ABSTRACT
Comrade Stalin, considered the world's greatest military genius from the mid-1930s until his death in 1953, was portrayed in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the person largely responsible for the huge Soviet losses in the early months of Adolf Hitler's invasion. Then, when many of the Party's leaders feared they also would become identified with Stalin's crimes, a halt had to be called to the de-Stalinization process. A new army, the army of the Soviet state, must have its own Soviet military science. This task was absolutely new for the Bolsheviks. The greatest theoretician and practitioner of military art of the machine period of war, Stalin, enriched the Soviet theory of strategy with teachings on the role of the permanently operating factors which decide the outcome of war. By brilliantly discovering the permanently operating factors of victory, Stalin thereby determined the direction and basis for further development of Soviet military art and especially its leading link-strategy.
