Encyclopedia
The short forms
Red Army and
RKKA refer to the
Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, , the armed forces first organized by the
Bolsheviks during the
Russian Civil War in 1918. This organization became the army of the
Soviet Union after the establishment of the
USSR in 1922, and eventually grew to form the largest army in the world from the 1940s until the collapse of the
Soviet Union in December 1991.
"
Red" refers to the blood shed by the working class in its struggle against capitalism. Although the Red Army officially became the
Soviet Army from 1946, people in the West commonly use the term
Red Army to refer also to the Soviet military after that date, i.e., during the
Cold War.
Early history
The Council of People's Commissars set up the Red Army by decree on January 15 1918 , basing it on the already-existing Red Guard. The official
Red Army Day of February 23, 1918 marked the day of the first mass draft of the Red Army in
Petrograd and
Moscow, and of the first combat action against the occupying imperial
German army. February 23 became an important national holiday in the
Soviet Union, later celebrated as "Soviet Army Day", and it continues as a day of celebration in
present-day Russia as Defenders of the Motherland Day. Credit as the founder of the Red Army generally goes to
Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for War from 1918 to 1924.
At the beginning of its existence, the Red Army functioned as a voluntary formation, without ranks or insignia. Democratic elections selected the officers. However, a decree of May 29, 1918 imposed obligatory military service for men of ages 18 to 40. To service the massive draft, the Bolsheviks formed regional
military commissariats , which
as of 2005 still exist in Russia in this function and under this name.
After General
Aleksei Brusilov offered the Bolsheviks his professional services in 1920, they decided to permit conscription of former officers of the army of
Imperial Russia. The Bolshevik authorities set up a special commission under the chair of Lev Glezarov , and by August 1920 had drafted about 315,000 ex-officers. Most often they held the position of military advisor . A number of prominent Soviet Army commanders had previously served as Imperial Russian generals. In fact, a number of former Imperial military men, notably a member of the Supreme Military Council, Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, had joined the Bolsheviks earlier.
The Bolshevik authorities assigned to every unit of the Red Army a political commissar, or
politruk, who had the authority to override unit commanders' decisions if they ran counter to the principles of the Communist Party. Although this sometimes resulted in inefficient command, the Party leadership considered political control over the military necessary, as the Army relied more and more on experienced officers from the pre-revolutionary
Tsarist period.
Officer Corps
Ranks and Titles
The early Red Army abandoned the institution of a professional officer corps as a "heritage of tsarism" in the course of the Revolution. In particular, the Bolsheviks condemned the use of the word "officer" and used the word "
commander" instead. The Red Army abandoned
epaulettes and ranks, using purely functional titles such as "Division Commander", "Corps Commander", and similar titles. In 1924 it supplemented this system with "service categories", from K-1 to K-14 . The service categories essentially operated as ranks in disguise: they indicated the experience and qualifications of a commander. The insignia now denoted the category, not the position of a commander. However, one still had to use functional titles to address commanders, which could become as awkward as "comrade deputy head-of-staff of corps". If one did not know a commander's position, one used one of the possible positions - for example: "Regiment Commander" for K-9.
On September 22, 1935 the Red Army abandoned service categories and introduced personal ranks. These ranks, however, used a unique mix of functional titles and traditional ranks. For example, the ranks included "
Lieutenant" and "Comdiv" . Further complications ensued from the functional and categorical ranks for political officers , for technical corps , for administrative, medical and other non-combatant branches.
On May 7, 1940 further modifications to the system took place. The ranks of "General" or "Admiral" replaced the senior functional ranks of Combrig, Comdiv, Comcor, Comandarm; the other senior functional ranks remained unaffected. On November 2, 1940, the system underwent further modification with the abolition of functional ranks for NCOs and the introduction of the Podpolkovnik rank.
In early 1942 all the functional ranks in technical and administrative corps became regularised ranks . On October 9, 1942 the authorities abolished the system of military commissars, together with the commissar ranks. The functional ranks remained only in medical, veterinary and legislative corps.
In early 1943 a unification of the system saw the abolition of all the remaining functional ranks. The word "officer" became officially endorsed, together with the
epaulettes that superseded the previous rank insignia. The ranks and insignia of 1943 did not change much until the last days of the USSR; the contemporary
Russian Army uses largely the same system. The old functional ranks of
Combat , Combrig and Comdiv continue in informal use.
