Partisan and anti-partisan warfare in Soviet military thinking, 1918–1941

This article examines the place of the partisan warfare in Soviet military thought in the interwar years. It argues that the Red Army commitment to the revolutionary ideology led to internally inconsistent theories of partisan warfare and inhibited the development of counter-partisan doctrine. Drawing on Soviet military journals, manuals, and seminar materials from the 1920s and 1930s, it shows how Soviet theories struggled to reconcile conventional approaches to the partisan warfare with Marxist ideology and how the perception of counter-partisan warfare as ideologically problematic and branding as ‘anti-bandit’ operations limited further theorisation of the Red Army Civil War experience.