Soviet Armed Forces

• 1. Introduction

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  The Soviet Armed Forces began as a decree signed on the 15th of January 1918 (Old Style), and by the time they dissolved in 1991, they had grown into what international observers regarded as collectively one of the strongest military forces in world history. At their Cold War peak, the ground forces alone numbered between four and five million personnel. They fought in some of the bloodiest campaigns ever recorded, lost more than eight million troops in a single war, and fielded weapons that shaped every army on earth that came after them.

  How did a volunteer force without ranks or insignia, whose officers were chosen by democratic elections, become the dominant land army on the planet for nearly half a century? What drove it from the banks of the Halha River in Mongolia to the streets of Budapest and Prague? And how did the force that broke the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and Kursk end its days unable to restore order in its own constituent republics? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Birth Under Fire

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  the 23rd of February 1918 was the day of the first mass draft in Petrograd and Moscow, and also the day the new Red Army met its first battlefield test against the advancing Imperial German Army. That date became a national holiday celebrated in the Soviet Union as Soviet Army Day, and it continues in Russia today as Defenders of the Motherland Day.

  Credit for founding the Red Army generally goes to Leon Trotsky, who served as People's Commissar for War from 1918 to 1924. The army he built was, at first, a curious experiment: no ranks, no insignia, officers elected by the troops. A decree of the 29th of May 1918 ended that experiment abruptly, imposing obligatory service for men between ages 18 and 40 and abolishing democratic officer elections in the same stroke. Saluting returned. Officers received separate quarters and higher pay.

  The army still needed experienced commanders, and Trotsky had a practical answer. After General Aleksei Brusilov offered the Bolsheviks his services in 1920, a special commission under Lev Glezarov drafted roughly 315,000 former officers of the Imperial Russian Army by August of that year. These men served mostly as military advisors, called voyenspets. One notable figure, Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, had joined the Bolsheviks even earlier as a member of the Supreme Military Council.

  Every unit received a political commissar, known as a politruk, empowered to override a commander's decisions if those decisions ran counter to Communist Party principles. The arrangement sometimes produced chaotic command, but Party leadership viewed it as essential when the army depended so heavily on officers from the old Tsarist order. The tension between military competence and political loyalty would define the institution for decades to come.

• 3. Trial by Civil War and Beyond

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  The Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 pitted the Bolsheviks against the Whites, who were backed by Allied powers seeking to overturn the revolution. The conflict began in earnest after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk forced Russia to cede territory to Germany, splitting the Bolsheviks from the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and sparking a domestic rupture. Ten million lives were lost, the majority civilians killed by disease and famine rather than combat.

  The Red Army's first foreign campaign came in the Polish-Soviet War. A Soviet counter-offensive following Poland's 1920 invasion of Ukraine showed early promise, but Polish forces halted it decisively at the Battle of Warsaw, a defeat the sources describe plainly as disastrous for the Soviets.

  The army's next major test came in the Far East. Mongolia and the USSR had been drawing closer since 1934, alarmed by Japanese expansion in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. A ten-year Mongolian-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on the 12th of March 1936 included a mutual defence protocol that would soon be invoked. In May 1939, a Mongolian cavalry skirmish east of the Halha River escalated rapidly. Both sides spent June building up forces. By July 1, the Japanese had 38,000 troops in position against a combined Soviet-Mongol force of just 12,500.

  On August 20, General Georgy Zhukov launched a massive offensive: heavy air attacks followed by three hours of artillery bombardment, then three infantry divisions and five armoured brigades, supported by a fighter regiment, with 57,000 troops storming a Japanese force of 75,000 deeply entrenched in the area. By August 23 the entire Japanese force was encircled. By August 31 it was largely destroyed. The Red Army lost 9,703 killed or missing and 15,952 wounded. The Japanese lost 25,000 killed outright; the grand total of killed, missing, wounded and captured reached 61,000. When Japanese soldiers were later allowed onto the battlefield to collect their dead, the scale of the carnage deepened an already shaken morale. That defeat almost certainly influenced Japan's decision not to attack the Soviet Union during World War II, which in turn freed the Red Army to transfer large numbers of Far Eastern troops into the desperate European Theatre in the autumn of 1941.

• 4. The Great Patriotic War

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  On the 17th of September 1939, the Red Army crossed into eastern Poland using the official pretext of protecting Ukrainians and Belarusians from Germany, which had attacked from the west on September 1. The force numbered 466,516 troops. They faced limited resistance, partly because most Polish forces were already engaged along the western border, partly because the Polish Supreme Command had issued orders not to engage the Soviets, and partly because many residents of the Kresy region viewed the advancing troops as liberators. The Red Army still lost 1,475 killed and missing and 2,383 wounded. Polish losses stood between 6,000 and 7,000.

