Just over a week ago, the Ukrainian army moved four crack motorised brigades, some 10,000-strong, to the border of Russia’s Kursk region.
The Russians either failed to recognise the significance of that deployment or missed it altogether. When the attack came, it caught them off-guard.
Since then the Ukrainians have managed to grab 400 sq. miles of Russian territory. That’s more than the ongoing Russian offensive in the Donbas has claimed in three months. How come?
To some extent, the answer lies in the skill and courage of the Ukrainian army. But to a larger extent, the reason is the historical drawbacks of the Russian army. That was something Generalissimo Suvorov knew and tried in vain to correct.
Alexander Suvorov (d. 1800) comes close to being canonised as a Russian saint. He certainly is already canonised as a Russian general.
Suvorov fought successfully against the Turks, not so successfully against the French and brilliantly against his own people, when he brutally suppressed the Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1775). That last achievement was downplayed during the Second World War, when Stalin used Suvorov’s name to rally the Soviet troops.
Suvorov was known not only for his victories and contributions to military doctrine, but also for his knack for coining aphorisms. Some he originated, some, such as “Train hard, fight easy”, were merely attributed to him. One aphorism, however, comes to mind at the sight of the surprise attack by the Ukrainian troops.
“Every foot soldier should know his manoeuvre,” Suvorov once said in a wistful exercise of wishful thinking. He meant that even the lowliest infantryman should understand both the overall strategic objectives and the tactical means of achieving them. That way the soldier would develop the initiative and speed of thought required to respond to a changing situation, improvising if necessary.
For all his talent, Suvorov never managed to train his army in that spirit. Neither has any Russian general since.
They’ve all failed not because Russian soldiers lack courage – quite the opposite: few nations breed so many young men ready to die en masse. Nor is it the failure of academic training: since the Second World War, the Russian officer corps has become well-versed in the ins and outs of military arts.
The problem lies deeper than that, and I must refer you to the brilliant book Carnage and Culture by the American historian Victor Davis Hansen. He shows that throughout history, from the Battle of Salamis (480 BC) onwards, Western armies have consistently defeated their enemies from elsewhere.
He analyses many contributing factors, but the overarching principle is that an army is always a reflection of the country that sends it into battle. Hence a Westerner growing up in conditions of even inchoate freedom perceives himself as a citizen, whereas his Persian or Carthaginian adversary knows that ultimately he’s a slave.
This distinction begets numerous ramifications. One of them is that a Westerner is imbued with a sense of individual responsibility. And when he becomes a soldier, he’s trained in the same spirit.
That gives him the confidence and flexibility to react instantly to a rapidly changing situation, something a slave can’t do. A soldier raised in a tyranny fears his own officers, the officers fear their generals, the generals fear their ruler – and such fears are greater than those caused by the enemy.
Taking initiative before a direct order arrives from high above is hard when a soldier of any rank knows that a setback will get him executed by his own people. (During the Second World War the Soviets executed 158,000 of their own soldiers. The corresponding number for the Wehrmacht was 8,000.) He has been trained since infancy that independent thought can get him in trouble.
Prodded by commanders who see soldiers as expendable material, such an army may astound the world with its readiness, nay eagerness, to take massive casualties in a human-wave assault. But it’ll hardly ever succeed in a situation where it has no numerical advantage and where the speed of improvisational thought and movement is at a premium.
That’s why the outnumbered proto-Western Greeks under Themistocles defied the odds to rout the Persians under Xerxes at Salamis. And why a small Anglo-French expeditionary force thrashed the Russian army in the Crimean War (1853-1856).
For Russia has always been typologically closer to the Persia of Xerxes than to the Greece of Themistocles. That’s why Friedrich Engels, Marx’s accomplice, pointed out that the Russians had never won any major battles where they hadn’t had much greater numbers than the opposition. (Engels’s views on Russia weren’t widely publicised in the Soviet Union.)
The wars Russia fought in the 20th century, against Japan, Poland, Finland, Germany and Afghanistan, all vindicated that observation. Some of those wars Russia won, some she lost, some she drew, but in each one her army demonstrated innate weaknesses similar to those pointed out by Hansen.
In 1939-1940, a tiny Finland managed to retain her independence, if not all of her territory, against the might of the Red Army, by far the most numerous and best-equipped in the world. In addition to defending the fortified Mannerheim Line, the Finns deployed small mobile units to strike fast and vanish into the forests. Meanwhile, the Soviets lost 500,000 men by sending wave after wave against entrenched positions, with each subsequent wave advancing over the corpses of the previous one.
