A staff general who turned wartime experience into military theory
After the 1989 withdrawal, he remained in Kabul to advise Najibullah’s government on conducting the war.
Makhmut Gareev was a senior commander and military theorist who shaped Soviet approaches to operations and training through the combined perspective of wartime experience and staff work. In the General Staff’s scientific and operational institutions, he developed a practical method for analysing war and preparing forces. After the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, he remained as chief military adviser to President Mohammad Najibullah, linking continuing Soviet aid with the Afghan government’s military planning and operations. In memoirs and studies, he interpreted the Afghan war and Soviet wartime experience as military and political lessons.
Activities and affiliations
- 1941–1945 Military command · Soviet Union · Military and defence
Career Timeline
- 1941–1945Served in the Great Patriotic War as a battalion and brigade staff officer
- 1947–1950Studied at the M. V. Frunze Military Academy
- 1965–1970Commanded the 50th Guards Motor Rifle Division and served as chief of staff of the 28th Army
- 1970–1971Chief of staff of the military advisory mission in the United Arab Republic
- 1974–1984Headed the General Staff’s Military Scientific Directorate and became deputy chief of its Main Operational Directorate
- 1984–1989Deputy Chief of the General Staff for scientific work and operational training
- 1989–1990Chief military adviser to the President of Afghanistan
- 1995–2019Founding president of the Academy of Military Sciences
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarFront operations staff officerFrom 1944 he served on the 3rd Belorussian Front and was wounded in the assault on Königsberg.
- 1979–1989The Soviet-Afghan WarHead of the military advisory missionHeaded the advisory mission of about 30 officers left in Kabul after the February 1989 withdrawal.
Practice and the war-history front after 1945
From June 1944 Gareev served in the operations department of the 45th Rifle Corps on the 3rd Belorussian Front, and from February 1945 he was posted as a senior officer to the staff of the 5th Army. Wounded during the assault on Königsberg, he stayed in the ranks; after the city fell, the 5th Army was transferred to the 1st Far Eastern Front and fought until Japan's surrender on 2 September 1945. He ended the war a major, with four wounds and a concussion, decorated with five combat orders. Immediately after the fighting he remained on the 5th Army staff, becoming head of the group supervising camps for Japanese prisoners of war in December 1945, and from October 1946 to November 1947 he was a senior officer studying war experience in the army's operations department.
That combat record became the raw material of his later theoretical work. He had already entered military-scientific research in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, producing over 100 scholarly works and more than 300 articles and contributions; he was lead author of numerous Soviet Army manuals and, in his later years, was credited with more than 200 books and studies. The collapse of the USSR did not end the activity. When the Academy of Military Sciences, a non-governmental research body, was founded in February 1995, he was elected its first president and held the post until his death, making the study of Great Patriotic War history and opposition to the falsification of that history central tasks. The scholarly collections he edited were credited with bringing thousands of previously unknown wartime documents into circulation. In September 2015 he received a Chinese medal for his part in the 1945 fighting at Mutanchiang against the Empire of Japan. The arc runs from wartime staff officer to the postwar organisation of war history and military theory, work he understood as distilling the military and political lessons of the Soviet state and its successor. He died on 25 December 2019 and was buried at the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery.