The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky,
seized power in November 1917. It immediately began peace negotiations with the
Central Powers and took control of the armed forces. Once peace was concluded
in March 1918 by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the demobilization of the old
Russian imperial army began.
THE RED ARMY
Adhering to Marxist doctrine, which viewed standing armies
as tools of state and class oppression, the Bolsheviks did not plan to replace
the imperial army and intended instead to rely on a citizens’ militia of
class-conscious workers for defense. The emergence of widespread opposition to
the Bolshevik seizure of power convinced Lenin of the need for a regular army
after all, and he ordered Trotsky to create a Red Army, the birthday of which
was recognized as February 23, 1918. As the number of workers willing to serve
on a voluntary basis proved to be insufficient for the needs of the time,
conscription of workers and peasants was soon introduced. By 1921 the Red Army
had swelled to nearly five million men and women; the majority, however, were
engaged full-time in food requisitioning and other economic activities designed
to keep the army fed and equipped as Russia’s beleaguered economy began to
collapse. Because they lacked trained leadership to fight the civil war that
erupted in the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks recruited and impressed former
officers of the old army and assigned political commissars to validate their
orders and maintain political reliability of the units.
The civil war raged until 1922, when the last elements of
anticommunist resistance were wiped out in Siberia. In the meantime Poland
attacked Soviet Russia in April 1920 in a bid to establish its borders deep in
western Ukraine. The Soviet counteroffensive took the Red Army to the gates of
Warsaw before it was repelled and pushed back into Ukraine in August. The Red
Army forces combating the Poles virtually disintegrated during their retreat,
and the Cossacks of the elite First Cavalry Army, led by Josef Stalin’s cronies
Kliment Voroshilov and Semen Budenny, staged a bloody anti-Bolshevik mutiny and
pogrom in the process. The subsequent peace treaty gave Poland very favorable
boundaries eastward into Ukraine.
The onset of peace saw the demobilization of the regular
armed forces to a mere half million men. Some party officials wanted to abolish
the army totally and replace it with a citizens’ militia. As a compromise, a
mixed system consisting of a small standing army and a large territorial
militia was established. Regular soldiers would serve for two years, but
territorial soldiers would serve for five, one weekend per month and several
weeks in the summer. Until it was absorbed into the regular army beginning in
1936, the territorial army outnumbered the regular army by about three to one.
For the rest of the decade the armed forces were underfunded, undersupplied,
and ill-equipped with old, outdated weaponry.
During the 1920s most former tsarist officers were dismissed
and a new cadre of Soviet officers began to form. Party membership was strongly
encouraged among the officers, and throughout the Soviet period at least eighty
percent of the officers were party members. At and above the rank of colonel
virtually all officers held party membership.
A unique feature of the Soviet armed forces was the
imposition on it of the Political Administration of the Red Army (PURKKA, later
renamed GlavPUR). This was the Communist Party organization for which the
military commissars worked. Initially every commander from battalion level on
up to the Army High Command had a commissar as a partner. After the civil war,
commanders no longer had to have their orders countersigned by the commissar to
be valid, and commissars’ duties were relegated to discipline, morale, and
political education.
During the 1930s political officers were added at the
company and platoon levels, and during the purges and at the outset of World
War II commanders once again had to have commissars countersign their orders.
Commissars shared responsibility for the success of the unit and were praised
or punished alongside the commanders, but they answered to the political
authorities, not to the military chain of command. Commissars were required to
evaluate officers’ political reliability on their annual attestations and
during promotion proceedings, thus giving them some leverage over the officers
with whom they served.
THE 1930s
The First Five-Year Plan, from 1928 to1932, expanded the
USSR’s industrial base, which then began producing modern equipment, including
tanks, fighter aircraft and bombers, and new warships. The size of the armed
forces rapidly increased to about 1.5 million between 1932 and 1937. The rapid
expansion of the armed forces led to insurmountable difficulties in recruiting
officers. As a stopgap measure, party members were required to serve as officers
for two- or three-year stints, and privates and sergeants were promoted to
officer rank. The training of officer candidates in military schools was
abbreviated from four years to two or less to get more officers into newly
created units. As a result the competence and cohesion of the leadership
suffered.
In the 1930s Soviet strategists such as Vladimir K.
Triandifilov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky devised innovative tactics for utilizing
tanks and aircraft in offensive operations. The Soviets created the first large
tank units, and experimented with paratroops and airborne tactics. During the
Spanish Civil War (1936–39) Soviet officers and men advised the Republican
forces and engaged in armored and air combat testing the USSR’s latest tanks
and aircraft against the fascists.
The terror purge of the officer corps instituted by Josef
Stalin in 1937–1939 took a heavy toll of the top leadership. Stalin’s motives
for the purge will never be known for certain, but most plausibly he was
concerned about a possible military coup. Although it is very unlikely that the
military planned or hoped to seize power, three of its five marshals were
executed, as were fifteen of sixteen army commanders of the first and second
rank, sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders, and 136 of 199 division
commanders. Forty-two of the top forty-six military commissars also were
arrested and executed. When the process of denunciation, arrest, investigation,
and rehabilitation had run its course in 1940, about 23,000 military and political
officers had either been executed or were in prison camps. It was long believed
that perhaps as many as fifty percent of the officer corps was purged, but
archival evidence subsequently indicated that when the reinstatements of
thousands of arrested officers during World War II are taken into account,
fewer than ten percent of the officer corps was permanently purged, which does
not diminish the loss of talented men. Simultaneous with the purge was the
rapid expansion of the armed forces in response to the growth of militarism in
Germany and Japan. By June 1941 the Soviet armed forces had grown to 4.5
million men, but were terribly short of officers because of difficulties in
recruiting and the time needed for training. Tens of thousands of civilian party
members, sergeants, and enlisted men were forced to serve as officers with
little training for their responsibilities. Despite the USSR’s rapid
industrialization, the army found itself underequipped because men were being
conscripted faster than weapons, equipment, and even boots and uniforms could
be made for them.
