Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle
David Glantz is one of the most famous and prolific western Sovietologists. In his 1991 Soviet Military Operational Art, he took a big yet close look at their conduct of campaigns, from theory to practice, from the revolution to the then-present. As with everything he’s written, it’s dry history. But it’s excellent for what it is.
Special focus needs to be given to his looking at the more obscure and lesser-known periods of Soviet military history, such as the revolution and Russian Civil War itself, the interwar period, and the immediate post-WW2 one. These tend not to get as much attention as WWII itself and the 1980s hypothetical WW3s, but are just important historically and frequently very different tactically. Looking at the layout of a Russian Civil War division, so different from the formations I knew, I thought “this was like when baseball pitchers threw underhand”.
The book is still a little dated in some areas, and has a few issues. I think the most glaring one is Glantz overstating the effect of the Stalin purges. While they didn’t help the Red Army, looking at later Russian sources gives me the impression that its biggest problem was expanding too much too quickly and that the purges were just the icing on the cake. Khrushchev-era politics would give an obvious incentive to blame Stalin directly for as much as possible.
But this is a small issue and the book itself is still excellent.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 
Reading Glantz is work, but worth it.
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Tukhachevsky’s idea of the continual offensive held that in a class war (which he distinguished from a national war between countries), recruits could be mobilized by an attacking army as it advanced, because classes sympathetic to the revolution would willingly join the revolutionary army as it liberated them. One more aspect of the deep battle. So, I designed a wargame (1920 Soviet march on Berlin after winning the Battle of Warsaw) in which this idea worked. Fun little variation.
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