought had very little relevance to modern warfare. Experience was, indeed, soon to show that heroes of the Civil War like Budienny and Voroshilov

were completely out of their depth in the war conditions of 1941. True, there had, since then, been the war in Spain, in which the Russians had participated in a small way, but, as the History says,

The limited and peculiar nature of the war in Spain was wrongly interpreted. Thus, the conclusion was reached that the concept of large tank units—though we were