The Soviet Period Military Experience.

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.

Sowing the Wind: The First Soviet-German Military Pact and the Origins of World War II

Sowing the Wind: The First Soviet-German Military Pact and the Origins of World War II

Before dawn on June 22, 1941, German bombers began to rain destruction down on a swath of Soviet cities from Leningrad to Sevastopol. It was the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in the history of the world.

Was the Russian Military a Steamroller? From World War II to Today

Was the Russian Military a Steamroller? From World War II to Today

Joseph Stalin supposedly claimed that " quantity has a quality all its own," justifying a cannon-fodder mentality and immense casualties. The problem is, Stalin never actually said that, but it fits our stereotype about the Russian military so neatly that everyone believes he did.

To Save Himself, Stalin was Ready to Give Hitler Ukraine and Baltic Republics and Possibly More, Archives Show

Lieutenant General Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov

Staunton, June 19 – A few days after Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet dictator used a diplomatic back channel to explore whether the Nazi leader would be prepared to end the war if Stalin agreed to hand over to German rule Ukraine, the Baltic republics and perhaps even more.

That is the conclusion of a Friday article by historian Nikita Petrov in “Novaya gazeta” an article that undercuts both Stalin’s carefully cultivated stance as someone who was prepared to fight the invader to the end and Vladimir Putin’s use of World War II as a legitimating and mobilizing tool in Russia today.

The history of these events is by its very nature murky and can be reconstructed only by a careful reading of Russian archival materials, Petrov suggests. But the basic facts of the case are these: In the first days after the German attack, Lavrenty Beria on Stalin’s order directed NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov to meet with a Bulgarian diplomat to explore what it would take for Hitler to stop his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Among the concessions Sudoplatov was authorized to discuss with the Bulgarian who Moscow believed would communicate his conversation to Berlin was the handing over to Hitler of Ukraine, the areas that Stalin had occupied in 1940-41 on the basis of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and perhaps more.

Such a sacrifice would constitute “a new Brest peace” but would save Stalin and his regime, Petrov points out by allowing the communist regime to continue to function beyond the Urals.

Obviously, discussing anything of this then or later was incredibly dangerous given that such things would have constituted in the clearest way treason, but information about them came out in the interrogations of Sudoplatov and Beria in 1953. And Petrov mines these sources for his article, even reproducing the key Sudoplatov declaration.

As many have pointed out, Stalin believed in Hitler and in his own ability to cut a deal right up to the moment of the German invasion. The archives suggest that he continued to believe in his ability to cut a deal with Hitler even after that time. In fact, however, Stalin was manipulated by double agents before June 22, 1941, and by his own fears after that time.

Nothing came as a result of Stalin’s feeler. Hitler was confident that his forces could defeat the Soviet Union and therefore ignored what was passed on by the Bulgarians. But there were consequences in the USSR for those most immediately involved because Stalin never forgot, Petrov continues.

Despite his regime’s presentation of him as the great military leader during World War II, Stalin remembered that “three people knew the secret of his cowardice and the depth of the collapse in 1941.” The Soviet dictator ordered Abakumov to arrest Sudoplatov, although Beria urged the secret police chief not to obey lest he and Beria himself be next.

And there was a third potential victim of Stalin’s malignant memory: Vyacheslav Molotov, who certainly knew about the meeting with the Bulgarian diplomat in June 1941 and Stalin’s willingness to sacrifice much of the country to save himself. Had Stalin lived, Petrov says, all three would have come to a bad end. But his death kept him from realizing his goal.

Soviet NKVD IV

The NKVD Officer – The Red Square, 1945.

