defences. This would be achieved by organizational innovations and be based on
the large-scale mechanization of the Red Army.
The issuance of new field regulations, the drafting of which he had played a
leading role while in the Red Army Staff, in 1929, provided Tukhachevsky with an
opportunity to recast training in the Leningrad Military District to reflect not
only the new regulations, but also his attempt to articulate his own concepts in
summer manoeuvres of the troops under his command. He also engaged the
Soviet military press to present his views to the army and party. In 1929, the Red
Army got its first mechanized regiment, and Tukhachevsky continued to agitate
for the creation of mechanized corps. 20 In 1930, the People’s Commissariat of
Defence (NARKOMO) authorized the creation of the first experimental airborne
detachment composed of three rifle companies in the Red Army. Tukhachevsky,
who had advocated such a force, used the experiment to integrate airborne
assault (vozdushnyi desant) into deep operations by experimenting with para-
chute landings and the introduction of mechanized capabilities into the detach-
ment, including the air landing of light trucks, motorcycles with sidecars, and
tankettes. 21 Aviation, armour, and airborne forces would make possible the
conduct of deep operations to achieve decisive success in the initial period of war.
While Tukhachevsky in Leningrad perfected the deep operation concept, the
political-ideological climate in the Soviet Union underwent profound changes.
Bolshevik ideology had by the 1920s embraced the technological transformation
of state, society, and economy as a defence of the revolutionary gamble of 1917.
Bolshevik e ́lan, Marxist-Leninist ideology, and mass industrial production would
create a socialist order and protect the regime from both foreign and domestic
threats to its existence. The first Five-Year Plan of 1929 called for mass domestic
production of aircraft and armour, with production targets in the next four years
of 3,500 aircraft and 5,000 tanks. Stalin’s slogan, ‘socialism in one country’, which
had been originally articulated in 1924 under the NEP, now began to take on the
form of a command economy. Military requirements, derived from threat analy-
sis, would drive subsequent central planning ventures towards high annual
productions of tanks and aircraft at the expense of investment in infrastructure.
Tukhachevsky became the central link between the emerging total war econo-
my and operational art. Championing the militarization of the Five-Year Plan, he
linked increased armaments production with the restructuring of the Red Army
to ‘new forms of operational art’. 22 His vision was of a mass mechanized army,
composed of 260 infantry and cavalry divisions, 40,000 aircraft, and 50,000
tanks. 23 He went ahead in spreading his own version of large-scale mechaniza-
tion, deep operations, and the battle of annihilation. He put forward his case in
an introduction he wrote for the Russian edition of J. F. C. Fuller’sThe Reforma-
tion of War. Rejecting Fuller’s concept of a small professional mechanized force,
he posed a hypothetical case of war between two opposing forces organized along
the lines advocated by Fuller and one reflecting his own vision:
We imagine a war of Great Britain against the USA, a war, for instance, which breaks out on
the Canadian border. Both armies are mechanized, but the English have let’s say Fuller’s
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 71