STRATEGY AND POWER IN RUSSIA 1600-1914

The recent collapse of the Soviet Union and he resurgence of long-suppressed national cultures and conflicts have awakened new uneasiness about the future role of the massive Soviet military establishment. That uneasiness has been compounded by concerns about the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the prospect of a military breakup into separate republican armies. But while the present situation is in many ways unprecedented, the sudden reemergence of a Russian state with its own national army promises a subsequent revival of strong interest — both in Russia and the West — in the main lessons and themes of the Russian military tradition.

In a uniquely comprehensive account of the relation between military strategy and political power in Russian history, William Fuller explores this tradition and shows that there are striking continuities in the problems and constraints faced by a succession of Russian governments, from Tsarist times to the present. Indeed, since the October Revolution, Soviet military debates between "Easterners" and "Westerners," between "technologists" and "magicians," and between advocates of a defensive strategy and those who have favored the offensive have echoed similar disputes under successive Tsarist regimes. There is thus a comprehensible tradition in Russian military thought going back hundreds of years, presenting fixed alternatives to fundamental problems that are no less relevant today than in the age of Peter the Great. With Russian leaders now confronted by a politically unstable federation, a crumbling national economy, a potentially unstable European front, and the need to adopt a new defensive military doctrine, the central doubt concerns not only whether they will use the army to implement new political objectives, but which elements of the Russian military tradition they will draw on in the years ahead to he[ define and realize these goals.

Fuller's book is an interpretive study of the ways in which Russian statesmen have tried to employ force or the threat of force to secure often similar objectives. As such, it is the first attempt to show the interdependence of Russian strategy, diplomacy, tactics, operations, and logistics, and moreover the manner in which the overall strategy has adapted (or failed to adapt) to the perennial challenges of democracy, economic and political backwardness, peripheral instability, and rapid technological change. Based on extensive firsthand research in recently opened Russian military archives, Fuller's book is a major contribution to the Western understanding of the Russian "style" of war.