Nobody wrote this book. That is not a figure of speech: in a hundred and fifty thousand words there is no author, no editorial board, no institute of origin and no preface signed by anyone. The front matter names two people — Donald Danemanis, who translated it, and Victor Kuzyakov, who designed it — and then gives the Russian title and stops. The copyright page, with whatever printing history it carried, has not survived into the text we hold, so the usual first question of this series cannot be answered from the book itself.
The date can be. The text cites the 24th Congress of the CPSU from the Novosti edition of 1971, and the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's World Military Expenditures, 1970, published in Washington in 1971. Its appended chronology of wars and armed conflicts runs to September 1969. Its opening paragraphs are about Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This is therefore that rarity in the Progress list, a book whose text is genuinely of its date: a Russian original of about 1971, in English in 1972, with no detectable lag. Readers of the other volumes in this series, several of which turn out to be reprints of texts a decade or two older than their spines, should note the difference. Whatever else is wrong here is wrong in 1971, not inherited from 1957.
The house question — who commissioned it — has an answer in the apparatus, and the answer is not "the export market". This is a course. Eight chapters, each broken into numbered sections, each section broken into named sub-topics: "The Role of Politics in Preparing and Unleashing the War", "Objective Criterion of the Social Characteristic of Wars", "Mechanism of Action and Utilisation of the Laws of Armed Struggle". That is a syllabus, not a chapter list.
And the worked material is Soviet-internal to a degree the export volumes never are. It cites the Field Regulations of the Armed Forces of the USSR (Voyenizdat, 1962); the Law on Universal Military Service; the Programme of the CPSU on what the Soviet Union needs an army for; the duties of a commander of the Soviet Army and Navy; the mechanics of one-man command and its history from dual command in 1918 through its introduction in 1928 to the wartime reintroduction of commissars and their removal in October 1942. Chapter Seven contains a section on "Moral-Psychological Training of Troops on a Scientific Basis". Chapter Eight is about the relation of dialectical materialism to Soviet military science and Soviet military doctrine. This is the philosophy-and-sociology-of-war course taught to Soviet officers and political workers, translated.
Translated for whom, though? For the other armies. Chapter Three ends with a section titled "International Importance of the CPSU's Experience in Defending the Socialist Motherland"; Chapter Five surveys the formation of the armies of Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the GDR and notes, with an administrator's eye, that "in the Hungarian People's Army, the Party leadership is carried out not by political bodies, but by elected Party committees". It names the Warsaw Pact exercises by codename — October Storm in the GDR, Vltava in Czechoslovakia, Rodopy in Bulgaria. The book is an English-language cadre text for allied and friendly officer corps, and secondarily a polemic aimed at named Western strategists. Its enemies are specific and current: Herman Kahn, Morton Halperin, Hans Speier, General Dale O. Smith, Senator Fulbright, the French sociologist Claude Delmas, the West German W. R. Schramm in the Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau. And, running through it, "the Chinese splitters" — the Introduction announces that "A more vigorous struggle should be waged against the anti-Marxist views disseminated by the Chinese leaders on questions of war and peace." That is the commission: a doctrine manual for the socialist bloc's armies, armed against Washington, Bonn and Peking simultaneously.
A great deal, and it should be said before anything else, because the failure of this book is not a failure of intelligence.
The long treatment of Clausewitz — twenty-six mentions, concentrated in the first chapter — is the best thing in it and among the better things in the whole Progress military list. It begins where Lenin began, with Lenin's notebook on On War, and it quotes him with the marginalia intact: on the transformation of war after 1789, "Lenin wrote out, underlined and marked 'correct!'" the proposition that "these changes emerged from the new politics that emerged from the womb of the French revolution". The book knows the difference between using Clausewitz and agreeing with him. It grants the debt plainly — Clausewitz's "formula about war being a continuation of politics by violent means" was "an indubitable contribution to the development of military thought of that time" — and then states the disagreement with precision: "Clausewitz said that politics represents the interests of society as a whole, he denied its class nature", he "understood by politics only foreign policy", and he "did not extend the concept of war to the civil wars of the popular masses against the exploiter classes and their state".
That is not a caricature of Clausewitz; it is close to what the best Anglophone commentary would later say. And the polemical use of it is sharper still. The book identifies two opposite abuses of the same author. On one side, the strategists who canonise him: it quotes Schramm — "We too must develop Clausewitz's theory into an instrument of world political and philosophical controversy" — and General Dale O. Smith on massive retaliation, and Kahn, "the 'Clausewitz of the nuclear age'", who wrote that "war is a terrible thing, but so is peace". On the other, those who declare him obsolete: it quotes Fulbright saying that "there is no longer any validity in the Clausewitz doctrine of war as a carrying out of policy with other means. Nuclear weapons have rendered it totally obsolete." Against both it insists that a nuclear war would still be somebody's policy, chosen by somebody, for reasons that can be named. Whatever one thinks of the framework, the observation was correct and it was not the fashionable position in 1971 in any capital.
The chapter on the origin and class essence of the army is straight, competent historical materialism, and its central proposition is the one this introduction will end up using against the book. Armies, it argues, are not free-standing technical instruments; they are made by the societies that raise them and reproduce those societies' divisions inside themselves. "A distinctive feature of the army of an exploiter state is that it is isolated from the people and serves as an instrument for their enslavement." "In all antagonistic formations the army is created and developed by the ruling class for the purpose of strengthening the exploiter system and suppressing the masses." And, decisively: "The socio-political functions of the army determine the composition of its commanding echelon and the method of recruitment and organisation… At all times, however, the commanding posts were held exclusively by the ruling classes."
It is honest about the internal function of armies in general, quoting Lenin — "Everywhere, in all countries," Lenin wrote, "the standing army is used not so much against the external enemy as against the internal enemy." It is honest about British India and the Opium Wars and about the American campaign in the Philippines, where it notes that Tolstoy and Mark Twain protested. Its chapter on the economics of war is ordinary Leninism but well-executed, and it uses Galbraith on the American federal budget rather than inventing figures. Its section on morale, drawing on Clausewitz's "it is the moral magnitudes that permeate the whole element of war", is thoughtful about danger and cohesion in a way that military sociology in the West was arriving at independently. And one sentence in the section on commanding personnel is worth the price of the book: "Contrary to pseudo-scientific racialist theories about 'superman' the qualities of the commanding personnel depend on the social environment, historical experience, political and moral education."
Hold on to that sentence.
The book applies its own analysis to every army on earth except one. At the Soviet frontier the sociology switches off and is replaced by definition.
The armies of the socialist states, we are told, "are armies of a new type", "fully determined by the nature of the socialist system, are samples of it". Their popular character is expressed "in its social make-up and in the relations between men and officers". And then the sentence that the rest of this introduction exists to answer: "In bourgeois armies there exists a social division between the officers and the rank-and-file, while the armies of socialist states are monolithic. All officers and men are working people; they have identical interests and the relations between them are therefore founded on mutual understanding and mutual respect." (The scan reads "monolythic". Where this introduction quotes the book, obvious scanner damage — broken words, footnote markers dropped into the middle of a sentence — is repaired silently rather than marked with a sic, since the errors are the digitiser's and not the translator's.)
Set that beside the book's own rule — that the composition of an army's commanding echelon is determined by the social functions of the army, and that commanding posts are always held by the ruling class — and the exemption is visible as an exemption. Either the principle is general or it is not a principle. The book does not argue that Soviet society had no privileged stratum; it does not raise the question. It simply asserts identity of interest between officers and conscripts and moves on.
The same switch operates on the army's internal function. "The victory of socialism in the USSR put an end to the function of the Soviet Armed Forces having to do with the suppression of the resistance of exploiters in the country by military means, and the army now has the sole purpose of defending the socialist country against attacks by imperialist aggressors." And it quotes the Party Programme: "In terms of internal conditions," the Programme of the CPSU says, "the Soviet Union needs no army."
Three chapters earlier the same book had written: "Sometimes it is necessary to use arms also to suppress counter-revolutionary mutinies against the already established proletarian dictatorship, as was the case in Hungary in 1956."
