Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
How Tough Is the Red Army?
By David Holloway
The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine
by Andrew Cockburn
Random House, 323 pp., $16.95
Inside the Soviet Army
by Viktor Suvorov
Macmillan, 296 pp., $15.95
In June 1921, after the Civil War had been won and Soviet power consolidated, Mikhail Frunze, one of the leading Red commanders, urged that a military doctrine be formulated, in order to give direction to the development and training of the Red Army. Trotsky, still the commissar for war, rejected Frunze's argument, on the grounds that doctrine would degenerate into 'doctrinairism.' For him the immediate tasks facing the Red Army were more mundane and practical—'to teach how to oil rifles and grease boots'—than the abstractions of doctrine.
Review, 3304 words
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