National military formations of the Red Army

In its first days of its existence, the Red Army had a tradition of forming national military units (which continued the trends that existed before the revolution), either openly (a unit with a "national" name was created, staffed mainly by representatives of the same nationality), or by the "concentration" method, in which conscripts of the same nationality were sent to one compound.[1] Many similar units in the former Imperial Russian Army had existed for years, with many national Bolshevik military units taking part in the October Revolution of 1917.[1] During the Russian Civil War,[2] national units had what was considered to be an impressive battle record.[1] It was the brainchild of Mikhail Frunze, who made sure that national formations were of different sizes, ranging from platoons to divisions.[2] For the training of military personnel of these units, special educational institutions were created. As a rule, national formations served in the areas where they were formed. The existence of units like these were controversial in the Soviet leadership, who believed that they couldn't be able to control them.[1]

The proportion of soldiers of the Red Army serving in national military units has always been small. At the beginning of 1938, less than 2% of the Red Army served in national formations. In 1934, the Belarusian and Ukrainian national units were disbanded and in 1938, a special decree of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the Council of People's Commissars "On National Units and Formations of the Red Army", abolished all national formations and introduced a unified national procedure for military service for representatives of the country's ethnic communities.[3] The outbreak of the Second World War a year later and the Great Patriotic War two years after that forced the Soviet government to reverse this decision. The reformation of the national units resumed in August 1941 by order of the State Defense Committee, two months after the start of Operation Barbarossa. This was meant to be a counter to the collaborationist formation composed of Soviet nationals on in occupied parts of the USSR (such as the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS "RONA", the Armenian Legion, and the Turkestan Legion).[1] The first formation ever raised was the 201st Latvian Rifle Division, with 90% of its personnel being residents of the Latvian SSR and more than half consisting of ethnic Latvians. Many national formations lost their nationality specification after the war, continuing to exist in numbers until the 1950s.[4]

Future North Korean leader Kim Il-sung 1946. Kim was a member of a Korean national division.

The 88th Separate Rifle Brigade was unique in that it incorporated the peoples of Korea, China and Soviet Central Asia in its ranks.[17] This unit was founded in July 1942 to accommodate the remaining forces of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, who were exiled to the Soviet Union after being driven by the Imperial Japanese Army to Manchuria during the war. Chinese Major General Zhou Baozhong was commander of the brigade.[18] Notable members have included Kim Il-sung, Lim Chum-chu and Kim Chaek.

• Kim Il-sung[19]
• Feliksas Baltušis-Žemaitis
• Hmayak Babayan

• In a ceremony that preceded the Shushi Liberation Day and Victory Day parade in Yerevan in 2020, the Armenian Honour Guard Company took the combat flags of the six Armenian national divisions out of the Mother Armenia Military History Museum and handed them over to Armenian veterans of the war.[20] Then, the six veterans were driven to the airport, where they handed the banners to the pilots participating in the flypast over the capital.[21]
• During the commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the Jassy–Kishinev Offensive in 2019, the center of which was a national ceremony at the Capul de pod Șerpeni Memorial Complex, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ceremonially handed to his Moldovan counterpart the military flags of two all-Moldovan regiments who participated in the offensive (including the 14th Assault Engineering and Combat Brigade), which until that point, were kept at the Central Armed Forces Museum.[22]
• In Taganrog, on the Sambek Heights, there is a memorial complex known as the Glory Memorial in honor of the 416th Azerbaijani Division, opened in 1980 at the personal initiative of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev. It was restored in 2011.[23]

• Korenizatsiya
• National delimitation in the Soviet Union
• Wehrmacht foreign volunteers and conscripts
• Mixed brigade