Hungary is named. It is named again in the appended chronology, as "Counter-revolutionary uprising in Hungary". Czechoslovakia in August 1968 is not named anywhere in the book. It appears in the chronology only as the object of a German seizure in 1938–39, and in the text as the site of the Vltava exercises and of a people's militia. The chronology is otherwise remarkably inclusive about armed force used by socialist states: it lists the "Counter-revolutionary mutiny in Kronstadt and its suppression by the Red Army" and the "Suppression by the Red Army of anti-Soviet kulak-Socialist-Revolutionary mutiny in the Tambov Gubernia (Antonov gangs)". Its date column runs 3 October 1968, 12 October 1968, 19 November 1968 — coups in Peru, Panama and Mali — and on into 1969. Between the Israeli offensive of June 1967 and the Peruvian coup of October 1968 there is nothing. In a Moscow chronology of the world's wars, armed uprisings and military conflicts, compiled some two or three years after the event, half a million Warsaw Pact troops entering an allied country left no entry. The other absence in the same list is 17 September 1939: the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939–40 is there, under that name and without comment, and the Soviet entry into Poland is not.
The answer had been published in English within a fortnight of the tanks crossing. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International's statement of 22 August 1968, "End the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia!", printed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 6 no. 28, 2 September 1968, made the argument this book's Chapter Five is designed to forestall: "What the Soviet bureaucracy demonstrated in fact by its military intervention in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is the incompatibility of its dictatorship, power and privileges with any form of workers democracy." And, in a single line that answers the entire apparatus of counter-revolutionary mutinies and armies of a new type: "Socialism is not endangered in Czechoslovakia except by the crimes of the bureaucracy." Joseph Hansen, writing in the same issue, put the political point about the troops: the Czechoslovaks "met military force with political weapons", approaching the soldiers "as comrades who had been misinformed", and "the Kremlin may be suddenly concerned lest its 350,000 missionaries with bayonets prove unduly receptive to conversion into countermissionaries."
There is a further test of "the armies of socialist states are monolithic", and it took place on the Baltic coast while this book was being written. In December 1970 Polish workers rose in Gdańsk and Szczecin and were fired on. Gerry Foley's report in Intercontinental Press, vol. 9 no. 1, 11 January 1971, assembled the eyewitness accounts: Expressen's correspondent in Gdańsk found that "only a few soldiers used their weapons" — "When they were ordered to shoot, they shot into the air. Many of them threw down their weapons and said they could not shoot at their fellow countrymen." In Szczecin, where the tanks were "filled with young military servicemen, many with just a few months' experience", the Swedish radio reporter Anders Tunborg found slogans like "We are workers, not roughnecks" "written on house walls and tanks", and youngsters gathered in front of the tanks "shouting 'The soldiers for the people!'" A people's army had been ordered against the people, and a good part of it had refused. On the book's account this could not happen, because the interests are identical. On its own account of every other army, it is exactly what would be expected to happen, and what it means.
Silence is the book's characteristic instrument, and the largest silence is the one it cannot avoid, because it is a book about the Red Army.
The Red Army was created by Leon Trotsky. He was People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council from 1918 to 1925; he built the army, ran it through the civil war, and fought and won the internal argument about what kind of army it should be. His name does not occur in this book. Neither does Stalin's — a fact worth pausing on, since it shows the silences are not simply pro-Stalin. Stalingrad is in the book five times; Stalin is in it none. This is the Brezhnev settlement: the 20th Congress is never mentioned either, and the phrase "cult of the individual" does not appear. The 1930s have been vacated rather than rewritten.
But the argument Trotsky won cannot be vacated, because the book needs its result. Here is how it handles it:
Before the October Revolution and immediately after its triumph, the Communist Party and the Soviet Government did not intend to create a regular army, but were guided by the Marxist proposition of replacing the regular army by a socialist militia. The armed intervention of international imperialism and the vast scope assumed by the Civil War made it necessary to revise this proposition. It was Lenin's great merit that he was the first Marxist courageously to advance and to lay a theoretical foundation for the idea that the Soviet state needed a regular army.
And then, on the opposition:
The Soviet Armed Forces were created while desperate battles were waged against numerous enemies coming on from all sides. The lack of any experience in this field posed additional difficulties to the Party and was responsible for some mistakes: there were people who did not understand that the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army would be unable to fulfil its historical mission without strict military discipline and a centralised command.
At the Eighth Party Congress Lenin and his followers decisively rebuffed the "army opposition", which was against strict discipline and centralised command of the army, insisted on a continuation of the partisan tactics inherited from the past, and thus obstructed the setting up of a regular army. The views of the "army opposition" were rejected and branded wrong and harmful. The Congress adopted Lenin's proposal to set up a regular Red Army.
