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Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation. By Sally W. Stoecker. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8133-3410-1. Photographs. Graphs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 207. $59.00.
Forging Stalin's Army describes the remarkable transformation of the Red Army from a peasant militia in the mid 1920s to a professional army in the mid 1930s. During this period the Red Army acquired a dynamic new philosophy, changing from defensive theories to one favoring offensives based on deep penetration. Soviet industrial planning reversed course from concentration solely on building peacetime factories to the beginning of massive accumulation of weapons, rather than waiting for war to begin before reorienting production. During this decade the Soviet...