Russia Military History

On May 14-15, 1905, in the Tsushima Straits near Japan, an entire Russian fleet was annihilated, its ships sunk, scattered, or captured by the Japanese. In the deciding battle of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese lost only three destroyers but the Russians lost twenty-two ships and thousands of sailors. It was the first modern naval battle, employing all the new technology of destruction.

Today, Chechnya is a republic with some degree of autonomy in the contemporary Russian Federation. The majority of Chechnya’s population is comprised of Sunni Muslims, meaning religion has played a key role in the territory’s development. Wedged in the North Caucasus mountain range and bordering the Caspian Sea, Dagestan is a true meeting point of cultures, religions and geopolitical rivalries. A crossroad between east and west, Dagestan has been vitally important at different times for various powers in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is a central character in the movie Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks. In his classic 1970 memoir, Powers reveals the full story behind what happened in the most sensational espionage case in Cold War history. After his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down, Powers was captured on May 1, 1960 and endured 61 days of rigorous interrogation by the KGB, a public trial, a conviction for espionage, and the start of a 10-year sentence.

Concluding his acclaimed series on the Eastern Front in World War I, Prit Buttar comprehensively details not only these climactic events, but also the "successor wars" that raged long after the armistice of 1918. New states rose from the ashes of empire and war raged as German forces sought to keep them under the aegis of the Fatherland. These unresolved tensions between the former Great Powers and the new states would ultimately lead to the rise of Hitler and a new, terrible world war only two decades later.

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.

The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy - the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.

In Red Mutiny, Neal Bascomb turns his attention to the legendary uprising aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905. After they are served rancid meat, 600 sailors rebel. Their violent struggle against oppression and hopelessness comes to symbolize the core ideals of the Russian Revolution.

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery - until now.

In Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the dramatic endgame of America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan’s central role in shaping the world we live in today. On May 31, 1988, Reagan stood on Russian soil and addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University, delivering a remarkable - yet now largely forgotten - speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital.

When Germany’s Sixth Army advanced to Stalingrad in 1942, its long-extended flanks were mainly held by its allied armies - the Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians. But as history tells us, these flanks quickly caved in before the massive Soviet counter-offensive which commenced that November, dooming the Germans to their first catastrophe of the war. However, the historical record also makes clear that one allied unit held out to the very end, fighting to stem the tide - the Italian Alpine Corps.

It was history's most successful political partnership - as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin - wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented - was the love of her life and her co-ruler. Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, defining the Russian empire to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine her young male favourites.

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

In April 1945, German troops withdrawing from the Seelow Heights were encircled by the Soviet Army near the small town of Halbe, south-east of Berlin. Rather than surrender, their orders were to attempt to break out, westward, and join up with the German twelfth Army. A brutal battle ensued, with an estimated 30,000 German and 20,000 Russian soldiers killed, along with thousands of civilians.

This DIA report examines a resurgent Russia’s military power to foster a deeper understanding of its core capabilities, goals, and aspirations in the 21st century. The resurgence of Russia on the world stage - the Crimean Peninsula, destabilizing Eastern Ukraine, intervening on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and shaping the information environment to suit its interests - poses a major challenge to the United States. Moscow will continue to aggressively pursue its foreign policy and security objectives by employing the full spectrum of the state’s capabilities.

In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans' fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin's armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, one of the turning points of World War II. Within six months, the invasion bogged down on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Eastern Front proved to be the decisive theater in the defeat of the Third Reich. Ever since, most historians have agreed that this was Hitler's gravest mistake. In Hitler's Great Gamble, James Ellman argues that while Barbarossa was a gamble and perverted by genocidal Nazi ideology, it was not doomed from the start.

General Erhard Raus was one of the German Army's finest panzer generals and a leading exponent of blitzkrieg in the east. German panzers were witnesses to the incredible onslaught that was the first few months of Barbarossa, then the gradual strengthening of Russian resistance, counterattack and, ultimately, the long and drawn-out German retreat. Raus and his panzers were tested in every conceivable tactical situation and, inevitably, Raus became highly versed in all aspects of mobilized warfare.

In 1941, Lenin's body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By 1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. Stalin imposed the most draconian controls-unbending censorship, no visits to the battlefront, and a ban on contact with ordinary citizens.