General Staff
On September 22, 1935, the authorities renamed the RKKA Staff as the
General Staff, which essentially reincarnated the General Staff of the
Russian Empire. Many of the former RKKA Staff officers had served as General Staff officers in the Russian Empire and became General Staff officers in the USSR. General Staff officers typically had extensive combat experience and solid academic training.
Military Education
During the
Civil War the commander cadres received training at the General Staff Academy of the RKKA , an alias of the Nicholas General Staff Academy of the Russian Empire. On August 5, 1921 the Academy became the Military Academy of the RKKA , and in 1925 the
Frunze Military Academy of the RKKA. The senior and supreme commanders received training at the Higher Military Academic Courses , renamed in 1925 as the Advanced Courses for Supreme Command ; in 1931, the establishment of an Operations Faculty at the Frunze Military Academy supplemented these courses. April 2, 1936 saw the re-instatement of the General Staff Academy; it would become a principal school for the senior and supreme commanders of the Red Army, as well as a centre for advanced military studies.
One should note that Red Army educational facilities called "academies" do not correspond to the military academies in Western countries. Those Soviet Academies were the
post-graduate schools, mandatory for officers applying for senior ranks . While a basic officer education in the Red Army was provided by the facilities named
??????? ????? or
??????? ??????? - which may be generally translated as "School" and compared to Western "academies" like
West Point or
Sandhurst.
Purges
The late 1930s saw the so-called "Purges of the Red Army cadres", occurring against the historical background of the Great Purge. The Purges had the objective of cleansing the Red Army of the "politically unreliable element", mainly among the higher-ranking officers. This inevitably provided a convenient pretext for settling personal vendettas and eventually resulted in a
witch hunt. Some observers believe that the Purges weakened the Red Army considerably, but this remains a hotly debated subject. Many commentators overlook the fact that the Red Army grew significantly in numbers during the peak of the Purges. In 1937, the Red Army numbered around 1.3 million, and it grew to almost three times that number by June 1941. This necessitated quick promotion of junior officers, often despite their lack of experience or training, with obvious grave implications. In another important consideration, by the end of the Purges the pendulum swung back, restoring and promoting many of the purged officers.
Recently declassified data indicate that in 1937, during the culmination of the Purges, the Red Army had 114,300 officers, of whom 11,034 suffered repression and did not gain rehabilitation until 1940. Yet, in 1938, the Red Army had 179,000 officers , of whom a further 6,742 suffered repression and did not gain rehabilitation until 1940.
In the highest echelons of the Red Army the Purges removed 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army generals, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 army corps generals, 154 out of 186 division generals, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.
Doctrines and Weapons
The Soviet Union established an indigenous arms industry as part of
Stalin's industrialization program in the 1920s and 1930s.
Notable Soviet tanks include the
T-34,
T-54 and T-55,
T-62,
T-72, and
T-80, as well as post-soviet variants of the T-72 and T-80 such as the
T-90 and
T-84. See also: Tanks ,
Tanks in WWII.
Soviet experimentation with small-arms began during the Second World War. In 1945 the Red Army adopted the Siminov
SKS, a semi-automatic 7.62x39mm carbine. In 1949 production of the 7.62x39mm Kalashnikov
AK-47 assault rifle began: planners envisaged troops using it in conjunction with the SKS, but it soon replaced the SKS completely. In 1978 the 5.45x39mm
AK-74 assault rifle replaced the AK-47: it utilized no less than 51% of the AK-47's parts. Designers put together the new weapon as a counterpart to the American 5.56x45mm cartridge used in the M-16 assault rifle, and the Russian army
continues to use it today.
Civil War
Polish-Soviet War
The
Polish-Soviet War represented the first foreign campaign of the Red Army. The Soviet counter-offensive following the
1920 Polish invasion of Ukraine at first met with success, but Polish forces halted it at the disastrous Battle of Warsaw .
Far East
In 1934,
Mongolia and the
USSR, recognising the threat from the mounting
Japanese military presence in
Manchuria and
Inner Mongolia, agreed to co-operate in the field of defence. On March 12, 1936, the co-operation increased with the ten-year Mongolian-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, which included a mutual defence protocol.
