To be honest, I haven’t read a whole lot of Solzhenitsyn’s writing. But his one novel I keep coming back to is August 1914. I’ve been re-reading it and I came upon this:
“Nevertheless it can be claimed that it it was the first defeat which set the tone of the whole course of the war for Russia; having begun the first battle with incomplete forces, the Russians never subsequently managed to muster enough men in time before an engagement.
Unable to discard bad habits acquired at the start, they went on throwing untrained troops into action direct from the railhead without a pause for acclimatization, thrusting them into the line wherever there was a breach or a leak, in a series of convulsive attempts to regain lost ground; without considering whether these attempts were strategically justified, and regardless of losses.
From the very first our spirits were damped, and our self-assurance was never regained; from the very first both our enemies and our allies were disappointed by our poor showing, and with the stigma of that contempt we had to battle on until we collapsed; from the very first, too, the doubt was awakened in us: did we have the right generals, did they know what they were doing?"
--- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, chapter 40
This seems like a very prescient analysis of what is going on today.