Echo of the Spanish civil war: the experience of tank use in the perception of the Red Army high command, 1936 - 1939

The article analyzes the soviet military elite’s perception of the tank use during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939. An emphasis is put on the particular attention paid by the top soviet military and political command to the experience of conducting a war by different branches and types of armed forces to be obtained and recorded. The article is based on a content analysis applied to the verbatim report which was made at a meeting of the Red Army High Command with the first military experts in 1937. The latter having returned from Spain were invited to share the obtained combat experience. As the author finds out, the meeting was not thoroughly worked out and prepared. Having analyzed and reconstructed their insight into the first experience of applying tanks in a modern war, the author concludes that that the Red Army command were mostly interested in the social and political aspect of the Spanish Civil War. The priority interest was the political situation on the fronts of the war: the interaction between the soviet military experts and representatives of political parties, the peasants’ attitude to the Republican authority and its army. According to the analysis of the military experience, the ability of cooperation between People’s Commissar for Defense Kliment E. Voroshilov and his subordinates is rated extremely low. The content-analysis revealed the incongruity between the content of the participants’ interest toward the experience of the war and their official status, which leads to the conclusion that the USSR’s High Military Command were not prepared for an adequate perception of the experience of the tank use in the course of the Spanish Civil War.