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Рубрики WWII; 1941; Версия для печати

Кто такой The Journal of Military History.Lexington? (англ)

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мне не нужно в общем-то но кому-то может пригодится:

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The Red Army at war, 1941-1945: Sources and interpretations
David M Glantz
(в pdf - 1.3 метра)

Copyright Society for Military History Jul 1998

ALTHOUGH a plethora of books have been written describing the wartime experiences of the Red Army, the thoroughness, accuracy, and credibility of these works have long been suspect. This has been the case for a number of wholly recognizable and cogent reasons. First and foremost, Soviet authorities firmly believed that the Red Army's wealth of wartime military experiences was a genuine national treasure, which was applicable to the future successful development of the Soviet Army. This belief, reinforced by a natural Soviet penchant for secrecy and severe political constraints concerning what was appropriate for open discussion, prompted Soviet authorities to cloak their archival materials within an impermeable veil of secrecy and to restrict their descriptions of the Red Army at war to a very limited audience. These restrictions dominated during the Stalinist period and gave way only grudgingly in the years that followed. With some notable exceptions, including the periods of the Khrushchev "thaw" and Gorbachev's glasnost' [openness], Soviet historians wrote primarily to inspire the Soviet population and educate its soldiers.

The volume of historical literature published to accomplish these two ends grew in scale during the post-Stalin years and, by the 1980s, amounted to several thousand volumes. These books included operational accounts, memoirs and biographies, unit histories, and an imposing array of specialized studies. Despite the immense volume of this work, its negative characteristics severely limited its credibility and utility in the West. First, these works were in Russian and, thus, not readily accessible for Western readers. Second, with some notable exceptions (such as the memoirs of key military figures), they were published in limited print runs and quickly became unavailable. Third, they were severely censored to remove details regarding such sensitive subjects as major military defeats, troop strengths, casualties, and politically sensitive issues. Finally, and most disturbing for Westerners, the books were suffused in an almost obligatory ideological rhetoric and the ritual glorification of the individual and collective Soviet soldier. All of these factors severely damaged the credibility of these works in the eyes of Westerners.

Even the best of these works, which were published for use in military education (such as the books in the famous Officers' Library [Biblioteka ofitsera), were suspect. While they contained significant amounts of operational and tactical detail, they also included inspirational ideological materials. Moreover, they, too, skirted the controversial, and, where controversy surfaced, it generally related to on-going debates in Kremlin military and political circles. Authors were limited strictly to the subject at hand, and most works lacked strategic, operational, and, in some cases, even credible tactical context. By adhering to this approach, Soviet authorities were able to discuss vital and instructive tactical aspects of failed military operations without revealing the real scope and the strategic and often operational impact of their military failures.

There were, of course, exceptions to this general pattern of historical reticence, but these were transitory and fleeting, and they were inevitably tied to domestic political debates. For example, during the Khrushchev period (roughly 1958-64), a historical "thaw" occurred, which was a direct result of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization program. During this period some of the fetters on historical research and writing were loosened, and published works were marked by greater candor. Once again, during the Gorbachev period of the late 1980s, the President's program of glasnost' prompted revelation of additional hitherto proscribed materials. Works published during these two periods were marked by noticeably greater candor across a wide range of previously forbidden topics. Even during these periods, however, the motivation for greater openness was essentially political and, thus, inherently limited by more enduring traditional constraints, many of which have not outlived the demise of the Soviet Union.

Thus, as a natural byproduct of this Soviet reticence, since war's end most Western operational accounts included only German detail, and opposing Soviet forces remained a virtually featureless and colorless mass, devoid of structure or personality. Quite naturally then, the German perspective on and interpretation of the war has predominated in the West. Understandably, and with few exceptions, Western scholars and the general reading public have treated Soviet or Soviet-based accounts of the war with suspicion and incredulity. In essence, while the German Army lost the war, it won the initial stages of the historical struggle with relative ease, and for good reason.

The so-called German historiographical school emerged during the immediate postwar years. It was a perfectly natural phenomenon that this school rose to early dominance since most available and credible sources on the war were German in origin and perspective. Because the German school prevailed, so also did their view of the Red Army. Initial source materials on the Red Army at war were produced by U.S. government agencies, which, as the victors, reaped the archival spoils of war. These agencies were charged with analyzing the nature of the war and the Red Army's performance in it so that the U.S. military could better understand and deal with future Soviet military threats. Subsequently, these official accounts were supplemented by an impressive array of German memoir materials prepared, often under U.S. supervision, by a generation of former German senior commanders, who were now unemployed and eager to share their unique wartime perspectives with the new enemies of their most bitter wartime rival. Subsequently, Western military historians produced scholarly accounts of the war and the Red Army based on these governmental materials and this memoir literature and, still later, on newly released German archival records. In time, this mass of German sources swelled with the addition of the memoirs of private soldiers and a steady stream of published German wartime unit histories. Although much of this material was written in German, Western historians were generally better equipped to master this language and more intellectually inclined to exploit these sources than similar Russian source materials.

In general terms, the German school portrayed the Red Army as a fundamentally flawed colossus whose military ineptitude, particularly at lower command levels, was overcome only by Soviet exploitation of geographical factors, callous disregard for human losses, the Soviet Union's immense manufacturing capabilities, the Soviet soldier's capacity for suffering, and sheer weight of numbers. This stereotypical view dominated in the immediate postwar years and persists in some quarters today.' While this school scorned Soviet combat performance and placed blame for ultimate German defeat squarely on the shoulders of Hitler's flawed strategy, it offered faint praise for the Soviet High Command and their strategic-operational skills. Ironically, this interpretation failed to explain how rigid, unimaginative junior officers could become effective operational and strategic warriors. Although these views have been qualified to a degree since the 1970s, the unfavorable treatment of the Red Army and Soviet soldier tended to persist and was reinforced in the 1990s by the revisionist interpretation that Stalin and the Red Army actually fomented the war.

From the outset, four imposing barriers inhibited the accuracy and utility of Soviet (Russian) historical accounts. Three of these barriers related to the relative inaccessibility and perceived incredibility of Soviet sources, which inhibited any Western appreciation of the Soviet perspective. Western historians' general lack of familiarity with Soviet historical works and their inability to read Russian would erode over time as more Western historians learned the Russian language. However, their deep-rooted and often justified distrust of Soviet historical credibility was fundamental and more difficult to overcome, since the content of most readily available Soviet historical works was significantly and blatantly ideological. Finally, the Soviets themselves reinforced Western reticence to believe what they wrote by their reluctance to reveal materials which they considered military secrets of potential value in contemporary warfare.

