Russian Civil War . The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) can be divided into three periods: • October 1917 – November 1918, from the
October Revolution to the
World War I armistice. The Bolshevik government's
nationalization of traditional
Cossack lands in November 1917 provoked the insurrection of General
Alexey Maximovich Kaledin's
Volunteer Army in the
River Don region. The
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 aggravated Russian internal politics. The overall situation encouraged direct
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, in which twelve foreign countries supported anti-Bolshevik militias. A series of engagements resulted, involving, amongst others, the
Czechoslovak Legion, the
Polish 5th Rifle Division, and the pro-Bolshevik Red
Latvian Riflemen. • January 1919 – November 1919, the advance and retreat of the White armies. Initially the White armies advanced successfully: from the south, under General
Anton Denikin; from the east, under Admiral
Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak; and from the northwest, under General
Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich. The Whites beat back the Red Army on each front.
Leon Trotsky reformed and counterattacked – the Red Army repelled Admiral Kolchak's army in June, and the armies of General Denikin and General Yudenich in October. By mid-November the White armies were all almost completely exhausted. In January 1920
Budenny's
1st Cavalry Army entered
Rostov-on-Don. • 1919 to 1923, residual conflicts. Some peripheral theatres continued to see conflict for two more years, and remnants of the White forces remained in the
Russian Far East into 1923. At the start of the civil war, the Red Army consisted of 299
infantry regiments. The civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the
Russian Constituent Assembly (5–6 January 1918) and the Soviet government signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), removing Russia from the First World War. Freed from international obligations, the Red Army confronted an internecine war against a variety of opposing anti-Bolshevik forces, including the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by
Nestor Makhno, the anti-White and anti-Red
Green armies, efforts to restore the defeated Provisional Government, monarchists, but mainly the
White Movement of several different
anti-socialist military confederations. "Red Army Day", 23 February 1918, has a two-fold historical significance: it was the first day of conscription (in
Petrograd and Moscow), and the first day of combat against the occupying
Imperial German Army. The Red Army controlled by the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic also against independence movements, invading and annexing
newly independent states of the former Russian Empire. This included
three military campaigns against the
army of the
Ukrainian People's Republic, in January–February 1918, January–February 1919, and May–October 1920. Conquered nations were subsequently incorporated into the Soviet Union. In June 1918,
Leon Trotsky abolished
workers' control over the Red Army, replacing the election of
officers with traditional army hierarchies and criminalizing dissent with the
death penalty. Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from the old
Imperial Russian Army, who were employed as
military advisors (
voenspetsy). The Bolsheviks occasionally enforced the loyalty of such recruits by holding their families as hostages. As a result of this initiative, in 1918, 75% of the officers were
former tsarists. By mid-August 1920 the Red Army's former tsarist personnel included 48,000 officers, 10,300 administrators, and 214,000
non-commissioned officers. When the civil war ended in 1922, ex-tsarists constituted 83% of the Red Army's divisional and corps commanders. and
Demyan Bedny in 1918 In September 1918, the Bolshevik militias consolidated under the supreme command of the
Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (). The first chairman was Trotsky, and the first commander-in-chief was
Jukums Vācietis of the
Latvian Riflemen; in July 1919 he was replaced by
Sergey Kamenev. Soon afterwards Trotsky established the
GRU (military intelligence) to provide political and military intelligence to Red Army commanders. and opposition to it was violently suppressed. To control the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Red Army soldiery, the Cheka operated special punitive brigades which suppressed
anti-communists,
deserters, and "
enemies of the state". ,
Kliment Voroshilov,
Leon Trotsky and soldiers,
Petrograd, 1921 In 1919, 612 "hardcore" deserters of the total 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed following Trotsky's draconian measures. According to Figes, "a majority of deserters (most registered as "weak-willed") were handed back to the military authorities, and formed into units for transfer to one of the rear armies or directly to the front". Even those registered as "malicious" deserters were returned to the ranks when the demand for reinforcements became desperate". Forges also noted that the Red Army instituted
amnesty weeks to prohibit punitive measures against desertion which encouraged the voluntary return of 98,000–132,000 deserters to the army. The Red Army used special regiments for ethnic minorities, such as the Dungan Cavalry Regiment commanded by the
Dungan Magaza Masanchi. It also co-operated with armed Bolshevik Party-oriented volunteer units, the
Forces of Special Purpose from 1919 to 1925. The slogan "exhortation, organization, and reprisals" expressed the discipline and motivation which helped ensure the Red Army's tactical and strategic success. On campaign, the attached Cheka special punitive brigades conducted summary field
court-martial and executions of deserters and slackers. Under Commissar
Yan Karlovich Berzin, the brigades took hostages from the villages of deserters to compel their surrender; one in ten of those returning was executed. The same tactic also suppressed peasant rebellions in areas controlled by the Red Army, the biggest of these being the
Tambov Rebellion. The Soviets enforced the loyalty of the various political, ethnic, and national groups in the Red Army through
political commissars attached at the
brigade and regimental levels. The commissars also had the task of spying on commanders for
political incorrectness. In August 1918, Trotsky authorized General
Mikhail Tukhachevsky to place
blocking units behind politically unreliable Red Army units, to shoot anyone who retreated without permission. In 1942, during the
Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
Joseph Stalin reintroduced the blocking policy and
penal battalions with
Order 227. In the spring of 1919, Anna Novikova was enrolled in the school of infantry commanders in Moscow. After completing military training, she became the first woman to command a combat unit of the Red Army. In 1920, she fought on an
armored train.
