ABSTRACT
The Soviet war effort was run by Stalin. Command was marked by strict centralization, with higher staffs merely acting as a means to channel information up to the supreme headquarters, the Stavka. Despite the advent of nuclear weapons, postwar Soviet doctrine atrophied along the lines of the permanently operating factors. The death of Stalin in 1953 released Soviet military thinking from the straitjackct of the permanently operating factors, and allowed a major reassessment of the impact of nuclear weapons on military doctrine. At the military-technical level, changes were required in terms of doctrine, equipment and organization to match the shift away from Kruschev’s ‘one variant war’. Soviet divisions in the mid–late 1960s were seen as lacking the weapons for a credible conventional option. The Ogarkov revolution was largely confined to developments at the military-technical level, the mid to late 1980s saw a fundamental review of Soviet security policy at all levels.
