Military history of the Soviet Union

Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police (known variously as the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, among many others) maintained control over the counterintelligence Special Departments (Особый отдел) that existed at all larger military formations. The best known was SMERSH (1943–1946) created during the Great Patriotic War. While the staff of a Special Department of a regiment was generally known, it controlled a network of secret informants, both chekists and recruited ordinary military.

Under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Red Army claimed to adhere to Karl Marx's proclamation that the bourgeoisie could be overcome only by a worldwide revolt of the proletariat, and to this end early Soviet military doctrine focused on spreading the revolution abroad and expanding Soviet influence throughout the world. Lenin provided an early experiment of Marx's theory when he invaded Poland in hopes of generating a communist uprising in neighboring Germany. Lenin's Polish expedition only complemented his March 1919 establishment of the Comintern, an organization whose sole purpose was to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State."

In keeping with the Comintern philosophy, the Red Army forcibly suppressed the anti-Soviet Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia in order to keep Turkestan in the Soviet alliance system. In 1921, a Red Army occupation of the Democratic Republic of Georgia overthrew the representative Georgian government and replaced it with a Soviet Republic. Georgia was then forcibly merged with Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to form the Transcaucasian SFSR, a member state of the Soviet Union.e

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's Five Year Plans and industrialization drive built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies.

In 1937, however, Stalin purged the Red Army of its best military leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed many Red Army officers, estimated in thousands, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet–Finnish War (Winter War) of 1939–40 and in World War II.

Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the autumn of 1957. Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform.

Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the armed forces.

In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons.

Mikhail Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements.

The Russian army was defeated in the First World War, a fact which strongly shaped the early stages of Red Army development. While the armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and develop new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn German armed forces. The Soviets viewed themselves as a nation unique to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation.

From its conception, the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days.

Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union had few resources to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This changed only when Stalin began the industrialisation drive in 1929, a policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated to the military.

Using these new resources, the Red Army of the 1930s developed a highly sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations of tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops designed to break through the enemy's line and carry the battle deep to the enemy's rear. Soviet industry responded, supplying tanks, aircraft and other equipment in sufficient numbers to make such operations practical. To avoid overestimating the power of the Soviet army, although before 1941 Soviet formations of a given level were at least equal to and often stronger than equivalent formations of other armies, huge wartime losses and reorganisation based on war experience reversed the trend during the later war years. Thus, for example, the Soviet Tank Corps was equivalent in armored vehicle power to an American armored division, and a Soviet rifle (infantry) division, unless specifically reinforced, was often equivalent to an American infantry regiment.

The Soviets developed their armament factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the four-year-long war.

The Red Army's focus on mobile operations in the early 1930s was gravely disrupted by Stalin's purge of the military's leadership. Since the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. Another factor contributing to the initial defeat was that the Soviet post-World War I rearmament effort was started too early, and in 1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that of the Wehrmacht.

In the initial period of the war, in the face of catastrophic losses, the Red Army drastically scaled down its armored formations, with the tank brigade becoming the largest commonly deployed armored unit, and reverted to a simpler mode of operations. Nevertheless, the revolutionary doctrines of the 1930s, modified by combat experience, were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943 after the Red Army regained the initiative.

T-26 light tanks of the Soviet 7th Army during advance into Finland, 2 December 1939.

Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Thanks to his control over and support from the Party and state bureaucracy, Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commissar in 1925, resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revolution abroad in favour of focusing on domestic issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion.

Eager to dispose of Trotsky's political and military supporters, Stalin directed the execution of eight high-ranking generals between 1935 and 1938. Primary among these was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, leader of the Soviet invasion of Poland.

Despite Stalin's isolationist policies, and even though the Soviet Union's borders would remain static for fifteen years following Lenin's death, the Soviets continued to involve themselves in international affairs, and the Comintern was instrumental in establishing the Communist parties of China in 1921 and Indochina in 1930. Additionally, the Red Army played a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War, supplying over 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms and 30,000 tons of ammunition to the Republican cause.

Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by the growing tension between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany and an avid supporter of the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. Nazi–Soviet relations were tempered by Hitler's personal hatred for communist ideology and for wanting to expand German territories. Direct armed conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union was delayed by the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, which essentially divided the nations of Eastern Europe into two spheres of interest, one belonging to the Soviets and the other to the Nazis.

The Soviet Union sold arms to the Governor of Xinjiang province of the Republic of China, Jin Shuren, and help install his successor Sheng Shicai in 1934 as their puppet governor. They intervened militarily in an invasion of Xinjiang against the Chinese Muslims 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) and Han chinese troops led by the Chinese Muslim General Ma Zhongying and the Han chinese general Zhang Peiyuan when they were on the verge of defeating Sheng's manchurian and white Russian troops.[2][3] 2 brigades of 7,000 men, armed with tanks, planes, mustard gas, and armored cars were the Soviet forces which invaded. After fierce fighting, in which mustard gas was used by the Soviet Union at the Battle of Tutung, Ma Zhongying retreated and Zhang committed suicide to avoid capture.[4] During the battle, the chinese Muslims reportedly dressed up in sheepskins and stormed Soviet machine guns posts with swords.[5][6][7] Ma encountered a Red Army column at the Battle of Dawan Cheng and wiped out the entire column, his Muslim troops rolled the wrecked Soviet armored cars off the mountainside.[8][9][10][11] The Soviet Union intervened again in the Xinjiang War (1937), invading with 5,000 troops and using planes with mustard gas.

