Stalin's purges devastated the Red Army's officer class. Commissars and NKVD political departments were constantly sniffing for any scent of treachery or incompetence, particularly in the earlier stages of the war. I remember reading one anecdote about a Soviet officer during Operation Barbarossa who was sent to the front to get a feel for the situation. He was also assigned two NKVD bodyguards, as they were locals who knew the area well. When he arrived, the commanding officer all but burst in to tears and pleaded "I haven't done anything!". Seeing the NKVD men with him, the CO had assumed he was being dragged to the gulag. Many officers early in the war were paralysed by fear, as any individual initiative may be perceived as disobeying orders.

Stalin's purges also claimed many military thinkers (for example Tukhachevsky), who in the interwar years had been developing the doctrine of "Deep Operations" (I'm no expert, but it seems to mean using combined arms to create and exploit deep breakthroughs). With the deaths of so many officers associated with the doctrine, it came to be seen as almost heretical. It had to be relearned by the Soviets during the war, and eventually they used it to great effect (I suppose the Raid on Tatsinskaya may fall under this definition).

Source: Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad

It might be about "Auftragstaktik" / "mission-type-tactics". I'm no expert but the way I understand it is that german subordinate leaders were given basically a mission goal and a time frame to achieve it. How ever they would do so was more or less up to them, and forces were allowed to adjust their tactics if the situation changed or new oportunities apeared. (( changeing your route because you ran into unexpected resistance, or splitting off a part of your force to ambush an enemy convoy you ran into ).

The allies on the other hand were given much stricter mission details and they had to stick to it.

From interviews with german veterans I remember them talking about how allied forces would again and again try to force their way through hard defended german positions instead of trying to outmanouver them because their mission-systhem didnt allow them to change/adjust their tactics in the same way the germans could.

Whatever might be the justification for it, the idea that Russians are doctrinaire in their approach to combat appears to be relatively common, at least in the West. For example, from Robert Shaw's book Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering: "I have found that asking two U.S. pilots for their tactics in a given situation elicits three different answers. By contrast, it is my understanding that three Russian fighter pilots will all give the same answer."