William Odom wrote:During World War II [the General Staff] became Stalin's main organ for operational direction of all military forces.

… Within the Ministry of Defence, all the resource allocation issues were normally resolved by the chief of the General Staff before going to the minister, and finally, after consultation with GOSPLAN, to the Politburo.

'[3]During the Cold War, the Soviet General Staff maintained Soviet plans for the invasion of Western Europe, whose massive scale was made known secretly to the West by spies such as Ryszard Kukliński and later published by German researchers working with the National People's Army files,[4] and the Parallel History Project[5] and the associated Polish exercise documents, Seven Days to the River Rhine (1979).

[6]Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and especially since 2004 the General Staff and the Russian Ministry of Defence have attempted to divide direction of the armed forces between them, often in intense bouts of bureaucratic disagreement.

[7] Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov who initiated the 2008 military reform, in order for separation of operational and administrative functions, the Ministry of Defense formed two functional lines of responsibility: the first was planning the use and construction of the Armed Forces, the second was planning the comprehensive support of troops (forces).

As a result of the transformations carried out, the General Staff was freed from duplicate functions and became a full-fledged strategic planning body that organizes and exercises control of the Armed Forces in fulfilling the assigned tasks.