"There were people who did not understand." "Lenin and his followers." Every proper noun on both sides of a real and bitter argument has been removed. The Military Opposition at the Eighth Congress in March 1919 was directed against Trotsky personally and against his policy of employing ex-tsarist officers under commissar supervision, and Voroshilov — made a Marshal in 1935, and one of the two of that first five to die in bed — was among its supporters. Stalin's exact relation to it is disputed by historians and I will not settle it here; what is not disputed is where the milieu was. Trotsky named the place in The Revolution Betrayed: "The principal centre of these moods was Tzaritzyn (now Stalingrad), where Budenny, Voroshilov, and afterward Stalin, began their military work." The book cannot say any of this, so it produces an argument with no participants.
What it also cannot say is that Trotsky was making the regular-army case in public, in the language the book itself uses, a fortnight before that congress opened. On 2 March 1919, reporting to the First Congress of the Communist International on the Communist Party and the Red Army, he explained why the Red Guards had failed on contact with regular German regiments, and then set out the principle:
Now, our program calls for a "people's militia." But it is impossible even to talk of a people's militia – this demand of political democracy – in a country where the dictatorship of the proletariat is in power, for an army is always intimately bound up with the character of the reigning power. War, as old Clausewitz says, is the continuation of politics by other means. The army is the instrument of war and it must therefore correspond to politics.
Clausewitz, from Trotsky, in March 1919, doing exactly the work the book's first chapter praises Lenin for doing with him. On the specialists — the policy the Military Opposition attacked and the book records only as the anonymous "weeding out" of "alien and unworthy commanders" — Trotsky was equally direct:
But we could not bide our time until Red generals arose out of our Red ensigns, inasmuch as the enemy did not extend us such a breathing spell; and we had to turn to the old commanding personnel and find capable people among these reserves… On the one side, we have the best and the most honest elements among the old officers corps, whom we surround with sensible Communists in the capacity of Commissars; and on the other, the best elements from among the soldiers, workers and peasants in the lower commanding posts. It is in this manner that we compounded our Red commanding personnel.
That is the dual-command system the book describes at length and attributes to nobody.
It is worth adding, because this series does not exist to flatter its own tradition, that Trotsky would have been unimpressed by the book's central intellectual claim. Speaking to the Military Science Society at the Red Army's Military Academy on 8 May 1922, he attacked precisely the enterprise of deriving a military doctrine from Marxism:
But even if one grants that "military science" is a science, it is nevertheless impossible to grant that this science could be built by the method of Marxism, because historical materialism is not at all a universal method for all sciences.
To try and construct a special domain of military affairs by means of Marxist method is a very great delusion, no less a one than that expressed in trying to include military affairs among the natural sciences.
Marxism, he said in the same speech, can explain why the peasant wears bast shoes, but "one can't plait bast shoes with the aid of Marxism. Nothing will come of that." His 1921 polemic Military Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism makes the case at length: "We approached military questions with, as our starting-point, not any 'military doctrine', as a sum-total of dogmatic postulates, but a Marxist analysis of the requirements for the self-defence of the working class". A reader who wants the strongest objection to Marxism-Leninism on War and Army as a genre will find it there, written by the man who had just built the army, thirty years before the genre was invented.
Then the officer corps was destroyed. Between May 1937 and the following year the command of the Red Army was decapitated: three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union created in 1935 were shot — Tukhachevsky, Yegorov and Blyukher — along with Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Eideman, Feldman, Primakov, Putna, and thousands of others; Gamarnik, head of the army's political administration, killed himself. The numbers are genuinely contested and should be given as a range. Trotsky's own contemporaneous figure, repeated by the Fourth International's press throughout the war, was about 30,000 officers "shot, discharged and deported" — a total that mixes executions with dismissals, many of the dismissed being later reinstated, and modern estimates of those actually shot vary by an order of magnitude. What is not contested is that the top of the army was destroyed, and that it happened four years before the German invasion.
The word purge occurs twice in this book, both times about something else. 1937 appears five times: the Spanish Civil War, a comparison of industrial output, the renaming of the Chinese Red Army, per-capita military spending in capitalist countries, and a date in the chronology. There is no reference of any kind to what happened to the army's command.