The end of the decade saw the Soviet Union involved in
several armed conflicts. From May to September 1939, Soviet forces under
General Georgy Zhukov battled the Japanese Kwantung Army and drove it out of
Mongolia. In September 1939 the Soviet army and air force invaded eastern
Poland after the German army had nearly finished conquering the western half.
In November 1939 the Soviet armed forces attacked Finland but failed to conquer
it and in the process suffered nearly 400,000 casualties. Stalin’s government
was forced to accept a negotiated peace in March 1940 in which it gained some
territory north of Leningrad and naval bases in the Gulf of Finland.
Anticipating war with Nazi Germany, the USSR increased the pace of rearmament
in the years 1939–1941, and prodigious numbers of modern tanks, artillery, and
aircraft were delivered to the armed forces.
WORLD WAR II
In violation of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed
in 1939, Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. Much of the forward-based
Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground on the first day of the onslaught.
All along the front the Axis forces rolled up the Soviet defenses, hoping to
destroy the entire Red Army in the western regions before marching on Moscow
and Leningrad. By December 1941 the Germans had put Leningrad under siege, came
within sight of Moscow, and, in great battles of encirclement, had inflicted
about 4.5 million casualties on the Soviet armed forces, yet they had been
unable to destroy the army and the country’s will and ability to resist. Nearly
5.3 million Soviet citizens were mobilized for the armed forces in the first
eight days of the war. They were used to create new formations or to fill
existing units, which were reconstituted and rearmed and sent back into the fray.
To rally the USSR, Stalin declared the struggle to be the Great Patriotic War
of the Soviet Union, comparable to the war against Napoleon 130 years earlier.
At the outset of the war, Stalin appointed himself supreme
commander and dominated Soviet military operations, ignoring the advice of his
generals. Stalin’s disastrous decisions culminated in the debacle at Kiev in
September 1941, in which 600,000 Soviet troops were lost because he refused to
allow them to retreat. As a result, Stalin promoted Marshal Georgy Zhukov to
second in command and from then on usually heeded the advice of his military
commanders.
The Soviet Army once again lost ground during the summer of
1942, when a new German offensive completed the conquest of Ukraine and reached
the Volga River at Stalingrad. In the fall of 1942 the Soviet Army began a
counteroffensive, and by the end of February 1943 it had eliminated the German
forces in Stalingrad and pushed the front several hundred miles back from the
Volga. July 1943 saw the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, ending in a
decisive German defeat. From then on the initiative passed to the Soviet side.
The major campaign of 1944 was Operation Bagration, which liberated Belarus and
carried the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw by July, in the process destroying
German Army Group Center, a Soviet goal since January 1942. The final assault
on Berlin began in April 1945 and culminated on May 3. The war in Europe ended
that month, but a short campaign in China against Japan followed, beginning in
August and ending in September 1945 with the Japanese surrender to the Allies.
THE COLD WAR
After the war, the armed forces demobilized to their prewar
strength of about four million and were assigned to the occupation of Eastern
Europe. Conscription remained in force. During the late 1950s, under Nikita
Khrushchev, who stressed nuclear rather than conventional military power, the
army’s strength was cut to around three million. Leonid Brezhnev restored the
size of the armed force to more than four million. During the Cold War, pride
of place in the Soviet military shifted to the newly created Strategic Rocket
Forces (SRF), which controlled the ground-based nuclear missile forces. In
addition to the SRF, the air force had bomber-delivered nuclear weapons and the
navy had missile-equipped submarines. The army, with the exception of the
airborne forces, became an almost exclusively motorized and mechanized force.
The Soviet army’s last war was fought in Afghanistan from
December 1979 to February 1989. Brought in to save the fledgling Afghan
communist government, which had provoked a civil war through its use of
coercion and class conflict to create a socialist state, the Soviet army
expected to defeat the rebels in a short campaign and then withdraw. Instead,
the conflict degenerated into a guerilla war against disparate Afghan tribes
that had declared a holy war, or jihad, against the Soviet army, which was
unable to bring its strength in armor, artillery, or nuclear weapons to bear. The
Afghan rebels, or mujahideen, with safe havens in neighboring Iran and
Pakistan, received arms and ammunition from the United States, enabling them to
prolong the struggle indefinitely. The Soviet high command capped the
commitment of troops to the war at 150,000, for the most part treating it as a
sideshow while keeping its main focus on a possible war with NATO. The conflict
was finally brought to a negotiated end after the ascension of Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1985, with nearly 15,000 men killed in vain.
Gorbachev’s policy of rapprochement with the West had a
major impact on the Soviet armed forces. Between 1989 and 1991 their numbers
were slashed by one million, with more cuts projected for the coming years. The
defense budget was cut, the army and air force were withdrawn from Eastern
Europe, naval ship building virtually ceased, and the number of nuclear
missiles and warheads was reduced—all over the objections of the military high
command. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, exposed the horrible
conditions of service for soldiers, particularly the extent and severity of
hazing, which contributed to a dramatic increase in desertions and avoidance of
conscription. The prestige of the military dropped precipitously, leading to
serious morale problems in the officer corps. Motivated in part by a desire to
restore the power, prestige, and influence of the military in politics and
society, the minister of defense, Dmitry Iazov, aided and abetted the coup
against Gorbachev in August 1991. The coup failed when the commanders of the
armored and airborne divisions ordered into Moscow refused to support it.
