Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933 (Modern War Studies) - Hardcover

Stone, David R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700610375 ISBN 13: 9780700610372

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 2000

Synopsis

From 1926 to 1933, a vast transformation swept through the Soviet Union, a massive militarization of society that was as powerful and far-reaching as the Revolution itself. In Hammer and Rifle, David Stone chronicles this transformation and shows why it is so central to our understanding of Stalin's emergence and consolidation of power.

While collectivization dramatically altered rural Russia and Stalin ruthlessly secured his control over the state apparatus, a military-industrial revolution remade the USSR into an immensely powerful war machine. As Stone reveals, the militarization of the Soviet economy—marked by a rapidly expanding defense industry, increasing centralized control, and growing military influence over economic policies—was an essential element in Stalin's strong-armed revolution from above.

Spurred by the Bolsheviks' unrelenting suspicions of other nations, the Soviet state embraced rearmament and military preparedness as its guarantee for national survival. Soviet military thinkers, Stone shows, pushed for a ruthlessly centralized economy—one requiring total integration of state and society—as the necessary means for achieving victory in future wars. The result was an ever upwardly spiraling defense budget and increasing military domination of civilian society.

Stone demonstrates how this domination emerged, evolved, and entrenched itself. But he also suggests that this military-industrial revolution, theoretically designed to protect the Soviet Union's national security, instead nearly destroyed it at the beginning of World War II. The rigid and inflexible economy that resulted ultimately undermined the Soviet state itself, destroying from within much of what it had tried to defend.

Based on unprecedented use of new archival sources, Stone's study also provides a cautionary tale about civil-military relations in an increasingly dangerous world. As such, it should appeal to readers well beyond those interested in Russian and Soviet history.

About this title

About the Author

David R. Stone is assistant professor of history at Kansas State University. He has also taught in the history department at Hamilton College and in the International Security Studies Program at Yale University.

From the Back Cover

"Based on prodigious research in newly-accessible Russian archives, Stone's landmark book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the advent of the Soviet garrison state. Touching on nearly every significant issue of the period, he deepens, challenges, or modifies many existing interpretations and cuts through the fog of conjecture, theory, and half-truths that still cloaks the era between 1926 and 1933."--Bruce Menning, author of Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914

"An important contribution to the field of Soviet military, economic, and political history."--Steven Miner, author of Between Churchill and Stalin and Stalin's Holy War

Reviews

Based on extensive research in newly opened Russian archives, this careful study is the best analysis to date of the central role of militarization in the development of state, society and economy in the U.S.S.R. between the end of the "New Economic Plan" in 1926 and the conclusion of the first "Five-Year Plan" in 1933. As Stone (an assistant professor of history at Kansas State University) shows, the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin inherited from Lenin an ideologically based belief that the non-Communist world embodied an irreconcilable hatred for the Soviet system. Stalin, regarding an apocalyptic armed conflict with global capitalism as correspondingly inevitable, focused economic development on military expansion. His Soviet Union became a comprehensively militarized society, with a steady erosion of distinctions and barriers between military and civilian spheres as the country sustained a massive military buildup. Stone challenges the familiar argument that only these earlier diversions of resources enabled the defeat of Hitler's Reich. He suggests instead that the disproportionate efforts devoted to military procurement distorted the Soviet economy as a wholeAand that continuous large-scale military production left Russia in 1941 with huge stocks of obsolescent equipment whose replacement required several years even with stepped-up wartime production. Similar inflexible military-industrial policies, Stone argues, fatally undermined the Soviet system in its long-term post-1945 struggle with the West. A slack, more flexible economy would have been better qualified to cope with the actual military challenges the Soviet Union faced, but would have run against the essential nature not only of Stalinism, but of a U.S.S.R. that Stone describes as committing suicide from fear of death at capitalism's hands. History Book Club selection. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0700610375
• ISBN 13: 9780700610372
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296