The Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Armed Forces, were the armed forces of the Russian SFSR (1917–1922) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991) from their beginnings in the Russian Civil War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In May 1992, Russian president Boris Yeltsin issued decrees forming the Russian Armed Forces, which subsumed much of the Soviet Armed Forces. Multiple sections of the former Soviet Armed Forces in the other, smaller Soviet republics gradually came under those republics' control.
According to the all-union military service law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Red Army, the Air Forces, the Navy, the troops of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the convoy guards of the union-republic NKVDs (on 30 October 1925, the convoy guards of the union-republic NKVDs were united into the Convoy Guard under the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union). The OGPU was later corporated into the newly created NKVD of the USSR in 1934, and thus its Border and Internal Troops were under the joint management of the People's Commissariats of Defense and of Internal Affairs (in 1934, the Convoy Guard Troops were included in the Internal Troops). In 1989, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the Ground Forces, the Air Defence Forces, the Air Forces, and the Navy, listed in their official order of importance.
In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied, which meant that all able-bodied males aged eighteen and older were drafted into the armed forces. International observers regarded the armed organizations as collectively one of the strongest such forces in world history. The relative advancement and development of the government's militaries was a key part of the history of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets maintained a notable reach across the world and particularly inside Europe. Russian and Soviet armies were always massive. By the 1980s they were "highly modernized, well-equipped, and have great firepower... [as well as] mobility", which meant that "manpower and materiel combined [made] the present Soviet ground forces a very formidable land army."The Soviet Army: Operations and Tactics". United States Department of Defense - Department of the Army. Field Manual (No. 100-2-1). 16 July 1984. Washington, D.C. The ground forces were always the largest of the five Soviet military services.
Names
Russian: , Ukrainian: , Belarusian: , Uzbek: , Kazakh: , Georgian: , Azerbaijani: , Lithuanian: Romanian (called "Moldavian" in the USSR; also known as Moldovan language): Форцеле армате але Униуна Републичилори Сочиалисть Советичь, Latvian: Kyrgyz: , Tajik: , Armenian: , Turkmen: , Estonian:
History
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 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
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,Telegram from the German Ambassador in the Soviet Union, (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office , 10 September 1939, at Yale Law School's Avalon Project: Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939–1941. 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.Sanford pp. 20–24 Nonetheless, the Red Army sustained losses of 1,475 killed and missing and 2,383 wounded.Ibid. The losses of the opposing Polish troops are estimated at 6,000–7,000. Edukacja Humanistyczna w wojsku . 1/2005. Dom wydawniczy Wojska Polskiego. . (Official publication of the Polish Army). Last accessed on 28 November 2006.
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.