In 1941-1942 the Nazis wiped out the professional Red Army, taking over 4,000,000 POWs in history’s greatest such harvest. This though the Soviets outnumbered them in practically every category, such as five to one in tanks, the principal weapon of that war.
German generals of the new generation, Kleist, Guderian, Manstein et al., vindicated another adage by Suvorov: “Fight by skill, not numbers.” It took the combined efforts of the whole world to defeat the Third Reich, which Stalin ruefully acknowledged by telling Roosevelt and Churchill that, but for their help, the Soviets would have lost.
The ongoing war in the Ukraine is, mutatis mutandis, yet another confrontation between East and West, with the Ukrainians cast in the latter role.
They are by nature more individualistic and, shall we say, European than the Russians, and always have been. In the past, Ukrainian agriculture rejected Russian collectivism. If the peasant commune was ubiquitous in Russia, Ukrainian peasants always resembled Western farmers, with a single family, not a commune, being the essential unit.
Ukrainians are in general more civilised than the Russians. Travellers are always struck by the instantly changing landscape the moment they cross from Russia into the Ukraine. Houses become sturdier and neater, fields better-tended, the populace more sober. The farther west one goes, the starker the contrast with Russia – for example, Lvov has always looked more Austrian than Slavic.
The Ukrainian Army was largely trained by Westerners, and it proved receptive to European tactics because its soldiers are themselves European, certainly more so than the Russians. The problem for the Ukrainians so far has come from the dampeners the West applied to their war effort.
Prohibited to attack Russian territory either with troops or long-range bombardment, the Ukrainians were forced to rely on trench warfare, where the Russians’ greater numbers and firepower negate the traditional tactical superiority of West over East.
Now some of the tethers have slipped off, and the Ukrainians are taking advantage of their superior mobility, tactical daring and personnel motivation. Looking at their continuing thrust deep into the Kursk region, one is tempted to think that, had they been properly supplied from the beginning and not artificially held back, the war would already be over.
I don’t know what plans the Ukrainian high command have for the future, nor what the strategic objective of the current offensive may be. The possibilities are numerous.
The Ukrainians may hope to hold on to some Russian territory and use it to barter for the occupied Ukrainian land in future negotiations. Or else they may feel they are strong enough to use their territorial gains as the beachhead for further advances.
Also, the objectives for the raid may be more political and diplomatic than purely military. Zelensky’s people may want to show the West that the weapons it supplies won’t be wasted in a lost cause. Given the right level of support, the Ukraine may well give Putin a bloody nose.
That was the conclusion reached by a by-partisan Senate delegation that visited Kiev on Monday: “After listening to President Zelensky, we urge the Biden Administration to lift restrictions on weapons provided by the United States so they can strike the Russian invaders more effectively.”
One thing is clear already: the true heirs to Suvorov’s legacy are fighting under the blue-and-yellow flag, not the Russian tricolour. More power to them.
P.S. I first heard of Carnage and Culture from my good friend, Prof. David Martin Jones. David tragically took his own life in April, and I miss him tearfully. RIP.
I also enjoyed Carnage and Culture, though it has been 20 years since I read it and I have forgotten all but the main theme. Prior to reading that book, I learned from many sources that one of the pivotal reasons the Allies were able to defeat Germany and Japan was, indeed, the ability of the lower-ranking officers, NCOs, and foot soldiers to improvise on the battlefield.
There is also a book by a former U.S. Marine stressing the importance of the role rifles play in the lives of many Americans. Many WWII volunteers and draftees were expert marksmen before they joined the armed forces. The one advantage he grants to the Japanese was their tendency to squat (as toddlers do), rather than sit. He felt that gave them the advantage shooting in the tall grasses and jungles of some of the Pacific islands. I do not remember the title of the book and my Kindle is not charged, so I have not been able to identify it.
My sincere condolences on the loss of your friend. I cannot imagine what drives a man to perform such an act. It seems to me that the far easier thing is to do nothing, and just slog on.
Shots Fired in Anger: A Rifleman’s Eye View of the Activities on the Island of Guadalcanal by John B. George (lieutenant in the U.S Army, not the Marine Corps).
And German infantrymen and NCOs were infinitely superior in that respect to their Russian colleagues. That’s why a Wehrmacht infantry company typically had just one officer, its commander. The Russian equivalent had seven officers, six of them doing the jobs done by NCOs in Germany.