The Soviet Military Experience is the first general work to place the Soviet army into its true social, political and international contexts. It focuses on the Bolshevik Party's intention to create an army of a new type, whose aim was both to defend the people and propagate Marxist ideals to the rest of the world. It includes discussion of the: * origins of the Workers and Peasant's Red Army * effects of the Civil War * Bolshevik regime's use of the military as a school of socialism * effects of collectivization and rapid industrialisation of the 1920s and 1930s * Second World War and its profound repercussions * ethnic tensions within the army * effect of Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Perestroika

Written in 1985, this book cuts through the Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and later political realities. The author probes Soviet history, society, and politics to explain how the U.S.S.R. remained stable from revolution through the mid-1980s.

"Integrating military history into the broader themes of Russian history, and drawing comparisons to developments in Europe, Stone traces Russia's fascinating military history, and its long struggle to master Western military technology without Western social and political institutions. Starting with the military dimensions of the emergence of Muscovy and the disastrous reign of Ivan the Terrible, he traces Russia's emergence as a great power under Peter the Great, and her mixed record following her triumph in the Napoleonic wars. The Russian Revolution created a new Soviet Russia, but this book shows how the Soviet Union's harrowing experience in World War II owed much to Imperial Russian precedents."--BOOK JACKET.

The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon M. Schechter attends to a diverse array of things—from spoons to tanks—to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

Two weeks after the Americans, British, and Canadians invaded Western Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front, its massive attempt to clear German forces from Belarus. In one of the largest military campaigns of all time, involving 2 million Soviets and 800,000 Germans, the Red Army advanced 170 miles in two weeks and destroyed German Army Group Center. Using recently declassified Soviet documents as well as German and Soviet unit histories, Dunn recounts this landmark operation of World War II.