Soviet Armed Forces

The Red Army Russian: Рабоче-Крестьянская Красная Армия, was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and that, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union.

Red refers to the blood of the working class in its struggle against capitalism. The appellation "Red" was dropped after World War II, when national symbols replaced those connoting the old revolutionary fervor, and it was officially renamed the Soviet Army. The Red Army eventually grew to form the largest army in history from the 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, although China's People's Liberation Army may have exceeded the Red Army in size during some periods.

This article focuses upon the land force element of the Soviet Army, later called the Ground Forces. See Soviet Armed Forces for a description of the Soviet armed forces as a whole.

World War II
Despite the USSR remaining initially neutral in World War II, the Red Army carried out an invasion of the Polish eastern territory in September 1939, with little resistance, and fought in a Winter War against Finland 1939-1940. By the autumn of 1940 the Third Reich had an extensive land border with the Soviet Union, but the latter remained neutral, bound by a non-aggression pact and by numerous trade agreements. For Hitler, no dilemma ever existed in this situation. Drang nach Osten remained the order of the day. On February 3, 1941, the final plan of Operation Barbarossa gained approval, and the attack was scheduled for the middle of May, 1941. However, the events in Greece and Yugoslavia necessitated a delay — to the second half of June.

At the time of the Nazi assault on the USSR in June 1941, the Red Army's ground forces had 303 divisions and 22 brigades, including 166 divisions and 9 brigades stationed in the western military districts. Their Axis opponents deployed on the Eastern Front 181 divisions and 18 brigades. Three Fronts, the Northwestern Front, the Western, and the Southwestern, controlled the forces defending the western border. However the first weeks of the war saw major Soviet defeats as German forces trapped hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers in vast encirclements, causing the loss of major equipment, tanks, and artillery. Stalin and the Soviet leadership responded by stepping up the mobilization that was already under way, and by 1 August 1941, despite the loss of 46 divisions in combat, the Red Army's strength stood at 401 divisions.

Soviet forces suffered heavy damage in the field as a result of poor levels of preparedness, whose primary causes were inadequate officers, as a result of the purges, disorganization as a result of a partially completed mobilization, and the reorganization the Army was undergoing. The hasty pre-war growth and over-promotion of inexperienced Red Army officers as well as the removal of experienced officers caused by the Purges offset the balance favorably for the Germans. The sheer numeric superiority of the Axis cannot be underestimated, though the combat strength of the two opposing forces appears to have been roughly equal in numbers of divisions.

A generation of Soviet commanders learned from the defeats, and Soviet victories in the Battle of Moscow, at Stalingrad, Kursk and later in Operation Bagration proved decisive in what became known to the Soviets as the Great Patriotic War.

The Soviet government adopted a number of measures to improve the state and morale of the retreating Red Army in 1941. Soviet propaganda turned away from political notions of class struggle, and instead invoked the deeper-rooted patriotic feelings of the population, embracing pre-revolutionary Russian history. Propagandists proclaimed the War against the German aggressors as the, in allusion to the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon. References to ancient Russian military heroes such as Alexander Nevski and Mikhail Kutuzov appeared. Repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church stopped, and priests revived the tradition of blessing arms before battle. The Communist Party abolished the institution of political commissars — although it soon restored them. The Red Army re-introduced military ranks and adopted many additional individual distinctions such as medals and orders. The concept of the Imperial Guard re-appeared: units which had shown exceptional heroism in combat gained the designation of Guards unit. This designation was more than symbolic, as Guards units had a more effectice TOE, and were thus allowed to draw better equipment, and drew the best recruits from training grounds and academies. Guardsmen also drew higher pay, and outranked non-guardsmen of the same nominal rank.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army conscripted 29,574,900 men in addition to the 4,826,907 in service at the beginning of the war. Of these it lost 6,329,600 KIA, 555,400 deaths by disease and 4,559,000 MIA. Of these 11,444,100, however, 939,700 re-joined the ranks in the subsequently-liberated Soviet territory, and a further 1,836,000 returned from German captivity. Thus the grand total of losses amounted to 8,668,400. The majority of the losses, excluding POWs, being ethnic Russians, followed by ethnic Ukrainians. However, as many as 8 million of the 34 million mobilized were non-Slavic minority soldiers, and around 45 divisions formed from national minorities served from 1941 to 1943.