A more tenable Soviet historical perspective would slowly emerge only after Western historians were able to tap into a broader and more credible base of Soviet works and when they were able to test the veracity of Soviet sources against German archival accounts. The clearly limited value of Soviet works produced in the decade immediately following the end of the war also discredited the positive efforts the Soviets made during the late 1950s and 1960s to improve the quality and accuracy of their historical works. In fact, despite the strenuous efforts of a few skilled Western historians to replace Soviet bombast with hard fact, the credibility of the Soviet school would not improve until the 1980s, when significant amounts of Soviet archival materials finally began to be released to public view.

German-Derived Source Materials

The German view of the Red Army predominated, first and foremost, because it monopolized existing source materials, particularly the bulk of the German Armed Forces archival records. More important, the Germans exploited and publicized these records at a time when the Soviets were treating their archives (and captured German archives), as well as details concerning their army's performance, as state secrets. Having emerged victorious on the battlefield, the Soviets abandoned the field of historical struggle to their former Allies and enemies.

Vast quantities of German archival materials provided the fodder for German analysis of the Red Army. Much of this material was captured by the Allied armies at war's end, and U.S., British, and, more recently, German archival repositories have made most of this material readily accessible to historians. U.S. authorities initially produced detailed monographs on Red Army wartime performance based upon this information, materials captured during wartime, and the recollections of U.S. personnel who lived in the Soviet Union during the war. Extensive German archival sources which fell exclusively into Soviet hands, however, remain inaccessible to Western scholars.

Among the most valuable German primary source materials regarding Red Army wartime performance are the postwar compilations of German archival materials issued in book form and the voluminous German military unit records maintained in Western archives, including the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the German Militargeschichtlichen Forschungsamt located in Freiburg and Potsdam. Most, but not all, of these documentary materials have been copied on microfilm and are available for scholarly use.2

Among the published series on the course of the war, the most valuable book compilations include the two-volume so-called OKW War Diary and comparable, yet less comprehensive, OKH volumes.3 The most important series among the OKH and German Army unit records in terms of Red Army structure, capabilities, and combat performance are the records of Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) found in National Archives Microfilm (NAM) series T-78. This series contains German wartime intelligence materials and assessments of all aspects of the Soviet Armed Forces and Soviet military-industrial activity. Most interesting are the assessments of Soviet (and German) military strength, strategic and operational intentions, and industrial war production; of the Red Army order of battle, force composition and morale; and of the Soviet political and military leadership. The NAM series T-311 through T-315, which contain the records of German army groups, armies, panzer armies, corps, and divisions, although incomplete, include periodic situation maps and logs of military activities, operational and intelligence assessments, operational studies, and correspondence between major headquarters.4 Valuable war diaries and special reports prepared by numerous senior and mid-level commanders are interspersed throughout the war diaries of forces above division level and offer more limited assessments of the Red Army.5

To supplement this German source material, during and shortly after World War II the U.S. government prepared assessments on the Red Army based upon their own intelligence sources and materials captured from the Germans. Among the most valuable of these U.S. government publications was Technical Manual (TM) 30-430, subtitled Handbook on USSR Military Forces, which was published in 1946. It covered in detail virtually every facet of Red Army organization, tactical procedures, and wartime performance and provided a base-line for subsequent studies of Red Army combat techniques issued later in the Department of the Army pamphlet (DA PAM) series on wartime operational and tactical procedures.

Even today, new primary source materials are being unearthed which will enrich existing German archival holdings. Hundreds of postwar memoir studies have lain fallow, while accounts by more famous and popular German commanders occupied the historical limelight. These newly discovered memoirs and studies include massive manuscripts written during the immediate postwar years by important, but less famous, German military leaders under the auspices of the U.S. military historical organization, in particular, the Historical Division of the U.S. European Command. The most prominent of this vast group of Germanlanguage manuscripts is the extensive memoir by the German defensive specialist, Gerhardt Heinrici, which has just been rediscovered and is now being prepared for publication.6

Supplementing these works are the personal memoirs of a host of German military leaders and private soldiers which have been retained since the war in private family holdings. When released for publication or exploited by scholars, these promise to offer a far more personal view from those who fought and suffered in the war. In addition, extensive Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, and Rumanian archival holdings supplement these German records.

Secondary materials based upon these sources include several series of "official" studies and histories prepared and published by national military historical organizations, primarily in the U.S. and Germany, personal memoirs, and other standard historical surveys of individual operations, the war in general, and the Red Army. The first of these were prepared by U.S. organizations on the basis of captured German archival materials. The U.S. Department of the Army Pamphlet series, prepared and published during the late 1940s and early 1950s as a product of an extensive governmental effort to debrief former German military commanders and analyze the nature of combat on the German Eastern Front, included only a fraction of the material collected by the U.S. European Command during its postwar analysis and debriefing program. Although often flawed by factual errors, these pamphlets were widely disseminated and have been reprinted periodically by the U.S. Army's Office of the Chief of Military History (CMH).7

In the 1960s, the U.S. Army's CMH began preparing substantive studies of the German-Soviet war to supplement an extensive ongoing series of publications on the U.S. Army's role in the war. CMH commissioned three volumes which were to cover the entire war chronologically. Ultimately two of these volumes appeared, the first dealing with the period November 1942 (Stalingrad) to 1945 (Berlin) and the second, with the period December 1941 (Moscow) to November 1942 (Stalingrad). While these studies incorporated as much Soviet source material as was readily available, that material remained minimal. In the 1980s, the German Military History Office (Freiburg) also began preparing an extensive series of official works on the Second World War. Several volumes of this new, and as yet incomplete, series cover the war on the Eastern Front.

The second group of important secondary sources are the postwar memoirs by or biographies of prestigious German wartime military leaders, the most famous of which appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s. These volumes established the motifs for the German school, appearing at a time when it was both necessary and sensible to disassociate oneself from Hitler or Hitler's policies. Justifiably or not, the writers of these memoirs, who shared in the earlier success of Hitler's Wehrmacht, refused to shoulder responsibility for the failures of the same armies and essentially placed the blame for German defeat squarely on Hitler. These included memoirs by Walter Warlimont (OKW), Erich von Manstein (LVI Panzer Corps, Eleventh Army, and Army Groups Don and South), Heinz Guderian (Panzer Group 2 and Second Panzer Army), and F. W. Mellenthin (llth Panzer Division and X:XXXVIII Panzer Corps). In addition, Walter Goerlitz edited the memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel wrote and a biography of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. Among the most notable and influential of the many German-language works was the classic study by F. M. von Senger und Etterlin, Der Gegeschla (The encounter battle). This work played a considerable role in the education of a generation of German officers.