  Adolf Hitler had no hesitation about what came next. Directive No. 21, issued on the 18th of December 1940, opened with the words that "the German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England." The final plan gained approval on the 3rd of February 1941. The attack was set for mid-May but delayed by events in Greece and Yugoslavia until the second half of June.

  When the assault came, the Red Army had 303 divisions and 22 brigades, totalling 4.8 million troops, with 166 divisions and 9 brigades stationed in the western military districts. The Axis deployed 181 divisions and 18 brigades totalling 3.8 million on the Eastern Front. Within weeks, virtually the entire Soviet Air Force had been destroyed on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were trapped in vast encirclements. Poor preparedness, a half-hearted Soviet mobilization, two years of German combat experience, officer shortages caused by the Purges, and the sheer Axis numerical advantage combined to produce catastrophic early losses.

  The turnaround came through hard-won learning. Georgy Zhukov and a generation of Soviet commanders absorbed the lessons of defeat. Soviet propaganda abandoned class-struggle language and invoked Alexander Nevski and Mikhail Kutuzov instead. The Orthodox Church was permitted to bless arms again. Military ranks, medals, and the Guards designation for elite units all returned. The Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Operation Bagration proved decisive.

  The numbers are almost impossible to absorb. During the war the Red Army drafted an additional 29,574,900 troops beyond the 4,826,907 already in service. It lost 6,329,600 killed in action, 555,400 to disease, and 4,559,000 missing or captured. After accounting for those who returned from liberated territory and from German captivity, the net total of losses reached 8,668,400. Ethnic Russians accounted for 5,756,000 of those dead; ethnic Ukrainians for 1,377,400. German losses on the Eastern Front ran to an estimated 3,604,800 killed or missing and 3,576,300 captured.

  The T-34 tank outclassed any German armour when it appeared in 1941, but supply problems hampered even the best-equipped Soviet formations. The Manchurian Campaign that followed the European war's end saw the Red Army attack Japan and its puppet state of Manchukuo on the 9th of August 1945, quickly overwhelming the Kwantung Army in combination with Mongolian and Chinese Communist forces. Japan surrendered unconditionally on the 2nd of September 1945.

• 5. Cold War Structure

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  By 1945 the Soviet military had only three services: Ground Forces, Air Forces, and the Navy. In March 1946 two separate ministries were merged into a single Ministry of the Armed Forces. A fourth service, the Troops of National Air Defence, was created in 1948. The Strategic Rocket Forces followed six years later, and the Soviet Airborne Forces functioned as a Reserve of the Supreme High Command.

  Personnel numbers collapsed after the war, from around 11.3 million to roughly 2.8 million by 1948. To manage that demobilization, the number of military districts rose temporarily to thirty-three before settling back. Through most of the Cold War, Western estimates put the Ground Forces at between four and five million. Soviet law required all able-bodied males 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.

  The trauma of the 1941 German invasion shaped the entire Cold War strategic posture: fight enemies on their own territory, or in a buffer zone under Soviet control, but keep war away from Soviet soil. Soviet units stayed in East Germany as the Group of Soviet Forces, with smaller forces in Poland as the Northern Group, in Czechoslovakia as the Central Group, and in Hungary as the Southern Group. When anti-Soviet uprisings arose in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Army moved in each time.

  The Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969 produced a sixteenth military district, the Central Asian Military District, headquartered at Alma-Ata. Four high commands grouping the military districts, forces groups, and fleets were established in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Far Eastern High Command first, then the Western and South-Western High Commands oriented toward Europe, and the Southern High Command at Baku facing the Middle East.

  Proxy conflicts supplemented direct nuclear deterrence throughout the Cold War. During the Korean War, two Soviet air divisions flying MiG-9 and MiG-15 fighters engaged U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers directly. During the Vietnam War, Soviet intelligence ships in the South China Sea tracked American B-52 bombers departing from Okinawa and Guam, relaying flight paths to North Vietnam's southern headquarters so analysts could calculate bombing targets and direct forces to move perpendicular to the attack. From 1968 to 1970 these warnings prevented the bombing runs from killing a single military or civilian leader in the headquarters complexes.

• 6. The Purges and Their Aftermath

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  In 1937 the Red Army numbered around 1.3 million men. By June 1941 it had nearly tripled in size. That rapid expansion came at the worst possible time, because the preceding years had gutted the officer corps in a catastrophic purge.

