Red Army Book

I loved this book from the first time I picked it up. In my teen years I read a lot of Tom Clancy so I was pretty well up to speed on 1980's weapon systems, and since I'd already ground through Red Storm Rising I thought I knew what I was in for here.

I was mistaken.

Red Army is not Red Storm Rising. In fact it's almost the anti-techno thriller, never getting bogged down in technology porn because sometimes a tank is just a tank. The focus is squarely, emphatically, on the characters, every one of whom is a real, relatable person who we want to see come out of this hellish experience alive. The story is driven by the impact of World War III on the minds and bodies of real people, and that's a very different kind of storytelling.

Being told from the Soviet point of view, it is also mercifully free of flag-waving Americans and their corny "Helluva thing, Mike" dialogue that infest most novels of this type. Instead we get the carefully chosen words of our officer-and-a-gentleman General Malinsky, the man charged with planning a full-scale invasion of West Germany. We get the hopefulness of Bezarin, whose ruthless capability and naivete make him feel like someone we could actually meet in the real world. We also get more repulsive creatures like Starukhin, the bully with the command tent, whose personal hatred for the Jewish staff officer Chibisov corrupts everything they achieve together.

It's a product of its time, having been written at the same time Rumsfeld was giving his infamous "They've been busy" speeches about the largely imagined power of the Soviet military. It was also unfortunate to be released in 1989, just as the Soviet Union was beginning its great breakup (although I think we're all glad it was never vindicated by history). And ultimately its blitzkrieg-on-steroids portrayal of Deep Operations was proven flawed by Desert Storm, where it turned out Clancy was right about the power and flexibility of modern defenses. But still... it's a vividly real picture of war in the (almost) modern era, contrasting the burning tanks and attrition of the fast-moving front with the traffic control disasters being faced by the high command, and at the climax, a chillingly sensible discussion of what to do if the battlefield goes nuclear.

So if you're after another techno-thriller, this ain't it. But if you're after a moving, tragic story of the human cost of war, or maybe a slice of alternate history, Red Army is brilliant.