In May 1939, a Mongolian
cavalry unit clashed with
Manchukuoan cavalry in the disputed territory east of the Halha River . There followed a clash with a
Japanese detachment, which drove the Mongolians over the river. The Soviet troops quartered there in accordance with the mutual defence protocol intervened and obliterated the detachment. Escalation of the conflict appeared imminent, and both sides spent June amassing forces. On July 1 the Japanese force numbered 38,000 troops. The combined Soviet-Mongol force had 12,500 troops. The Japanese crossed the river, but after a three-day battle their opponents threw them back over the river. The Japanese kept probing the Soviet defences throughout July, without success.
On August 20
Georgy Zhukov opened a major offensive with heavy air attack and three hours of
artillery bombardment, after which three
infantry divisions and five armoured brigades, supported by a
fighter regiment and masses of artillery , stormed the 75,000 Japanese force deeply entrenched in the area. On August 23 the entire Japanese force found itself encircled, and on August 31 largely destroyed. Artillery and air attacks wiped out those Japanese who refused to surrender.
Japan requested a
cease-fire, and the conflict concluded with an agreement between the USSR, Mongolia and Japan signed on September 15 in
Moscow.
In the conflict, the Red Army losses were 9,703 KIA and MIA and 15,952 wounded. The Japanese lost 25 thousand KIA; the grand total was 61 thousand killed, missing, wounded and taken prisoner.
Shortly after the cease-fire, the Japanese negotiated access to the battlefields to collect their dead. Finding thousands upon thousands of dead bodies came as a further shock to the already shaken morale of the Japanese soldiers. The scale of the defeat probably became a major factor in discouraging a Japanese attack on the USSR during
World War II, which allowed the Red Army to switch a large number of its
Far Eastern troops into the
European Theatre in the desperate autumn of 1941.
World War II
The Scope of the War
As its name implies,
World War II involved many countries and military theatres. It subsumed many different conflicts, which some historians may or may not consider part of the same war, depending on the perception and, alas, prejudice of the examiner. However, common usage accepts that World War II began on September 1 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and ended on August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered. Consequently, we may regard all major military conflicts within this period as episodes of World War II. This method of analysis has special significance for the European theatre, where any “independent” use of military force within this period had the potential to affect the balance of power and thus directly influence the course of World War II.
The Polish Campaign
On September 17, 1939 the Red Army marched its troops into the western Belarusian and Ukrainian territories controlled by
Poland in the
interbellum, using the official pretext of coming to the aid of the Ukrainians and the Belarusians threatened by Germany , which had attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet invasion opened a second front for the Poles and forced them to abandon plans for defense in the Romanian bridgehead area, thus hastening the Polish defeat. The Soviet and German advance halted roughly at the
Curzon Line.
The
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had included a secret protocol delimiting the “spheres of interest” of each party, set the scene for the remarkably smooth partition of Poland between Germany and the USSR. The defined Soviet sphere of interest matched the territory subsequently captured in the campaign. The territory became part of the
Ukrainian and the Byelorussian
Soviet Socialist Republics.
Even though water barriers separated most of the spheres of interest, the Soviet and German troops met each other on a number of occasions. The most remarkable event of this kind happened in
Brest-Litovsk on 22 September, 1939. The German 19th panzer corps under the command of
Heinz Guderian had occupied Brest-Litovsk, which lay within the Soviet sphere of interest. When the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade under the command of S. M. Krivoshein approached Brest-Litovsk, the commanders negotiated that the German troops would withdraw and the Soviet troops enter the city saluting each other . Just three days earlier, however, the parties had a more damaging encounter near
Lviv, when the German 137th Gebirgsjägerregimenter attacked a reconnaissance detachment of the Soviet 24th Tank Brigade; after a few casualties on both sides, the parties turned to negotiations, as a result of which the German troops left the area, and the Red Army troops entered L'viv on 22 September.
According to
Soviet casualties and combat losses in the twentieth century edited by Colonel-General Krivosheev, the Red Army force in Poland numbered 466,516. The Red Army troops faced little resistance, mainly due to the entanglement of the majority of the Polish forces in fighting Germans along the Western border, but partly due to an official order by the Polish Supreme Command not to engage in combat with the Soviet troops, and also partly because many Polish citizens in the Kresy region - Ukrainians and Belarusians - viewed the advancing troops as liberators, welcoming them with flowers and "
bread and salt". Nonetheless the Red Army sustained losses of 1,475 killed and missing and 2,383 wounded. The losses of the opposing Polish troops remain unknown; the Red Army reported that it had "disarmed" 452,536 men but this figure probably included a large number not enrolled as regular
Polish Army servicemen. The Polish PWN encyclopaedia gives the number of approximately 240,000 prisoners taken by the Red Army. The Soviet Union did not consider such prisoners as POWs, but as interned persons. This action saved many Polish Jews from the Nazis, though German authorities killed many of them later after the
German invasion of the USSR began in June 1941.
