Mass, Mobility, and the Red Army’s Road to Operational Art, 1918-1936

The first requirement for this paper is to deal with the problem of exactly what we mean by the three terms employed in the title. Mass in the Russian context has a double meaning. To some it unquestionably calls to mind the image of the Russian steamroller, which provided nightmares of Schlieffen and his planners in the decades before World War I. A simple process of extrapolation based upon the size of Russia’s standing army, the number of conscripts being inducted in any year under the universal military service statute, and the Empire’s total population provided a rough estimate of the total number of rifles and bayonets which the tsar could put into the field. The tsarist government’s adoption of the Grand Program for rearmament in 1912 thus threatened to change the military balance on the continent. Those forces would mobilize slowly, but, like a steamroller, their momentum would carry all before them.