Origins parade in
Moscow, 1922 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 the first combat action against the
rapidly advancing 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 celebration day in 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 (voenkomats), which still carry out this function in Russia. They should not be confused with military
political commissars. Democratic election of officers was also abolished by decree, while separate quarters for officers, special forms of address, saluting, and higher pay were all reinstated. After General
Aleksei Brusilov offered the Bolsheviks his professional services in 1920, they decided to permit the conscription of
former officers of the
Imperial Russian Army. The Bolshevik authorities set up a special commission under the chair of
Lev Glezarov (Лев Маркович Глезаров), and by August 1920 had drafted about 315,000 ex-officers. Most often they held the position of
military advisor (
voyenspets: "военспец" an abbreviation of "военный специалист", i.e., "
military specialist"). A number of prominent Red 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 of the Soviet Union. 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.
Civil War The Russian Civil War (1917-1922) was fought between the Bolsheviks (Communists) and the Whites, on the periphery of Soviet Russia. It was sparked by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which forced Russia to cede territory to Germany, causing a break between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Whites, supported by the Allies, aimed to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The Red Army, led by Trotsky, ultimately gained military superiority due to better organization, control of Russia's heartland, and better access to military resources. The communist victory resulted in the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The war resulted in the loss of 10 million lives, mainly civilians, due to disease and famine.
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 (for the Soviets)
Battle of Warsaw (1920).
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 (also known in Russian as Халхин-Гол, Halhin Gol). 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 (57,000 troops in total), 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 killed in action (KIA) and missing in action (MIA) and 15,952 wounded. The Japanese lost 25,000 KIA; the grand total was 61,000 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.
Second World War of Red Army soldiers during
World War II in the
Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces commemorating the Soviet Armed Forces and some of its most important World War II battles –
Defense of Brest Fortress,
Battle of Smolensk and
Battle of Moscow The Polish Campaign On September 17, 1939, the Red Army marched its troops into the eastern territories of
Poland (now part of
Belarus and
Ukraine), 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 defence 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 Soviet and German troops met each other on a number of occasions. Most remarkably, on 22 September 1939, the German
XIX Panzer Corps had occupied Brest-Litovsk, which lay within the Soviet sphere of interest. When the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade approached Brest-Litovsk, the commanders negotiated a German withdrawal, and a
joint parade was held. Just three days earlier, however, the parties had a more damaging encounter near
Lviv, when the German 137th Gebirgsjägerregimenter (mountain infantry regiment) attacked a Soviet reconnaissance detachment.; After a few casualties on both sides, the parties negotiated, the German troops left the area, and the Red Army troops entered L'viv on 22 September. According to post-1991 Russian sources, 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.
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists rose against the Poles, and communist partisans organised local revolts, e.g. in
Skidel, robbing and murdering Poles. Nonetheless, the Red Army sustained losses of 1,475 killed and missing and 2,383 wounded. The losses of the opposing Polish troops are estimated at 6,000–7,000.
The Finnish campaigns The
Winter War began when the Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939, two months after the invasion of Poland by Germany that started World War II. Because the attack was judged as illegal, the Soviet Union was expelled from the
League of Nations on 14 December. The war ended on 13 March 1940. The
Continuation War was the second of two wars fought between Finland and the Soviet Union during World War II. On 25 June 1941 the Soviet Union conducted an air raid on Finnish cities, prompting Finland to declare war and to allow German troops stationed in Finland to begin an offensive. By September 1941, Finland had regained its post–Winter War concessions to the Soviet Union: the
Karelian Isthmus and
Ladoga Karelia. However, the Finnish Army continued the offensive past the 1939 border during the
conquest of East Karelia, including
Petrozavodsk, and halted only around from the centre of
Leningrad. It participated in
besieging the city by cutting the northern supply routes and by digging in until 1944. In
Lapland,
joint German-Finnish forces failed to capture
Murmansk or to cut the Kirov (Murmansk) Railway, a transit route for Soviet
lend-lease equipment. The conflict stabilised with only minor skirmishes until the tide of the war turned against the Germans and the Soviet strategic
Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive occurred in June 1944. The attack drove the Finns from most of the territories that they had gained during the war, but the Finnish Army halted the offensive in August 1944. Hostilities between Finland and the USSR ended with a ceasefire, which was called on 5 September 1944, formalised by the signing of the
Moscow Armistice on 19 September 1944.