  The Great Purge targeted what the leadership called "politically unreliable elements," particularly senior officers. At the highest ranks, the damage was staggering: 3 of the 5 marshals were removed, 13 of 15 army-level 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. What began as a political cleansing quickly became a vehicle for personal vendettas and descended into a witch-hunt. Junior officers were rushed into positions that demanded experience and training they simply lacked, with consequences that played out in the catastrophic early weeks of Operation Barbarossa.

  The political control mechanisms that enabled the Purges remained baked into the military's structure permanently. Party membership was mandatory above certain ranks. Top military leaders were integrated into the highest party bodies. Political officers called zampolity served in every unit, lecturing troops on Marxism-Leninism, monitoring political attitudes, and reporting on commanders' performance. During World War II the zampolit lost veto power over commanders' decisions but kept the power to report upward. By 1989, more than 20 percent of all armed forces personnel were party or Komsomol members; over 90 percent of all officers held that membership.

• 7. Ethnic Fault Lines

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  Soviet authorities officially described the military as a "school of internationalism" where soldiers of different nationalities would build mutual respect. In practice the history was far more fractured. The Bolsheviks had briefly employed non-Slavic national military units during the Civil War, then grew suspicious of their size and placed them under heavy supervision before disbanding them entirely by 1938. The units were briefly revived in World War II, then disbanded again in the mid-1950s.

  In 1956, when soldiers were ordered to respond to protesters in Tbilisi, the ethnic-Georgian unit refused to follow orders from their Russian officers. A 1983 RAND Corporation report by Alexander Alexiev and S. Enders Wimbush noted that between 600,000 and 1,400,000 former Soviet citizens had served in the German military on the Eastern Front during World War II; more than half of those auxiliaries came from non-Russian backgrounds including Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians. An additional 250,000 volunteer nationals of Central Asian and Caucasian origin were organized into units called the Ostlegionen.

  At the height of the war, infantry units broke down as Russians (62.95%), Ukrainians (14.52%), Belarusians (1.9%), and all other ethnicities (20.63%). Non-Slavic servicemen were generally barred from elite positions including the Strategic Rocket Forces, Air Force, and Navy, on suspicion of divided loyalty. Around 80 percent or more of combat units were staffed by Slavic nationalities; non-combat units ran between 70 and 90 percent non-Slavs, especially Central Asians and Caucasians. Russians made up 69.4 percent of the officer corps, with the total Slavic share reaching 89.7 percent. By 1990-69.2 percent of all military members were ethnic Slavic, 1.9 percent Baltic, 20.6 percent Muslim-Turkic, and 8.3 percent all others. The uneven ethnic burden would matter enormously as the Soviet republics began asserting independence.

• 8. Afghanistan and the End

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  In 1979 the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan to support a communist government under pressure from the mujahideen, insurgent groups receiving military training in Pakistan and China, and billions of dollars in funding from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. The Politburo authorized only a "limited contingent" averaging between 80,000 and 100,000 troops, which proved insufficient to control the countryside or secure the border. Mujahideen fighters used hit-and-run tactics, exploiting easy escape routes and reliable supply channels from across the border.

  The war's actual casualty rate averaged 1,670 deaths per year, which Soviet sources described as modest, but when glasnost opened the media, even that number turned public opinion sharply against the conflict. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately withdrew Soviet forces. The experience left what observers called the "Afghan Syndrome," a parallel to the American trauma after Vietnam. At least half a million Afghan civilians died in addition to rebel fighters, and millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran.

  Gorbachev had been reducing the military's share of the economy since 1985. By 1989 Soviet troops were leaving their Warsaw Pact neighbors. The Eastern Bloc collapsed in the same year. As the Soviet Union moved toward dissolution, the army turned inward. On the 9th of April 1989, army and MVD units killed approximately 190 demonstrators in Tbilisi. On January 19-20, 1990, Soviet forces entered Baku, removed the republican government, and killed hundreds of civilians. On the 13th of January 1991, Soviet forces stormed the State Radio and Television Building and the television retranslation tower in Vilnius, killing 14 people and injuring 700.

  The August 1991 coup attempt saw tanks roll into Moscow, but an official Soviet Academy of Sciences commission found that the army had no clear goal of overthrowing Gorbachev, who was absent on the Black Sea coast. Only three civilians died in a single confrontation with tank crews. The coup ended through inaction rather than force. On the 8th of December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine signed the Soviet Union out of existence and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on December 25. The Supreme Soviet dissolved itself the following day. The last remnants of the Soviet command structure were finally dissolved in June 1993. The Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet remained in Crimea, where a fleet division arrangement and a Russian leasehold for naval bases was finally worked out in 1997.