THE RED ARMY The Red Army - 1918 to 1945 / the Soviet Army - 1946 to the Present

Another study by the well known military specialist collects many articles by various European and American authorities which together define the modern Russian Army in terms of its history, equipment, types of campaigns, individual soldier psychology and so forth. Basically valuable and interesting, the articles are written in the scholarly tones of the specialists which will seem dry to the layman unless he has a preliminary interest in the subject. Among the contributors are Leonard Schapiro, the Russian Colonel Andolanko, Marshall Maxime Weygand, the British writer J.M. Mackintosh, Sir David Kelly, former British ambassador to Moscow, and the editor himself. The topics under discussion range widely enough to include almost every aspect of an army's life and in this case to distinguish the Red Army as a world entity- developed from the imperial traditions of Peter the Great, fashioned by the elements of the Revolution, made up of men only recently released from a background of serfdom, pervaded by the Communist ideologics and a fantastic upsurge of technical advancements. All of the recent campaigns- Polish, Finnish, German, Asian- are closely analyzed, now from the Russian, now from the Axis, now from the Allied point of view, and especially interesting (to this lay reader) are Sir David Kelly's comments on Soviet soldier psychology and the two articles on behavior in victory and occupation. A substantial addition to military history.