- This article is about the armed forces of the Soviet Union. See
Red Army Faction for the German militant group; Japanese Red Army for the Japanese militant group; and People's Liberation Army for the Chinese Red
Army.
The short forms Red Army and RKKA refer to the "Workers' and Peasants' Red Army",
(Рабоче-Крестьянская
Красная Армия - Raboche-Krest'yanskaya
Krasnaya Armiya in Russian), the armed forces
organised by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918. This organisation became the army of the
Soviet Union after its establishment in 1922. "Red" refers to the blood shed by the working class in its struggle against
capitalism.
Early History
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 of the first combat
action against the occupying 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 day of celebration in present-day 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 and insignia. Democratic
elections selected the officers. However, a decree of May 29, 1918 specified obligatory military service was decreed for men of ages 18 to 40. To service the massive draft,
the Bolsheviks formed regional military commissariats (военный
комиссариат,
военкомат (voenkomat)), which existed in this function and under this name
till the very last days of the Soviet Union. (Note: do not confuse military commissariats with the institution of military
political commissars.)
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.
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.
The institution of a professional officer corps, abandoned as a "heritage of tsarism" in the Revolution, returned in 1935. The Red Army acquired a General Staff made up of officers trained by German experts during
the period of Soviet-German cooperation between
the two World Wars. During the Great Purges of 1937-1939 (and later), the NKVD executed
nearly all senior officers or sent them to forced labor camps as
potential threats to Stalin's authority.
World War II
At the time of the Nazi assault on the USSR in June 1941, the Red Army numbered around 1.5 million men,
but political cleansing of its ranks had weakened it. The German invasion took the Red Army cadres by surprise. 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 the deeper-rooted patriotic feelings of the population, embracing pre-revolutionary Russian history.
Propagandists proclaimed the War against the German aggressors as the Great Patriotic War, in allusion to the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon. References to ancient Russian military heroes such as
Alexander Nevski and Mikhail Kutuzov appeared. Repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church stopped, and priests revived the tradition of blessing arms before battle.
The Party abolished the institution of political commissars
-- although it soon restored them. Military ranks were introduced. Many additional individual distinctions such as medals and
orders were adopted. The Guard was re-established: units which had shown exceptional heroism in combat gained the names of
"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
died. Nazi troops who captured Red Army soldiers frequently shot them in the field or shipped them to concentration camps and executed them 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 Red 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
gained the official name of the Soviet Army in 1946.
The Cold War
After the end of the Second World War, the numbers of the Soviet Army
dropped to approximately 5 million. Soviet Army units which had liberated the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule
remained in some of them to secure the régimes in what became satellite
states of the Soviet Union and to deter and to fend off NATO forces. The greatest Soviet military presence based itself in East Germany, in the so-called Western Group of the Armed 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 from reaching Soviet soil. In order
to secure these Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army moved in to quell anti-Soviet uprisings in the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s 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 in 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 supporting loyal client régimes or rebel movements in Third World countries.
In 1979, however, the Soviet Army intervened in a civil war raging in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army came to back a Soviet-friendly secular government 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
parallels the American trauma over the lost war in Vietnam. The débacle of
Afghanistan, moreover, drained away military resources at a time when the Soviet Union had to strain to keep pace with the West,
and would ultimately prove a contributory factor in its decay.
The End of the Soviet Union
In 1991, the Army played a decisive role in the coup d'état 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 dissolved and the USSR's successor states divided its assets among themselves. The bulk of the Soviet
Army, including most of the nuclear missile forces, became
incorporated in the Army of the Russian Federation. Military
forces garrisoned in Eastern Europe (including the Baltic states)
gradually returned home between 1991 and 1994.
Further Reading
- Roter Stern über Deutschland, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk und Stefan Wolle, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, 2001, ISBN 3-86153-246-8. This German book, The
Red Star over Germany, without excessive hatred presents 49 years of the Soviet
Army stationed in East Germany. The 256 pages of the book cover it all:
from 49,000 who perished in prison camps of the Soviet zone, to the 18 Russian soldiers who refused to shoot unarmed
Germans.
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