The German losses on the Eastern Front comprised an estimated 3,604,800 KIA within the 1937 borders plus 900,000 ethnic Germans and Austrians. Approximately 1,800,000 MIA and 3,576,300 captured; the losses of the German satellites on the Eastern Front approximated 668,163 KIA/MIA and 799,982 captured. Of these 11,349,245, the Soviets released 3,572,600 from captivity after the war, thus the grand total of the Axis losses came to an estimated 7,776,645.

As the Red Army started to advance back across Europe it exacted often brutal revenge for German atrocities. However it also made brutal atrocities on non-German populations in Baltic states, Poland, and even on prisoners in concentration camps. While the laws of the Red Army officially prohibited such activities, the leadership nonetheless tolerated them. However some historians say they refuted allegations that Soviet officials actively encouraged such behavior. As regards prisoners of war, both sides captured large numbers and had many die in captivity - one recent Russian figure says 3,6 of 6 million Soviet POWs died in German camps, while 300,000 of 3 million German POWs died in Soviet hands.

In the first part of the war, the Red Army fielded weaponry of mixed quality. It had excellent artillery, but it did not have enough trucks to maneuver and supply it; as a result the Wehrmacht captured much of it. Red Army T-34 tanks generally outclassed other tanks until 1943, yet most of the Soviet armored units were less advanced models; likewise, the same supply problem handicapped even the formations equipped with the most modern tanks. The Soviet Air Force initially performed poorly against the Germans. The quick advance of the Germans into the Soviet territory made reinforcement and replacements much more difficult since much of the Soviet Union's military industry lay in the west of the country. Until the Soviet authorities re-established the industry east of the Urals, much improvisation was necessary, and Soviet units were routinely far below their weapons establishment levels.

After World War II the Soviet Army had the most powerful land army in history. It had more tanks or artillery than all other countries taken together, more soldiers, and large numbers of greatly experienced commanders and staffs. The British Chiefs of Staff Committee rejected as militarily unfeasible a British contingency plan, Operation Unthinkable, to destroy Stalin's government and drive the Red Army out of Europe.

The Cold War
To mark the final step in the transformation from a revolutionary militia to a regular army of a sovereign state, the Red Army gained the official name of the Soviet Army in 1946. Georgi Zhukov took over as chief of the Soviet Ground Forces in March 1946, but was quickly succeeded by Ivan Konev in July. Konev held the appointment until 1950, when the position was abolished for five years. Scott and Scott speculate that the gap probably was associated in some manner with the Korean War.

The size of the Soviet Armed Forces declined from around 11.3 million to approximately 2.8 million men from 1945 to 1948. In order to control this demobilization process, the number of military districts was temporarily increased to thirty-three, dropping to twenty-one in 1946. The size of the Armed Forces throughout the Cold War remained between 2.8 million and 5.3 million, according to Western estimates. Soviet law required all able-bodied males of age to serve a minimum of three years until 1967, when the Ground Forces draft obligation was reduced to two years. Soviet Army units which had the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule remained in some of them to secure the régimes in what became Warsaw Pact satellite states of the Soviet Union and to deter NATO forces. The Soviet Army may also have been involved alongside the NKVD in suppressing Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. The greatest Soviet military presence was in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, but other Groups of Forces were also established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In the Soviet Union itself, forces were divided by the 1950s among fifteen military districts, including the Moscow, Leningrad, and Baltic Military Districts. As a result of the Sino-Soviet border conflict, a sixteenth military district was created in 1969, the Central Asian Military District, with headquarters at Alma-Ata.

In order to secure Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army broke up 1950s anti-Soviet uprisings in the German Democratic Republic, and Hungary in 1956. Soon afterward, Nikita Khrushchev started reducing the Ground Forces, placing more emphasis on the Armed Forces' nuclear capability, and building up the Strategic Rocket Forces. In doing so he ousted Zhukov, who had opposed the reductions, from the Politburo in 1957. The Soviet Ground Forces again crushed an anti-Soviet revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1968, bringing the Prague Spring to an untimely end.

The Soviet Union reorganized the Ground Forces for war involving nuclear weapons, though Soviet forces did not possess sufficient theatre nuclear weapons to meet war planning requirements until the mid 1980s. The General Staff maintained plans to invade Western Europe whose massive scale was only made publicly available after German researchers gained access to National People's Army files following the collapse of the Soviet Union.