The Red Army of Workers and Peasants (RKKA, Rabochekrest'yanshi Krasny), the official name of the army of the Soviet Union (191845). It was the most important land force engaged in the defeat of Nazi Germany (19415), and later became the most powerful land force in the world.
The short forms Red Army and RKKA' refer to the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, (in Russian: Рабоче-Крестьянская Красная Армия - Raboche-Krest'yanskaya Krasnaya Armiya), 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. This article focusses upon the land force element of the Red Army, later called the Ground Forces. See Military of the Soviet Union for the Armed Forces as a whole.
"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.
Origins
The Council of People's Commissars set up the Red Army by decree on January 15, 1918 (Old Style) (January 28, 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. (Note: do not confuse military commissariats with the institution of military political commissars.)
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Kievan Rus' Druzhina (862-1400s) Muscovy Streltsy (1400s-1721) Imperial Russia Army (1721-1917) White Movement White Guard (1917-1921) Soviet Union Red Army (1918-1991) Russian Federation Army (1991-Present) |
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. A number of prominent Soviet Army commanders had previously served as Imperial Russian generals.
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.
Personnel
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. The Red Army abandoned epaulettes and ranks, using purely functional titles such as "Division Commander", "Corps Commander", and similar titles.
On September 22, 1935 the Red Army abandoned service categories and introduced personal ranks. Further complications ensued from the functional and categorical ranks for political officers (e.g., "Brigade Commissar", "Army Commissar 2nd Rank"), for technical corps (e.g., "Engineer 3rd Rank", "Division Engineer"), for administrative, medical and other non-combatant branches.
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Kievan Rus Druzhina (862-1400s) Zaporozhian Host Viysko (1492-1775) Ukrainian National Republic
Sich Riflemen (1917) Soviet Union Red Army (1918-1991) Ukraine Armed Forces (1991-Present) |
On May 7, 1940 further modifications to the system took place.
In early 1942 all the functional ranks in technical and administrative corps became regularised ranks (e.g., "Engineer Major", "Engineer Colonel", "Captain Intendant Service", etc.).
In early 1943 a unification of the system saw the abolition of all the remaining functional ranks.
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.
Military Education
During the Civil War the commander cadres received training at the General Staff Academy of the RKKA (Академия Генерального штаба РККА), an alias of the Nicholas General Staff Academy (Николаевская академия Генерального штаба) of the Russian Empire. 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 (and later Soviet 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 (e.g., the rank of Colonel since 1950s).
Purges
The late 1930s saw the so-called "Purges of the Red Army cadres", occurring against the historical background of the Great Purge.
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.
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.
Weapons and Equipment
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.
The five round, magazine fed, bolt action Mosin-Nagant rifle remained the primary shoulder firearm of the Red Army through WWII.
The Red Army suffered from a shortage of adequate machine guns and semiautomatic firearms throughout WWII.
Soviet experimentation with small-arms began during the Second World War.
From the Civil War to the 1930s
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 (for the Soviets) Battle of Warsaw (1920).
Later in the 1920s and during the 1930s, Soviet military theorists introduced the concept of deep battle.
Deep Operations were first formally expressed as a concept in the Red Army's 'Field Regulations' of 1929, but was only finally codified by the army in 1936 in the 'Provisional Field Regulations' of 1936. However the Great Purge of 1937–1939 removed many of the leading officers of the Red Army, including Tukhachevsky, and the concept was abandoned, until opportunities to use evolved later during World War II.
Slowly developing their mechanised forces, in 1930 the Army formed their first mechanized unit, the 1st Mechanized Brigade, which consisted of a tank regiment, a motorized infantry regiment, and reconnaissance and artillery battalions. From this humble beginning, the Soviets would go on to create the first operational-level armored formations in history, the 11th and 45th Mechanized Corps, in 1932.
Impressed by the German campaign of 1940 against France, the Soviet NKO ordered the creation of nine mechanized corps on July 6, 1940. This fact would play a crucial role in the defeat of the Red Army in 1941 at the hands of the German Armed Forces.
In May 1939, a Mongolian cavalry unit clashed with Manchukuoan cavalry in the disputed territory east of the Halha River (also know in Russian as Халхин-Гол, Halhin Gol).
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 (57 thousand troops in total), stormed the 75,000 Japanese force deeply entrenched in the area.
In the conflict, the Red Army losses were 9,703 KIA and MIA and 15,952 wounded.
Shortly after the cease-fire, the Japanese negotiated access to the battlefields to collect their dead. 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
As its name implies, World War II involved many countries and military theatres.