These authors wrote their memoirs on the basis of their memories or their personal notes or records. Interpretation aside, the absence of archival sources often resulted in serious factual errors. These fascinating works tended to portray the Red Army as a faceless enemy, an armed host which possessed neither concrete form nor precise features. In short, other than sensing the size and power of their foe and the ferocity and inhumanity of combat, they knew not what they fought. Although a subsequent generation of talented Western professional military historians have left a legacy of superb works, their scholarship remains firmly imbedded in the German school. Try as they did to reconstruct the Soviet face of war, they failed in the effort, since much of their primary material remained, of necessity, German.

Beginning in the early 1960s, an increasing number of able historians began producing accounts of war and operations on the German Eastern Front. Although these works were more thorough than those of their predecessors, since they were based primarily on German sources, they did not achieve requisite balance between the German and Soviet perspectives. The earliest of these volumes did contain some Soviet materials collected and preserved by German wartime intelligence collection organs, and later volumes incorporated some materials produced by Soviet authors in the early 1960s, after Khrushchev had loosened the reins on Soviet historiography. These works also included studies by Westerners who had spent considerable time in the Soviet Union during the war.

Among the best and most substantive of these works were Alan Clark's survey of the war, Barbarossa (1965); Earl Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin (1968) and later (with Magna Bauer), Moscow to Stalingrad (1987); Paul Carel's more popular accounts, Hitler Moves East (1965) and Scorched Earth (1966); Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days (1969); and Albert Seaton's The Russo-Germn War (1971) and The Battle of Moscow (1971). Clark's book contained some Soviet operational data but typified many books of the period by devoting most of its attention to the first two years of war. This reflected an often-expressed judgment that there was little reason to study operations after mid-1943 because, after that time, Hitler's interference in operational matters perverted the ability of German commanders to conduct normal and reasonable operations.

Ziemke's books in the CMH series commendably sought to restore interpretive balance by incorporating a limited amount of Soviet data, perspectives, and interpretations. He also questioned some of the more prominent errors contained in earlier accounts. Writing under the penname Paul Carell, Paul Schmidt tapped a wealth of personal wartime recollections by individual German officers and enlisted men to construct moving human narratives of the harrowing combat. All the while, he consulted extensively with military experts on the war whose contributions made his essentially journalistic accounts remarkably accurate, moving, and credible. Salisbury drew upon his personal experiences and contacts with the Soviet population to describe the incredible suffering of the Leningrad population during its wartime siege. Finally, Seaton added a new dimension to war histories by using selective German unit histories and memoirs to describe tactical operations at the lowest level. Seaton, however, was also unable to exploit Soviet sources.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a wealth of new secondary works on the Red Army appeared, which, however, fell largely into the German school. In addition to a new wave of German memoirs and unit histories, some of which have been translated into English (including the Goebbels diary and Speer's memoirs), operational accounts now routinely incorporate a limited quantity of Soviet materials. Among the best of these many works are the second volume by Ziemke (and Bauer) and Gerd Neipold's study of the destruction of German Army Group Center in 1944.8 Specialized studies by Robert H. Jones, T. Vail Motter, Charles W. Sydnor, Omer Bartov, and Alexander Dallin have addressed such ancillary issues as Allied Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, the role of SS formations in the war, German occupation policy in the East, and the nature and impact of German wartime genocidal policies.9 Few of these works, however, offered a more refined view of the Red Army.

Soviet Source Materials

The nature, availability, and accuracy of Soviet source materials reflects the closed nature of Soviet society and ideological restrictions on the writing of history. Prior to 1987, the Soviet government severely limited their historians' access to primary source materials, releasing only archival materials which supported Communist Party policies. Military historians wrote on narrow themes, using only officially approved sources. As policy changed, so did the scope of source materials. While the factual content of these military studies was often accurate, such topics as casualties, defeats, and the actual correlation of forces between the warring sides were either severely proscribed or routinely distorted. History tended to serve starkly utilitarian ends, such as specific political aims or military education. Ironically, the Soviet desire to educate scientifically often resulted in unintended candor. While the Soviet General Staff produced detailed but highly classified studies with remarkably few constraints, books written for the general public were less candid and accurate.10

Because of the unavailability of archival materials, detailed military studies prepared for the purposes of military education and memoir materials, which the Soviets used as vehicles for discussing controversial military and even political issues, fell into a category midway between what Westerners considered as primary and secondary source material. If properly juxtaposed against Western primary sources, these military studies and memoirs served as proxies for actual primary sources.

The Soviet (Russian) military archives are voluminous and surprisingly complete. The Moscow-based Central State Archives of the Soviet Army (TsGASA) contains army military records from 1918-1940. Other archives include the Central Archives of the Combined Armed Forces (TsAOVS-formerly the Central Archives of the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Defense-TsAMO), located at Podolsk, the Central Archives of the Navy located at Gatchina, and lesser archives.

The Central Archives (TsAOVS) is the largest storehouse of military documentation in the Russia Federation. Its more than eighteen million records include documents from the Stavka (the Headquarters of the Soviet High Command), force branches, armies, special force headquarters, operational commands, large formations and units; and military institutions, organizations, and enterprises (excluding the Navy). More than ten million of these records deal with the period 1941-45.

Although encouraging, the increased access to these archival materials must be viewed in perspective. Collectively, access is still severely restricted, and archival releases have been selective in nature. This access and associated release procedures indicate that some of these materials are not archival at all but are rather products of a system which still attempts to manage information and history.

Military archival materials fall into several distinct categories. The most accurate and useful releases have included semiprocessed studies prepared by various directorates of the General Staff during the period 1942 through 1964.12 These series represent a serious General Staff attempt to determine the truth about the Red Army's performance in wartime and to harness these truths in the service of improving future Soviet Army combat performance.13 Even these series, as candid as they were, avoided mention of some of the Red Army's most serious defeats, including the Liuban' operation in early 1942 with its Vlasov connection, and Operation "Mars," the companion piece to the Stalingrad operation, which occurred at the same time, but which was forgotten since it ended as a bloody failure. Politically sensitive topics, such as discussions and disputes between Stavka members (Stalin in particular), the General Staff, and field commands, which were numerous throughout the war, and the motives for these and other controversial political and military decisions were prohibited topics.