The Finnish Campaigns
See the
Winter War and the
Continuation War .
The Great Patriotic War, 1941 - 1945
- Main article: Great Patriotic War
By the autumn of 1940 a new world order had emerged. The
Third Reich and its allies dominated most of the
European continent. Only the
United Kingdom and the
Soviet Union could challenge fascist hegemony. The Third Reich and Britain had no common land border, but a
state of war existed between them; the Germans 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. This culminated, on December 18, in the issuing of ‘Directive No. 21 – Case
Barbarossa’, which opened by saying “the German
Armed Forces must be prepared to crush
Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against
England”. Even before the issuing of the directive, the German
General Staff had developed detailed plans for an anti-Soviet campaign. 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 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 . The first weeks of the war saw the annihilation of virtually the entire
Soviet Air Force on the ground, the loss of major equipment, tanks, artillery, and major Soviet defeats as German forces trapped hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers in vast pockets.
Soviet forces suffered heavy damage in the field as a result of poor levels of preparedness, which was primarily caused by a reluctant, half-hearted and ultimately belated decision by the Soviet Government and High Command to mobilize the army. Equally important was a general tactical superiority of the German army, which was conducting the kind of warfare that it had been combat-testing and fine-tuning for two years. The hasty pre-war growth and over-promotion of the Red Army cadres as well as the removal of experienced officers caused by the Purges offset the balance even more favourably for the Germans. Finally, the sheer numeric superiority of the Axis cannot be underestimated.
A generation of brilliant 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 "
Great Patriotic War", 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 a Guard re-appeared: units which had shown exceptional heroism in combat gained the names of "Guards Regiment", "Guards Army", etc.
During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army drafted a staggering 29,574,900 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 comprised ethnic Russians , followed by ethnic Ukrainians ..
The German losses on the Eastern Front comprised an estimated 3,604,800 KIA/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 8,649,300, the Soviets released 3,572,600 from captivity after the war, thus the grand total of the Axis losses came to an estimated 5,076,700.
A comparison of the losses demonstrates the cruel treatment of the Soviet POWs by the Nazis. Most of the Axis POWs were released from captivity after the war, but the fate of the Soviet POWs differed markedly. Nazi troops who captured Red Army soldiers frequently shot them in the field or shipped them to
concentration camps and executed them as a part of
the Holocaust. Hitler's notorious Commissar Order implicated all the German armed forces in the policy of war crimes.
When the Red Army entered German territory it exacted often brutal revenge for German atrocities, including engaging in plunder, rape, and murder of civilians. While the laws of the Red Army officially prohibited such activities, the leadership nonetheless tolerated them. Note however that some historians say they refuted allegations that Soviet officials actively encouraged such behaviour, despite the fact, that evidence exists that Soviet propagandists serving the Red Army, such as Ilja Ehrenburg, actively called on Soviet troops to rape and murder once they had reached ethnic German territory in
East Prussia.
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 manoeuvre and supply it; as a result the Wehrmacht captured much of it. Red Army
T-34 tanks outclassed any other tanks in the world, yet most of the Soviet armoured 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 re-inforcement difficult, if not impossible, since much of the Soviet Union's military industry lay in the west of the country. Until the Soviet authorities re-established the industry in the East, the Red Army had to rely on improvised weapons and partly on British and American supplies .
The Manchurian Campaign
As a postscript to the war in Europe, the Red Army attacked Japan and
Manchukuo, Japan's puppet state in
Manchuria, on 9 August 1945 and in combination with Mongolian and Chinese Communist forces rapidly overwhelmed the outnumbered Kwantung Army. Soviet forces also attacked in
Sakhalin, in the
Kuril Islands and in northern
Korea. Japan surrendered unconditionally on 2 September 1945.