And here the two silences compound in a way that is genuinely remarkable. Tukhachevsky is in the book. He appears once, in the opening section of Chapter One, as an authority:
M. N. Tukhachevsky, analysing the experience of the Civil War, noted that war "is not exhausted by military operations. The actions of the armed forces are supplemented by organised and combined pressure and blows on all the fronts of the struggle (economic, political, etc.)…"
The footnote sends the reader to volume 2 of his Selected Works, published by the Ministry of Defence house in Moscow in 1964 — that is, after his rehabilitation. The only other Soviet soldier named in the entire book is Frunze, the man who replaced Trotsky at the head of the military establishment in 1925 and died that October, cited once for the proposition that "the best commander will be the one who fulfils his task without resorting to repressive measures".
Two names, in a hundred and fifty thousand words about the army. No Zhukov, no Konev, no Rokossovsky, no Vasilevsky, no Chuikov, no Shaposhnikov, no Voroshilov, no Budyonny — no Chapayev. The word Marshal does not occur in the book at all. A long section titled "Commanding Personnel", explaining what qualities a Soviet officer must have, does not name one. Tukhachevsky is present as a footnote and absent as a man: available to be quoted, unavailable to have been shot. He analyses the experience of the civil war in a book that will not say who commanded it, and he is silent about the experience that killed him.
The consequence shows up where you would expect. The book's account of 1941 is entirely military-technical. The Germans "enjoyed a considerable numerical superiority (on the main sectors this superiority was four or five to one)", the Red Army "fought in pockets of resistance", "the absence of a continuous defence line" allowed the enemy to bypass them, and "these and other circumstances were among the main reasons for the forced retreat of the Soviet troops in the beginning of the war". Afterwards "the Soviet Command took the mistakes committed in the initial period into account" — the mistakes being nobody's, the Command being nobody in particular. A book that has just explained, correctly, that the qualities of the commanding personnel depend on the social environment and the historical experience, declines to notice the largest thing that had happened to its own commanding personnel within living memory of most of its readers.
And this was a choice, not a prohibition. Twelve years later Progress Publishers itself issued, in French, the memoirs of Marshal Vasilevsky, the wartime chief of the Soviet General Staff: La Cause de toute une vie, Moscow, 1984, from a Russian edition of 1975. Mandel, reviewing the rehabilitations of the glasnost years in International Viewpoint no. 128, 26 October 1987, noticed what was bound into it. The volume, he wrote, "includes, after p.80, a group photo entitled, 'The first marshals of the Soviet Union,' showing M. Tukhachevsky, S. Voroshilov, A. Yegorov, S. Budyenny and V. Blücher in 1935. Stalin had three of these marshals shot in 1937." (Voroshilov's initial was K., and International Viewpoint prints the marshal's own name as "Vasilevksi"; both slips are the journal's, not the scanner's.) Mandel's point in that article was that the army's dead were the most openly commemorated of Stalin's victims: unlike the civilian defendants, "the military chiefs rushed to include pictures of their comrades murdered by Stalin in the memoirs they were publishing and in history textbooks". Soviet marshals were putting the faces of the shot into their books. The philosophy course would not print the names.
One more thing has to be set down, because it is the point at which the book's philosophy becomes dangerous rather than merely evasive.
Having argued at length and rather well that nuclear war would still be a continuation of policy, the book goes further and says it would be "even more 'political'", citing Lenin's marginal note that "war seems the more 'warlike', the more political it is". It then concedes, quoting the 1969 Moscow meeting of communist parties, that a world conflict "would spell the death of hundreds of millions of people". And then:
In the new war, if it should be allowed to happen, victory will be with the countries of the world socialist system which are defending progressive, ascending tendencies in social development, have at their command all the latest kinds of weapons, and enjoy the support of the working people of all countries. The balance of forces between the two systems, the logic of history, its objective laws, prescribing that the new in social development is invincible—all this predicts such an outcome.
The historical laws will decide the outcome of a thermonuclear exchange. Nothing in the book's Clausewitz material licenses this; it is the one place where the Marxism stops being an analysis and becomes an assurance. The book is careful to add that Marxists-Leninists "decisively condemn nuclear war, consider it the heaviest crime that could be committed against humanity", and it attacks the Chinese for treating a world war as a means of accelerating the revolution. Both things are said, and they do not fit together. This was a live argument inside the Soviet establishment in exactly these years, between the political leadership's line that a nuclear war would have no victors and a military-academy tradition that could not concede defeat as a possibility. The book sits on the fault line and reproduces both sides without noticing.
