Germans from Poland began in January 1945 and carried the front from the
Vistula to the Oder and the approach to Berlin. In the south, the Red Army seized
Budapest and Vienna and was advancing towards Prague. The final operation of
the Eastern Front was the capture of Berlin during which Stalin had Konev and
Zhukov racing against each other to secure the German capital before the western
Allies might arrive. Eisenhower, judging Berlin as a political and not a military
objective, never approved any race. In the end, Soviet operational art with
considerable costs in men and materials put Soviet power in control of the
ancient capitals of Central and Eastern Europe and thereby set the stage for
both the Iron Curtain and the East–West military confrontation along the
inner-German border. The last execution of Soviet operational art came with
the surprise entry of the USSR into the war against Japan and took the form of a
lightning operation ‘to break the spine of Japan’, in the words of Stalin, that is, the
Kwantung Army, in Manchuria as part of a negotiated intervention by the United
States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. That event took place in the context of
Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, and the twin blows of 6
and 9 August brought to an end that war and set the stage for post-war tensions in
the Far East. The emergence of nuclear weapons had a profound impact on Soviet
operational art in the post-war period—during the US nuclear monopoly and
after the USSR acquired atomic and then nuclear weapons.
OPERATIONAL ART FROM 1945 TO 2003When contemporary Russian students of operational art seek to provide a periodi-
zation of the development of Soviet/Russian operational art, they start with the
decade before the war. It was during this period that the foundations for the concept
were laid and the tank and mechanized armies capable of putting it into practice
were built up. The next period covers the years of the Great Patriotic War and the
immediate post-war period through to 1953, when Stalin died. 72 The discussion of
operational art stresses the lessons learnt during the war and the development of a
truly mechanized force to conduct combined-arms warfare on a multi-front scale.
General-Major Kopytko, the former deputy chief of the chair of operational art
at the Academy of the General Staff, treats the entire period from 1954 to 1985 as
a single whole dominated by the appearance of nuclear weapons and ballistic
missiles. By the late 1950s, under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet
Union embarked upon the military-technical revolution in which nuclear weap-
ons and ballistic missiles were seen as the new definition of national power. Since
the Soviet Union was undergoing a demographic crisis because of a low birth rate
during the war, this revolution was supposed to provide security while the
ground, air, and naval forces were cut. The strategic concept for such a military
posture was laid out in the three editions of Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky’sMilitary
Strategybetween 1962 and 1968 and focused upon nuclear war fighting as the
dominant characteristic of modern war. 73
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 87