On February 5, 1943 this army was designated as the 70th Army with Far-Eastern, Transbaikal, Siberian, Central-Asian, Ural and Stalingrad divisions renamed respectively: 102nd, 106th, 140th, 162nd, 175th and 181st Rifle divisions, a total of 69236 personnel. The 70th Army was instantly transferred to the K.K.Rokossovsky’s Central Front, which was preparing a local offensive, and suffered its first defeat. Rokossovsky wrote after the war: “We have been expecting too much from the 70th Army when directing it to the most important sector on our right wing, where our troops linked with the Bryansk Front. But the former border-guards failed due to the poor experience of the officers, who found themselves in a difficult combat situation for the first time. The units entered combat from the march, in elements and disorganised, without proper artillery support and ammunition”. As the carnage battle of Kursk salient loomed on the horizon, the 70th Army was reinforced considerably, with the staffs of 19th and 28th Rifle Corps arriving, followed by the 19th Tank Corp, 132nd, 211th and 280th Rifle divisions, 1st Guards Artillery division, several separate armour, engineer and aerial units. Withstanding countless German assaults during the battle of Kursk, the 70th Army fought quite well, but that is easily explained by its strength—by the end of August 1943 there were 18 divisions within its ranks, with generous supplies and replacements! Eventually, the 70th Army ended its warpath in the battle of Berlin, after heavy fighting in Poland and East Prussia.

All these measures of either incorporating NKVD troops into the Red Army formations for covering the enormous combat losses, or employing them as blocking detachments for boosting the regular unit’s persistence in defence were quite effective also after the battle of Kursk and transition of strategic initiative to the Soviet side. Nevertheless we can still encounter separate NKVD combat formations later in the war being used on the front-line as assault troops, as was the case with the 290th NKVD Rifle regiment. This unit participated within the ranks of 18th Army in the crushing assault on the port of Novorossijsk on the Taman peninsula in autumn 1943, landing in the city with the seaborne element of the operation and breaching the German defences. The same applies to the 3rd Separate Artillery Unit of NKVD Home Security troops in the battle of Koenigsberg, 1st and 2nd NKVD Artillery Regiments in the battle of Novgorod, 273rd NKVD Rifle regiment in the battle of Gdansk, 145th NKVD Rifle regiment in the battle of Poznan, 103rd Separate Mobile NKVD rear-security troops Group in the battle of Stettin—all winning the decorations and the corresponding honorary titles of Novorossijsk, Koenigsberg, Novgorod, Gdansk, Poznan and Stettin for their ruthless actions. However it should be remembered that since 1943 the NKVD troops returned to their original role of home security troops, whose primary objective was to secure Soviet power both in newly liberated areas and in the rear, so the participation of NKVD units in combat since 1943 should be rather treated as an exception.

Much more typical was their employment in the security operations on the territory of Third Reich and its allies, essentially sketched in the State Committee of Defence Decree dated December 1944. According to this document, entitled as “Concerning the security measures in rear areas and communications of the Red Army in East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania” , NKVD troops were given a task of maintaining security in the areas lying between the state border and the front-line troops, combating the remnants of German troops, nationalist guerrilla movement, “counter-revolutionary and bourgeois elements” among the civilian population, etc. Therefore, 6 new NKVD divisions were raised, somewhat weaker in strength—only with 5,000 of personnel each, given the numbers of 57th, 58th, 59th, 60th, 61st and 62nd NKVD Rifle divisions. After the Third Reich was crushed, these formations comfortably camped in Germany and Austria, followed by newly raised 63rd, 64th and 65th NKVD Rifle divisions, designated for the occupational service, with the 66th NKVD Rifle division deployed in Romania. The last accord of NKVD fighting forces expansion was witnessed during the August Storm of 1945, when the 3d NKVD Rifle divison followed the rolling Soviet tanks into Manchuria, to neutralise the Japanese resistance and Russian emigrant circles of former ataman Semenov. But the story of their confrontation with the new enemies, like AK or UPA guerrilla armies makes up a separate chapter in the long and fascinating history of Soviet war machine.

After the dawn of "Barbarossa" and the disastrous outcome of the initial battles near the state frontier, the Soviet military leadership realized the necessity of specially trained units for behind-the-lines operations designated to destroy German manpower, thwart enemy advance by demolishing transport infrastructure, assassinate the personnel of the German-backed local anti-Communist self-government, etc. On the 22nd of June 1941 the Special Group appeared in the structure of NKVD, subordinated directly to People's Commissar of Interior, notorious sadist and maniac L.P.Berija; this think-tank, later reformed into 4th Department of NKVD, was expected to conduct reconnaissance operations and creating the underground network on the territories already occupied by Germans, and has headed by experienced spy, saboteur and assassin NKVD Lieutenant-General P.Sudoplatov(responsible for murdering Ukrainian nationalist leader Colonel Eugen Konovalets in Amsterdam in 1938). Among the troops at the disposal of the Special Group of NKVD was initially the Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade for Special Purposes, but this formation remained in the limelight while lesser-known NKVD special-operations units were neglected by post-war historians.

