The Liberators: My Life in the Soviet Army

Here is a sardonic and highly personal document by the author of the definitive study of the Red Army, ‘Inside the Soviet Army.’ Suvorov is the pseudonym of an officer in the post-Khrushchev Soviet army who defected to England.No previous book by a Russian has revealed with such clarity and honesty what life is like in the Soviet Army. Suvorov takes the reader through the mind-freezing savagery of a penal glass-house and the extravagant idiocy of army maneuvers on the grandest scale. He shows how an officer is trained, and how the hierarchy of the Soviet army is achieved and maintained. He gives brutally frank portraits of the senior commanders and politicians, and of the petty bureaucrats and Party informers. There is much satiric humor in his Suvorov’s vivid narrative, which includes his experiences not only in training and garrison but in action, such as the infamous crushing of the Czech uprising.