The Soviet Army was one of the most powerful military forces ever created.

As the sun set over the radar crews of Kamchatka, across the strait from Alaska, it rose on divisions barracked on the former German soil of Kaliningrad.

Between these extremities of the eastern and western hemispheres, its men underpinned a system and a superpower.

Their desertion from the Tsar in 1917 created, amid a swirling civil war, the world's first Communist State in a giant country that neither Marx nor Lenin had thought ripe for revolution.

In the greatest battles of the Second World War, they broke the back of Nazism. They brought Communism and a new post-war order into the heartland of Europe during their advance. They maintained it through the long years of Soviet power, despite the tragic Hungarian and Czech revolts. At their peak, they were a rival to the United States.

In this, the most authoritative general study of Soviet military strength, Brian Moynahan reveals the history of this military colossus, its hardware, the ethos of its officers and men, its strategy and ambitions.

Gorbachev's sackings of senior officers are seen against the horrors of the Purges, current military-industrial strength against the freezing, roofless factories of 1942, the invasion of Afghanistan against the crushing of Prague. Trotsky, Stalin, Beria, Barbarossa, Zhukov, Khrushchev, Cuba, Dubček, Walesa haunt its pages, as they haunt the new generation of Russian leaders in the Kremlin.

The book is drawn from a wide variety of published and unpublished sources, and from interviews with former members of the Soviet armed forces. At a time of flux, it strips the obscurity from the greatest force in modern times.

“As complete a briefing as can probably be found this side of a NATO intelligence file or Kremlin archives.” – Kirkus Reviews

Brian Moynahan (born 1951) was European editor of the Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he covered many modern crisis points first hand. He was a former Scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and graduated with a double first in History.

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