TRIANDAFILLOV, VIKTOR KIRIAKOVICH

(1894–1931), military theorist and intellectual.

Triandafillov was one of the key intellectual leaders of the Red Army during the inter-war period (1918–1939). Triandafillov was instrumental in formulating a new and revolutionary understanding of modern war. Up until the Industrial Revolution, military campaigns had consisted of a single decisive battle or series of inconclusive combats. The industrialization of war set in motion a revolutionary change in the means and methods of waging war. Campaigns became more protracted, battles were less decisive, and armies were more widely distributed in a theater of operations. Triandafillov, along with Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky, Alexander A. Svechin, Boris M. Shaposhnikov, Mikhail V. Frunze, and G. S. Isserson, recognized that the material transmutation of war demanded a corresponding conceptual transformation. He believed that one could no longer think about modern war using a Napoleonic paradigm.

Triandafillov's unique contribution was to help overturn the old Napoleonic cut that framed war in the dual strategy-tactics creative structure. The German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) had associated each of the levels of military art with a particular activity. Strategy was concerned with campaigns and tactics with battles. Other Soviet theorists argued that the complexity of war demanded a new creative component that they referred to as operational art (operativnoe iskusstvo ). The creative domain of operational art became the operation (operatsiia ). Triandafillov made his seminal theoretical contribution concerning the modern operation in a book entitled The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies (1929, 1932, 1936, and 1937). Triandafillov defined the modern operation as a distinct military activity consisting of a "mosaic" of battles and maneuvers, distributed in space and time but unified by aim and purpose, conducted for the object of strategy. Triandafillov was killed in a plane crash in July 1931 while he was in the process of revising his work to consider the practical problems of creating a mass mechanized Red Army.

See also: military, soviet and post-soviet

bibliography

Naveh, Shimon. (1996). In Pursuit of Military Excellence.

Schneider, James J. (1994). The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State.

Triandafillov, Viktor K. (1994). The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies.

James J. Schneider