During and after the Second World War, Voennoe izdatel'stvo or Voeni.sdat (the Ministry of Defense's official publishing house) published many classified studies prepared by the Red Army General Staff on wartime military operations. These included studies on all of the most important wartime operations.14 Voenizdat prepared similar, but shorter volumes on many lesser wartime operations. Many of these classified studies later generated less detailed unclassified versions.15 Together with these materials. Soviet military authorities prepared detailed, but highly classified works on the strength, organization, structure, and command cadre of the Red Army.16

Soviet and Russian political and military journals have also published archival materials, primarily documents, on Red Army combat performance. Prior to the 1980s, these added an air of authenticity to operational accounts and underscored important political messages. After 1987, Party First Secretary Gorbachev exploited these journals to support his program of historical glasnost'. The most important of these archival materials appeared in the military journal Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal [Military-historical journal, abbreviated as VIZhI and a newly created, but short-lived journal of the Party Central Committee.17

Established by President and Party First Secretary Gorbachev, the now-defunct party journal Izvestiia TsK KPSS [News of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet, played a particularly important role in this process by publishing documents on previously forbidden themes.' Unfortunately, the failed coup of 1991 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union ended the publishing life of this journal and this important series of document releases.

Interested readers should note that most of these materials, although technically archival, are in some way processed, and this processing has often affected their content. These are also released materials, which implies that their contents have been thoroughly vetted by authorities. While release is welcome, the question of archival access remains in doubt. Although Russian authorities have publicly and frequently announced that the archives are open, access remains severely limited and is in no way comparable with access to Western archives.19

Materials released thus far are of mixed quality. In general, classified or restricted Soviet archival-based studies published since 1964 lack the substance and accuracy of their wartime and postwar counterparts. In this sense, they resemble operational and tactical materials published publicly during this period. The general narrative of events and details about operations and tactics remain essentially accurate. However, they exaggerate enemy strength, cover up the worst aspects of Soviet combat performance, and delete details concerning many Soviet combat defeats. In addition, political content became far more pervasive and strident than that of earlier General Staff volumes. These flaws in educational materials used at the Voroshilov and Frunze Academies may explain why many contemporary Russian officers remain less than enthusiastic about the study of their own operational experiences.

These post-1964 materials fall into three general categories: Institute of Military History publications, and publications of the Voroshilov and Frunze Academies. The Institute of Military History published a short series under the rubrics "Bulletins" and "Notes." The "Bulletins," which contained short articles (ten to twenty pages) on a wide variety of military subjects, and the short-lived "Notes," whose publication was an attempt to create a more substantive Institute journal, failed within a short time. The content of these publications failed to match the more substantive General Staff work of earlier years since they lacked detail and had greater political content.

The Voroshilov Academy published generally scholarly texts, studies, analytical works, and lectures for delivery at the academy. Those published prior to 1964 were substantive and credible. More recent publications are less so. These works include multivolume surveys of the history of war and military art, such as a two-volume work edited by the eminent military historian I. E. Shavrov, which were published in revised versions every few years. The most interesting and valuable are the wartime volumes and the collections (Sborniki) of wartime materials. Frunze Academy publications possess the same characteristics as their Voroshilov counterparts.

The publication of documents in journals seems to have represented a genuine attempt to accelerate the release of archival materials. By their very nature, however, these documents too are selective and processed. Sadly, this flow of archival materials has noticeably decreased since 1991. It remains to be seen whether this trend will be reversed.

Compared with the previous availability of Soviet sources on the nature of the Red Army at war, recent archival releases have been revolutionary. However, just as the new Russian Revolution is in its infancy, so also is the revolution in historiography. Archival materials released thus far appear prodigious when compared with the meager archival materials previously available. They represent, however, only the tip of the iceberg of what is still located behind closed doors. While there is much to celebrate, there is also much to anticipate.

Despite their nonavailability in the West and the difficult problem of language, the Soviets have published a vast array of secondary materials on the Red Army, in particular since 1958. Prior to 1958, public volumes on the Red Army were blatantly inaccurate propaganda pieces designed to glorify the Red Army's performance and achievements and attribute those feats of arms to Stalin's military genius. Since that time, and largely as a result of de-Stalinization, Soviet historiography has produced for public consumption a massive number of survey histories, operational studies, memoirs, unit histories, and assessments of Red Army wartime performance.

Included in these works were three important official survey histories and several imposing encyclopedias. The first comprehensive survey of the war was S. P. Platonov's single-volume history, entitled The Second World War, which established the parameters of Soviet interpretation of the war. The massive six-volume History of the Great Patriotic War, published between 1960 and 1965, exemplified the de-Stalinization process and Khrushchevian glasnost'. It covered a wide range of hitherto forbidden topics, such as the 1941 catastrophe, and obvious wartime defeats, such as the May 1942 Khar'kov disaster, which became the "Potemkin village" for failed Soviet wartime operations. Between 1973 and 1982, the twelve-volume History of the Second World War appeared, which, while according the Red Army and Soviet state the leading role in the war, finally introduced Russian readers to Allied operations. Characteristic of the Brezhnev period, however, these volumes were less candid about Soviet failures than their six-volume predecessor.

During the period 1976 through 1980, the Ministry of Defense produced the eight-volume Sovetskaia voennaia entsiklopediia (Soviet military encyclopedia), edited under the supervision of then Marshal I. V. Ogarkov. A companion single-volume encyclopedia of the Great Patriotic War appeared in 1985. Although immensely useful to researchers, these volumes were in Russian and reflected the same faults as other books published during the period. Beginning in 1990 the Ministry of Defense began preparing a new, more candid version of the multivolume encyclopedia, three volumes of which have since appeared.

The most accurate and least politicized secondary sources appeared during the "thaw" of the early 1960s. These included a wide range of books which examined narrow aspects of once forbidden topics but without totally lifting the constraints on author candor. Thereafter, works were of mixed value depending on the degree of license accorded each author and the sensitivity of the subject each addressed. As a general rule, those in favor were permitted to write with greater candor, as were those writing utilitarian accounts for Soviet Army officer education. Regardless of historical license, writing on such topics as many combat defeats, correct correlations of forces, and politically sensitive operations remained proscribed. On the other hand, wartime controversies which served current political needs were thoroughly aired (such as the Zhukov-Konev debate, which paralleled political infighting in the contemporary Soviet political hierarchy).

