A Decade Half-Full: Post-Cold War Studies in Russian and Soviet Military History

The 1990s witnessed a modest yet remarkable flowering of scholarship in Russian and Soviet military history. New ground was broken, many taboos were discarded, and the subject made more accessible. Still, progress came more by fits and starts than by leaps and bounds, as traditional and novel obstacles imposed limits both on the exercise of the historian's craft and on the field's quest for a place in the larger disciplinary and public sun. Despite vastly changed circumstances, the pursuit of military history failed to divorce itself entirely from politics in post-communist Russia, while nearly everywhere historians grappled not only with obstacles to sources and resources but also with fresh competition for diminishing attention.

Two significant studies, William C. Fuller, Jr.'s Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 and Gabriel Gorodetsky's Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, reflect anomalies inherent in the changed post-Cold War era.¹ Published respectively near the beginning and end of the decade, they form figurative bookends for the period, with each mirroring the progress and unfulfilled promise of the 1990s. Neither book was military history as traditionally conceived, yet each relied heavily on the field to afford significant insights into the larger Russian and Soviet past. Although both volumes justly garnered their share of scholarly and critical acclaim, both also embodied the frustrations inherent in the recent pursuit of Russian and Soviet military history. Neither author enjoyed unhampered access to archives, nor, because of various non-academic factors, ranging from fickleness of climate to ill-timed publication, did their books strike the intended resonant chord with a larger reading public. It was as if attention too long riveted on the Russian and Soviet military colossus had wearily turned elsewhere. Lacking assured archival access and consistent Cold War-style fixation on military issues from the media, even genuine breakthroughs remained muted. To paraphrase an American military historian writing about the vicissitudes of his own field several decades ago, Russian and Soviet military history had surmounted the parapet only to find its advance partially bogged down in the wire.²

That is not to say that Russian and Soviet military studies had not benefited from renewed public interest at least within Russia. Indeed, a lively resurgence of interest predated the disintegration of the Soviet Union, coinciding directly with Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost'. Long starved for materials to fill in the "blank spots," especially as they related to knotty issues of military history, various practitioners toward the end of the Soviet era had already begun laying the foundations for the modest flowering of the 1990s. The scholar and activist who in many ways came to embody this movement was Colonel General Dmitrii Antonovich Volkogonov, former Deputy Chief of the Soviet Army's Main Political Administration and by the late 1980s Chief of the USSR Institute of Military History. Volkogonov was a hardy Siberian, by lineage a Ussuri Cossack, who had lost his parents in the purges of the 1930s and who had risen through the military-political ranks of the Far Eastern Military District. Stalin's legacy had left a deep impression on Volkogonov, who evidently used his position to gather materials for what eventually became a revisionist biography of the dictator. Published just before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the work was notable both for its frankness and for its insight into Stalin as military leader, particularly during the Great Patriotic War. Before his untimely death from cancer in 1995, Volkogonov published companion volumes on Lenin, Trotskii, and key leaders of the early Soviet regime.³ All fed the flames of controversy, and all contributed to a greater understanding of Soviet military development.

Volkogonov's impact extended beyond his own work. As Chief of the Military Institute until roughly 1993, he sparked renewed institutional interest in and a dedication of resources to publication of a new official multi-volume history of the Great Patriotic War. Before Defense Minister Dmitrii Timofeevich Iazov shut down the project during the spring of 1991, its chief editor, Colonel Robert Aleksandrovich Savushkin...