With Their Tanks, and Their Bombs, and Their Bombs, and Their Guns: Soviet Arms Exports

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union was the largest arms exporter in the world. According to Robbin Laird’s article “Soviet Arms Trade with the Noncommunist Third World”, in 1980 the USSR was responsible for 34% of the world’s arms exports. A CIA report from 1980 places the value of those sales […]

Let’s Talk About Tanks Baby: T-34 and Soviet Armor in the Second World War

Over the last week, we’ve been talking about the inexorible Soviet war machine that, once awakened, slowly ground the Nazis into the dirt. It did this through shear inexaustible weight of men, materiel, and machines. For this week’s blog post, I want to focus on the “war machine” part of that war machine, in particular […]

Deep Battle and the Development of Soviet Military Theory in the Interwar Period

The bloody fields of the First World War prompted major shifts in military thinking. Going into the war in 1914, most of the belligerents still conceived of war as it was during the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars. This emphasized maneuver between compact forces, punctuated by sharp, decisive battles on relatively small battlefields. The winner […]

Much Ado About Swords- Exploring the Zlatoust weapons foundry through photographs

As part of my 20th Century Russia history class, we have to pick a photograph taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. As I was browsing through the World Digital Library gallery, a group of pictures stood out to me. Entitled “Successive Steps in the Production of Blades, Scabbards, and Manufacture of Welded Damask Steel at the Zlatoust […]