2025/07/29 by Yaacov Falkov · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy #Military History and Strategy #Philosophy, History, and Historiography
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02684527.2025.2546247
openalex publication_date 2025/07/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
In the first half of the 20th century, the Soviets recognized the causal link between strategic and operational failures in the military and intelligence domains and the quality of the intelligence analysis that precedes those failures. With the aim to improve their own processing and further use of intelligence data, the Soviet special services tried various organizational and methodological solutions. For the first time in their history, they created professional analytical functions, trained professional analysts, experimented with research methods advanced for their time, and entered the field of intelligence forecast. Drawing on unique, hitherto unpublished Soviet sources, this article follows this fascinating Soviet intellectual and practical enterprise, highlights its ups and downs, discovers its catalyzers and inhibitors, and traces its influence on the later Soviet concept of intelligence analysis. The article concludes with proposals for future historical research on this topic, as well as with placing its findings in the broader context of Western academic discourse on intelligence analysis.