Aftermath
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. The British Chiefs of Staff Committee rejected as militarily unfeasible a proposed British plan 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.
The numbers of the Soviet Army dropped from around 13 million to approximately 5 million. The size of the Army throughout the
Cold War remained between 3 million and 5 million, according to Western estimates. Soviet law required all able-bodied males of age to serve a minimum of 2 years. As a result, the Soviet Army remained the largest active army in the world from 1945 to 1991. Soviet Army units which had liberated the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule remained in some of them to secure the régimes in what became satellite states of the Soviet Union and to deter and to fend off
NATO forces. The greatest Soviet military presence based itself in
East Germany, in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. In the Soviet Union itself, forces were divided among sixteen, later fifteen
military districts, including the Moscow Military District.
The trauma of the devastating German invasion of 1941 influenced the Soviet cold-war military doctrine of fighting enemies on their own territory, or in a buffer zone under Soviet hegemony, but in any case preventing any war from reaching Soviet soil. In order to secure Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army moved in to quell anti-Soviet uprisings in the
German Democratic Republic ,
Hungary and
Czechoslovakia .
Confrontation with the US and NATO during the Cold War mainly took the form of threatened mutual deterrence with
nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union invested heavily in the Army's nuclear capacity, especially in the production of ballistic missiles and of nuclear submarines to deliver them. Open hostilities took the form of wars by proxy, with the Soviet Union and the US supporting loyal client régimes or rebel movements in
Third World countries.
The limited contingent in Afghanistan
In 1979, however, the Soviet Army
intervened in a civil war raging in
Afghanistan. The Soviet Army came to back a Soviet-friendly secular government threatened by Muslim fundamentalist guerillas equipped and financed by the United States. Technically superior, the Soviets did not have enough troops to establish control over the countryside and to secure the border. This resulted from hesitancy in the Politburo, which allowed only a "limited contingent", averaging between 80,000 and 100,000 troops. Consequently, local insurgents could effectively employ hit-and-run tactics, using easy escape-routes and good supply-channels. This made the Soviet situation hopeless from the military point of view . The understanding of this made the war highly unpopular within the Army. With the coming of glasnost, Soviet media started to report heavy losses, which made the war very unpopular in the USSR in general, even though actual losses remained modest, averaging 1670 per year. The war also became a sensitive issue internationally, which finally led
Gorbachev to withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The "Afghan Syndrome" suffered by the Army parallels the American Vietnam Syndrome trauma over their own lost war in
Vietnam.
Eventually, the enormous cost of maintaining a 5-million-man peacetime army, as well as of waging a 9-year war in Afghanistan, would prove a major factor contributing to the decay of the Soviet economy and the Soviet Union as a whole.
The end of the Soviet Union
From around 1985 to 1990, the new leader of the Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reduce the strain the Army placed on economic demands. His government slowly reduced the size of the army. By 1989 Soviet troops had completely left their
Warsaw Pact neighbors to fend for themselves. That same year Soviet forces left Afghanistan. By the end of 1990, the entire Eastern Bloc had collapsed in the wake of democratic revolutions. As a result, Soviet citizens quickly began to turn against the Communist government as well. In March 1990, nationalism in Lithuania caused that republic to declare its independence. A series of out-lying republics would also declare their independence that year. Gorbachev reacted in limited fashion, declining to turn the Army against the citizenry, and a crisis developed. By mid-1991, the Soviet union had reached a state of emergency.
According to the official commission appointed by the Supreme
Soviet immediately after the events of August 1991, the Army did not play a significant role in what some describe as
coup d'état of old-guard communists. Commanders sent tanks into the streets of
Moscow, but only with orders to ensure the safety of the people. It remains unclear why exactly the military forces entered the city, but they clearly did not have the goal of overthrowing
Gorbachev or the government. The coup failed primarily because the participants didn't take any decisive action, and after several days of their inaction the coup simply stopped. Only one confrontation took place between civilians and the tank crews during the coup, which led to the deaths of three civilians. Although the victims became proclaimed heroes, the authorities acquitted the tank crew of all charges. Nobody issued orders to shoot at anyone.
Following the coup attempt of August 1991, the leadership of the Soviet Union retained practically no authority over the component republics. Nearly every Soviet Republic declared its intention to secede and began passing laws defying the Supreme Soviet. On December 8, 1991, the Presidents of Russia, Belarus, and U