Almost all of it was written before the events this book cannot describe were over.
The direct answer to the treatment of the army is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), chapter 8, "Foreign Policy and the Army", whose two central sections are titled "The Red Army and Its Doctrines" and "The Abolition of the Militia and the Restoration of Officers' Ranks". Trotsky is more honest about the compromise than the book is: "The Red Army was created from the very beginning as a necessary compromise between the two systems, with the emphasis on the regular troops." He records that the Eighth Congress the book invokes had also resolved that "We are shifting the militia to a class basis and converting it into a Soviet militia", and that by the mid-1920s "74 per cent of the army was reorganized on a militia basis" — a fact the book's flat account of the militia's inferiority cannot accommodate. Then, in September 1935, "civilized humanity, friends and enemies alike, learned with surprise that the Red Army would now be crowned with an officers' hierarchy, beginning with lieutenant and ending with marshal", and Trotsky calls the decree "a still more deadly blow to the principles of the October revolution". His objection is sociological, not sentimental: "The reform pursues a purely political aim: to give a new social weight to the officers." He quotes Tukhachevsky, then the effective head of the war department, defending the change — which is worth noticing, since it means one of this book's two Soviet military authorities was on the record on the question the book will not raise, two years before he was shot.
And the general principle Trotsky states there is the same one the Soviet textbook states and then suspends: "The army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature." In chapter 3 he puts it more sharply still — "It is not the tasks of defense which create a military and state bureaucracy, but the class structure of society carried over into the organization of defense" — and records the outcome: the army "has given birth to a privileged officers' caste, crowned with marshals". Against "the armies of socialist states are monolithic. All officers and men are working people; they have identical interests", that is the argument, made thirty-six years earlier from published Soviet decrees.
Chapter 8 also recovers the argument that followed the civil war, which this book has erased even more thoroughly than the one at the Eighth Congress. Trotsky's opponents in the early 1920s over "unified military doctrine" were, he writes, "A school of 'proletarian military doctrine' to which belonged or adhered Frunze, Tukhachevsky, Gussev, Voroshilov, and others" — a list that contains both of the two Soviet soldiers this book is willing to cite. The men it quotes as settled authority were parties to a dispute it does not tell its readers took place.
On the purge itself the tradition's contemporaneous record is substantial. Trotsky wrote about the executions six weeks after they happened, in "The Crimes of Stalin" of 27 July 1937, listing the accused one by one — Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik, Yakir, Uborevich, Eideman, Kork — and noting the absurdity: "The military representatives of France, Great Britain and Czechoslovakia had only recently paid tribute to the Ukrainian maneuvers held under the direction of General Yakir. It turns out that Yakir was preparing for the seizure of the Ukraine by Hitler." By March 1939 he was giving a figure — "He exterminated the flower of the General Staff. He shot, discharged and deported about 30,000 officers" — and on 2 September 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, he wrote the sentence the whole subsequent argument turns on: "The Red Army is decapitated. This is not phraseology but a tragic fact."
The fullest thing he wrote on it was for a long time unreadable in English, and the story of that is worth telling because it bears directly on how this book came to be written. In July–August 1937 the Bulletin of the Opposition, the Left Opposition's own journal, printed Trotsky's article "The Decapitation of the Red Army" (no. 56–57). Written for the commercial press and refused by it, it appeared only in Russian, apart from an excerpt in The Militant of 4 October 1941. The complete English translation, by George Saunders, was first published in Intercontinental Press, vol. 8 no. 9, 9 March 1970 — under the cover line "First Time in English", two years before this Progress volume appeared. Its argument was that the frame-ups were not a policy but a symptom: "It would be too superficial, however, to explain the murderous and suicidal measures of Stalin only by his lust for power, cruelty, vindictiveness, and other personal qualities. Stalin long ago lost control over his own policies. The bureaucracy as a whole lost control over its own self-defense reflexes."
The editorial headnote to that translation dates the reason for its timeliness with some precision, and the date is this book's: "At the height of de-Stalinization in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Soviet historians and military writers elaborated on the points Khrushchev had made, without carrying the analysis deeper… In the late 1960s, the official Soviet press began to run articles tending to 'rehabilitate' Stalin as a military leader." That is the turn in Soviet military writing that Marxism-Leninism on War and Army embodies. It does not rehabilitate Stalin; it does something quieter and more complete, which is to write the whole question out.
