Russia's Army

With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putins Russia seems to have stepped out of time, reverting to an imperial era of conquest and expansion. But as Roger Reese points out in this comprehensive new history, Russias way of war has changed little from one century to the next, one regime to another, from the army of the tsar to the army of today. Russias Army reveals how the Imperial Russian Army and its successors, the Soviet Army and the army of the Russian Federation, confronted the states foreign policy challengesprojecting power and defending the empireand the domestic challenge of containing internal unrest generated by nationalism, competing ethnic and religious identities, and political discontent. These twin challenges, in turn, drove defense policy and the planning and conduct of war. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development of the army was driven by shifts in the European balance of power and changes in global diplomacy, politics, economics, and society. Reese identifies themes that weave their way through this military history: the adoption of a strategy to maintain a defensive posture in the West, an offensive strategy in the Balkans, and an expansionist policy in the East; maintenance of a large standing army; and a consistent unease about the armys and non-Russian minorities loyalty to the state. These themes, he shows, have emerged in times of peace and war, as heads of state have made operational and strategic military decisions while managing civil-military relationsfrom the times of tsarist Russia through the collapse of the Soviet empire, when Putin sought to restore authoritarian rule and hegemony over the former Soviet states of the USSR. A comprehensive account of the history of the Russian army from 1801 to 2022, Reeses is the first book to link Russian military history across three distinct eras and to situate this history within the context of military strategy and doctrine, as reflected in specific campaigns, issues of manning and maintaining an army, and relations between army and society, at home and in the near abroad.