the costs of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War and calling into question the
rationality of offensive war fighting based upon mass industrial war in the context of
nuclear parity and the emerging revolution in conventional capabilities. Such criti-
cism undermined the legitimacy of the Soviet armed forces by bringing into question
the ideology, the institutions, and the values of the Soviet system. The outcome was
the collapse of the Soviet military and, ultimately, the Soviet system. 82
Soviet operational art, which emerged out of the Stalinist system designed to
fight and win a total war, collapsed in the face of a qualitative shift in the nature of
future war from an industrial model to one based on information and control.
That shift posed a problem for party control that Leonid Brezhnev had been
unwilling and unable to address. As Vitaly Shlykov observed, ‘Stalin created a
unique system for the preparation of the economy to mobilize for war...’. 83 It
was a system that would finally break the Soviet Union, not in war but under the
burden of perpetual preparation for war on all fronts and by all means. 84
The command system which had worked during the Stalin industrialization, the
Great Patriotic War, and even the nuclear and space challenges was unable to meet
this new challenge. 85 Cybernetics and the inability to create an information society
posed problems that the Stalinist model in even a less repressive form could not
answer. Mass was no longer sufficient towinwars or to guide a society and economy.
With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the mobilization base for mass
industrial war disappeared in Russia. The general staff continues to study the
evolution of military art and speculate on the nature of future war. Much of that
speculation concerns the definitions of the threats to Russia and the capacity of
the national economy to adapt to the informatization of warfare. 86
CONCLUSION: REFLECTIONS ON THEORY AND PRACTICEUnder the Soviet system, the general staff and the Stavka framed the conduct of
operations, mobilized new formations, and controlled the reserves of the high
command. These reserves were the paints that operational artists would apply on
the broad canvas of the Eastern Front. Initially, they did so in defensive operations
under desperate conditions of the initial surprise attack; then during the counter-
offensives at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk; and, finally, during the great offen-
sive operations that liberated Soviet territory and carried the war into Eastern
Europe and to Berlin, Hitler’s capital.
In the difficult environment created by Stalin’s paranoia and the cult of his
genius, Shaposhnikov and his school had focused their considerable intellectual
and organizational skill on the role of the general staff in modern war. The
objective was to offer effective strategic guidance by anchoring the conduct of
operations in a specific political-strategic situation. To that end, Shaposhnikov
had even recommended Svechin’sStrategyto Stalin during the first difficult year
of the war. 87 As the Soviets recovered from the initial surprise and forged the
instruments to execute deep operations with increased sophistication and greater
means, their skill at applying operational art grew.
90 The Evolution of Operational Art