The Liberators

The Red Army: courtesy of TV we’ve seen the tanks and the missiles paraded through Red Square, rumbling through the resentful streets of Prague, feeling their way into the high bleak valleys of Afghanistan and manoeuvring across carefully edited PR film.
For their differing reasons both NATO and the Russians present it as an invincible clanking machine.
But what is it really like?
Here at last, told with a brutally detailed clarity by a young serving officer, is the inside view: the savage discipline, the often hilarious incompetence, the extravagant idiocy, the corruption, disillusion and petty bureaucracy of a dangerously ramshackle machine.
‘The fifteen years’ regular service in the Red Army of the Ukrainian author of this lively book confers a rare authenticity upon its exposure of weaknesses in Soviet armed forces and its illumination of some of the more grotesque features in the detestable regime they serve’
GENERAL SIR JOHN HACKETT
‘devastating frankness’
OBSERVER
“should be read not just for pleasure but also for understanding’
NEW SOCIETY
‘startling light on the degradation of the Soviet soldiers, often treated no better than uniformed serfs’
DAILY TELEGRAPH