about the conduct of war. He had played a leading role in directing Soviet foreign
policy during the decades of its isolation as a pariah state, a revolutionary bastion
of socialism surrounded by hostile capitalist powers. In internal policy, he had
carried out a revolution from above that consolidated a totalitarian state bent
upon rapid industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture. This
revolution had laid the basis for the militarization of the Soviet economy and
maximized the capacity of the state to mobilize the society. He had done all this
by terrorizing class enemies, national minorities, and even his own party elite.
In 1936, the Red Army received the Temporary Field Regulation-36 (PU-36).
Soviet deep-operations theory, as presented inPU-36, emphasized atroikaof
surprise, deception, and secrecy to create the operational preconditions for
success.PU-36 called for a succession of combined-arms blows, led by mechan-
ized formations and supported by tactical aviation and airborne troops, to break
through the enemy’s defences through their entire depth and create conditions
for exploitation and destruction of the enemy by means of manoeuvre and
shock. 29 Meeting engagements in which the second echelon would encounter
and destroy the enemy’s reserves as they moved up to join the battle were to lead
to encirclements. 30 However, within a year of the publication ofPU-36, many of
those who had championed and promoted its concepts were dead, victims of a
sweeping purge of the Red Army’s leadership. Among them were Tukhachevsky,
the real dynamo behind the changes of the period 1931–5, as well as Svechin.
Once the terror instrument was turned loose upon the Red Army, it devastated
the greater part of the military elite, including 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army
commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division comman-
ders. This created many opportunities for the rapid advancement of junior
commanders, but it also meant that many rose too rapidly and lacked both the
experience and the education for the ranks they assumed. Moreover, the survivors
could not be sure that the same terror might not be used against them.
STRATEGY AND OPERATIONAL ART IN
THE SOVIET–FINNISH WAR, 1939–40In October and November 1939, the Soviet government put pressure on Finland
to conclude a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance that included demands
for the transfer of Finnish territory—the Karelian Isthmus, the Hango Peninsula,
and the Rybachi and Srednyi Peninsulas in the north—to the Soviet Union. The
Finns refused to negotiate their own destruction—giving up the fortified posi-
tions on the Karelian Isthmus would have left Finland effectively defenceless—
and prepared to fight. They mobilized their forces in mid-October; the war itself
began on 30 November.
Stalin and his commissar for defence, Klenemtii Voroshilov, believed that the
war would be short and decisive. In June 1939, during the crucial period when the
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 73