As German panzer divisions pushed toward the Russian rear with incredible speed, the Luftwaffe blasted their inexperienced and badly trained Russian counterparts. As a result of this Blitzkrieg, the Baltic states were swiftly overrun. The damage inflicted by the Germans was catastrophic. By November, vital agricultural, industrial, transportation, and communications centers had been destroyed. More than 2 million Russian soldiers had been captured. Three hundred and fifty thousand Russian troops had been killed. Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand were missing. And 1 million had been wounded. In Leningrad alone, 900,000 civilians were killed during the enemy siege. It wasn't until the last days of December that the battered but resilient Russians-- helped by -20° temperatures that shattered German boot soles, froze their equipment, and destroyed morale-- were able to mount their first successful counterattack. As a result of this counteroffensive, the Russians were just able to keep Moscow from enemy hands.

Ultimately, Operation Barbarossa was a disaster for the Germans. But it taught the Soviets an important lesson about the desirability of fighting an offensive rather than a defensive war. For the next forty years, their military grew with the almost fanatical goal of being able to launch and sustain an offensive war-- as General Mikhail Kosigan had once put it in a speech to his troops, "to fight the next world war, if it comes, on everyone else's territory." To this end, missions for commanders of first-echelon tactical units were comprised of three components designed to destroy or capture enemy troops and equipment and seize and control key territory: the immediate mission, or blizhaiashcha zadacha; the subsequent mission, or posledyushchaia zadacha; and the follow-up mission, or napravlenie dal'neishego nastupleniia. Within those broad missions, regiments were often assigned a key mission of the day, or zadacha dnia, which were goals that had to be completed within a specific time frame-- no excuses accepted.

Whether it was in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, or Chechnya in 1994, Moscow relied on its military and not on diplomacy to solve problems in its own backyard. Its guiding principles were supriz, neozhadennost' and vnezapnost': surprise, anticipation of the unexpected, and causing the unexpected. Often their efforts were successful, and sometimes they were not. But the mind-set remained, and Interior Minister Dogin knew it. He also knew that many Russian commanders yearned for the opportunity to redeem themselves after nine bloody years in Afghanistan and the lengthy and costly suppression of the rebels in Chechnya.

The time had come to give them a chance. Many of his men had been moved to Russia's border with Ukraine, where, unlike Afghanistan and Chechnya, they wouldn't be fighting rebel armies and partisan guerrillas. This war, this aktivnost, this initiative, would be different.