Regional NKVD institutions have also raised their fighting troops to be employed in the special operations, namely the Motorized Infantry Reconnaissance--Demolition Regiment of the Moscow region NKVD Board. This unit was raised in one day according to the order of the Head of NKVD Moscow region Board, Senior Major of State Security M.Zhuravliov, on October 17, 1941. The total number of personnel drafted amounted to 1914 men and women. Initially the core of the Regiment (1st and 2nd battalions) was composed of the weakened and decimated Demolition battalions of the Komintern and Krasnogvardejsk districts of Moscow, basically being similar to British Home Guard or the later German Volkssturm, numbering respectively 298 and 460 soldiers. Later on the 3rd battalion was raised, employing the manpower of the Moscow NKVD security officers and NCOs, and the 4th battalion based on the cadres of NKVD district departments of Moscow, including the criminal police officers and traffic-police sergeants, followed by the students of the Industrial Academy, Physical Training academy, workers and employees and eventually high-school students. The main advantage of the latter was based on the assumption that they were never engaged in the service within NKVD and thus were less vulnerable, as by the time of formation it became evident that the civilian population eagerly handed over NKVD servicemen to SD or German auxiliary units.

Regiment Commander--Border Guarding Troops Colonel A.Mahankov

Regiment Commissar--Major of State Security M.Zapevalin

NKVD Motorized Infantry Reconnaissance--Demolition Regiment was trained extensively during October and early November, prepared for combat in small groups comprising 15-20 men. A typical group would have 5-7 Mosin-Nagant rifles, usually of 1891|/1930 model, one rifle geared with optics, 3-5 automatic SVT Tokarev-1940 rifles, 2 light machine-guns DP(Degtjarov Pehotnyj) in 1927 modification, and 2-3 submachine guns--initially PPD, later replaced by PPSh. All weapon systems were using the 7,62mm bullet, and in order to ensure the uninterrupted supply of ammunition behind the enemy lines the NKVD commanders ordered the deployment of foreign weapons using ammunition identical to German. Thus the undisturbed weapon stocks captured after bloodless Red Army 1939-1940 campaigns in Poland and Baltic states were brought into play, including systems manufactured in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia, with curious exceptions, such as Japanese "Arisaka" rifles dating back to World war One. each soldier also received two splinter F-1 hand grenades, or two anti-tank RPG-40 grenades, accompanied by 1-2 Molotov-cocktails, 1 dynamite stick or a landmine. The main handicap of the otherwise well-supplied formation was the debilitating lack of radio equipment, the existing radio stations employed for communication between regimental and battalion headquarters, which seriously affected the fighting capabilities of the Regiment and limited the value of the reconnaissance information it supplied.

The atmosphere of importance which accompanied the formation of NKVD Motorized Infantry Reconnaissance--Demolition Regiment was confirmed at the military parade in Moscow on the 7th of November 1941, when the column of demolition and workers battalions was headed specifically by the NKVD regiment, possibly because of the position its commanders held in NKVD hierarchy.

The first engagement happened in November 1941, when the total of 31 mobile groups comprising 474 soldiers and officers were sent into the woods surrounding Moscow in order to infiltrate the enemy positions. But in reality the main military endeavours consisted of setting fire to the buildings, blowing up the bridges, planting mines on the roads, etc.--according to Zhukov's order of the day on the 30th of October 1941, authorizing the destruction of civilian property on the unprecedented scale--100 kms up to the frontline. These measures have definitely affected German advance, but consequently hindered the Soviet counter-offensive in December-February, when the scorched earth exhibited its double-edged nature. And the civilian population of the Moscow region had a very harsh winter to live through, as a result.