Polish–Soviet War and prelude The
Soviet westward offensive of 1918–1919 occurred at the same time as the general Soviet move into the areas abandoned by the
Ober Ost garrisons that were being withdrawn to Germany in the
aftermath of World War I. This merged into the 1919–1921
Polish–Soviet War, in which the Red Army invaded Poland, reaching the central part of the country in 1920, but then suffered a resounding
defeat in Warsaw, which put an end to the war. During the Polish Campaign the Red Army numbered some 6.5 million men, many of whom the Army had difficulty supporting, around 581,000 in the two operational fronts, western and southwestern. Around 2.5 million men and women were mobilized in the interior as part of reserve armies.
Reorganization The XI Congress of the
Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RCP (b)) adopted a resolution on the strengthening of the Red Army. It decided to establish strictly organized military, educational and economic conditions in the army. However, it was recognized that an army of 1,600,000 would be burdensome. By the end of 1922, after the Congress, the Party Central Committee decided to reduce the Red Army to 800,000. This reduction necessitated the reorganization of the Red Army's structure. The supreme military unit became corps of two or three divisions. Divisions consisted of three regiments. Brigades as independent units were abolished. The formation of departments'
rifle corps began.
Doctrinal development in the 1920s and 1930s is second from the right. After four years of warfare, the Red Army's defeat of
Pyotr Wrangel in the south in 1920 allowed the foundation of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. Historian
John Erickson sees 1 February 1924, when
Mikhail Frunze became head of the Red Army staff, as marking the ascent of the
general staff, which came to dominate Soviet military planning and operations. By 1 October 1924 the Red Army's strength had diminished to 530,000. The
list of Soviet divisions 1917–1945 details the formations of the Red Army in that time. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Soviet military theoreticians – led by Marshal
Mikhail Tukhachevsky – developed the
deep operation doctrine, a direct consequence of their experiences in the Polish–Soviet War and in the Russian Civil War. To achieve victory, deep operations envisage simultaneous
corps- and army-size unit maneuvers of simultaneous parallel attacks throughout the depth of the enemy's ground forces, inducing catastrophic defensive failure. The deep-battle doctrine relies upon aviation and armor advances with the expectation that
maneuver warfare offers quick, efficient, and decisive victory. Marshal Tukhachevsky said that
aerial warfare must be "employed against targets beyond the range of
infantry,
artillery, and other arms. For maximum tactical effect aircraft should be employed
en masse, concentrated in time and space, against targets of the highest tactical importance." Red Army deep operations found their first formal expression in the 1929 Field Regulations and became codified in the 1936 Provisional Field Regulations (PU-36). The
Great Purge of 1937–1939 and the
1941 Red Army Purge removed many leading officers from the Red Army, including Tukhachevsky himself and many of his followers, and the doctrine was abandoned. Thus, at the
Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 and in the
Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 (
major border conflicts with the
Imperial Japanese Army), the doctrine was not used. Only in the Second World War did deep operations come into play.
Chinese–Soviet conflicts The Red Army was involved in armed conflicts in the
Republic of China during the
Sino-Soviet conflict (1929), the
Soviet invasion of Xinjiang (1934), when it was assisted by White Russian forces, and the
Islamic rebellion in Xinjiang (1937) in
Northwestern China. The Red Army achieved its objectives; it maintained effective control over the Manchurian
Chinese Eastern Railway, and successfully installed a
pro-Soviet regime in
Xinjiang.
