The Strategic Mind-Set of the Soviet Military: An Essay-Review.

摘要

To the extent that inaccessibility has in the past limited utilization of Soviet professional military writings by Western analysts, that constraint is fast being relaxed thanks to the appearance of competent translations of major Soviet military works, such as the volumes under review. The book by the late Marshal of the Soviet Union A. A. Grechko, who was at the time of his death last year both a full member of the Soviet Communist Party's Politburo and USSR Minister of Defense, is the 12th in the Soviet Military Thought translations series published since 1974 under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force. The translation is from the second (1975) Russian edition, with certain slight revisions. The second volume under review is a new translation, with analysis and commentaries, by Harriet Fast Scott of the third edition of what still stands as the most comprehensive Soviet treatise on military strategy. Written by a group of leading Soviet military academicians under the supervision of the late Marshal V. D. Sokolovskiy, Chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1953 to 1960, Military Strategy was first published in the USSR in 1962. As the first Soviet work of its kind to appear in almost four decades, the Sokolovskiy volume attracted wide attention in the West and was published in two independent translations in the United States, each accompanied by analytical introductions and annotations written by distinguished American students of Soviet military affairs.