The Soviet reply had begun too, from inside the profession. In November 1969 Intercontinental Press printed a long extract from Pyotr Grigorenko's samizdat study of the 1941 collapse — Grigorenko being a former Major General who, IP records, "held high command positions during the second world war" and "taught cybernetics at the Frunze military academy until 1961, when he was fired for accusing Khrushchev of following in Stalin's footsteps" ("Stalin as Generalissimo: Why Hitler Was Able to Overrun the USSR", vol. 7 no. 37, 10 November 1969). Grigorenko's charge is against the doctrine as doctrine: the official account of 1941, he wrote, was a "shameless falsification" converted by "Stalinist toadies" into "Stalin's brilliant doctrine on active defense, which for a long time killed any creative thinking in the realm of military matters and in the study of military history". His method is exactly the one our textbook refuses: "the real causes of the defeats must be sought where certain people are reluctant to look for them, in the subjective factors, in the persons who directed the preparation of the country's defenses". IP notes that he had been arrested by the secret police in May 1969, as he was preparing to defend the Crimean Tatars — not, that is, for the military study; but it was the same man, and by the time this book went to press in Moscow he was in custody. Grigorenko's question is the one Marxism-Leninism on War and Army was written not to ask.
One further honest note about the archive. The English-language selection from Biulleten' Oppozitsii held here — only a fraction of a journal published overwhelmingly in Russian — contains nothing on the destruction of the Red Army command; the selection thins out sharply after 1936 and the June 1937 executions fall in a gap. The nil is in our translation record, not in what the Opposition said, and the IP text of 1970 is the proof of it. But a reader who goes looking in the English Bulletin will not find it there, and should be told so.
The most sustained analysis in the wartime press is John G. Wright's "Trotsky and the Red Army", in Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 8, whole no. 15, October 1941 — written four months into the German invasion, when nobody knew how it would end. The title alone is the review this book requires: it is the sentence Marxism-Leninism on War and Army is built to make unwriteable. Wright's account of the 1935 reforms is precise:
In September 1935 sweeping changes were introduced in the Red Army. The militias were greatly restricted. This weakened the direct ties between the army and the populace. The arsenals formerly in each factory were taken over by the GPU. Another terrible blow was dealt to the principles of October by the restoration of a privileged officers' caste.
And on the purge:
In the space of a single year – May 1937 to May 1938 – the Red Army was stripped almost to a man of all those commanders who had been recruited in the period of the Civil War. Purged too were those Civil War fighters who had risen from the ranks in the course of the next 15 years. The flower of the Red Army command was either shot or imprisoned as "enemies of the people" in the period of the infamous Moscow Frameups.
Wright's judgement of the men — "Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik, Yakir, Uborevich, Bluecher, Primakov… had continued, even under Stalin, to build the Red Army on the foundations laid down by Lenin and Trotsky. These men had modernized and mechanized the Red Army" — is a claim about military substance, not only about injustice, and it is the claim later Western military historiography broadly upheld. His companion piece, "The Soviet Union at War" (Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 7, whole no. 14, August 1941), made the institutional argument the Soviet textbook's account of one-man command needs and cannot bear: "By restoring all the reactionary practices of the Czarist army, from the creation of ranks to the military salute, Stalin opened an unbridgeable gulf between the officers corps and the rank-and-file."
A year later, in "Stalin Bolsters His 'New' Tradition" — printed in Fourth International, vol. 3 no. 7, July 1942, according to the article's own provenance line, though the surviving index heading misdates it to the June issue — A. Roland set out exactly the operation this 1972 textbook is still performing. Stalin, he wrote, must forget Blyukher against Dutov, Yakir in Bessarabia, Putna at Kazan, "Tukhachevsky so brilliantly retook Simbirsk. Above all let nobody even whisper the name of the creator of the Red Army and its victories, L.D. Trotsky. The tradition of these men is sealed to Stalin by their blood." Thirty years later the name was still unwhispered.
