The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991

This chapter analyses the evolution of Soviet‐Russian operational art from the perspectives of both war and society. The chapter begins by examining the ideas developed by officer‐scholars such as Aleksandr A. Svechin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the former emphasizing a form of attrition as an alternative to destruction of the enemy army and the latter focusing on ‘deep operations’ and their linkage to the strategy of annihilation. The author examines operational art in various campaigns and battles during the Second World War, from the Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–40 to the linked operations Bagration and Lvov‐Sandomierz in the summer of 1944 which is characterized as an ‘outstanding example of Soviet operational art’.