In late 1930s, Soviet Union was no longer satisfied with the status quo in its relations with independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. This came as a result of a change in Soviet foreign policy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave a great opportunity to recover the provinces of Imperial Russia lost during the chaos of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.[12] As a result of this pact, on 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland from the west. When the Poles were close to defeat and the Polish government left the country, on 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland from the east to regain the territories populated mostly by ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Next, Soviet Union sent ultimatums to the Baltic states and gained control in September and October. The Soviet Union had negotiated with the Finns for over a year, but they refused Soviet demands, and the Red Army assaulted on 30 November 1939 starting the Winter War. Simultaneously, a puppet regime, called the Finnish Democratic Republic, was set by the Soviets.[13] The initial period of the resulting war proved disastrous for the Soviet military. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations on December 14, 1939. The Red Army faced a disastrously underestimated opponent, suffering a series of embarrassing defeats.

However, in 1940 the Soviets reorganized their forces and mauled the enemy in a final great offensive. Mannerheim, the Finnish commander, then advised his government to negotiate peace on Soviet terms. Recognizing that they had lost the war, the Finns wisely chose to settle early with the Soviets, while there was still potential for a relatively lenient peace treaty. In the end, the Finns retained their independence, but ceded huge tracts of territory, and resources, to the victorious Soviets.

Soviet ski troops advancing the front line during the siege of Leningrad.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with a secret protocol describing how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided between them. In the invasion of Poland of 1939 the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland, and in June 1940 the Soviet Union also occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

German soldiers surrendering to the Red Army units near Vitovka village, 1941.

The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany and other Axis countries allied with it swept across the newly relocated Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The poor Soviet performance in the Winter War against Finland encouraged Hitler to ignore the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and take the Red Army by surprise. During the initial stages of the war, Soviet forces were often ordered to stand their ground despite limited defensive capabilities, resulting in numerous encirclements and correspondingly high numbers of casualties.

The United States program of lend-lease was extended to Soviet Union in September 1941, supplying planes, tanks, trucks and other war materials. Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the gates of Moscow, in part because mobilized troops with winterized clothing from Siberia were transferred from there after Stalin realized that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Union (Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbor). The Red Army launched a powerful winter counteroffensive which pushed the Germans back from the outskirts of Moscow. At the start of 1942, the weakened Axis armies abandoned their march on Moscow and advanced south towards the Caucasus and Volga river. This offensive, in turn, ran out of steam in autumn 1942, allowing the Soviet forces to stage a devastating counteroffensive on the overextended enemy. The Red Army encircled and destroyed significant German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 and reversed the tide of the war in Europe.

In the summer of 1943, following the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war. All Soviet territory was liberated from Axis occupation by 1944. After having driven the Axis armies out of Eastern Europe, in May 1945 the Red Army launched its assault on Berlin, which effectively ended World War II in Europe (see V-E Day). Much of Eastern Europe and great parts of the Soviet Union were devastated by Red Army troops as a result of an aggressive policy of "scorched earth".[14] Once Germany had surrendered, the Red Army joined the war against Japan, and in summer 1945 carried out an offensive against Japanese forces stationed in northern Manchuria. The Red Army emerged from the war as one of the most powerful land armies in history with five million soldiers, and more tanks and artillery than all other countries combined.

The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of over eight million soldiers and as much as fifteen million civilians dead, by far the highest losses of any country during the war. This is believed to be the highest human death toll from any military conflict.[15]

The RPK light machine gun is typical of the Red Army's influence in the post-war world. It is based on the AK-47 assault rifle, which would ultimately effect change in both future rifle design and in the methods of modern warfare.

By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10 to 13 million men. During and right after the war, the Red Army was by far the most powerful land army in the world. Immediately following Germany's surrender, this number was reduced to five million; this decline was indicative not of diminishing interest in the Soviet military but rather of a growing interest in establishing more modern and mobile armed forces. This policy resulted in the 1949 introduction of the AK-47, designed two years earlier as an improvement on the submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and reliable source of short-range firepower. Also important was the 1967 introduction of the BMP-1, The first mass-used infantry fighting vehicles commissioned by any armed force in the world. These innovations would help direct the course of Soviet military operations throughout the Cold War.

The Soviet military assisted the Second East Turkestan Republic during the Ili Rebellion.