On the Soviet-Finnish war, which this book lists in its chronology as a bare title with no comment, the reply is Trotsky's "Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events", written 25 April 1940 and published in Fourth International, vol. 1 no. 2, June 1940 — and it is not a simple denunciation. Trotsky refused both the defencist and the abstentionist positions: "Stalin's assault upon Finland was not of course solely an act in defense of the USSR. The politics of the Soviet Union is guided by the Bonapartist bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is first and foremost concerned with its power, its prestige, its revenues. It defends itself much better than it defends the USSR." He drew the conclusion that the whole Fourth International tradition has kept: the failure of the Soviet regime to attract the Finnish workers meant not that the USSR should be surrendered to imperialism "but only that the USSR must be torn out of the hands of the bureaucracy".
The mature counterweight is Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986), which should be read against this volume's whole apparatus of just and unjust wars. Mandel's answer to the question the Soviet textbook settles by taxonomy is that the Second World War cannot be characterised as one war at all: it "must be grasped as a combination of five different conflicts" (ch. 3, "The Social Forces", p. 45), of which the second is "A just war of self-defence by the Soviet Union against an imperialist attempt to colonize the country and destroy the achievements of the 1917 Revolution", alongside an inter-imperialist war for world hegemony and three wars of colonial and occupied peoples. He keeps the category the book keeps — "By 'just wars' are meant wars which should have been fought, and which revolutionaries supported then as they do now" — and refuses the political conclusion the book draws from it, that a just war obliges the working class to subordinate itself to the state waging it. On 1941 Mandel is blunt where the textbook is passive: Stalin's purges and diplomacy "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR", while industrialisation "enabled the Soviet Union to survive in the end" (ch. 2, "The Immediate Causes", p. 33). And on the "planned retreat" legend he is worth quoting because Soviet accounts of this vintage lean on it: "At the end of the war crude attempts were made to present the Red Army's defeats of 1941-42 as the products of a strategy of calculated retreat, deliberately drawing the Wehrmacht into the Russian interior only to destroy it in a series of counteroffensives. There is no substance whatsoever in such claims" (ch. 5, "Strategy", p. 61).
Mandel is not exempt from correction. His own text dates the Secret Additional Protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to 27 August 1939; it was signed on the night of 23 August. This series records that where it appears, rather than working around it quietly, on the principle that a tradition which corrects Moscow's dates must correct its own.
Two bookends, finally, from either side of this volume's own decade. In 1976 Mandel, contributing to the Sakharov debate, put the question in the single sentence that states this book's problem as a question: "Why is it that the works of L.D. Trotsky, the organizer of the October insurrection, the creator of the Red Army, the man designated in Lenin's last testament as the CPSU's most capable leader, are not freely available in the USSR?" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 14 no. 34, 13 September 1976, from a piece written for the West German monthly Das Da.) And in 1988, when Pravda ran extracts from General Dmitri Volkogonov on Trotsky and Stalin, Livio Maitan judged the result still "essentially negative" — but noted the change that had made it necessary: "in the age of glasnost the arguments of the Stalin-era manuals can no longer be used" (International Viewpoint no. 148, 3 October 1988). Marxism-Leninism on War and Army is a Stalin-era manual in the strict sense Maitan meant. It does not praise Stalin. Its arguments are simply the arguments that remain available once everything Stalin's period made unsayable has been removed — and they lasted, in this form, until Pravda itself gave them up.
Read the first chapter for the Clausewitz. It is the genuine inheritance, it is handled with care, and the polemic against Kahn and Fulbright is a real argument that a serious reader can still learn from. Read the chapter on the class origin of the army and the chapter on the economics of war as competent, unoriginal, honestly executed Marxism. Read the chapters on the armies of the people's democracies as a first-hand institutional record, hostile and self-serving but detailed, of how those armies were actually built between 1944 and 1948 — the dates, the retention of "vestiges of bourgeois discipline" until 1948, the Party committees in Hungary, the codenames of the exercises. That material is not falsified; it is simply told from the top, by the side that did it.
Then read the passage about the Eighth Party Congress, and the section on commanding personnel, and the chronology, and count the names.
A book that argues, correctly, that every army is a copy of its society, and that the character of a commanding echelon is determined by the social order that produces it, has written a hundred and fifty thousand words about one particular army and named two of its commanders: the man who took over from its founder, and a man it will not say was shot. The method is sound. It was simply not permitted to point at the object in front of it. That is not a flaw in Marxism-Leninism on war and the army; it is what the phrase had come to mean.