Whereas Stalin by his forced industrialization of the Soviet Union had provided
the resources with which to wage total war, the detailed design came from Svechin
(albeit that he ended up being shot). Svechin provided the political-strategic
concept of war, formulated the system of command and control, and recom-
mended the strategy finally adopted out of necessity. Strategy would guide opera-
tional art. The brush strokes that Soviet commanders applied were the gift of
Tukhachevsky: deep operations of multiple fronts deeply echeloned with tank
armies providing the means for shock and deep manoeuvre. If Western operational
art was like the work of individual great masters, Soviet operational art was more
like that of the studio art of Peter Paul Rubens—prolific but under the control of
one master. In major operations, Stalin and the Stavka provided immediate
direction; in secondary operations, they only controlled the most critical details,
and in some other operations they provided models but left the local commanders
to execute the work after providing the instruments. 88 This helped to ensure that
the Red Army would be a learning organization and incorporate that learning in
subsequent operations. The strategic operational creations that emerged out of
‘the Great Patriotic War’ became the most important source of legitimacy for the
regime. They enabled it to survive in an ossifying form until it finally collapsed
under the weight of its own all-consuming military preparations for the war that
did not come. The regime refused until Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika to
ever acknowledge in detail the costs that victory in the Great Patriotic War had
imposed on Soviet society. In continuing to prepare for total war in both its
conventional and nuclear manifestations and in the context of strategic isolation,
when the regime faced not only the United States and its allies, but also a hostile
People’s Republic of China, the USSR clung to an operational art that did not fit
the conflicts which it faced, especially in Afghanistan, and finally found its forces in
Eastern Europe reduced to an unwanted army of occupation. The Russian armed
forces have been made to give up any hope of conventional parity, and since 1999
have conducted military exercises involving explicit nuclear first use to counter-
acknowledge operational superiorities of potential adversaries employing preci-
sion-strike systems in a form of non-contact war on the model of NATO’s air
campaign against Yugoslavia. The poor performance of the Russian army in
Yeltsin’s Chechen War did lead to reforms, but as was demonstrated in the Russian
intervention against Georgia over the independence of South Ossetia, the Russian
army still relies on the instrument of mass industrial war and has not achieved the
‘informatization’ of its own armed forces.
NOTES- Viktor Khudoleev, ‘Ofitser, myslitel’, patriot’,Krasnaia zvezda, 29 August 2008, 1. On
Svechin’s writing on these conflicts, see A. A. Svechin,Voina v gorakh: Takticheskoe
issledovanie po opytu russko-iaponskoi voiny, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. A.
Berezovskogo, 1907); A. A. Svechin,V vostochnom otriade: Ot Liaoiana k Tiuenchenu i
obratno—Marshi, vstrechi, boi nabliudeniia(Warsaw, 1908); A. A. Svechin and Iu.
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 91