Soviet–Japanese border conflicts , August 1939 The
Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, also known as the "Soviet–Japanese Border War" or the first "Soviet–Japanese War", was a series of minor and major conflicts fought between the Soviet Union and the
Empire of Japan from 1932 to 1939. Japan's expansion into
Northeast China created a common border between Japanese controlled areas and the
Soviet Far East and
Mongolia. The Soviets and Japanese, including their respective
client states of the
Mongolian People's Republic and
Manchukuo, disputed the boundaries and accused the other side of border violations. This resulted in a series of escalating border skirmishes and
punitive expeditions, including the 1938
Battle of Lake Khasan, and culminated in the Red Army finally achieving a Soviet-Mongolian victory over Japan and Manchukuo at the
Battles of Khalkhin Gol in September 1939. The Soviet Union and Japan agreed to a ceasefire. Later the two sides signed the
Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 13 April 1941, which resolved the dispute and returned the borders to
status quo ante bellum.
Winter War with Finland The Winter War (, , ) was a war between the
Soviet Union and
Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939three months after the start of World War II and the
Soviet invasion of Poland. The
League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union on 14 December 1939. The Soviet forces led by
Semyon Timoshenko had three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many
tanks. The Red Army, however, had been hindered by Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin's
Great Purge of 1937, reducing the army's morale and efficiency shortly before the outbreak of the fighting. With over 30,000 of its army officers executed or imprisoned, most of whom were from the highest ranks, the Red Army in 1939 had many inexperienced senior officers. Because of these factors, and high commitment and morale in the Finnish forces, Finland was able to resist the Soviet invasion for much longer than the Soviets expected. Finnish forces inflicted stunning losses on the Red Army for the first three months of the war while suffering very few losses themselves. the
Drang nach Osten ("Drive towards the East") policy secretly remained in force, culminating on 18 December 1940 with
Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa, approved on 3 February 1941, and scheduled for mid-May 1941. , London in February 1943 When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army's ground forces had 303 divisions and 22 separate brigades (5.5 million soldiers) including 166 divisions and brigades (2.6 million) garrisoned in the western military districts. The Axis forces deployed on the
Eastern Front consisted of 181 divisions and 18 brigades (3 million soldiers). Three Fronts, the
Northwestern,
Western, and
Southwestern conducted the defense of the western borders of the USSR. In the first weeks of the
Great Patriotic War (as it is known in Russia), the
Wehrmacht defeated many Red Army units. The Red Army lost millions of men as prisoners and lost much of its pre-war matériel.
Stalin increased mobilization, and by 1 August 1941, despite 46 divisions lost in combat, the Red Army's strength was 401 divisions. The Soviet forces were apparently unprepared despite numerous warnings from a variety of sources. They suffered much damage in the field because of mediocre officers, partial mobilization, and an incomplete reorganization. The hasty pre-war forces expansion and the over-promotion of inexperienced officers (owing to the
purging of experienced officers) favored the
Wehrmacht in combat. The Axis's numeric superiority rendered the combatants' divisional strength approximately equal. A generation of Soviet commanders (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. at the
capture of Prague by the Red Army in May 1945 In 1941, the Soviet government raised the bloodied Red Army's
esprit de corps with propaganda stressing the defense of Motherland and nation, employing historic exemplars of Russian courage and bravery against foreign aggressors. The anti-Nazi
Great Patriotic War was conflated with the
Patriotic War of 1812 against
Napoleon, and historical Russian military heroes, such as
Alexander Nevsky and
Mikhail Kutuzov, appeared. Repression of the
Russian Orthodox Church temporarily ceased, and priests revived the tradition of blessing arms before battle. To encourage the initiative of Red Army commanders, the
CPSU temporarily abolished
political commissars, reintroduced formal military ranks and decorations, and introduced the
Guards unit concept. Exceptionally heroic or high-performing units earned the Guards title (for example
58th Guards Rifle Division), an elite designation denoting superior training, materiel, and pay. Punishment also was used; slackers, malingerers, those avoiding combat with self-inflicted wounds cowards, thieves, and deserters were disciplined with beatings, demotions, undesirable/dangerous duties, and
summary execution by
NKVD punitive detachments. and
Rokossovsky with General
Sokolovsky leave the
Brandenburg Gate after being decorated by
Field Marshal Montgomery At the same time, the
osobists (NKVD military counter-intelligence officers) became a key Red Army figure with the power to condemn to death and to spare the life of any soldier and (almost any) officer of the unit to which he was attached. In 1942, Stalin established the
penal battalions composed of
gulag inmates, Soviet POWs, disgraced soldiers, and deserters. In addition to dangerous military assignments, the penal troops could be used for hazardous front-line duties, e.g., as
