This is a collection of vignettes written by Soviet junior officers describing their experiences fighting the Mujahideen guerillas. The material was originally collected and published - for internal use only - by the Frunze Combined Arms Staff College to serve as a text on combat against a guerilla force in mountain-desert terrain. It provides examples of good and bad military practice. The lessons are not specific to the Russian forces, and the knowledge gained could apply to future conflicts.

Partisans and terrorists have dominated military history during the second half of the 20th century. Confounding greater and lesser powers alike, these fighters have offered a destructive counterpoint to the more stark and apparent phenomenon of nuclear war. Leonid Grenkevich offers an account of the shadowy partisan struggle that accompanied the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).

This volume offers detailed information about the Red Army's preparation for and conduct of the Battle of Kursk, the nature of the war on the German Eastern Front, and on the range of horrors that have characterized warfare in the 20th century.

This, the second book in Alexander A. Maslov's planned trilogy regarding the tragic fate of Red Army general officers who fell victim to the Second World War, is perhaps the most depressing. In it Maslov relates the fate of those generals who fell into German captivity. After relating the grisly circumstances of their ordeal in German prisoner-of-war camps, Maslov tells the sordid tale of how an ungrateful state condemned for treason against their homeland many of those who had served it loyally both in combat and in German prisoner-of-war camps. By exploiting unprecedented archival...

The Red Army's summer offensive of 1944 against Hitler's Wehrmacht was unprecedented in terms of its scale, scope, and strategic intent and impact. For the first time in the Soviet-German War, the Soviet High Command planned a series of massive and strategic operations, each aimed at the defeat of a full German army group.

During the winter of 1943-1944, the Red Army mounted major offensive operations against Hitler's Wehrmacht. By January 1944 the Red Army had penetrated the vaunted Eastern Wall along the Dnepr river and was preparing to lunge deep into the Ukraine. In mid-January 1944, Stalin ordered his 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts to crush German forces defending the last portion of the Eastern Wall in German hands, the salient around Korsun'-Shevchenkovskii. The ensuing offensive destroyed a major portion of two German army corps and precipitated the subsequent fighting withdrawal of German forces from the...

At the request of its Western Allies, on 9 August 1945 a force of over 1.5 million Red Army soldiers, supported by over 5500 tanks, and 27,000 artillery pieces, unleashed a massive offensive against the vaunted Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Employing extensive and imaginative maneuver to overcome terrain thought to be impenetrable, within two weeks, the attacking forces overcame formidable Japanese defenses along a front of more than 2700 miles spanning the most formidable terrain an army has ever faced, utterly demolished the Japanese defenders, and forced them to surrender. The Red...

This study of Soviet military strategy is based upon the relationship between the army and politicians as well as Soviet writings on the subject of military strategy.

At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of Germany's Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht's Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat...

This rare 10th anniversary edition (published in 2007) contains a new introduction by expert Soviet historian David M. Glantz. In addition all maps and graphics have been enhanced from the 1996 edition. "When the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan, they evaluated their chances for success upon their experiences in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately for their soldiers, as well as the people of Afghanistan, they ignored not only the experiences of the British in the same region, but also their own experience with the Basmachi resistance fighters in Central Asia from...