Stalin was fond of talking about the impact on warfare of new technology and of hectoring his top commanders to break with their fixation on experiences during the Russian Civil War. Yet, judging by the books in his library, a favourite strategist was a nineteenth-century Tsarist General Staff officer called Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).
Leer was the closest Russian equivalent of Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the great Prussian strategic theorist. Leer taught at the Tsarist General Staff Academy from 1858 to 1898, the last ten years as its chief. He published a number of books on strategy, tactics and military history. Leer believed that military strategy should be taught as a science based on historical experience and as one that could derive from empirical data enduring rules and precepts about the conduct of war.251
Stalin possessed four of Leer’s works: The Experience of Critical-Historical Research on the Laws of the Art of the Conduct of War (1869); Strategy (Part One: Main Operations) (1885); Combined Operations (1892); and The Method of Military Science (1894).252
All these books were stamped as belonging to the office library of the Defence Commissariat, which dates their earliest acquisition by Stalin to the mid-1930s, which was a period in which he read a number of military-related books, including the memoirs of Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), who was chief of the Prussian General Staff, and General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s military supremo during the First World War. In Moltke’s memoirs he was drawn to the chapter on preparations for war, while in Ludendorff’s it was the stress on importance of popular support during wartime.253
An obscure figure in the twentieth century, Leer was quite well known in nineteenth-century Russia. His name came up in Soviet military theory debates in the 1920s, often coupled with that of Clausewitz. Stalin might have picked up on Leer from Svechin’s writings. Stalin read and marked the latter’s two-volume history of military art (from the Defence Commissariat library, too) and also had a copy of Svechin’s own book on strategy. Svechin disagreed with Leer’s scientific approach but agreed with him about the importance of the study of history. And it was military history that interested Stalin most.254
Apart from Svechin’s strategy book, which approached the subject conceptually rather than historically, the alternative to Leer’s writings would have been Clausewitz’s On War. Although Stalin also ‘borrowed’ a copy of a 1932 Russian translation of this classic text from the Defence Commissariat, he does not appear to have paid it much attention, except to read the publisher’s preface, which praised Clausewitz as a fine student of history and a master of the dialectical study of war. Stalin also marked the comment that lumped Leer and Svechin together as logicians and metaphysicians, compared to Clausewitz, who had liberated the theory of war from such ‘bourgeois’ methods.255
All four Leer books are heavily marked, three of them by the same hand, but it is not Stalin’s. The fourth book, Strategiya, was marked by multiple readers, one of whom might have been Stalin. According to Leer, the chief tasks of military art were twofold: to prepare the means of war and then to rationally deploy them. That required close attention to the economic, political and geographical character of the theatre of war as well as to its strictly military aspects. In the conduct of war the choice of strategic direction was all-important, as was the safeguarding of the forces and supplies tasked to carry out operations.
An underlined Leer passage that might well have stuck in his Stalin’s mind was that after his defeat by Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812, Kutuzov faced a choice between saving his army and saving Moscow.256 Kutuzov chose the former and then conducted a harassing campaign against Napoleon’s forces when they retreated from Moscow. A similar dilemma confronted Stalin as Hitler’s armies approached Moscow in October 1941. In the event, he decided that to save his army he had to save Moscow so he remained in the capital and organised its defence. On 7 November 1941, he addressed troops parading through Red Square on their way to the front:
Remember the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was . . . in the hands of foreign interventionists. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army . . . there was a shortage of food, of armaments. . . . Fourteen states were pressing against our country. But we did not become despondent, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us. . . . And what happened? We routed the interventionists, recovered our lost territory, and achieved victory.
Stalin returned to the patriotic theme in his peroration:
A great liberation mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission. . . . Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky [who defeated the Swedes], Dimitry Donskoy [who beat the Tartars], Kuz’ma Minin and Dimitry Pozharsky [who drove the Poles out of Moscow], Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov [the Russian hero generals of the Napoleonic Wars] – inspire you in this war. May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar.257
Stalin’s favourite among Soviet strategic theorists was Boris Shaposhnikov, a former Tsarist officer who had joined the Red Army in 1918. During the civil war he helped plan Red Army operations and then served in various capacities, including as head of the Red Army Staff, commandant of the Frunze Military Academy and chief of the General Staff (1937–40, 1941–3). He got on well with Stalin personally and is said to be the only Soviet general the dictator addressed using the familiar second person singular, ty, as opposed to the more formal second person plural, vy (like ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French).258
Like Stalin, Shaposhnikov was an intellectual as a well as a practical man of action. Before the First World War he attended the Tsarist General Staff Academy. A keen student of history, he was conversant with several foreign languages, including French, German and Polish. His Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army) was a study of strategic lessons from the First World War focusing on the role of General Staffs. Shaposhnikov’s combination of grand strategy and critical organisational detail were also the hallmarks of Stalin’s military and political leadership. Systematic and admirably lucid, Shaposhnikov’s exposition in Mozg Armii was also a paragon of political orthodoxy, with many citations from the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well as western and Russian strategic theorists.259
The fundamental military lesson of the First World War, argued Shaposhnikov, was that General Staffs had prepared for a short, sharp war of annihilation but found themselves fighting a prolonged war of attrition. The lesson for future warfare was the necessity for prolonged economic and industrial mobilisation to fight protracted wars. Soviet preparations for the Second World War began even before Shaposhnikov had completed publication of Mozg Armii at the end of the 1920s. During the 1930s, defence’s share of the national budget increased from 10 per cent to 25 per cent. The Red Army grew from under a million to more than 4 million. By 1939, the Soviet Union had the largest and most extensively equipped army in the world and was annually producing 10,000 planes, 3,000 tanks, 17,000 artillery pieces and 114,000 machine guns.
In Mozg Armii, Shaposhnikov rehearsed at length the Clausewitzian commonplace that since war was a continuation of politics, war’s goals and overall direction were the prerogative of political leadership. On the one hand, General Staffs needed to understand the interrelations of domestic, foreign and military affairs while, on the other, political leaders required a good grasp of military matters. ‘In our times’, wrote Shaposhnikov, ‘the study and knowledge of war is essential for all state leaders.’260