tramplers clearing Nazi minefields. Given the dangers, the maximum sentence was three months. Likewise, the Soviet treatment of Red Army personnel captured by the
Wehrmacht was especially harsh. Per a
1941 Stalin directive, Red Army officers and soldiers were to "fight to the last" rather than surrender; Stalin stated: "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors". During and after World War II
freed POWs went to special "
filtration camps". Of these, by 1944, more than 90% were cleared, and about 8% were arrested or condemned to serve in
penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated POWs, and other
displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, 80% civilians and 20% of POWs were freed, 5% of civilians, and 43% of POWs were re-drafted, 10% of civilians and 22% of POWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2% of civilians and 15% of the POWs (226,127 out of 1,539,475 total) were transferred to the
Gulag. , raised above the German Reichstag in May 1945 , Berlin 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 this total of 34,401,807 it lost 6,329,600
killed in action (KIA), 555,400 deaths by disease and 4,559,000
missing in action (MIA) (most captured). Of the 4.5 million missing, 939,700 rejoined 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. This is the
official total dead, but other estimates give the number of total dead up to almost 11 million men, including 7.7 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million
prisoners of war (POW) dead (out of 5.2 million total POWs), plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses. Officials at the Russian
Central Defense Ministry Archive (CDMA) maintain that their database lists the names of roughly 14 million dead and missing service personnel. 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.
Shortcomings In 1941, the rapid progress of the initial German air and land attacks into the Soviet Union made Red Army logistical support difficult because many depots (and most of the USSR's industrial manufacturing base) lay in the country's invaded western areas, obliging their re-establishment east of the Ural Mountains.
Lend-Lease trucks and jeeps from the United States began appearing in large numbers in 1942. Until then, the Red Army was often required to improvise or go without weapons, vehicles, and other equipment. The 1941 decision to physically move their manufacturing capacity east of the Ural Mountains kept the main Soviet support system out of German reach. In the later stages of the war, the Red Army fielded some excellent weaponry, especially artillery and tanks. The Red Army's heavy
KV-1 and medium
T-34 tanks outclassed most
Wehrmacht armor, but in 1941 most Soviet tank units used older and inferior models.
Lend-Lease The Red Army was financially and materially assisted in its wartime effort by the
United States and the
British Empire. In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11
billion in materials ($180 billion in the 2020 money value): over 400,000
jeeps and trucks; 12,000
armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were
M3 Lees and 4,102
M4 Shermans); 14,015 aircraft (of which 4,719 were
Bell P-39 Airacobras, 2,908 were
Douglas A-20 Havocs, and 2,400 were
Bell P-63 Kingcobras) and 1.75 million tons of food.
Wartime rape Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in
Germany. The
wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence. According to historian
Antony Beevor, whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges,
NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often
rear echelon units who committed the rapes.
Soviet–Japanese War (1945) While the Soviets considered the surrender of Germany to be the end of the "Great Patriotic War", at the earlier
Yalta Conference the Soviet Union agreed to enter the
Pacific Theater portion of World War II within three months of the
end of the war in Europe. This promise was reaffirmed at the
Potsdam Conference held in July 1945. The Red Army began the
Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August 1945 (three days after the first
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the same day the second
atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, while also being exact three months after the surrender of Germany). It was the largest campaign of the
Soviet–Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the
Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace following the 1932–1939
Soviet–Japanese border conflicts. The Red Army, with support from
Mongolian forces, overwhelmed the Japanese
Kwantung Army and local Chinese forces supporting them. The Soviets advanced on the continent into the Japanese
puppet state of
Manchukuo,
Mengjiang (the northeast section of present-day
Inner Mongolia which was part of another puppet state) and via an
amphibious operation the northern portion of
Korea. Other Red Army operations included the
Soviet invasion of South Sakhalin, which was the Japanese portion of
Sakhalin Island (and Russia had lost to Japan in 1905 in the aftermath of the
Russo-Japanese War), and the
invasion of the Kuril Islands. Emperor
Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan on 15 August. The commanding general of the Kwantung Army ordered a surrender the following day although some Japanese units continued to fight for several more days. A
proposed Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, the second largest Japanese island, was originally planned to be part of the territory to be taken but it was cancelled. ==Administration==