Page:Joseph Davies Memorandum regarding Military Strength of the Soviet Union.djvu/11

 military institutes or academies which prepare officers for general command duty and for general staff duty. His military qualifications for command of company, battalion, regimental, and brigade units are considered excellent. His qualifications for higher command have not been tested but are probably good. His general education is spotty. As a rule, he is qualified in the basic sciences, his own language and literature, and has been exposed to a long course of training in socialist theory. He has also some general culture and an appreciation of music and art. His knowledge of history is usually deficient, and his views as to foreign nations are nearly always distorted. He is usually a man of excellent physique, ambitious, and full of energy, and accepts as part of his job hardships and deprivations which do not fall to the lot of officers in other armies.

28. The government fully realizes that its strength and the success of the regime it is attempting to maintain, depends in the last analysis on the loyalty and support of the Red Army. No pains have been spared to indoctrinate both of officers and conscripts with a sense of loyalty to the government and to their country. These efforts have, in fact, produced a loyal army. The military trials of 1937 and the exposure of -11-