LW 520/MLH 543
Russian Military History

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This course is a study of Russian military history from the eve of the reforms of Peter the Great up to the late Soviet period. The emphasis is on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It covers examples from the past 50 years of historiography on the Russian military experience including "new military history" as well as more traditional approaches to the subject matter.

Over the past 200 years, Russia has experienced numerous armed conflicts along almost all of its frontiers. These had to be prepared, planned and fought at many levels, giving us a rich menu of traditional military topics to explore in this class. In addition, the military has continued to play its traditionally strong role as a factor to be reckoned with in the country's national history. While the Russian army is not, as such, traditionally political, it has interacted in society in numerous ways both typical for modernizing European countries and unique to Russia: questions of recruitment and training and readiness of manpower, the military and the economy, technology and armament, garrisons and local communities, and the ideological role of the armed forces are only some of the possible themes which tie the military experience into the greater context of Russian history. Thus, both traditional "guns and bugles" military history as well as the larger societal context of the military and the country's wars will be a part of this class. The Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s is not a subject of this course, as APUS offers other courses on that subject. The Cold War era is covered, however, up to and including the collapse of the Soviet military.

Students write a major research paper, two campaign or battle analyses, and contribute to weekly discussions of textbook readings, scholarly articles and primary sources.

Textbooks

Glantz, David M.; House, Jonathan: When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. University of Kansas Press: 1995.
Merridale, Catherine: Ivan's War. Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
Odom, William E.: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. Yale Univ. Press, 2000.
Reese, Roger R.: The Soviet Military Experience. London/New York, 2000. (This title is availabe in APUS online library.)

Recommended Books

The literature listed here consists of some of the later writing on Russian military history. Some of the titles are former textbooks from this class.

Gatrell, Peter: Russia's First World War. A social and economic history. Pearson Longman, 2005.
Glantz, David M.: The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union. A history. Frank Cass, 1992.
Higham, Robin; Kagan, Frederick W. (Eds.): The Military History of the Soviet Union. Palgrave, 2002.
Higham, Robin; Kagan, Frederick W. (Eds.): The Military History of Tsarist Russia. Palgrave, 2002.
Kagan, Frederick W.: The Military Reforms of Nicholas I. MacMillan, 1999.
Keep, John L.: Soldiers of the Tsar. Army and society in Russia 1476-1874. Oxford University Press, 1985. This seminal work would be one of the course's core readings were it not for the prohibitive price.
Kokoshin, Andrei A.: Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917-1991. MIT Press, 1998.
Menning, Bruce W.: Bayonets before Bullets. The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914. Indiana University Press, 1992. This is a rather convetional but highly useful survey of the Russian armed forces during the period.
Reese, Roger (Ed.) The Russian Imperial Army 1796-1917. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006. This is a collection of articles published in scholarly journals between the 1950s and the 1970s. We will be reading a number of them in class. This volume represents a selection of some of the best writing on this subject in English from the Cold War period.
Russian General Staff: The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Translated and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress. University Press of Kansas, 2002. This war is not a subject of this class, but it used to be and this was the book used.
Sanborn, Joshua: Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925. Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. This important book will likely become a required textbook this coming spring.
Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David; Menning, Bruce W.: Reforming the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Scholarly Articles

We read and discuss some of these articles in class. The list is not current in that there are articles that we read that are not on this list yet.

