Kunikov wrote: It's a great source for intelligence reports, if someone was to do a study of all the reports I think a new picture would become clear as to how much was really known and how contradictory and general some reports really were.
Well some attempts of that kind were made, for example, by Metlukhov. But the issue IMO still remains open.
Now "On the eve of the war" publsihed as a first volume of "Russian Archive" series. This is a stenographic record of the annual meeting of leading figures among Red Army high commanders which was held in December 1940. The meeting was rather widely known and was mentioned in a number of secondary or memoir sources, but the ful record was published only in 1993. The conference consisted of two parts. The first traditional one was devoted to current problems, first of all to the state of military training. The second, and it was a peculiarity of that year's meeting contained several reports on theoretical issues which were some kind of summary of the current situation in Soviet military doctrine. More specificaly these reports were: "Nature of modern offensive operation" by Georgy Zhukov, "Nature of modern defensive operation" by Ivan Tyulenev, "Airforces in offensive operation" by Pavel Rychagov, 'Mechanized foces in offensive opeartion" by Dmitry Pavlov and "The rifle division in defensive and offesnive combat" by Andrey Smirnov. In general it's a very instructive reading, moreover I was always impressed by the record of direct speach of real historical characters - it creates a preesence effect, that no other source can give.
The book in electronic form (in Russian):
http://militera.lib.ru/docs/da/sov-new-1940/index.html
BTW the records of the same annual conference for the years 1937 and 1938 were published a couple of years ago. See:
http://www.book.ru/176627
But probably hey were published not a long ago or probably this boks are of less interest thay remianed to be relatively less known than the first.
In 1939 the conference wasn't held because of the Winter War, instead we have the book "Stalin and the Soviet-Finnish War, 1939-40":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/071465 ... roduct_top
It was also published in Russian and IIRC in Finnish. Fortunately, this book is more about the SF War than about Stalin. It is a record of the conference again, this time held in April 1940 just after the war ended and summarizing its experience. The remarkable feature is a rather critical attitude of the most part of participants toward Red Army's perfomance in the war sometimes even with sharp criticism.
Unfortunately, I have only the first volume, but, yes, it's an valuable source.