Red Army

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Red Army, formally called the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, once stood as the largest ground force in the Allied victory across the European theatre of the Second World War. Up to 34 million soldiers served within its ranks during that conflict alone. It inflicted 75-80% of all casualties suffered by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front. It captured Berlin. And when it was finished, it had paid a price so staggering that the official death toll ran to nearly 8.7 million, while estimates from the Russian Central Defense Ministry Archive list roughly 14 million dead and missing by name.

  How did a force born in January 1918 from what its own commander called little more than a mob grow into a colossus that decided the fate of the world's most destructive war? What did it take to hold such an army together across revolution, civil war, foreign intervention, purges, and near-annihilation? And what did that holding-together cost the soldiers inside it? The answers reach back to a single decree, signed by the Council of People's Commissars, and forward to a renamed army that outlasted the union that created it.

• 2. Born From Collapse

  ›

  In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote that there was only one way to prevent the restoration of the police: create a people's militia and fuse it with the army. He was describing a vision. What existed instead was catastrophe. The Imperial Russian Army had begun to disintegrate. Tsarist general Nikolay Dukhonin estimated 2 million deserters, 1.8 million dead, 5 million wounded, and 2 million prisoners, leaving roughly 10 million men nominally still under arms but many without weapons at all.

  On the 28th of January 1918, the Council of People's Commissars signed the decree establishing the Red Army. It envisioned a body drawn from "the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes," open to all citizens of the Russian republic aged 18 or older. The families of those who joined were promised rations and help with farm work. The response was genuine: men and some women flooded recruitment centres, and those turned away collected scrap metal, prepared care-packages, and in some cases pooled earnings toward tanks.

  By the 22nd of February 1918, the first commander-in-chief, Nikolai Krylenko, was already cataloguing disaster. At a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, he said: "We have no army. The demoralized soldiers are fleeing, panic-stricken, as soon as they see a German helmet appear on the horizon, abandoning their artillery, convoys and all war material to the triumphantly advancing enemy." That day, the 23rd of February 1918, became Red Army Day: the first day of conscription in Petrograd and Moscow, and the first day of combat against the occupying Imperial German Army.

• 3. Forged in Civil War

  ›

  Leon Trotsky's most consequential decision in June 1918 was not military but structural: he abolished workers' control over the Red Army, replaced elected officers with a traditional command hierarchy, and made desertion punishable by death. Simultaneously, he launched a mass recruitment of officers from the old Imperial Russian Army, employed as military advisors called voenspetsy. To secure their loyalty, the Bolsheviks sometimes held the officers' families as hostages. By 1918-75% of the Red Army's officers were former tsarists; by the time the civil war ended in 1922, that figure had risen to 83% of divisional and corps commanders.

  The civil war itself ran in three distinct phases from October 1917 to 1923. In the second phase, from January to November 1919, White armies under General Anton Denikin from the south, Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak from the east, and General Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich from the northwest advanced on multiple fronts simultaneously. Trotsky reformed and counterattacked: the Red Army repelled Kolchak's army in June, and turned back Denikin's and Yudenich's forces in October. By mid-November, the White armies were nearly spent.

  Discipline inside the Red Army was brutal and often arbitrary. In 1919, when desertion reached crisis proportions among 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters, 612 were executed as "hardcore" cases. Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin's punitive brigades took hostages from the home villages of deserters, executing one in ten of those who returned. Yet the army also instituted periodic amnesty weeks that encouraged 98,000-132,000 deserters to voluntarily return. Anna Novikova's trajectory captures something of the period: enrolled in Moscow's school of infantry commanders in the spring of 1919, she became the first woman to command a combat unit of the Red Army, and by 1920 was fighting from an armored train.

• 4. Doctrine and the Purge

  ›

  Mikhail Frunze became head of the Red Army staff on the 1st of February 1924, and historian John Erickson marks that date as the ascent of the general staff in Soviet military planning. By the 1st of October 1924, army strength had fallen to 530,000 as the post-civil-war reorganization cut the force roughly in half from its wartime size.

  Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky led Soviet theoreticians in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s to develop the deep operation doctrine, a direct outgrowth of the bruising lessons from the Polish-Soviet War and the civil war. Deep operations envisaged simultaneous corps- and army-size maneuvers striking throughout the depth of an enemy's defenses, with aviation and armor advancing together. Tukhachevsky specified that aerial warfare must be "employed against targets beyond the range of infantry, artillery, and other arms" and concentrated in mass "against targets of the highest tactical importance." The doctrine found its first formal written expression in the 1929 Field Regulations and was codified in the 1936 Provisional Field Regulations (PU-36).

  Then Stalin destroyed it. The Great Purge of 1937-1939 gutted the officer corps. Among those removed: 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army generals, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 army corps generals, 154 of 186 division generals, all 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars. In 1937 alone, 11,034 officers were dismissed from an army of 114,300. Tukhachevsky himself, perceived by Stalin as a potential political rival, was executed. An atmosphere of fear so permeated what remained that suicide rates among junior officers reached record levels. One of the deepest operational wounds was practical: when the entire junior class of one service academy was graduated a year early in 1937 to fill sudden vacancies, the Red Army found itself led at every level by officers who had never held the commands they now occupied.

• 5. Tanks on Paper, Obsolescence in the Field

  ›

  An American journalist writing in 1941 noted that the Soviet defence budget in 1940 equalled $11 billion, representing one-third of national expenditure, and observed that the Russians "worship machines" in a way that helped make the Red Army among the most mechanized in the world. The journalist was not wrong about the ambition. The first mechanized unit formed under Stalin's campaign in 1930: the 1st Mechanized Brigade, built around a tank regiment, a motorized infantry regiment, and reconnaissance and artillery battalions. By 1932, the Soviets had created the first operational-level armored formations in history, the 11th and 45th Mechanized Corps.

  The gap between ambition and reality, however, was severe. By 1941, the Red Army's 29 mechanized corps had an authorized strength of no fewer than 29,899 tanks. Actual availability was roughly 17,000. The pressure to show production numbers meant most armored vehicles were obsolescent models, critically short of spare parts, with nearly three-quarters overdue for major maintenance. On the 22nd of June 1941, only 1,475 of the modern T-34s and KV-series tanks were available, and these were scattered too thinly along the front to mass for any local success. The 4th Army's 518 tanks were all obsolete T-26 models, against an authorized strength of 1,031 modern medium tanks. When the Wehrmacht struck in June 1941, these paper formations dissolved.

• 6. The Eastern Front

  ›

  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army's ground forces fielded 303 divisions and 22 separate brigades, totalling 5.5 million soldiers, with 2.6 million garrisoned in the western military districts. The Wehrmacht hit with 181 divisions and 18 brigades, roughly 3 million men. In the first weeks the Red Army lost millions of men as prisoners and most of its pre-war equipment. Yet Stalin mobilized relentlessly: by the 1st of August 1941, despite 46 divisions destroyed in combat, the Red Army counted 401 divisions.

  The war prompted a rapid reorganization of how the army fought. Following six months of combat, the high command abolished the rifle corps level of organization because it proved ineffective in 1941. After the victory at the Battle of Moscow in January 1942, rifle corps were reintroduced as experience accumulated. The count went from 62 on the 22nd of June 1941, down to six by the 1st of January 1942, back to 34 by February 1943, and up to 161 by the start of 1944. Tank formation thinking evolved similarly: from destroyed corps in 1941, to smaller brigades and battalions in 1942, back to corps-sized armor in late 1942 and early 1943, and finally to tank armies by mid-1943 whose strength by war's end could reach 700 tanks and 50,000 men.

  Political controls ran alongside the military ones. In 1942, Stalin reintroduced blocking units and penal battalions under Order 227. Penal troops formed from gulag inmates, disgraced soldiers, and deserters were assigned the most hazardous duties, including clearing Nazi minefields on foot. Stalin's directive that Red Army soldiers "fight to the last" rather than surrender, combined with the declaration "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors," meant that those who were captured faced another ordeal upon liberation. By 1945 about 100 filtration camps processed more than 4 million repatriated prisoners and displaced persons; of POWs processed, 15% totalling 226,127 out of 1,539,475 were transferred to the Gulag.

  To sustain the army materially, the United States delivered to the USSR through Lend-Lease $11 billion in supplies at wartime value, equivalent to roughly $180 billion in 2020 terms: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 12,000 armored vehicles, 14,015 aircraft, and 1.75 million tons of food. When the war in Europe ended, the Red Army turned east. On the 9th of August 1945, exactly three months after Germany's surrender, it launched the invasion of Manchuria, overwhelming the Japanese Kwantung Army and driving into Manchukuo, Mengjiang, and the northern portion of Korea. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on the 15th of August.

• 7. The Weight of Losses

  ›

  The official death toll from the Second World War stands at 8,668,400. That figure breaks down into 6,329,600 killed in action, 555,400 deaths by disease, and 4,559,000 missing in action, most of them captured. Of the missing, 939,700 rejoined Soviet ranks in liberated territory, and 1,836,000 returned from German captivity. Other estimates push the total dead toward 11 million. The Russian Central Defense Ministry Archive database holds names of roughly 14 million dead and missing service personnel, a number that has not been fully reconciled with the official count.

  The ethnic composition of the losses reflects the army's scale and diversity. Ethnic Russians accounted for 5,756,000 of the dead, followed by ethnic Ukrainians at 1,377,400. As many as 8 million of the 34 million mobilized were non-Slavic minority soldiers; around 45 divisions formed from national minorities served from 1941 to 1943. The Red Army had always organized ethnic minority units separately, from the Dungan Cavalry Regiment commanded by Magaza Masanchi in the civil war to the national minority divisions of the Second World War.

  On the German side, the Eastern Front cost an estimated 3,604,800 killed or missing within the 1937 borders, plus 900,000 ethnic Germans and Austrians from outside those borders, plus 3,576,300 captured, totalling over 8 million Axis military losses. Soviet forces released 3,572,600 German prisoners after the war; roughly 300,000 of 3 million German POWs died in Soviet captivity. A recent British estimate put 3.6 of 6 million Soviet POWs dead in German camps. In February 1946, the Red Army was renamed the Soviet Army, absorbing into a new institutional identity what it had cost to win.