study of shock armies in breakthrough operations during the German and Allied
campaigns of 1918. Triandafillov studied the problem of command and control of
fronts and armies and explored the problem of logistical support for deep
operations by modern armies.
It was in this context that Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was then chief of the
RKKA Military Staff (1925–8), emerged as the chief promoter of both mechani-
zation and deep operations. During the civil war, Tukhachevsky, former Guard
officer in the Tsarist Army, escaped prisoner of war, and war hero, had cham-
pioned class politics as the means to bring the revolution from without. He even
took part in the suppression of the Kronstadt naval revolt. When that technique
failed to bring victory during the Polish campaign of 1920, of which he had been
the commander, he started seeking other means to achieve such shock. For
inspiration, he looked to the civil war. Specifically, in August–September 1919,
General K. K. Mamontov’s IV Don Cavalry Corps had attacked the Bolshevik
Southern Front. Using air reconnaissance to find a gap in the Red Army’s lines,
Mamontov moved deep into the enemy’s rear, wrecking rail lines, destroying
military stores, and creating panic across sixgubernias(districts).
At the time, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took the threat seriously enough to create
an Internal Front under M. M. Lashevich to restore order and engage Mamontov’s
forces on their return to Denikin’s lines. Assessing this successful use of cavalry, the
Revolutionary Military Council authorized the creation of the First Cavalry Army
(Konarmiia) under the command of S. M. Budennyi and tasked it with a raiding
function analogous to that of Mamontov’s corps. In this case,Konarmiiaincluded
cavalry divisions, an armoured-car battalion, mounted infantry, cart-mounted
machine guns, air reconnaissance assets, and an armoured train. From this point
on, Budennyi’sKonarmiiaserved as shock troops for the Red Army and was
assigned to various fronts to conduct deep raids into the enemy’s rear. After the
war, its operations remained the subject of a military debate.
Following Lenin’s proclamation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1923,
demobilization got under way. Senior Red Army commanders might warn of the
need to prepare the Soviet defence industry for fighting the encircling capitalist
powers. However, the reality of the NEP demanded a small standing army, foreign
procurement of technology, and modest investments in domestic production.
Not everybody accepted these ideas; in the discussions of the Five-Year Plan,
Tukhachevsky had emerged as an outspoken champion of the militarization of
the Soviet economy as a first step towards the creation of a mass mechanized
army with large-scale armoured forces and long-range aviation. His initial pro-
posals to the Central Committee of the Party were rejected by Stalin who labelled
them as ‘Red militarism’. 19 In 1928, Tukhachevsky was moved out of the Red
Army Staff to command the Leningrad Military District. There he remained until
1931, finding both a major concentration of military units and leading enterprises
of the defence industry. He was thus able to continue his own study of and
agitation for the development of ‘deep battle’ and its transformation into deep
operations leading to the annihilation of the enemy throughout the depth of his
70 The Evolution of Operational Art