Barbarossa, 1941–1945 (Great Patriotic War) By the autumn of 1940,
Nazi Germany and its allies dominated most of the European continent. Only the United Kingdom (in the West) was actively challenging
national socialist and
fascist hegemony. Nazi Germany 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, adhering to a
non-aggression pact and by numerous
trade agreements. (
Politruk) urges Soviet troops forward against German positions (12 July 1942) For
Adolf Hitler, no dilemma ever existed in this situation.
Drang nach Osten (German for "Drive towards the East") 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 a 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 Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army 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. Their Axis opponents deployed on the
Eastern Front 181 divisions and 18 brigades (3.8 million troops). 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 (most notably
Georgy 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 Tsarist 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
German–Soviet 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 (most captured). Of these 11,444,100, however, 939,700 re-joined the ranks in the subsequently re-took 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 were ethnic Russians (5,756,000), followed by ethnic Ukrainians (1,377,400). The German losses on the Eastern Front consisted of an estimated 3,604,800 KIA/MIA (most killed) and 3,576,300 captured (total 7,181,100). by Red Army soldiers, January 1945 in
Berlin, June 1945 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 (which rated it highly) captured much of it. Red Army
T-34 tanks outclassed any other tanks the Germans had when they appeared in 1941, 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 reinforcement difficult, if not impossible, since much of the Soviet Union's military industry lay in the west of the country.
The Manchurian Campaign After the end of 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.
The Cold War The Soviet Union only had Ground Forces, Air Forces, and the Navy in 1945. The two ministries (
Narkomats), one supervising the Ground Forces and Air Forces, and the other directing the
Navy, were combined into the Ministry of the Armed Forces in March 1946. A fourth service, the
Troops of National Air Defence, was formed in 1948. The Ministry was briefly divided into two again from 1950 to 1953, but then was amalgamated again as the
Ministry of Defence. Six years later the
Strategic Rocket Forces were formed. The
Soviet Airborne Forces, were also active by this time as a
Reserve of the Supreme High Command. Also falling within the Soviet Armed Forces were the
Tyl, or Rear Services. Men within the Soviet Armed Forces dropped from around 11.3 million to approximately 2.8 million in 1948. In order to control this demobilisation process, the number of
military districts was temporarily increased to thirty-three, dropping to twenty-one in 1946. The size of the Ground Forces during most of the Cold War remained between 4 million and 5 million, according to Western estimates. However, there was a large-scale reduction in force size in 1953–56; 1.1 million personnel were released from the armed forces. Two military districts were disestablished in 1956. Soviet law required all able-bodied males of age to serve a minimum of two years. As a result, the Soviet Ground Forces remained the largest active army in the world from 1945 to 1991. Soviet units which had taken over the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule remained to secure the régimes in what became
satellite states of the Soviet Union and to deter and to fend off pro-independence resistance and later
NATO forces. The greatest Soviet military presence was in
East Germany, in the
Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, but there were also smaller forces elsewhere, including the
Northern Group of Forces in Poland, the
Central Group of Forces in
Czechoslovakia, and the
Southern Group of Forces in Hungary. 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 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). 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. To improve capabilities for war at a theatre level, in the late 1970s and early 1980s four high commands were established, grouping the military districts, groups of forces, and fleets. The Far Eastern High Command was established first, followed by the Western and South-Western High Commands towards Europe, and the Southern High Command at Baku, oriented toward the Middle East. Confrontation with the US and NATO during the Cold War mainly took the form of threatened mutual deterrence with
nuclear weapons. But a number of
proxy wars took place. The Soviet Union and the United States supported loyal
client régimes or rebel movements in
Third World countries. During the
Korean War, the
Soviet Air Forces directly fought against United States and
United Nations Command (UNC) forces. Two Soviet air divisions flying
MiG-9 and
MiG-15 fighter jets were sent against U.S.
Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers and their U.S. and allied fighter escorts. The Soviet Union invested heavily in nuclear capabilities, especially in the production of ballistic missiles and of nuclear submarines to deliver them. During the
Vietnam War, Soviet ships in the
South China Sea gave vital early warnings to PAVN/VC forces in South Vietnam. The Soviet intelligence ships would pick up American
B-52 bombers flying from
Okinawa and
Guam. Their airspeed and direction would be noted and then relayed to the
Central Office for South Vietnam, North Vietnam's southern headquarters. Using airspeed and direction, COSVN analysts would calculate the bombing target and tell any assets to move "perpendicularly to the attack trajectory." These advance warnings gave them time to move out of the way of the bombers, and, while the bombing runs caused extensive damage, because of the early warnings from 1968 to 1970 they did not kill a single military or civilian leader in the headquarters complexes.
Military doctrine The Soviet meaning of
military doctrine was much different from U.S. military usage of the term. Soviet Minister of Defence Marshal
Andrei 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. According to Harriet F Scott and William Scott, the political parts of Soviet military doctrine best explained the international moves that the Soviet Union undertook during the Cold War.
The war in Afghanistan , 1988 In 1979, however, the Soviet Army
intervened in a civil war raging in
Afghanistan. The Soviet Army came to back a Soviet-friendly communist government threatened by multinational, mainly Afghan, insurgent groups called the mujahideen. The insurgents received military training in neighboring Pakistan, China, and billions of dollars from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. 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 (short of using "
scorched earth" tactics, which the Soviets did not practice except in World War II in their own territory). 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 General Secretary
Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The "
Afghan Syndrome" suffered by the Army parallels the American
Vietnam Syndrome trauma over their own unsuccessful war in
Vietnam. Tactically, both sides concentrated on attacking supply lines, but Afghan mujahideen were well dug-in with tunnels and defensive positions, holding out against artillery and air attacks. The decade long war resulted in millions of Afghans fleeing their country, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. At least half a million Afghan civilians were killed in addition to the rebels in the war.
The end of the Soviet Union From 1985 to 1991, the new leader of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to reduce the military strain on the economy. His government slowly reduced the size of the army. By 1989 Soviet troops were leaving 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 Soviet government as well. As the Soviet Union moved towards disintegration, the reduced military was rendered feeble and ineffective and could no longer prop up the ailing Soviet government. The military got involved in trying to suppress conflicts and unrest in
Central Asia and the
Caucasus but it often proved incapable of restoring peace and order. On April 9, 1989, the army, together with
MVD units, massacred about 190 demonstrators in
Tbilisi in Georgia. The next major crisis occurred in
Azerbaijan, when the Soviet army forcibly entered
Baku on January 19–20, 1990, removing the rebellious republic government and allegedly killing hundreds of civilians in the process. On January 13, 1991, Soviet forces stormed the State Radio and Television Building and the television retranslation tower in
Vilnius,
Lithuania, both under opposition control, killing 14 people and injuring 700. This action was perceived by many as heavy-handed and achieved little. By mid-1991, the Soviet Union had reached a state of emergency. According to the official commission (the Soviet Academy of Sciences) 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. Commanders sent tanks into the streets of Moscow, but (according to all the commanders and soldiers) 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 (absent on the Black Sea coast at the time) or the government. The coup failed primarily because the participants did not 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 Ukraine declared the Soviet Union dissolved and signed the document setting up the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). 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. For the next year and a half various attempts were made to keep the Soviet military in existence as the
United Armed Forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Steadily, the units stationed in
Ukraine and some other breakaway republics swore loyalty to their new national governments, while a series of treaties between the newly independent states divided up the military's assets. Following
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Army dissolved and the USSR's successor states shared out its assets among themselves. The share out mostly occurred on 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 Armed Forces. On 7 May 1992, Yeltsin signed a decree establishing the Russian Armed Forces and assumed the duties of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. This marked a crucial step in the creation of the new
Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the bulk of what was still left of the old Soviet forces. The last vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were finally dissolved in June 1993. In the next few years, the former Soviet forces withdrew from central and Eastern Europe (including the
Baltic states), as well as from the newly independent post-Soviet republics of
Azerbaijan,
Georgia (partially),
Moldova (partially),
Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan. In 2020, Russian forces remained in
Abkhazia,
Armenia,
Belarus,
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan,
South Ossetia,
Tajikistan and
Transnistria. While in many places the withdrawal and division took place without any problems, the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet remained in the
Crimea, Ukraine, with the fleet division and a Russian leasehold for fleet bases in Crimea finally achieved in 1997. ==Structure and leadership==