rations and equipment as it was to enlist the population as soldiers. Military-economic planning took root in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, after World War I. The scope of the plans that prepared the Soviet economy for war continues to be debated. Some argue that war preparation was a fundamental objective influencing every aspect of Soviet peacetime economic policy; there were no purely civilian plans, and everything was militarized to some degree. Others see military-economic planning more narrowly as the specialized activity of planning and budgeting for rearmament, which had to share priority with civilian economic goals.
The framework for military-economic planning was fixed by a succession of high-level government committees: the Council for Labor and Defense (STO), the Defense Committee, and, in the postwar period, the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK). The armed forces general staff carried on military-economic planning in coordination with the defense sector of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Gosplan’s defense sector was established on the initiative of the Red Army commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who pioneered the study of future war and offensive operations associated with the concept of deep battle. To support this he advocated ambitious plans for the large-scale production of combat aircraft and motorized armor. Tukhachevsky crossed swords at various times with Josef V. Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Kliment Voroshilov. The military-economic plans were less ambitious than he hoped, and also less coherent: Industry did not reconcile its production plans beforehand with the army’s procurement plan, and their interests often diverged over the terms of plans and contracts to supply equipment. To overcome this Tukhachevsky pressed to bring the management of defense production under military control, but he was frustrated in this too. His efforts ended with his arrest and execution in 1937.
Military-economic plans required every ministry and workplace to adopt a mobilization plan to be implemented in the event of war. How effective this was is difficult to evaluate, and the mobilization plans adopted before World War II appear to have been highly unrealistic by comparison with wartime outcomes. Despite this, the Soviet transition to a war economy was successful; the fact that contingency planning and trial mobilizations were practiced at each level of the prewar command system may have contributed more to this than their detailed faults might suggest.
During World War II the task was no longer to prepare for war but to fight it, and so the distinction between military-economic planning and economic planning in general disappeared for a time. It reemerged after the war when Stalin began bringing his generals back into line, and the security organs, not the military, took the leading role in organizing the acquisition of new atomic and aerospace technologies. Stalin’s death and the demotion of the organs allowed a new equilibrium to emerge under Dmitry Ustinov, minister of the armament industry since June 1941; Ustinov went on to coordinate the armed forces and industry from a unique position of influence and privilege under successive Soviet leaders until his own death in 1984. It symbolized his coordinating role that he assumed the military rank of marshal in 1976. See also: GOSPLAN; TUKHACHEVSKY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYE-VICH; USTINOV, DMITRY FEDOROVICH; WAR ECONOMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark, eds. (2000). The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Harrison, Mark (2001). “Providing for Defense.” In Behind the Fa?ade of Stalin’s Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives, ed. Paul R. Gregory. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Samuelson, Lennart. (2000). Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military- Economic Planning, 1925-1941. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.
Measured by large outcomes, the Imperial Russian military establishment evolved through two distinct stages. From the era of Peter the Great through the reign of Alexander III, the Russian army and navy fought, borrowed, and innovated their way to more successes than failures. With the major exception of the Crimean War, Russian ground and naval forces largely overcame the challenges and contradictions inherent in diverse circumstances and multiple foes to extend and defend the limits of empire. However, by the time of Nicholas II, significant lapses in leadership and adaptation spawned the kinds of repetitive disaster and fundamental disaffection that exceeded the military’s ability to recuperate.
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ARMY
The Imperial Russian Army and Navy owed their origins to Peter I, although less so for the army than the navy. The army’s deeper roots clearly lay with Muscovite precedent, especially with Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s European-inspired new regiments of foreign formation. The Great Reformer breathed transforming energy and intensity into these and other precedents to fashion a standing regular army that by 1725 counted 112,000 troops in two guards, two grenadier, forty-two infantry, and thirty-three dragoon regiments, with supporting artillery and auxiliaries. To serve this establishment, he also fashioned administrative, financial, and logistical mechanisms, along with a rational rank structure and systematic officer and soldier recruitment. With an admixture of foreigners, the officer corps came primarily from the Russian nobility, while soldiers came from recruit levies against the peasant population.
Although Peter’s standing force owed much to European precedent, his military diverged from conventional patterns to incorporate irregular cavalry levies, especially Cossacks, and to evolve a military art that emphasized flexibility and practicality for combating both conventional northern European foes and less conventional steppe adversaries. After mixed success against the Tatars and Turks at Azov in 1695-1696, and after a severe reverse at Narva (1700) against the Swedes at the outset of the Great Northern War, Peter’s army notched important victories at Dorpat (1704), Lesnaya (1708), and Poltava (1709). After an abrupt loss in 1711 to the Turks on the Pruth River, Peter dogged his Swedish adversaries until they came to terms at Nystadt in 1721. Subsequently, Peter took to the Caspian basin, where during the early 1720s his Lower (or Southern) Corps campaigned as far south as Persia.
After Peter’s death, the army’s fortunes waned and waxed, with much of its development characterized by which aspect of the Petrine legacy seemed most politic and appropriate for time and circumstance. Under Empress Anna Ioannovna, the army came to reflect a strong European, especially Prussian, bias in organization and tactics, a bias that during the 1730s contributed to defeat and indecision against the Tatars and Turks. Under Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the army reverted partially to Petrine precedent, but retained a sufficiently strong European character to give good account for itself in the Seven Years’ War. Although in 1761 the military-organizational pendulum under Peter III again swung briefly and decisively in favor of Prussian-inspired models, a palace coup in favor of his wife, who became Empress Catherine II, ushered in a lengthy period of renewed military development.
During Catherine’s reign, the army fought two major wars against Turkey and its steppe allies to emerge as the largest ground force in Europe. Three commanders were especially responsible for bringing Russian military power to bear against elusive southern adversaries. Two, Peter Alexandrovich Rumyantsev and Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov, were veterans of the Seven Years War, while the third, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, was a commander and administrator of great intellect, influence, and organizational talent. During Catherine’s First Turkish War (1768-1774), Rumyantsev successfully employed flexible tactics and simplified Russian military organization to win significant victories at Larga and Kagul (both 1770). Suvorov, meanwhile, defeated the Polish Confederation of Bar, then after 1774 campaigned in the Crimea and the Nogai steppe. At the same time, regular army formations played an important role in suppressing the Pugachev rebellion (1773-1775).
During Catherine’s Second Turkish War (1787-1792), Potemkin emerged as the impresario of final victory over the Porte for hegemony over the northern Black Sea littoral, while Suvorov emerged as perhaps the most talented Russian field commander of all time. Potemkin inherently understood the value of irregular cavalry forces in the south, and he took measures to regularize Cossack service and bring them more fully under Russian military authority, or failing that, to abolish reMILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA calcitrant Cossack hosts. Following Rumyantsev’s precedent, he also lightened and multiplied the number of light infantry and light cavalry formations, while emphasizing utility and practicality in drill and items of equipment. In the field, Suvorov further refined Rumyantsev’s tactical innovations to emphasize “speed, assessment, attack.” Su-vorov’s battlefield successes, together with the conquest of Ochakov (1788) and Izmail (1790) and important sallies across the Danube, brought Russia favorable terms at Jassy (1792). Even as war raged in the south, the army in the north once again defeated Sweden (1788-1790), then in 1793-1794 overran a rebellious Poland, setting the stage for its third partition.
Under Paul I, the army chaffed under the imposition of direct monarchical authority, the more so because it