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 Interwar period, 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 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 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. 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 (mountain infantry regiment) 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". the Red Army reported that it had "disarmed" 452,536 men (Ibid.) but this figure probably included a large number not enrolled as regular Polish Army servicemen. The Soviet Union did not consider such prisoners as POWs, but as interned persons.
The Finnish Campaigns
See the Winter War (1939 - 1940) and the Continuation War (1941 - 1944).
The Great Patriotic War, 1941 - 1945
By the autumn of 1940 a new world order had emerged. Only the United Kingdom (in the West) and the Soviet Union (in the East) could challenge fascist hegemony. 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. 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”.
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 (4.8 million troops), including 166 divisions and 9 brigades (2.9 million troops) stationed in the western military districts. However the first weeks of the war saw major Soviet defeats as German forces trapped hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers in vast pockets and the loss of major equipment, tanks, and artillery. Stalin and the Soviet leadership responded by stepping up the mobilisation 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, which was primarily caused by a reluctant, half-hearted and ultimately belated decision by the Soviet Government and High Command to mobilize the army.
A generation of Soviet commanders (most notably Zhukov) 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.
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 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.
The German losses on the Eastern Front comprised an estimated 3,604,800 KIA/MIA (most killed) and 3,576,300 captured (total 7,181,100); 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.
When the Red Army entered German territory it exacted often brutal revenge for German atrocities, including engaging in plunder, rape, and murder of civilians. 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. Red Army T-34 tanks outclassed any other tanks in the world, yet most of the Soviet armoured units were less advanced models; 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 (see Lend-lease for details).
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 (Operation August Storm) 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.
After World War II the Soviet Army had the most powerful land army in history.
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.
Men within the Soviet Army dropped from around 13 million to approximately 5 million after the war. 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 by the 1950s among fifteen military districts, including the Moscow, Leningrad, and Baltic Military Districts.
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 (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
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 Armed Forces' nuclear capability, and while building up the Strategic Rocket Forces, also reorganised 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 discovered after German researchers gained access to National People's Army files following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Manpower and Enlisted Men
The Ground Forces were manned through conscription, which had been reduced in 1967 from three to two years. This system was administered through the thousands of military commissariats (военный комиссариат, военкомат (voyenkomat)) located throughout the Soviet Union. Between January and May of every year, every young Soviet male citizen was required to report to the local voyenkomat for assessment for military service, following a summons based on lists from every school and employer in the area.
Military Doctrine
The Soviet meaning of military doctrine was much different from U.S. military usage of the term. Soviet Minister of Defence Marshal Grechko defined it in 1975 as 'a system of views on the nature of war and methods of waging it, and on the preparation of the country and army for war, officially adopted in a given state and its armed forces.' Soviet theorists emphasised both the political and 'military-technical' sides of military doctrine, while from the Soviet point of view, Westerners ignored the political side. However the political side of Soviet military doctrine, Western commentators Harriet F Scott and William Scott said, 'best explained Soviet moves in the international arena'.
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 made the Soviet situation hopeless from the military point of view (short of using "scorched earth" tactics, which the Soviets did not practise except in World War II in their own territory). 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.
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. That same year Soviet forces left Afghanistan. As a result, Soviet citizens quickly began to turn against the Communist government as well. By mid-1991, the Soviet union had reached a state of emergency.
According to the official commission (the Academy of Soviet Scientists) appointed by the Supreme Soviet (the higher chamber of the Russian parliament) 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.
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 Ukraine declared the Soviet Union dissolved and signed the document setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev finally resigned on December 25, 1991, and the following day the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, dissolved itself, officially ending the Soviet Union's existence.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Army dissolved and the USSR's successor states divided its assets among themselves. The divide mostly occurred along a regional basis, with Soviet soldiers from Russia becoming part of the new Russian Army, while Soviet soldiers originating from Kazakhstan became part of the new Kazakh Army. As a result, the bulk of the Soviet Ground Forces, including most of the Scud and Scaleboard Surface-to-surface missile (SSM) forces, became incorporated in the Russian Ground Forces. (1992 estimates showed five SSM brigades with 96 missile vehicles in Belarus and twelve SSM brigades with 204 missile vehicles in Ukraine, compared to 24 SSM brigades with over 900 missile vehicles under Russian Ground Forces' control, some in other former Soviet republics). By the end of 1992, most remnants of the Soviet Army in former Soviet Republics had disbanded.
In mid-March 1992, Yeltsin appointed himself as the new Russian minister of defence, marking a crucial step in the creation of the new Russian armed forces, comprising the bulk of what was still left of the military. The last vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were finally dissolved in June 1993.
In the next few years, the former Soviet Ground Forces withdrew from central and Eastern Europe (including the Baltic states), as well as from the newly independent post-Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia(partially), Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan.
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