Marxism-Leninism on War and Army

This is the philosophy-and-sociology-of-war course taught to Soviet officers and political workers, translated into English for the armies of the socialist bloc.

The apparatus gives it away. Eight chapters, each broken into numbered sections and named sub-topics, in the shape of a syllabus rather than a book. The worked material is Soviet-internal to a degree the export volumes never are: the Field Regulations of the Armed Forces, the Law on Universal Military Service, the duties of a commander, and the mechanics of one-man command traced from dual command in 1918 through its introduction in 1928 to the wartime return of commissars and their removal in October 1942. Chapter Five surveys the formation of the armies of Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the GDR, noting with an administrator's eye how party leadership is organised differently in each, and names the Warsaw Pact exercises by codename.

The best thing in it, and among the better things in the whole Soviet military literature, is the long treatment of Clausewitz. It begins where Lenin began, with his notebook on On War, and quotes him with the marginalia intact - including the proposition Lenin wrote out, underlined and marked "correct!" about the transformation of war after 1789. The book knows the difference between using Clausewitz and agreeing with him.

Its named opponents are specific and current: Herman Kahn, Morton Halperin, Hans Speier, Senator Fulbright, Claude Delmas, and the West German military press. For once there is no lag - the text cites the Twenty-Fourth Congress and a 1971 Washington arms-control publication, and its chronology of wars runs to September 1969.

Translated by Donald Danemanis. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.