It has been reported that the General Staff's main role now is that of the Russian Ministry of Defence's department of strategic planning, and the Minister of Defence himself is now gaining executive authority over the troops. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and especially since 2004 the General Staff and the Russian Ministry of Defence have attempted to divide direction of the armed forces between them, often in intense bouts of bureaucratic disagreement. … Within the Ministry of Defence, all the resource allocation issues were normally resolved by the chief of the General Staff before going to the minister, and finally, after consultation with GOSPLAN, to the Politburo.' ĭuring the Cold War, the Soviet General Staff maintained Soviet plans for the invasion of Western Europe, whose massive scale was made known secretly to the West by spies such as Ryszard Kukliński and later published by German researchers working with the National People's Army files, and the Parallel History Project and the associated Polish exercise documents, Seven Days to the River Rhine (1979). The minister of defence had only a limited staff for his own support, leaving him heavily dependent on the General Staff.
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After the war it became the most powerful centre for virtually all aspects of military planning, operations, and determination of resource requirements. General Staff officers typically had extensive combat experience and solid academic training.ĭuring World War II became Stalin's main organ for operational direction of all military forces. Many of the former RKKA Staff officers had served as General Staff officers in the Russian Empire and became General Staff officers in the USSR. On 22 September 1935, the authorities renamed the RKKA Staff as the General Staff, which essentially reincarnated the General Staff of the Russian Empire. the history of the Soviet General Staff – as it was to become – begins'. Erickson dates the development of the Staff as the Soviet "military brain" from Mikhail Frunze's appointment to the post of Chief of Staff by Order No.78 of 1 April 1924. A Red Army Staff first formed in 1921 but, historian John Erickson says, until 1924 developed into an unwieldy grouping dealing with combat training, routine Red Army affairs, and defence policy, all without real definition. In the Soviet Armed Forces, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR acted as the main commanding and supervising body of the military. Memorial sign "250 years of the General Staff" (2013)