The Mongolian People's Republic became involved in a border dispute with the Republic of China during the Pei-ta-shan Incident, Soviet Russian and Mongol forces attempted to occupy and raid Chinese territory, in response, a Chinese Muslim Hui cavalry regiment, the 14th Tungan Tungan Cavalry regiment was sent by the Chinese government to attack Mongol and Soviet positions.[16]

Many of the Soviet forces who fought to liberate the countries of Eastern Europe from Nazi control remained in the region even after Germany's surrender in 1945. Stalin used this military occupation to establish satellite states, creating a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets quickly became an enormous political and economic influence in the region and the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948, seven eastern European countries had communist governments.

In this setting, the Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry S. Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the agreement made at the Yalta Conference. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to stop Communist expansion, and in 1955 Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO alliance.

Conventional military power showed its continued influence when the Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress the democratic aspirations of their peoples and keep these countries within the Soviet regime. The Soviet Union and the western forces, led by the US, faced a number of standoffs that threatened to turn into live conflicts, such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which saw "hawks" on both sides push the respective rivals closer towards war due to policies of brinksmanship. This attitude was tempered by fears of a nuclear conflict and desires among moderates for détente.

Under Khrushchev's leadership, Soviet relations with Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia were finally repaired with the 1956 dissolution of the Cominform. This decision generated a further rift between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, a neighboring communist state which felt the Soviets were turning their back on the fundamental Marxist–Leninist struggle for the worldwide triumph of communism. This Sino-Soviet split erupted in 1967 when the Red Guard besieged the Soviet embassy in Beijing. Additional conflicts along the Sino-Soviet border followed in 1969.

Tension between the political forces in Moscow and Beijing would greatly influence Asian politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and a microcosm of the Sino-Soviet split emerged when the by-then late-Ho Chi Minh's Soviet-aligned Vietnam invaded Pol Pot's pro-Chinese Cambodia in 1978. The Soviets had ensured the loyalty of Vietnam and Laos through an aggressive campaign of political, economic and military aid – the same tactic which allowed the Soviet Union to compete with the United States in a race to establish themselves as neocolonial rulers of newly independent states in Africa and the Middle East. Extensive arms sales made weapons like the AK-47 and the T-55 tank icons of the contemporary wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Also significant was the 1968 declaration of the Brezhnev Doctrine which officially asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in other nation's internal affairs in order to secure socialism from opposing capitalist forces. This doctrine was used to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In Afghanistan the Soviet forces met a fierce resistance from the Afghans who were supported by the CIA. Battling an opposition that relied on guerrilla tactics and asymmetric warfare, the massive Soviet war machine proved incapable of achieving decisive victories and the entire campaign quickly devolved into a quagmire not unlike that which the U.S. faced a decade earlier in the Vietnam War. After ten years of fighting at the cost of approximately 20 billion dollars a year (in 1986 United States dollars[17]) and 15,000 Soviet casualties, Gorbachev surrendered to public opinion and ordered troops to withdraw in early 1989.

The Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb codenamed "First Lightning" on 29 August 1949, four years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surprising many Western commentators who had expected the U.S. monopoly to last for some time longer. It soon came out that the Soviet atomic bomb project had received a considerable amount of espionage information about the wartime Manhattan Project, and that its first bomb was largely a purposeful copy of the U.S. "Fat Man" model. More important from the perspective of the speed of the Soviet program, the Soviets had developed more uranium reserves than specialists in the American military had thought possible. From the late 1940s, the Soviet armed forces focused on adapting to the Cold War in the era of nuclear arms by achieving parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons.

Though the Soviet Union had proposed various nuclear disarmament plans after the U.S. development of atomic weapons in the Second World War, the Cold War saw the Soviets in the process of developing and deploying nuclear weapons in full force. It would not be until the 1960s that the United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed to ban weapon buildups in Antarctica and nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater.

By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reached a rough parity with the United States in some categories of strategic weaponry, and at that time offered to negotiate limits on strategic nuclear weapons deployments. The Soviet Union wished to constrain U.S. deployment of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs).

The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty began in November 1969 in Helsinki. The interim agreement signed in Moscow in May 1972 froze existing levels of deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and regulated the growth of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). As part of the SALT process, the ABM Treaty was also signed.

The SALT agreements were generally considered in the West as having codified the concept of Mutually assured destruction (MAD), or deterrence. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized their mutual vulnerability to massive destruction, no matter which state launched nuclear weapons first. A second SALT agreement, SALT II, was signed in June 1979 in Vienna. Among other provisions, it placed an aggregate ceiling on ICBM and SLBM launchers. The second SALT agreement was never ratified by the United States Senate, in large part because of the breakdown of détente in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At one time, the Soviet Union maintained the world's largest nuclear arsenal in history. According to estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the peak of approximately 45,000 warheads was reached in 1986.[18] Roughly 20,000 of these were believed to be tactical nuclear weapons, reflecting the Red Army doctrine that favored the use of these weapons if war came in Europe. The remainder (approximately 25,000) were strategic ICBMs. These weapons were considered both offensive and defensive in nature. The production of these weapons is one of the factors that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.