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Soviet Union [USSR] ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND COMBAT EXPERIENCE
Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the
Bolsheviks (see Glossary) merged their 20,000-man army, the Red
Guards, with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and Petrograd garrison
soldiers who supported the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik leader Vladimir I.
Lenin decreed the establishment of the Workers' and Peasants' Red
Army on January 28, 1918, and Leon Trotsky was then first commissar
for war. The Bolsheviks recognized the importance of building an
army under their control; without a loyal army, the Bolshevik
organization itself would have been unable to hold the power it had
seized.
The early Red Army was egalitarian but poorly disciplined. The
Bolsheviks considered military ranks and saluting to be bourgeois
customs and abolished them. Soldiers elected their own leaders and
voted on which orders to follow. This arrangement was abolished,
however, under pressure of the Civil War (1918-21), and ranks were
reinstated
(see Soviet Union USSR - Civil War and War Communism
, ch. 2).
Because most professional officers had joined the antiBolshevik , or White, forces, the Red Army initially faced a
shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this situation,
the Bolsheviks recruited 50,000 former Imperial Army officers to
command the Red Army. At the same time, they attached political
commissars to Red Army units to monitor the actions of professional
commanders and their allegiance to the Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik). By 1921 the Red Army had defeated four White armies
and held off five armed, foreign contingents that had intervened in
the Civil War.
After the Civil War, the Red Army became an increasingly
professional military organization. With most of its 5 million
soldiers demobilized, the Red Army was transformed into a small
regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime
mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the Civil
War, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to
the party. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military
profession, the party downgraded political commissars, established
the principle of one-man command, and reestablished formal military
ranks.
During the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin's five-year
plans and industrialization drive built the productive base
necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in
Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its
military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to
match the power of its potential enemies. In 1937, however, Stalin
purged the Red Army and deprived it of its best military leaders
(see Soviet Union USSR - The Period of the Purges
, ch. 2). Fearing or imagining that
the military posed a challenge to his rule, Stalin jailed or
executed an estimated 30,000 Red Army officers, including three of
five marshals and 90 percent of all field grade officers. Stalin
also restored the former dual command authority of political
commissars in Red Army units. These actions were to severely impair
the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40
and in World War II.
After occupying the Baltic states and eastern Poland under the
terms of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, the Soviet
Union demanded territorial concessions from Finland in late 1939
(see Soviet Union USSR - Foreign Policy, 1928-39
, ch. 2). When the Finnish government
refused, the Red Army invaded Finland. The resulting war was a
disaster for the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union has not
published casualty statistics, about 100,000 Red Army troops are
believed to have died in the process of overcoming the small,
poorly equipped Finnish army.
The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous
deficiencies before Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa,
which began his war against the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. At
the beginning of the
Great Patriotic War (see Glossary), the Red
Army was forced to retreat, trading territory for time. But it
managed to halt the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg in December 1941 at the
gates of Moscow. In 1942 the Wehrmacht launched a new offensive
through the Volga region aimed at seizing Soviet oil resources in
the Caucasus. At this critical moment, Stalin reinstituted one-man
command and gave his field commanders more operational
independence. The Red Army encircled and destroyed German forces in
the city of Stalingrad in a battle that ended in February 1943. In
the summer of 1943, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative,
and it liberated all Soviet territory from German occupation during
1944. After having driven the German army out of Eastern Europe, in
May 1945 the Red Army launched the final assault on Berlin that
ended the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army emerged from the war as
the most powerful land army in history and became known as the
Soviet army thereafter. The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come,
however, at the cost of 7 million military and 13 million civilian
casualties among the Soviet population.
From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, the Soviet armed forces
focused on adapting to the changed nature of warfare in the era of
nuclear arms and achieving parity with the United States in
strategic nuclear weapons. Conventional military power showed its
continued importance, however, when the Soviet Union used its
troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep
these countries within the Soviet alliance system
(see Soviet Union USSR - Appendix C).
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union began to modernize its conventional
warfare and power projection capabilities. At the same time, it
became more involved in regional conflicts or
local wars (see Glossary) than ever before. The Soviet Union supplied
arms and sent
military advisers to a variety of Third World allies in Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East. Soviet generals planned military
operations against rebels in allied Angola and Ethiopia. Soviet
troops, however, saw little combat action until the invasion of
Afghanistan in December 1979. They fought a counterinsurgency
against the Afghan rebels, or mujahidin, for nearly ten
years. An estimated 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed and
35,000 wounded in the conflict by the time Soviet forces began to
withdraw from Afghanistan in May 1988. All 110,000 Soviet troops
deployed in Afghanistan had been withdrawn by February 1989,
according to Soviet authorities.
Data as of May 1989
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