Adelman, Jonathan R.: Lessons of the Russian & Chinese Civil Wars for the Development of Communist Armies. Military Affairs, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct, 1979), 139-143.
Arbatov, Alexei G.: Military Reform in Russia: Dilemmas, Obstacles, and Prospects. International Security, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Spring, 1998), 83-134.
Baumann, Robert F.: Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Russia: The Case of the Bashkirs. Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 3/4 (Autumn-Winter, 1987), 489-502.
Bordyugov, Gennady: War and Peace: Stalin's regime and Russian Nationalism. History Today, May, 1995 v45 n5 p27(7).
Bushnell, John: The Russian Officer Corps 1881-1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency. The American Historical Review, Vol. 86, No.4 (Oct. 1981), 753-780.
Chukrai, Grigori: A soldier's tale from Khrushchev's USSR. History Today, Nov. 1995 Vol. 45, No. 11, 48.
Cooper, Julian: The Military and Higher Education in the USSR, Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, Vol. 502, Universities and the Military (Mar., 1989), 108-119.
Erickson, John: Barbarossa. Who Attacked Whom?. History Today, July 2001, 11-17.
Glantz, David M.: The Red Army at War, 1941-1945: Sources and Interpretations, The Journal of Military History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), 595-617.
Glantz, David M.: Observing the Soviets: U.S. Army Attaches in Eastern Europe During the 1930s. The Journal of Military History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), 153-184.
Gross, Natalie: Youth and Army in the USSR in the 1980s. Soviet Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul.1990), 481-498.
Holloway, David: State, Society, and the Military under Gorbachev. International Security, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter, 1989-1990), 5-24.
Jones, Ellen: Manning the Soviet Military. International Security, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Sum 1982), 105-131.
Kaufman, Stuart J.: Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's Civil War, International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Autumn, 1996), 108-138.
Kipp, Jacob W.: Mass, Mobility and the Red Army's Road to Operational Art, 1918-1936. Foreign Military Studies Office, Ft. Leavenworth, KS, 1988.
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.: "Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families": Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda. Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), 825-847.
MacGregor, Douglas A.: Uncertain Allies? East European Forces in the Warsaw Pact. Soviet Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), 227-247.
Merridale, Catherine: The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock (Jan., 2000), 39-55.
Meyer, Stephen M.: How the Threat (and the Coup) Collapsed: The Politicization of the Soviet Military. International Security, Vol 16, No. 3 (Winter 1991-1992), 5-38.
Odom, William E.: The Soviet Approach to Nuclear Weapons: A Historical Review. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 469, Nuclear Armament and Disarmament, (Sept. 1983), 117-135.
Overmans, Rüdiger: 55 Millionen Opfer des Zweiten Weltkrieges? Zum Stand der Forschung nach mehr als 40 Jahren. Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, Vol ?, No ?, (1990), 103-121.
Pintner, Walter M.: The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725-1914. Russian Review, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), 231-259.
Raack, R.C.: Stalin's role in the coming of World War II: the international debate goes on. World Affairs, Vol. 159, No. 2 (Fall 1996), 48.
Roberts, Cynthia A.: Planning for War: The Red Army and the Catastrophe of 1941. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 47, No. 8 (December 1995), 1293-1396.
Sanborn, Josh: The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination. Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer 2000), 267-289.
Simes, Dimitri K. : The Military and Militarism in Soviet Society. International Security, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Winter 1981-1982), 123-143.
Stockdale, Melissa K: "My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness": Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia's Great War, 1914-1917. The American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 1 (February 2004), 78-116.
Uldricks, Teddy J.: The Icebreaker Controversy: Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler?, Slavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), 626-643.
Weiner, Amir: The Making of a Dominant Myth: The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities Within the Soviet Polity. Russian Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Oct. 1996), 638-660.
Wesson, Robert G.: The Military in Soviet Society.Russian Review, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr. 1971), 139-145.
Zimmerman, William; Berbaum, Michael L.: Soviet Military Manpower Policy in the Brezhnev Era: Regime Goals, Social Origins and "Working the System", Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2 (1993), 281-302.

Primary Sources from Russian Military History and Theory

Shchukin: Flight as Duty (A Russian Orthodox Sermon from the Summer of 1915).
Lenin: War and Revolution
Hatlie, Mark R.: Memories of a Strained Alliance. A survey of American and Soviet Veterans.
Trotsky: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive , contains most of what he wrote, including his early military writings
Marxism and War, a collection of writings on war by various Marxists

Russian History Links

General Resources / Primary Sources / Resources on Specific Themes

General Resources

H-Russia's list of history links
Bruce Hull, a colleague at UMUC Europe, has a collection of resources on Russian history . The focus is primarily on the Soviet period, but includes resources on pre-Soviet history.
Nicholas J. Pappas, a professor of history at Sam Houston State University, has set up a great list of links on Russian history, including lots of primary source documents from every period of Russian history, from the early middle ages up to the post-Soviet period.
The Modern History Sourcebook has numerous primary sources from pre- and postrevolutionary Russia.
Readings in Russian History by Prof. Gerhard Rempel is a great collection of primary source documents and secondary readings on Russian history from the middle ages up to the 1990s.
The History of the Soviet Union page at the School of History, UEA, College of Norwich, has links to Russian search engines, other collections of Russian history resources, as well as to primary and secondary sources. Some of the links are broken, however.
Guide to Resources on Russian History at the Library for Slavic and Eastern European History (Urbana) is a guide to resources on Russian history. It is mostly about traditional print resources, however.
See Kultura for excellent articles on current and historical issues in Russia: http://kultura-rus.de/index.html