A limited number of these works, such as memoirs by senior commanders, G. K. Zhukov, A. M. Vasilevsky, I. S. Konev, K. K. Rokossovsky, A. I. Eremenko, S. K. Meretskov, and V. I. Chuikov, an invaluable study of the General Staff at war by S. M. Shtemenko, and a few operational studies on politically safe operations such as Kursk appeared in English translation. Soviet authorities heavily edited all of these memoirs, and only today are the unexpurgated portions of these memoirs appearing. The best and most accurate operational and tactical studies, however, remained in the Russian language.

Toward a New Synthesis

Prior to the 1970s, by virtue of their wartime service, keen linguistic talents, or unique access to Soviet sources, a handful of Western historians were able to synthesize Soviet materials and present a unique picture of the wartime Red Army. In so doing, they formed the nucleus of a growing Soviet school of war historiography in the West. Foremost among this small group were W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, who in 1946 wrote the first history of the war on the Eastern Front from a Soviet perspective, Raymond I. Gartoff, whose 1954 study of Soviet military doctrine pioneered work in this field, and Malcolm Mackintosh and John Erickson, whose work in the 1960s began to etch a "face" on the hitherto featureless Red Army and to add detail to equally shadowy Red Army operations.

Gartoffs research brought to the surface for Western readers the obscure and often misunderstood Soviet concept of military doctrine. By pondering how Russia made war, he provided a context within which historians could study and appreciate the Red Army's wartime performance. This work also provided an admirable basis for Gartoff's subsequent seminal work on Soviet military strategy in an increasingly nuclear postwar era.

Mackintosh's interest and knowledge of the Red Army resulted from his wartime service as liaison officer with the Soviet 4th Ukrainian Front. Erickson's work resulted, in part, from his unique access to senior Red Army commanders during the early 1960s and his keen ability to exploit the Khrushchev "thaw." For many years, Mackintosh's single-volume history of the Red Army, entitled Juggernaut, was the most reliable source on the subject. Erickson's seminal study, The Soviet High Command, appeared in 1962 and provided unprecedented detail about the Red Army's development from 1918 through 1941, and, later, his massive and classic tomes The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin provided rich detail of Soviet participation in the war. Yet even Erickson would admit that, although much of his work has withstood the archival test, he would have preferred to have had greater access to Soviet archives at the time he was writing his works.

Other Western historians developed the trend initiated by Mackintosh and Erickson. Contemporary to Mackintosh's and Erickson's work, L. Goure published his study of the siege of Leningrad, one of the first Western works to convey the intense wartime suffering of the Russian population and the tenacity of the Soviet soldier. In 1969 Seweryn Bialar edited an anthology of biographical sketches of leading Soviet military figures, and two years later Otto Chaney wrote a comprehensive biography of the leading Soviet military commander, Marshal G. K. Zhukov. The effort to add personality to a faceless Red Army has now culminated with the recent publication of Harold Shukman's biographical anthology, Stalin's Generals, and Richard Armstrong's Red Army Tank Comanders.

Fueled by improved access to Russian-language sources, increased Soviet historical candor, and intensified interest in Soviet affairs by Western scholars, since the late 1970s, the Soviet (Russian) historiographical school has matured. More important, scholars have been able to integrate Russian materials with and test them against German and Japanese archival sources to produce a more balanced interpretation of the war.

During the early 1980s, the U.S. Army War College contributed greatly to an improved understanding of the nature of combat on the Eastern Front. It sponsored three week-long symposia on Soviet wartime operations, in which German war veterans and experts on Soviet operational experiences jointly studied specific wartime operations. The proceedings of these symposia, and a fourth, later sponsored by the U.S. Army's Soviet Army Studies Office, were then published in four detailed volumes. Symposia products prompted additional valuable work, including Christopher Duffy's popular study of the final year of war, Paul Adair's uniquely human assessment of the 1944 Belorussian operation, and a series of studies by David M. Glantz.20

By exploiting his earlier works on the Soviet August 1945 offensive against Japanese forces in Manchuria and Soviet airborne experiences, and by incorporating materials from the War College symposia, Glantz prepared detailed studies of Soviet wartime intelligence and deception operations, which offered new perspectives on Soviet performance in wartime operations.21 Subsequently, Glantz used both German and Soviet archival materials to study Soviet tactics, operational methods, and wartime strategies. This work culminated in the publication of a comprehensive single-volume survey history of wartime operations, entitled When T/tans Clashed, which exploited both German and Soviet records to uncover previously forgotten major operations and cast new light on those which were already well known. Assisted by even more extensive Soviet archival releases and more thorough analysis of German archival sources, new volumes are in preparation which promise to alter fundamentally traditional accounts of the war. A blueprint for this new analysis, entitled "The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War," appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and in a Russian Academy of Science reassessment of the war, entitled The Second World War (in Russian).22

At the same time, Michael Parrish facilitated the work of all historians working in the field by publishing his massive and seminal two-volume bibliographical study of Soviet historical materials on the war. This work was later supplemented by a single-volume work of a similar nature by John and Ljubica Erickson.

Meanwhile, other authors investigated specific operations and various aspects of Red Army combat performance. Christopher Bellamy published his comprehensive assessment of the wartime Soviet use of artillery, The Red God of War, while Geoffrey Jukes, Brian I. Fugate, and James F. Gebhardt provided more detailed accounts of Operation Barbarossa, the titanic Battle of Kursk, and the Petsamo-Kirkenes operation in the Soviet far north.

Former Soviet officers are finally releasing what potentially could prove to be a treasure trove of uncensored memoirs. The first of these, a translation of a memoir of Dmitriy Loza, a Soviet wartime tank unit commander, provides a fascinating, accurate, and unprecedented picture of life in a Soviet combat unit.

While much work remains to be done on the Soviet Navy, adequate work has been done on the Air Force. For example, Von Hardesty published Red Phoenix, the first thorough account of the Red Air Force at war, and the Office of Air Force History translated and published the official Soviet history of the air force in the war. New vistas on Soviet force structuring, organization, and order of battle have been opened by Walter S. Dunn, Jr.'s, seminal study, Hitler's Nemesis, which covers Soviet wartime combat forces and has been followed by a similar work on support and logistical forces, and by Robert G. Poirier and Albert Z. Conner's massive study of the Soviet Army wartime order of battle, entitled The Red Army Order of Battle. Finally, Harold S. Orenstein has applied his keen translation and editorial talents to publishing three volumes in the imposing and extensive Soviet General Staff archival series, as well as a two-volume documentary work on the evolution of Soviet operational art. Many of these Soviet archival studies have been serialized in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies.

