Army and Party, War and Politics

Abstract

When Sir Winston Churchill characterised the Soviet Union as ‘a mystery wrapped inside a riddle inside an enigma’, he might have added, ‘and so she would wish to appear’. No past rival of Western democracies, not even Hitler’s Germany, has presented to the outside world a more opaque image of policy-making than has the USSR, and in no sphere does this arouse greater confusion and concern than defence policy. Soviet success in turning secrecy into a prime purpose of government is likely for the foreseeable future to deprive the West of any definitive understanding of these matters, and leave even knowledgeable émigrés in dispute about them.

Russian monarchs traditionally considered the military, that is, the army, the closest to their heart among all branches of the administration. It is precisely there that they considered themselves the most competent and consequently interfered in all spheres of its life.

P. A. Zayonchkovskiy

Socialism is against violence being used on nations. That is indisputable. But socialism is in general against violence being used on people. However, no one except a Christian anarchist or a Tolstoyan has ever deduced from this that socialism is against revolutionary violence.

V. I. Lenin