Primary Sources

Stalinka, the University of Pittsburgh's digital collection of Stalin images.
Primary Sources on early Russian history collected by Daniel C. Waugh.
Dr. Francis King's translation site, a growing collection of primary sources on Soviet-era Russian history in English.
Documents in Russian History at Seton Hall University.
kwhdev.net, a growing list of primary sources from the medieval, early modern and imperial eras.
The Laws of Rus'
Primary Sources on early Russian history collected by Daniel C. Waugh.
Readings in Russian History by Prof. Gerhard Rempel is a great collection of primary source documents and secondary readings on Russian history from the middle ages up to the 1990s.
Nicholas J. Pappas, a professor of history at Sam Houston State University, has set up a great list of links on Russian history, including lots of primary source documents from every period of Russian history, from the early middle ages up to the post-Soviet period.
The Modern History Sourcebook has numerous primary sources from pre- and postrevolutionary Russia.
Primary sources on early Russia and Ukraine at Daniel Waugh's page at the University of Washington.
gramoty.ru is a Russian-only site which shows photographs, facsimiles and Russian translations of all Novgorod birch bark documents from the 11th to 15th centuries. It is part of the INTAS-Project "Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts".

Specific Historical Topics or Persons

Wehrmacht map of European Russia, 1943-1944, an interesting resource for the road and railway network of the country.
For the Great Patriotic War and Chechnya, see the Russian Warrior. While lacking a scholarly aura, it does have some fun resources including photos, pictures of equipment, uniforms, insignia, etc. It also has an interactive section for getting in touch with people interested in all aspects of Russian military history.
The Russo-Japanese-War Research Society has resources on that war. The page is based almost exclusively on Japanese source material, however, and has little information on the Russian side.
The Leon Trotsky Internet Archive contains photos, a biography and just about everything Trotsky ever said or wrote. His texts are well organized by period and subject so you can easily find, for example, his ideas about the Red Army. It is part of the Marxist Internet Archive.
The Marxist Internet Archive has an encyclopedia of Marxism and other resources on ideology and personalities, including the writings of many prominent authors.
http://www.soviet-awards.com/ has all you want to know about Soviet military awards.
http://rkkaww2.armchairgeneral.com/ is all about the military history of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Lots of maps, orders of battle, "raw data", images, etc.

Present-Day Russia

Johnson's Russia List is useful for information on present-day Russia. You can even subscribe to a daily e-mail update on Russia.
See Kultura for excellent articles on current and historical issues in Russia: http://kultura-rus.de/index.html

Military History Links

General Links and Military Strategy and Theory
Journals and Reference Works
World War One Sites and Collections
World War Two Sites and Collections
Russian Military History

General Links and Links on Military Strategy and Theory

Military History Links at Hillsdale College. This is a very big list of resources.
Richard Jensen has collected a list of web sources for military history.
Air War College Gateway to the Internet has a great collection of links on military theory and campaign and leader analysis.
The Ten Principles of War according to the Australian Defence Force.

Journals and Reference Works

Military History Online covers traditional military history from ancient times to the present.
The Journal of Military History is more scholarly.
The Military History Encyclopedia is self explanitory.

World War One Sites and Collections

These three sites will get you started on just about any aspect of the First World War from combat to poetry, zeppelins to women in the workforce.

http://onwar.com/ has maps, articles and lots of other information on dozens of military conflicts.
A wide variety of primary source documents, photos and other resources can be found at the World War One Document Archive. The site includes links to other World War One sites, including scholarly articles.
FirstWorldWar.com is a multi-media history of the conflict with a wide range of material.
This is a long list of links to items on the First World War.

Various Wars and Conflicts (primarily Russia and USSR)

There are countless summaries of various wars that can be found with a simple google search. The following webpages have been chosen if they provide original or documentary material.

Here is a cute little webpage about a Russo-Turkish War museum with links to Balkan and Bulgarian military history.
http://rkkaww2.armchairgeneral.com/ is all about the military history of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Lots of maps, orders of battle, "raw data", images, etc.
The webpage of the Russo-Japanese War Research Society provides some resources, but mostly from Japanese sources and perspective.
Here is a very large list of documents on U.S. policy in the Cold War from the Mount Holyoke College website.
Russia's Nuclear Warriors on PBS
This is a great resource on the current war in Iraq.

World War Two Sites and Collections

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Carrothers has a great collection of World War Two propaganda posters.

Russian Military History

Most of these sites are not terribly scholarly. They are more on the level of "hobby." There is some useful information here, however, especially on weapons, uniforms and operations.

Mark Conrad's collection of documents in English translation. Most of these are 19th century documents.
U.S. Army Military History institute list of sources on Soviet inter-war military history
battlefield.ru is a general site on early Soviet military history.
R.K.K.A. is a Russian language site on the early history of Soviet armed forces.
The Sword of the Motherland, a site dedicated to Russian military history since 1830. It is partially information, partially memorial pathos.
The Russo-Japanese War Society

LW 520/MLH 543Russian Military History