Tangentially, additional light has been cast on Soviet participation in the 1939 Polish and 1939-40 Finnish War. While Finnish and, more recently, Polish historians have written fresh accounts of these formerly obscure wars, for years the best English-language source on the SovietFinnish War was Allen Chew's The White Death. In his recent book, The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 1939-40, Carl van Dyke skillfully exploited a wide range of Soviet archival sources to present a vivid and detailed account of this sordid chapter in Soviet military history. Steven Zaloga's and Victor Madej's The Polish Campaign, 1939 remains the most thorough English-language account of this once obscure Soviet campaign. Debates and Interpretations

It was inevitable that warfare on so colossal a scale and with so decisive an influence on the ultimate outcome of the Second World War would generate heated controversy on both sides. Although many critical issues have already been defined, shaped, and debated, striking changes in the availability and exploitation of archival materials (particularly Soviet, but also German) now necessitates extensive revision of what are now considered to be classic accounts and interpretations of the war. That revisionism is now only beginning. When complete, it will likely fundamentally change the face of the German-Soviet war.

The most pervasive and extensive debate on the German side has been and continues to be the question of wartime leadership and the analogous issue of who was responsible for military defeat-Hitler or his generals. Fueled by German memoir materials, to a greater or lesser degree, most of those in the German school tend to side with the latter and conclude that Hitler's policies, if they did not deprive Germany of victory, certainly hastened defeat. The best of these works, such as that of Ziemke and Seaton, debate the issue with an understanding that, regardless of blame, the German military effort against the Soviet Union was probably beyond Germany's means.

No less pervasive and extensive has been the debate over the nature of the Red Army itself. In essence, this debate involved testing and either validating or refuting the earlier stereotypical German view of the Red Army. The German view has been stridently reaffirmed in recent works by Albert Seaton and in a sociological study of the prewar Soviet soldier prepared by Robert Reese, while a wide range of books continues to challenge that traditional view.

A third major debate, more recent in nature and fueled by inflammatory writing based on Soviet sources, rages over responsibility for the war in the first place and the associated question of the combat readiness of the Red Army in June 1941. This debate swirls around a claim made, ironically, by a Soviet emigre, that Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union was preemptive in nature and responded to Soviet plans to invade German territory in summer 1941. This claim, which was a virtual by-product of political turmoil in the Soviet Union shortly before its fall, was quickly embraced by many extreme reformers who, largely due to their intense hatred of the Communist system, sought to discredit all things Soviet in general and Stalin's policies in particular. While most reputable Soviet scholars in the West and contemporary Russian historians reject the claim, understandably it has found fertile ground among a growing number of German historians.23

Finally, a debate has raged since the late 1980s over the human cost exacted by the war on the Red Army and the civilian population of the Soviet Union. This issue surfaced as a direct result of President Gorbachev's program of historical glasnost' and produced numerous articles and, finally, the book Gif sekretnosti sniat: poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistvakh, i voennykh konfliktakh (Classification secret removed: the losses of the Soviet armed forces in wars, combat operations, and military conflicts), published in 1993, which represented the final official view on Soviet losses. This official view has been heatedly challenged as being far too low by a number of other historians, the most vocal of which has been B. V. Sokolov.24

Debates also occurred within the Soviet historical community after the late 1950s, when the lid was taken off strict Stalinist censorship, although these were not nearly as heated as current debates, and they were officially sanctioned and controlled. These debates took place within the context of contemporary political debates or power struggles (such as de-Stalinization) and the changing political fortunes of key military figures (such as Marshal G. K. Zhukov). The most contentious issues were the role of Stalin in decision making, the nature and causes of surprise in June 1941, blame for subsequent military defeats (those few revealed), and debates over the operational conduct of the war (like the Zhukov-Konev controversy).

Future debates will likely mark the inevitable and necessary revision of accounts of the Red Army's conduct of the war. Already, a few Western and Russian historians are finally lifting the veil on long-forgotten or suppressed military defeats and reassessing the role and importance of various prominent Soviet commanders and their command styles.25 Others are engaged in unprecedented study of the neglected and utterly obscure human dimension of the war. A. A. Maslov has prepared detailed studies of Soviet general officers who perished in the war, in prisoner-ofwar camps, and at the hands of Stalinist repression and plans further research on the fate of those in lower ranks.26 More extensive exploitation of German archival sources, together with more significant Russian archival releases, will demand and permit that the history of the war be rewritten.

Conclusions

Although thousands of works have been written in German, Russian, and English about the German-Soviet War, historiographical coverage of the war remains woefully inadequate. While German archival materials have been available for decades and have been skillfully exploited, Soviet archival materials have been frozen in a historical limbo. Without the latter, full exploitation of the former cannot occur. Already the testing of German materials against Soviet open-source accounts and the limited existing quantity of Soviet archival materials has produced a strikingly different picture of the war. When that comparison and testing can be done in full measure, the results will be even more significant. In essence, on the eve of the twenty-first century, we stand not at the end of historiography on the war, but rather at the threshold of a new beginning.

[Footnote]
1. See, for example, the analysis of the Red Army and Russian soldiers found in F. von Mellenthin, Pan,ser Battles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 292-310, and more recently, Albert and Joan Seaton, The Soviet Army: 1918 to the Present (New York: New American Library, 1987). Mellenthin prudently qualified his assessment by citing improvements in Red Army wartime performance, while the Seatons paint a universally bleak picture of the development of the Red Army.

