Richard W. Harrison – författare

In the first half of the twentieth century, both czarist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, were confronted with the problem of conducting military operations involving mass armies along broad fronts, a characteristic of modern war. Despite the ideological and technological differences between the two regimes, both strove toward a theory that became known as operational art - that level of warfare that links strategic goals to actual combat engagements. From the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, through World War I, the civil war, and to the eve of World War II, modern operational art grew from theoretical speculations by a small group of officers to become a critical component of the Soviet art of war. In this first comprehensive treatment of the subject, Richard Harrison shows how this theory emerged and developed to become - despite radically different political settings and levels of technology - essential to the Red Army's victory over Germany in World War II. Tracking both continuity and divergence between the imperial and Red armies. Harrison analyzes, on the basis of theoretical writings and battlefield performance, the development of such operationally significant phenomena as the ""front"" (group of armies), consecutive operations, and the deep operation, which relied upon aircraft and mechanized formations to penetrate the kind of intractable defense systems that characterized so much of World War I. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including memoirs, theoretical works, and materials from the Russian military archives (many presented here for the first time), Harrison traces the debates within the Russian and Soviet armies that engaged such theorists as Neznamov, Svechin, Triandafillov, and Isserson. The end result is an exemplary military intellectual history that helps illuminate a critical element in the ""Russian way of war.

The Red Army's leading operational theorist in the 1930s, Georgii Samoilovich Isserson was the mastermind behind the "deep operation"--the cornerstone of Soviet offensive operations in World War II. Drawing from an in-depth analysis of Isserson's numerous published and unpublished works, his arrest file in the former KGB archives, and interviews with his family, this book provides the first full-length biography of the man. The bulk of the narrative deals with the flowering of his intellectual talents from 1929 through 1941. Additional chapters deal with Isserson's arrest and his remaining 35 years, 14 of which were spent in labor camps and internal exile.

Soviet Secret Police Chiefs, 1926–1953. Commissars of Fear is a combined edition of two works by Boris V. Sokolov, detailing the lives and careers of the six Soviet secret police heads from Dzerzhinskii to Abakumov. The book brings together The People’s Commissars of Fear and its expanded version The People’s Commissars of Terror, offering a comprehensive view of the men who led Stalin’s apparatus of repression.This reflection on the Soviet era, particularly from the 1920s to the 1950s under Stalin, challenges romanticized views of the past by revealing it as a grim and tragic period. The fates of the six Soviet secret police chiefs—once powerful figures of state repression—serve as stark illustrations. These men, who were responsible for countless deaths during the Great Terror, ultimately shared the fate of their victims, executed by the same regime they served. The author stresses that they were not inherently monstrous but ordinary individuals shaped—and corrupted—by a criminal system. Had historical circumstances differed, they might have lived quiet lives. The positions they held sealed their destinies, making them too dangerous for the regime to keep alive due to the blood they had on their hands, which mirrored that of the top party leadership. Their tragic end highlights how power not only corrupted but consumed its own agents. The author concludes that it was not personal evil but the systemic, criminal nature of Soviet power that transformed these otherwise mediocre men into enduring symbols of terror.A note of gratitude is extended to individuals and institutions who supported the book’s research, especially the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI).