10 - Military Culture, Military Efficiency, and the Red Army, 1917–1945

Summary

The story of Red Army military culture in 1917–1945 is a story of selective continuity with centuries of Russian military tradition, as well as dramatic innovation and discontinuity. The Bolshevik Party set out to create a new kind of state, a new kind of army, even a new kind of human being, the New Soviet Man. It never achieved the total transformation it envisioned, but the attempt shaped a unique military culture that blended new ideals with old traditions. For all the discontinuities in the revamped Red Army, the military culture of the Soviet era cannot be considered sui generis; continuities with the old imperial army were also in evidence. However, it was not the intention of the new Soviet state to allow such continuity. In fact, the state had intended just the reverse. Military culture in the Soviet period was dynamic. There were attempts to "change everything" with dramatic pendulum shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, in terms of organization, recruitment, hierarchies, and political oversight. Most of those efforts settled somewhere in the middle through a long process of debate and compromise. This produced a unique dialectic that distinguished Soviet military culture in 1917–1945 from any other.