Red Army
- This article is about the armed forces of the Soviet Union. See Red Army Faction for the German terrorist group; Japanese Red Army for the Japanese terrorist group; and People's Liberation Army for the Chinese Red Army.
Red Army Flag
The Red Army was created by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars on February 23, 1918 from the already-existing Red Guard. This date was an important national holiday in the Soviet Union, later celebrated as "Soviet Army Day", and it continues to be celebrated in present-day Russia as "Defenders of the Fatherland Day". Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Union's People's Commissar for War from 1918 to 1924, is generally regarded as the founder of the Red Army.
At the beginning of its existence, the Red Army was a voluntary formation, without ranks and insignia. Officers were democratically elected. Later on in the Civil War, obligatory military service was introduced, and every unit was assigned a political commissar, or politruk, who was given the authority to override unit commanders' decisions which were in opposition to the principles of the Communist Party. Although this sometimes resulted in inefficient command, the Party leadership considered political control over the military to be necessary as the Army relied more and more on experienced officers from the pre-revolutionary Tsarist period.
Lenin, Trotsky, and soldiers of the Red Army in Petrograd
The institute of professional officers, abandoned as a "heritage of tsarism", was restored in 1935. During the Great Purges of 1937-1939 (and later), nearly all senior officers were executed or sent to forced labor camps as potential threats to Stalin's authority.
| Table of contents |
|
2 The Cold War 3 The End of the Soviet Union 4 Literature 5 Related articles |
At the time of the Nazi Germany assault on the USSR in June 1941, the Red Army numbered around 1.5 million men. Already weakened by the political cleansing of its ranks, the Red Army was taken by surprise by the German invasion. The first weeks of the War saw the annihilation of virtually the entire Soviet air force on the ground, and major Soviet defeats as German forces trapped hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers in vast pockets.
The Soviet government adopted a number of measures to improve the state and morale of the retreating Red Army in 1941. Soviet propaganda turned away from political notions of class struggle, and instead invoked deeper-rooted patriotic feelings of the population, embracing pre-revolutionary Russian history. The War against the German aggressors was proclaimed the Great Patriotic War, in allusion to the Patriotic War war against Napoleon in 1812. References to ancient Russian heroes such as Alexander Nevski and Mikhail Kutuzov were made. Repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church stopped, and priests revived the tradition of blessing arms before battle. The institution of political commissars was abolished, although it was later restored. Military ranks were introduced. Many additional individual distinctions such as medals and orders were adopted. The Guard was reestablished, with units having shown exceptional heroism in combat being renamed Guards Regiment, Guards Army etc.
During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army drafted between 15 and 20 million officers and soldiers, of which 7 to 10 million were killed. Red Army soldiers captured by the Nazi armies were frequently shot in the field, or shipped to concentration camps and executed as a part of the Holocaust. Following its costly victory over Germany after the capture of Berlin in 1945, the prestige and influence of the Army in post-war Soviet society increased greatly.
To mark the final step in the transformation from a revolutionary militia to a regular army of a sovereign state, the Red Army was renamed Soviet Army in 1946.
After the end of the War, the numbers of the Soviet Army were reduced to approximately 5 million. Soviet Army units which had liberated the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule remained there to secure Soviet influence in what became socialist satellite states of the Soviet Union. The greatest Soviet military presence was maintained in East Germany, in the so-called Western Group of the Armed Forces, to deter and to fend off NATO forces.
The trauma of the devastating German invasion influenced the Soviet cold-war military doctrine of fighting enemies on their own territory, or in a buffer zone under Soviet hegemony, but in any case preventing any war to reach Soviet soil. In order to secure that Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army moved in to quell anti-Soviet uprisings in the GDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950 and 1960s.
The confrontation with the US and NATO during the Cold War mainly took the form of mutual deterrence with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union invested heavily in the Army's nuclear capacity, especially the production of ballistic missiles and of nuclear submarines to deliver them. Open hostilities took the form of wars by proxy, with the Soviet Union and the US respectively supporting loyal regimes or rebel movements in Third World countries.
In 1979, however, the Soviet Army itself was sent to intervene in a civil war raging in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army was to back a Soviet-friendly secular government which was threatened by Muslim fundamentalist guerillas (including Osama bin Laden) equipped and financed by the United States. In spite of technical superiority, the Soviets could not establish control over the country and suffered heavy losses in guerilla attacks and ambushes, which led Gorbachev finally to withdraw the Soviet forces from the country. The blow to the Army's pride suffered in the debacle of Afghanistan was comparable to the American trauma over the lost war in Vietnam, which was fought for similar motives.
In 1991, the Army played a decisive role in the coup d'etat of reactionary communists and senior military commanders, who sent tanks into the streets of Moscow to overthrow Gorbachev and his reform-minded government. The coup failed as citizens took to the streets and tank crews refused to shoot at their compatriots.
After the following collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Army was dissolved and its assets divided among the USSR's successor states. The bulk of the Soviet Army, including the nuclear rocket forces, was incorporated in the Army of the Russian Federation. Military forces garrisoned in Eastern Europe were gradually moved back home between 1991 and 1993.
World War II
The Cold War
The End of the Soviet Union
Literature
Related articles