New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Gudrun Persson, "Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

·1 hr 22 min·5 clips

You cannot understand Russia’s current leadership without the long evolution of Russian military thought.

Steven Sikiewicz talks with Gudrun Pierson about Russian military thought. The conversation centers on her work on the development of Russian strategy since the Crimean War, and on what that long history can still say about the present. Pierson treats the post-Crimean period as a reform moment. She describes the years after the war as a time when fresh air entered Russian public life and military debate. From there, the talk turns to a split inside military thinking. One strand, which Pierson links to an academic school, focused on operational lines and technology. Another strand, tied to Dragomirov, stressed fighting spirit, the will to sacrifice, and the need to know why you fight. She compares that divide to the literary controversy between Westerners and Slavo-philes. The analogy is not exact, but it does place the military debate inside a wider Russian intellectual pattern. The episode then asks what happened when those arguments were carried into doctrine. Pierson says the first Soviet military doctrine in the 1920s squared the circle by including both a political part and a technological part. She argues that the same split is still visible today. That matters because it shows Russian military theory as something built with history in view. Pierson contrasts that with the West, and especially the United States, where military history and military theory are often treated as separate things. She suggests that the Western habit is often to cherry-pick a few historical examples, such as France in 1940, for shock-and-awe lessons. The conversation stays with doctrine, institutions, and interpretation rather than battlefield spectacle. That keeps the focus on how ideas move across time. Near the end, the host asks what Pierson is working on now. She says the next project is still early, but it will look at Russia-Swedish relations over a longer time period.

As heard by us

Russian strategy is treated as a living argument, not a museum piece.

The piece follows Russian military thought from the Crimean War onward, showing strategy as something argued over, revised, and carried forward rather than settled once and for all.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the logic behind Russian doctrine, this conversation stays with the question.

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