[Footnote]
2. The original document collections have since been returned to the custody of the German archives. These collections contain several particularly extensive and valuable German sources, including the complete set of daily OKH situation maps for the war in the East (the Lage Ost).
3. Edited by Percy E. Schramm, the two-volume so-called OKW War Diary is a comprehensive chronological high-level German record of the war from the perspective of the Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (the Armed Forces High CommandOKW). Until September 1942, when the Oberkommandos der Heeres [Army High Command-KH] received full responsibility for operations in the Eastern Theater, the OKW received detailed reports on the Eastern Front situation and played a significant role in German strategic decision-making in the East. Supplementing this work are the fragmentary diary of Colonel Walter Scherff, Hitler's official war historian, and Helmuth Greiner's description of OKW wartime functions. Surviving OKH records are fragmentary since the Red Army captured many German unit war diaries, particularly later in the war, and some German forces destroyed their records to prevent them from falling into Soviet hands. Still other unit records were destroyed by Allied fire while being removed from Berlin after the Nazi government's collapse. The mass of surviving archival materials includes a significant number of personal diaries interspersed among thousands of unit records at every level of army command. The most interesting high-level diary is that kept by the Chief of the German General Staff, Franz Halder, in which he recorded his impressions of the war in the East until Hitler removed him from office in September 1942. Among the most valuable and unique OK/ records are the O/KH Lage Ost (Eastern situation) maps, which display a complete German order of battle and a daily intelligence assessment of the Soviet order of battle throughout the war. These wallsize maps lay in the U.S. National Archives until the late 1980s, when they were returned to Germany, unfortunately without being microfilmed. Therefore, they are not available for researchers' and the general public's use through the Archives microfilm system.

[Footnote]
4. The NAM series T-311, the records of German Army Groups, although incomplete, also duplicates some of the records of subordinate armies, most importantly, some of the armies whose records were lost or destroyed. NAM series T-312, the records of German field armies, contains information prepared by the operations department (Ia), intelligence (Ic), quartermaster, and other staff departments subordinate to army headquarters. Although large gaps exist in these series, particularly involving Ninth and Sixth armies, army records often include extracts from records of armies operating in adjacent sectors.
NAM series T-313, the records of German panzer groups and armies, are analogous to those maintained by field armies, and NAM series T-314, the record of German army, motorized, and panzer corps, are similar to those maintained at army level. NAM series T-315, the records of German divisions of all types, are similar to records maintained at corps level. All of these series contain extensive assessments of Red Army structure and combat performance.
5. These include, for example, the personal war diaries contained in the NAM records prepared by Field Marshals Fedor von Bock (Army Group South) and Wilhelm von Leeb (Army Group North), and General Eberhart von Mackensen (III Panzer Corps). The most valuable aspects of the corps and divisional records are the units' war diaries (Tagebuch) with extensive appendixes and the associated periodic operational and intelligence situation maps which they include.

[Footnote]
6. The multivolume account of the war in the East written by Heinrici is being published by Frank Cass, London.
7. While these pamphlets made valuable initial contributions to a better Western understanding of the war, their accuracy was suspect, since their authors, all of whom had been wartime German commanders and staff officers, wrote them largely

[Footnote]
from memory and without access to German archival materials. Thus, in addition to their natural German bias, they contained numerous errors of fact. For example, a study prepared on wartime airborne operations neglected the extensive Soviet employment of such forces. Although the pamphlet's author later corrected his error, CMH has continued to reprint the flawed original version.

[Footnote]
8. See Gerd Neipold, Battle for White Russia: The Destruction of Army Group Centre, June 1944 (London: Brassey's, 1987).
9. See Robert H. Jones, The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969); T. Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia (Washington: GPO, 1952); Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 193s1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); and Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945 (New York: St. Martin's, 1957).

[Footnote]
10. The General Staff prepared extensive series of classified military studies between 1942 and 1964. Open-source books published prior to 1953 were openly and blatantly propagandistic. After Stalin's demise, books became much less so. As a part of his de-Stalinization program, Premier and Party Secretary Khrushchev instituted a thaw which endured into the early 1960s. With some exceptions, most of the opensource literature in this period is marked by far greater accuracy and candor. After Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, Soviet authorities restricted this candor somewhat. 11. The Central Archives and that of the Navy also supervise the work of the remainder of the military archival system.

[Footnote]
12. The principal and most important General Staff sources are the Sborniki (Collections) of materials prepared by the Soviet (Red) Army General Staff. These General Staff studies, prepared by the Directorate for the Study of War Experience and the Military-Historical Directorate, include four distinct collections. The Sbornik materia,lov po izucheniiu opyta voiny, No's 1-26 (Collection of materials for the study of war experience, Nos. 1-26), abbreviated as SMPIOV and classified top secret or secret, were published between 1942 and 1948. These volumes, the earliest done by the General Staff, were the product of a system established in 1942 and designed to exploit the study of war experiences in the service of improving Red Army combat performance. Numbers 1-4 in this series, published between July 1942 and February 1943, contain random reports covering a host of unrelated subjects, and are each about two hundred pages long. Subsequent volumes in this series were longer, more substantial, and essentially thematic in nature. Single volumes often covered various aspects of a single major operation in detail. These included studies of the Moscow, Stalingrad, Voronezh-Kastornoe, Kursk, Dnepr, Mius, Crimea, Korsen'-Shevchenkovsk, Belorussian, lassy-Kishinev, Budapest, L'vov-Sandomiercz, Carpathian, East Prussian, and Vistula-Oder operations. Interspersed among these major operational studies were several volumes containing shorter studies on functional themes. The final volume, published in 1948, dealt with topographical support of combat operations.
The second series, entitled Sbornik boevykh dokumentov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Vypusk 1-43 (Collection of combat documents of the Great Patriotic War,

[Footnote]
issues 1-43), abbreviated SBDVOV and classified secret, was published between 1947 and 1960. This extensive documents series supplemented the war experience volumes and contained directives and orders from the Stavka as well as combat documents relating to the activities of all branches and types of Soviet forces. The first thirty volumes (called Issues) focused on functional themes, with volumes on offense, defense, artillery support, river crossing, engineer support, air defense, troop combat training, armored and mechanized forces, etc. An exception was Issue 5, which contains selected Stavka orders. Issues 31 and 32 changed focus and, instead, provided combat histories of the first four Soviet guards rifle divisions for the period 22 June to 31 December 1941. These issues paved the way for an even more extensive effort by the General Staff to reconstruct, on a documentary basis, the events of the initial period of war.
The subsequent issues, numbered 33-43, were perhaps the most informative and interesting portions of the documents series. These were compilations of combat

[Footnote]
orders and reports of fronts, armies, and corps during the period 22 June-5 Novemher 1941, assembled in the fashion of force war diaries. Although their component documents were selective, coverage was thorough, and they provided a most vivid, candid, and probably accurate portrait of combat during this difficult period. The SBDVOV document collection and publication effort ended in the early 1960s when the function of historical analysis was turned over by the General Staff to the newly created Military History Institute of the Ministry of Defense, a more politically oriented organization which discontinued the war diary project.
The third series, entitled Sbornik voenno-istoricheskikh materialov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Vypusk 1-19 (Collection of military-historical materials of the

