Soviet_Military_Experience.pdf

THE SOVIET MILITARY EXPERIENCE

‘Roger Reese utilises an impressive range of archives, military publications and personal accounts

to show how persistently peacetime deficiencies, crime, corruption, incompetence, training and

leadership affected battlefield performance from the Civil War to Afghanistan’

John Erickson, University of Edinburgh

‘Roger Reese’s The Soviet Military Experience is a clear and persuasive narrative of the Red

Army’s history from its founding to its demise. He has made excellent use of recent disclosures

from the Soviet archives to shed new light on all the major periods in the Army’s development.

Professor Reese’s keen instinct as a social historian allows him to capture from the documentary

record what service was like for officers and soldiers during each period, but he also has a welcome

sense of the Army as a political and military institution, and the importance of war for such an

institution. Finally, Reese stresses the distinctive features of the Red Army throughout its history

and compares it to the experiences of other armies; he thereby helps the reader to place the

experience of the Soviet Army in the broader context of Imperial and post-Soviet military life’

Mark von Hagen, Columbia University

From its revolutionary inception in 1917, to its counter-revolutionary demise in 1991, the Red

Army played a crucial role in all aspects of Soviet life. The Soviet Military Experience is the first

general work to place the Soviet army into its true social, political and international contexts.

Focusing on the Bolshevik Party’s intention to create an ‘army of a new type’, the army’s aim

was both to defend the people and propagate Marxist ideals to the rest of the world. Lenin

believed that this new people’s army would be a tool for social transformation and cohesion. But

The Soviet Military Experience shows that by the end of the cold war and collapse of the USSR in

1991, Russian society once again saw their army as the elitist and callous organization which its

Bolshevik founders had tried so hard to avoid. This timely account of the Soviet military

experience includes discussion of the:

origins of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army

effects of the Civil War

Bolshevik regime’s use of the military as a ‘school of socialism’

effects of collectivization and rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s

Second World War and its profound repercussions

ethnic tensions within the army

effect of Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika.

This up-to-date account is organized chronologically and thematically within chapters, and

includes a comprehensive bibliography.

Roger Reese is Associate Professor of History at Texas A & M University, USA.

Warfare and History

General Editor

Jeremy Black

Professor of History, University of Exeter

Published

European Warfare, 1660–1815

Jeremy Black

Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades

John France

Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700

Rhoads Murphey

European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1795

Armstrong Starkey

Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa since 1950

Anthony Clayton

The Great War, 1914–18

Spencer C. Tucker

The Korean War

Stanley Sandler

Vietnam

Spencer C. Tucker

Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914

Bruce Vandervort

Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830

Richard Harding

German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806

Peter H. Wilson

Air Power in the Age of Total War

John Buckley

Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800

John K. Thornton

Forthcoming titles include:

War and Israeli Society since 1948

Ahron Bregman

English Warfare, 1511–1641

Mark Charles Fissel

THE SOVIET

MILITARY EXPERIENCE

A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991

Roger R. Reese

London and New York

First published 2000

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Reese, Roger R.

The Soviet military experience: a history of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991/Roger R. Reese.

p. cm. – (Warfare and history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-21719-9. – ISBN 0-415-21720-2 (pbk.)

1. Soviet Union. Sovetskaia Armiia–History. I. Title. II. Series.

UA772.R434 1999

355´ .00947–dc21

99-14259

CIP

ISBN 0-415-21719-9 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-21720-2 (pbk)

ISBN 0-203-01185-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-17341-4 (Glassbook Format)

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