"It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the Red Army."

"Foolish, or even criminal, is the word to describe the behaviour of any Army that does not prepare itself to master all the various types of weapon ... that the enemy has or might have."

V I Lenin

"We will not spare our forces in fighting for the victory of Communism."

"Under Stalin, Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe were governed by a system of open dictatorship, uncamouflaged in any way. The Warsaw Treaty did not exist for one simple reason - it was not needed. All decisions were taken in the Kremlin and monitored by the Kremlin. The Defence Ministers of the East European counties were regarded as equal in status to the Commanders of Soviet Military Districts and they came under the direct command of the Soviet Minister of Defence ... The Defence Ministers of the 'sovereign' states of Eastern Europe were either appointed from the ranks of Soviet generals or were 'assisted' by Soviet military advisers ... Each adviser had at his disposal at least one tank army, several all-arms armies and special SMERSH punitive detachments. To disregard his 'advice' would be a very risky business."

"The Warsaw Treaty Organisation is a chimera, called into being to camouflage the tyranny of Soviet Communism in the countries under its occupation in order to create an illusion of free will and corporate spirit. Propaganda claims that it was as a result of the establishment of NATO that the countries of Eastern Europe came together in a military alliance. The truth is that, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union took full control over the armies in the countries which it had overrun, long before NATO came into existence ...During the Organisation's first thirteen years the Ministers of Defence of the sovereign states, whether they were Soviet puppets or actual Soviet generals and marshals, were subordinated to the Commander-in-Chief, who was appointed by the Soviet government and who was himself a Deputy Minister of Defence of the USSR."

"The organisation [WTO], despite its great complexity, has absolutely no reality. The Supreme Soviet neither formulates policy nor takes decisions. It is purely decorative, like the WTO, there for show and nothing more ... The ultimate goal is the disbandment of all military blocs, in Europe and throughout the world .. If NATO is disbanded, the West will have been neutralised, once and for all. The system of collective self-defence of the free countries will have ceased to exist. If the Warsaw Treaty Organisation is disbanded at the same time, the USSR loses nothing except a cumbersome publicity machine. It will remain in complete control of the armies of its 'allies'. All that will be lost is the title itself and the organisation's bureaucratic ramifications."

"When Munich, Rome and Helsinki applaud Soviet marksmen, wrestlers and boxers, everyone assumes that these are amateurs. But they are not - they are professionals, professional killers."

"Soviet Military Intelligence is neither an Armed Service nor an Arm of Service. It has no uniform or identifying badge or emblem. Nor are these needed. Intelligence is a logistical support service, like the services concerned with nuclear warheads or camouflage or disinformation. All these services are secret and do not need publicity. Each of them adopts the appearance of the unit in which it finds itself and becomes indistinguishable from it. In numbers and technical equipment, Military Intelligence is approximately the size of the Bundeswehr - the entire armed services of the Federal German Republic."

"In East Germany there are 5 Soviet Armies, that is to say 10 electronic intelligence battalions, which keep a constant watch on the enemy, in addition to the 19 companies which are on the strength of the divisions of these armies."

"In peacetime, East European divisions see themselves as part of their own national armed forces. In war they would be distributed throughout the Soviet Armies .. For military purposes they would be subordinated to the Soviet Armies, Fronts and Strategic Directions and, ultimately, to the Soviet Supreme Commander and to his General Staff. It is because of this that the Staff of the WTO is a bureaucratic institution rather than an operational headquarters."

"If socialism is unable to feed itself in peacetime, when the whole army is used to bring in the harvest, what will happen when all the men and vehicles at present used for agriculture are mobilised for war?"

"A Tank Army is like a rushing flood, tearing its way through a gap in the dyke, smashing and destroying everything in its path. By contrast an All-Arms Army is a quiet, stagnant sheet of water, flooding a whole area, drowning enemy islands and slowly undermining buildings and other structures until they collapse."

The presence of UN forces in Safe Areas is being compromised and undermined. "In Sarajevo, the Bosnian Army provokes the Serbs on a daily basis. Since the middle of December, the Bosnian Army jumped another step by launching heavy infantry attacks from Sarajevo to the Serb-held suburbs of the city. The Bosnian Army attacks the Serbs from a safe area, the Serbs retaliate, mainly on the confrontation line, and the Bosnian presidency accuses Unprofor for not protecting them against Serb aggression and appeals for air strikes against the Serb gun positions." Report on the position as he saw it in January 1994, to the civilian head of the UN in former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi.

General Francis Briquemont

"Some senior officers, notably General Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, Commander in Chief of the Air Force, and Lieutenant-General Pavel Grachev, commander of Airborne Forces, had set themselves against the coup from the outset, and were to be rewarded with senior commands when it collapsed. Others, such as General Yuri Maksimov, Commander in Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, sat on the fence but took prudent precautions. Maksimov ordered his ballistic missile crews to assume a non-provocative posture, parking their mobile launchers in the view of US satellites."

"A 1994 expose in Atlantic Monthly by Seymour Hersh reported that the NSA had succeeded in taping into landlines carrying the Soviet Union's highest level military traffic, presumably in Moscow. [He] suggested that the NSA had fed Yeltsin with information about the loyalty of different sections of the armed forces during the August 1991 coup ... if the expose is accurate this extraordinary intelligence operation may explain why President Bush took a sanguine attitude from the outset of the coup." UK Eyes Alpha

Mark Urban