[Footnote]
Great Patriotic War, issues 1-19), originally classified secret and cited as SV/MVOV, was published between 1949 and 1968. In this series the General Staff used the raw materials contained in other series, together with the full mass of other archival materials, to prepare more polished studies of major wartime operations. Some of these appeared as multivolume books (such as a study of the Moscow operation edited by the former Chief of the General Staff, B. M. Shaposhnikov) and others as singleissue operational studies. The final issue contained an interesting and detailed survey of Soviet creation and wartime employment of allied (Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Rumanian, etc.) forces.
The fourth and final series was the Sbornik takticheskikh prim,erov po opytu Otechestvennoi voiny, No's 1-23 (Collection of tactical examples based on the expe

[Footnote]
rience of the Patriotic War, nos. 1-23), originally classified secret and abbreviated as STPPOOV, which appeared between 1942 and 1947 and supplemented the strategic and operational series. The twenty-three volumes (called numbers) in this series were organized functionally by type of combat action (offense, defense, pursuit, reconnaissance, and the use of types of specialized forces). Of particular interest were Soviet assessments of German tactics (Nos. 1, 3, 4, and 7). The Naval Staff prepared its own series of war experiences, called Sbornik mateiaE po opytu boevoi deiatel'nosti Voenno-Morskogo Flota SSSR, No's 1-39 (Collection of materials based on the experiences of the U.S.S.R.'s naval fleets' combat activities, nos. 1-39), originally classified secret and abbreviated as SMPOBDVMF and published between 1943 and 1950. This thirty-nine-volume series was similar in format to the General Staff war experience volumes. Single volumes related in detail the wartime operations of fleets, flotillas, naval bases, and the Soviet submarine force, and also covered in detail major naval and amphibious operations. These seem to have been as accurate and candid as their General Staff counterparts. Although not yet released, other naval studies, which were published in more polished book form, probably exist.
13. For the most part, when these studies are compared with German and Japanese archival records, their general accuracy and candor are vindicated.

[Footnote]
14. For example, see B. M. Shaposhnikov, ed., Razgrom nemetskikh voisk pod Moskvoi, T. 1-3 (The destruction of German forces at Moscow, vols. 1-3) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1943). The Shaposhnikov-edited study of the Moscow operation (three volumes) represented the best of General Staff traditions. It was detailed, accurate, and fairly candid, and its recent release will substantially alter existing historiography on that operation, which is now largely based on German sources. Other such studies were published, including major books on the Kursk and Berlin operations (which were critiqued as being too politically incorrect at the time of their publication). One hopes that the original or corrected versions will soon be released, together with whatever other major studies the General Staff prepared. 15. See, for example, D. Proektor's study of the Carpatho-Dukla Operation (published in 1960), V. A. Matsulenko's study of 37th Army's role in the lassy-Kishinev operation (published in 1954), K. K. Rokossovsky's Stalingrad study (published in 1965), and others. Although accurate in the main, these works leave out statistical data, in particular relating to correlation of forces and means. 16. See, for example, Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi arm, Chast 1-5 (The combat composition of the Soviet Army, parts 1-4) (Moscow: Voroshilov General Staff Academy [VAGShI, 1963, and Voenizdat, 1966-90) and Komandovanie korpusnogo i divi.sionnogo zvena Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh Sil peri.oda VOV 1941-1945 (Corps and division-level commanders of the Soviet army in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945) (Moscow: Frunze Academy, 1964).
17. See, for example, the series, "Pervyye dni voiny v dokumentakh" (The first days of war in documents), V/Zh, Nos. 5-9 (May-September 1989); "Voennye razvedchiki dokladyvali . . ." (Military intelligence reported), Nos. 2-3 (February-March 1989); and "GKO postanovliaet. . " (The people's commissariat of defense decrees), Nos. 2-5 (February-May 1992).

[Footnote]
18. See, for example, the extensive series of documents published under the rubric "Iz istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny" in Nos. 1-12 (January-December 1990) and Nos. 1-8 (January-August 1991).
19. When archival access has been tested and received the most publicity, such as in the case of the officially agreed upon U.S. search for POW information, access has meant documents brought to researchers rather than researchers hunting for documents in the actual archive locations. Scholars who to date have claimed access normally have had access to peripheral materials or have been provided selected materials on request or through the intervention of an influential third party. It also appears that front-level and higher records and intelligence and political officer records (the commissar chain of command) are still proscribed to researchers.

[Footnote]
20. At these symposia, Colonel Paul Adair, British Army (Ret.), organized the participation of German war veterans, and Colonel David M. Glantz analyzed Soviet sources and detailed Soviet participation in the examined operations. 21. The studies on the Manchurian operation and Soviet airborne experiences were prepared at the request of Japanese historians within the context of U.S.-Japanese historical exchanges. In the fourth symposia, two Soviet war veterans presented their perspectives on the war.

[Footnote]
22. Among the most important forgotten operations were Operation Mars, conducted in November-December 1942 under the supervision of Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Central and Kursk Front offensive of February-March 1943, which for a time threatened to split the entire German Eastern Front, and the Belorussian operation of November-December 1943. All three operations failed with heavy losses and, henceforth, were ignored by Soviet authorities and historians alike. Other books in the publishing conduit are volumes on the state of the Red Army in 1941, on Operation Mars, and on the Battle of Kursk. A program is under way to translate and edit all Soviet General Staff analyses of Soviet wartime operations.

[Footnote]
23. For the pros and cons of the debate, see Viktor Suvorov's works: Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), and Den =M: 22 unia 1941 (M-Day: 22 June 1941) (Moscow: "Vse dlia vas," 1994); and the balanced critique of the debate contained in G. A. Bordiugov and V. A. Nevezhin, Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuiu voinu protiv Gitlera? (Did Stalin begin an offensive war against Hitler?) (Moscow: "AIRO-XX," 1995). An authoritative assessment of the Red Army's combat readiness in 1941 is contained In David M. Glantz, The Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army in June 1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming).
24. For details on Sokolov's view, see his book, Tena pobedy (The cost of victory) (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991), and numerous articles, including "The

[Footnote]
Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939-1945," Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (March 1996): 152-93.

[Footnote]
25. See, for example, David M. Glantz, Marshal Zhukov s Greatest Defeat: Operation Mars, November-December 1942 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming).
26. See A. A. Maslov, Fallen Generals: Soviet General Officers Who Were Killed by Enemy Fire in the War Against Nasi Germany, 1941-1945 (London: Frank Cass, forthcoming).